Issue: Template Expansion

It differs from 2014 because as of 2014, VWE-2015-1840 had not been discovered (it was patched November 11, 2015). It is also possible that your Maximum Allowed Characters setting changed if you used vBulletin in 2014 and use XenForo now. The default values for those settings are different depending on your forum platform, because the efficiency of those platforms for certain tasks is different.

Instead of stripping out templates, you can try to make the templates more efficient. Here are a few options:

• Move template documentation to a separate page that is injected (INJECT tag) only on the template within NOINCLUDE tags; OR
• Move template documentation to a separate page that has been set as header content for that template page; OR
• Move template documentation to a separate page that has been picked in a wiki-chooser custom field that applies to the template (not included by the template), where that field renders as a separate tab (preferably called "Documentation").

In all these situations, the documentation content would largely/completely not be counted when using the template.

Unfortunately, otherwise, unless you have evidence to show that the expanded form of the page is actually lower than what it reports, or that the reported value is not high enough to trigger expansion protection, AND the page is reaching that decision in less than 5 seconds (because there is also a time limit applied), this appears to be Working as Designed.