Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/Some comments/reply

Lots to talk about here; I'm going to go point by point. Please forgive any snipping.

1. I have been wondering how long the flow would go. Is it planned to go on forever as we scroll (the way twitter is doing) or can it be limited by preference ? (if stopped, it could be either by setting up a time limit such as "last week" or "last month" or "last day" which I think would reflect quite well on many current uses. Or it could be a fixed length).

As currently designed, it will be an "infinite scroll", yes. Filtering to a date range seems emminently reasonable, though. Non-javascript users will likely get a paginated version.

2. Related issue... how is stuff archived ? I see there is a link for a future archived talk. What goes in archived ? and when ? and how ? I think most users are happy to somehow archived information for a time period (such as per months or per year). It should probably be a decision by the user, not something imposed. I am just curious how you are planning it given that the flow seems to be rather planned unlimited.

That link is an example to show that the old "User_talk" - the wikitext page - is still available for reading. Ideally, we'd lock that down for editing (so as not to perpetuate a "shadow" conversation space). We don't want to delete old conversations, obviously.

The archiving system is totally different. You won't have to archive your discussions; that will happen naturally as time goes on. The system for archiving (and locking) is more fully explained here.

3. Full expansion versus complete collapse of a topic is I think unsufficient. Often, we would like to keep track of a specific comment that it drowned in thousand of lines. What about being able to collapse individual comments rather than the full topic ?

The system (currently) tries to be smart about collapsing of posts within a topic and only auto-collapses posts you've already read. To add a per-post collapse control is pretty cluttery - you can see how it works in LiquidThreads, and it's a bit clunky. I am currently working on a design for "zooming" into deeper threads that may solve for some of our other weird issues with this.

4. I am disturbed by the "report abuse". What if I click on this button ? What happens ? Is it "calling" someone to rescue me ? Who will come ? What will be the practical consequence of this ? I can imagine it will somehow feed a sort of list of "abuse reported", which can be looked upon by admin and eventually deleted. Right... If the "abuse" is in my own board or my feed, I want to deal with it myself first by being able to collapse it to *my* view. Hence a first need for an individual collapse thingy. But I would be happy to also deal with abuse for the benefit of others rather than selfishly for my benefit only. So I want to be able to collapse it from others views as well (the light version of what we do right now which is "removing" someone else comment) If we want to be logical, everyone should have the ability to report abuse. Then what happens with buggers who will find it funny to report abuse even when there is not ? An option to deal with that would be to have the abusive content flow ranking reports according to number of reports (10 reports high on the list. Only one report low on the list). But one single report can be a very serious one, which may be overlooked if at the bottom of the list. Well, overall, I fear that feature because I feel it very binding and inclusive that every one is able to deal with an abuse right now. Whilst the liquid thread system and the flow possibly make it able to deal with only by admins. And this is NOT going in the right direction. If I may suggest a rather radical solution... it would be that all comments could be edited and removed by everyone (edition and removal being actions able to be reverted of course). Of course, I realise the consequences of what I am asking for. I fear the consequence of removing that option will actually have a bad impact on community health. In any cases... I hope you realise that we actually "trust" the admins (including our self) because we know that everything they do... can be reverted. Despite this, the number of editors becoming admins over time on big languages is dropping. This is a serious issue. If the admins are given the option to delete/edit comments made by others without the reverting option... the rate of people becoming admins will come to zero... and the activity of admins will drop because they will be aware an action is permanent. In short, flow needs to be wiki.

I really wish I hadn't put the "report abuse" link in there; it was meant to be illustrative of the beginnings of "how can we handle vandal comments" and the like but I didn't get a chance got flesh it out. Unfortunately, it's become a topic of conversation and I'm not super happy about that.

Ideally, clicking on that link (and the terminology there is obviously open for discussion) will start a workflow that helps a user define if a comment is abusive, vandalism, off topic, whatever.

I have intentionally not spent a great deal of time on anti-vandalism workflows because I wanted to get more information about how people would like to see that work; this is my fault for showing something half-baked.

5. Is the flow going to work for all linguistic versions ? (for example, through a dropdown list of all projects for example ?)

I'm unsure what you're asking here. Flow will be localized and will use the local wiki's language settings (or local user preference, which ever is applicable).

6. Status of editors proeminently displayed in their post (admins, number of edits, staff etc.) -> very bad idea (already commented above by other editors. I agree with them. Please do not do that.

I know. :) That line was just meant to be illustrative of the kinds of things we can surface that we can't easily do with current talk pages.  The idea comes from navigation popups.

7. I would suggest it would be a good idea to better differenciate (or be able to select, unselect) the different spaces for the feed (main space, users, talk pages etc.)

Right now, we're only focusing on user talk. When we move to additional talkspaces, there will be visual cues to let you know where a discussion is taking place.