Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Unstructered section vs. Unstructured sections (plural!)/reply (15)


 * "Actually, "up to one scratchpad per comment" was not what I said. I see no particular reason why you couldn't have a dozen scratchpads associated with a single comment, if that's what you wanted."

Well, then add it to the list of things I said! I don't think this would be a good idea. In fact i think this would be a hell of a mess! I can't imagine a single reason one would need more than (at most) one scratchpad per comment (many comments might need none at all). It will definitely increase clutter to have separate scratchpads in the first place, instead of typing Wikitext directly into the comment. Having even multiple scratchpads will increase clutter exponentially (and render the whole idea of not having Wikitext inside comments useless).

For the second part: You're exactly right (and that's what I said): It will be hard to find a scratchpad for reuse. Therefore I think this is an unnecessarily complicated "feature" that will only be useful in some very rare edge cases.

Therefore my suggestion: Don't add such a tagging feature. Irrevocably attach scratchpads to the comments they were created for. This will a) simplify the user experience; b) won't seriously limit functionality; c) will almost certainly simplify the implementation in the backend.

I'm wondering a little bit what you try to achieve with such a tagging feature for scratchpads in the first place? First you state that Wikitext won't be available inside Flow comments as a design constraint. Then you try to implement some incredibly complicated tagging for some "mysterious" scratchpads, nobody asked for and even I (whom I'm one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the need for Wikitext inside Flow) would not now a single really useful usage scenario for.

Why don't go the simple way and simply allow one Wikitext area at a fixed place per page, thread, and comment?