Extension talk:LiquidThreads/LQT Archive 1

"Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed ...

Initial comments
... to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer, some time before 1995. All web forums I've ever seen are examples. What does LiquidThreads do that an NNTP server with a group per article couldn't do? (Of course, there are problems, e.g. a .newsrc listing a million groups ...) - David Gerard 13:43, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Have you looked at this? -> http://www.jibble.org/piespy/ The LiquidThreads concept reminded me of some of Jibbler's experiments. Quinobi 20:41, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

When? Hi, I'm very interested in this since I'm hoping to start a wiki or two where forums (vs. current talk pages) would be a huge plus. If anyone has any more info on whether or when this might be incorporated into MW, drop me a line of you don't mind. Zach 16:58, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * It isn't in development or on the roadmap. R3m0t 14:34, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

There is a Wiki called fuwiki (short for "FUCKUP Wiki"), which is basically a wiki trying to work like a forum while still giving its users all the wiki options. You can find it here. If you want to see a running instance of this wiki, go here. --Elfboi 20:10, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

How are time stamps added to this page?


 * The MediaWiki software automagically timestamps your edit if you add five tildes . Four tildes adds your username and the timestamp if you're logged in or your IP address and the time if you'r not. Three tildes adds only your user name or IP address. This is all basic stuff. See Help for much more information about how this all works. Quinobi 17:19, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Nomenclature
Why is it called Liquid Threads, anyways? DavidMcCabe 04:00, 3 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Ermm... you can move them between pages like liquid! 212.85.21.28 09:53, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Problems
It think that it is a problem that one can move the channels around! This means that if I comment on one page, then someone can move the channel/comment to a page where it is out of context and make me look like a fool. --130.225.29.254 14:36, 25 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Only if no one looks in the edit history. If that's the case, anyone can do that now by cutting and pasting. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:17, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Question/suggestion
I'm not sure I understand this project fully, but would LiquidThreads make it possible for posts to be made to two different user talk pages at the same time? That is, someone posts on my "talk page", and I respond on his "talk page", but on both pages the full conversation is visible. A real weakness right now is the fractured discussions when two people discuss something via user talk pages. --Spangineer[en] [es] (háblame) 15:24, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Editable comments
"The author of a comment can determine if other users may edit it." I strongly disagree with this idea. SoftSecurity is one of the great strengths of wikis. Rarely does anyone edit anyone else's comment to vandalize or substantially modify it, and this is easily detected and quickly censured. Much more often, comments are edited to fix formatting (consider the newbies who try indenting their posts with spaces at the beginning of the line), subst templates that should be substed (such as boilerplate user talk messages), or to delete spam. Some also edit comments to remove personal attacks; this is controversial, but there's no consensus against it at least on the English Wikipedia, so prohibiting it by technical means is unreasonable.

So if this is going to be in the package, make it optional, perhaps per-usergroup. It shouldn't be imposed. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:25, 1 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. Ability to edit user comments is very important. In many ways, it makes every user a "moderator" (in the conventional forum sense) which is very much the wiki-way. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 22:01, 17 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Possibly this could be a site-wide option (as to whether posters can chose whether others can edit their comments)? Wikimedia wikis wouldn't use it, but some other wiki installations might find it useful.
 * James F. (talk) 12:36, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * It should be possible for an admin to lock a thread which has been identified as "toxic" or somesuch, however, to prevent the continuance of a discussion which is liable to cause actual harm… —Phil | Talk 13:26, 19 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, admins don't have that ability right now... except maybe to RFC someone. Is that really necessary? &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 14:09, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
 * It is possible to protect a page, which in the case of a discussion page would have the effect of locking all discussions thereon. The point is that LiquidThreads allows a much finer granularity, so a particular discussion could be locked down leaving others to continue without interruption. This is not a revolutionary concept in bulletin-board systems which LiquidThreads is attempting to simulate. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 08:20, 20 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Blah, blah. You're opposed to it on the basis of some ideological persuasion.  A comment that someone makes has always been that person's comment.  Nobody should have the power to modify it -- only if the speaker says they can.  This is how a conversation is different from a collective work. -130.49.221.7 00:49, 20 January 2007 (UTC)


 * On the en.wikipedia at least, it's really important to be able to edit others' comments. That's how we handle requests to edit protected pages, replace templates when they're being deleted, fix erroneous category links, etc.  It would be a maintenance nightmare if it took an admin just to replace templates, or had to run bots with admin rights to edit talk pages. 68.40.167.173 11:42, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Link system

 * Cross posted from: 

Although subpages would be the preferred manner for a new special page, there might be some problems integrating it into a Talk page.

Besides hooking it in to MediaWiki (while Special Pages make passing everything after the slash easy, I'm not that sure about talk pages), there could be collisions if you need to keep the old talk pages hanging around.

However, making them subpages does have a significant aesthetic appeal. I would imagine it would look like this:

Talk:Article/Channel/Thread

I would strongly advocate meaningful titles as opposed to numeric IDs. MediaWiki follows a strong convention of using unique meaningful ids for the interface while keeping a non-meaningful integer id inside. Also, I don't think paginating the discussion would be beneficial (it would definitely make linking to posts easier). &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 22:00, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Great idea - offer to contribute
Message board functionality on Wikipedia would save an immense amount of work and encourage greater participation. Some of the most serious issues that I've enumerated with wiki-based discussion include:


 * Manual archiving, and difficulty in searching after manual archiving
 * Edit conflicts
 * The need for new users or one-time users to understand section and signature syntax, and that new sections go at the bottom.
 * The problems associated with manual formatting, such as missing indents and the confusion resulting from the convention of "resetting" nesting back to the left side (who is the next reply replying to?)

With real message boards, a multitude of frustrations will evaporate, and this proposal seems to get more or less everything right. I'm a PHP coder with Mediawiki experience and I'd be happy to help in any way I can with this project, and point other interested people to it as well. Deco 21:04, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Reply notification
I'm a non-intensive wikipedian; that is, I go around making general improvements to deficiencies I happen across in my browsings (as random as it gets sometimes). Rarely, I'll post something on a talk page. When I do, I'd like the wiki software to tell me (like that big brown box that says when somebody posts on *my* talk page) when somebody replies to my post.

All things considered, I think this whole project is marvelous, and the constant progress and improvements being made speak loudest for the potential herein. Excellent work, everyone (except the trolls)! w:User:Xaxafrad (why doesn't my account copy to other wikimedia projects? or at least the parent ones) 68.6.27.235 23:49, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Channels vs Threads
Hey lookit me! I have a meta account now (read the above anonymous comment). If my ideas are bad, can you not ignore them, but instead tell me why they're bad?

Should I edit the (project?) page directly, or appeal for changes here?

Anyway, channels vs threads...why are they different things? I've tried understanding these from a conceptual point of view and one or the other seems redundant. Maybe I need an example of a channel containing several different threads. Why not simply have threads with comments? I've tried studying the mock-up picture and it seems overly complex. Remember K.I.S.S.? Don't diverge too far from the original, just put some make up on it. Start by codifying the ID numbers for individual comments, that should be the foundation. On top of that, you can design a plethora of presentation paradigms (sorry for the alliteration, it just kinda came out). Maybe they could be made customizable like the skins in our monobooks? If each comment is like an article's subpage, then couldn't some tricked out esoteric template process each comment, read subject lines and summaries from the header, and display the content when somebody clicks on the titles?

You guys have been at this for months, and have probably already come up with and rejected these ideas for various excellent reasons, but maybe not. Xaxafrad 05:18, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Synchronised threads on usertalk pages
This page was recently mentioned to me by w:User:Piotrus. I think it's a brilliant idea, and I really look forward to it. Just one question, though: it doesn't seem to support another useful tool: synchronised threads. Synchronised threads are subpages where a conversation occurs that are transcluded to the userpages of the users involved. They help make talkpages more readable by keeping the entire conversation in a single location. Ingoolemo talk 22:22, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Why not xanological structures?
If we have wiki and discussions, why not take it all the way and implement (or adapt) token_word or http://www.abora.org, as first articulated by. This would be better than a discussion forum, because (among other things) it would keep each comment connected to all the comments about it or parts of it. It will also automatically track all changes to documents. It is a more general and useful framework than wiki or discussion forums. All it requires is that the comments and links between them be stored separately, and that links be able to reference arbitrary parts of text, indexed (for example) by the number of characters from the start of the document. -130.49.221.7 04:23, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

LiquidThreads to complement Talk pages, not to substitute them
I think LiquidThreads may be even more interesting as a complement for talk pages instead of as a substitute.

Talk pages often contain some content about an article that remains valuable for editors but has no place in the article itself. This can, for example, be sources, evaluating comments about source, sources that have become invalid or unavailable or agreements about style and content of the article.

Talk pages also contain some amount of small talk or noise, which may also sometimes arrive at valuable conclusions. A sensible application of LiquidThreads could be to keep debates in LiquidThreads but to retain the Talk page as a place for summaries of debates or other content with permanent value for editors. --Fasten 11:38, 25 February 2007 (UTC)


 * While I think LTs are a wonderful idea, and I've been hating Mediawiki's idea of discussions for some time, I do agree that having both is a big plus. There are some things that despite my aversion to them I have to admit comment pages ARE good at.


 * One thought that occurs to me is instead of mucking around in the Talk: namespace, maybe a Thread: or Forum: namespace would be more appropriate. So that you would have Thread:Article/Channel/Thread/message_id (or whatever you come up with to identify each message uniquely). This would also be helpful in upgrades so you would not clobber existing sub-talk-pages where they already exist. The downside of course is figuring out how to integrate the namespaces into existing Wiki namespaces, since right now they use the even/odd namespace IDs... personally I think that was a bad idea, and that talk namespaces should have been a sub-namespace of some sort, but that's an entirely different ball of wax. --24.23.186.34 01:26, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The separate namespace idea is a good one; I, too, don't like the idea of having LiquidThreads replace the existing Talk pages. The new namespaces are also good ideas, and making things like Forum:, User forum:, Template forum:, etc. would be a good idea. It would probably require re-numbering the existing namespaces, and it would confound the existing even/odd model, but it should be pretty easy with an update script.


 * Perhaps that issue could be partially resolved by simply adding namespaces at a different point in the number line. Maybe numbers from 0-199 could be reserved, instead of 0-99 as it currently is in MW 1.10.0, and the numbers beginning at 100 could be used for the new NS's. 100 could be Forum:, 102 could be User forum:, 104 could be Project forum:, etc. That could be a solution. Not sure what to do with the odd numbers 101, 103, 105... Perhaps another new MediaWiki feature will be developed to use those. The only problem is, it makes adding new namespaces more complicated, since this scheme only works with numbers less than 10; this means it wouldn't even work with the current revision of MediaWiki, which has namespaces -2 through 15 defined as of SVN r22580 of Defines.php.


 * Barring that unlikely scheme, it seems that MediaWiki would be rewritten to use four namespace numbers per namespace: NS, NS_TALK, NS_FORUM, and an unused NS_BLANK for another, future feature. But I'm just rambling ;) — Tuvok[Talk/Contribs] 09:03, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Private userpage threads
Having run various electronic forums for years and years (like since 300 baud was neat), one thing I can tell you is that correcting someone's mistakes in public sometimes is not a good idea. You can, no matter how gently, take a contributing member and turn them away, or worse, turn them into some sort of monster. People just don't take it well.

That being the case, it may be nice for at least admins at various levels to be able to start private threads on the user's page where he and the user can discuss problems behind closed doors. Should not be all that hard to implement. Maybe have a special 'private' channel on the userpages, and only the user and the person who started the thread can read it. --24.23.186.34 01:50, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The times they are a-changing. By that I mean, people WILL get used to it. By simply removing privacy, people will unavoidably CHANGE. __meco 06:32, 5 June 2007 (UTC)