| The Userbox migration (formerly known as the German userbox solution) is a method of avoiding userbox related controversies, by moving the userboxes in question to userspace.No new policy is needed to do this, and this is not a policy proposal. Just go ahead and do it. |
The Userbox migration involves moving controversial (such as "Template:User Christian") or unencyclopedic (such as "Template:User eats bagels") userbox templates into subpages of userspace (such as "User:CharonX/Userboxes/User christian" or "User:Malcolm/Userboxes/Bagels"). To userfy a userbox, simply follow these steps:
- Move the userbox from its template location to somewhere in your userspace.
- Edit the resultant redirect from the move and replace the #REDIRECT [[page]] with {{User UBM UBX to}} to indicate where the userbox has been moved. In our Christian example, this would be {{User UBM UBX to|Christian|CharonX/Userboxes/User christian}}.
- Wait a while. People are periodically running bots that update people's userpages to point from the old location in template space to the new location in userspace. If there are only a few transclusions you might consider doing this manually. (To minimize page display disruptions, if you have your own bot or are experienced with a tool like WP:AWB, you might want to bypass redirects before you edit/delete the original redirect page.)
- Delete the original template once all incoming transclusions have been taken care of. You will need an administrator for this.
That's it!
The term "German userbox solution" came about because the idea was borrowed from the German-language Wikipedia.