Help talk:Structured Discussions

About this board

Structured discussions are not under development anymore.

There is a new project, the Talk pages project, where you should post your improvements ideas. Reports of bugs are still welcomed here.

Override core-messages

1
WikiForMen (talkcontribs)

I did an extension SkinCustomiser made for helping to customise wikis, specially in wiki farm environment. It can add customised messages, for example for the sidebar (see here). So fine, so well. But I also like to override some core-messages, for example in the login Special page. It does not work. Is there any way to do that?--WikiForMen (talk) 14:57, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Reply to "Override core-messages"

Disappearing TOC on subpages of a Flow talk page

4
Dcljr (talkcontribs)

Back in June 2020, Help talk:Extension:ParserFunctions was changed from a normal talk page to a "Flow" page. There were already six subpages of that talk page that were (and still are) archived discussions split up by year (see the archives listed on the page I just linked to). When editing some of those subpages (specifically, the ones for 2009 and 2011), I found that the Table of Contents (which happened to be provided via the {TOCright} template) disappeared. Using the _TOC_ directive or the {TOC} template to "force" the TOC to be displayed didn't work: the TOC was still not shown on either page. When I reverted my edits, the TOCs were still missing. Eventually I discovered that merely purging the pages (with no edits made to them) was enough to cause the TOCs to disappear. None of the subpages have a TOC now, even though all of them except the one for 2010 had them before. So, is this a Known Issue, that the TOC will disappear from a ("normal") subpage of a "Flow" page?

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Hello

I see the TOCs on all pages.

Have you switched to the new Vector skin by any chance? If so the TOC is on the left sidebar. I'm asking as it is the most common cause of TOC disappearing these days.

Dcljr (talkcontribs)

No, I'm still using the legacy Vector. But the TOCs showed up for me today, too (both before and after my latest edits to those pages). I don't know what could have caused the problem, because I even tried followup null edits and page purges, and neither action resulted in visible TOCs. (Of course, they should have shown up immediately upon saving the pages, like they did after today's edits.) Weird.

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Maybe the fact that I visited the pages somehow purged the cache?

Reply to "Disappearing TOC on subpages of a Flow talk page"

Error {"flow-workflow":"vd0hqd6z5q85kr9j"}

3
PrometheusAla (talkcontribs)

Please help! https://бахаи.kz/index.php?title=%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5:%D0%9F%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BC%D0%BE_%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%83_%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D1%8B%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%B8_%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%BE%D1%82_27_%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%82%D1%8F%D0%B1%D1%80%D1%8F_2014_%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0

PrometheusAla (talkcontribs)
PrometheusAla (talkcontribs)

?

Reply to "Error {"flow-workflow":"vd0hqd6z5q85kr9j"}"

Show recent topics list

4
Theklan (talkcontribs)

Is it possible to show a list of the most recent topics in a board in another place (i.e. a Wikipage)?

Thanks

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)
Theklan (talkcontribs)

Could you give me an example of how to use the API to show for example this board? I'm not very good with it!

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I'm afraid that we have the same knowledge of the API. :/ I'll ask for help.

Reply to "Show recent topics list"

Considering "upvote" utility

3
BillyJSimsIII (talkcontribs)

Up-votes! - While I love the utility of having chronologically organized posts, and appreciate how this aids in understanding the progression of discussion, I wonder about adding upvotes - possibly under an alternate, toggle-able discussion view mode.

advocating points:

-empower users to raise awareness of a particular comment/idea. This may be significantly more valuable in a wiki with "numerous" (to a human, "innumerable") pages/topics, and with frequent posts, allowing for something like a collective attention span.

-encourage users to collectively revisit a subject. i.e. posts may become relevant/reviewed as needed, despite chronology.

-encourage more user engagement and curatorial responsibility. Many wikis are reference-based and function as a communal utility. Some, however, may have a more active, research-based, or otherwise participative orientation. Upvotes would be extremely helpful for these wikis to self-organize attention outside of the structure of the site (pages, topical division, etc)

concerns:

-corrupting a relatively pure-to-concept discussion forum with metrics of personal value - (likes, reposts, upvotes)


Curious as to people's thoughts on this!

Aron Manning (talkcontribs)
Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Structured discussions are not under development anymore. There is a new project, the Talk pages project, where you should post your ideas!

Reply to "Considering "upvote" utility"

How does archiving work?

6
Theklan (talkcontribs)

I wonder how we can browse older topics. Is there any automatic archive system?

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Hello

All Topics displayed on a board are listed on a table of contents. You can browse all these Topics on this table.

Archiving is automated: all discussions disappear when they are not active anymore. You can display older Topics by scrolling down the page, or by searching on the table of contents (but it is lagging a bit).

Theklan (talkcontribs)
Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)
Theklan (talkcontribs)

Thanks! Yes, maybe two different things!

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

(I've just edited my message above. )

Reply to "How does archiving work?"
Yurik (talkcontribs)

It seems module invocations used in a discussion page has no way of refreshing. For example, Module_talk:TNT/testcases contains unit test results of a module. There seems to be no simple way to purge that page... In the longer term, might need to rethink where unit tests can be stored - talk pages seem to no longer be a good place for them, but storing them in the Module namespace is not possible (unless somehow show it as a part of docs?)

Reply to "Purging content"

Add useful links to diffs

1
Summary by Trizek (WMF)
FF-11 (talkcontribs)

In a content page's diff, there is a link to the page of the editing user and a link to edit an old revision and save it as the current. On flow page diffs they're missing.

Here a compare of features within content page diffs, flow diffs and the history of those page types

Feature Content page Flow page
Diff Hist Diff Hist
Edit an old revision Yes No No No
revert Yes Yes unknown
undo Yes Yes Yes Yes
links to user page Yes Yes No Yes
comperation of chosen revisions Yes = Only neighbours =

There should be more features. The most useful would be the link to userpage and "edit an old revision". This would be more comfortable.

Reply to "Add useful links to diffs"

Keyboard accessibility

11
Summary by Trizek (WMF)
Skalman (talkcontribs)

I can't figure out how to post a topic without using a mouse.

  1. When I try to tab out of this textbox, nothing happens (neither tab nor shift+tab).
  2. Ctrl+enter (which usually works in chat software) doesn't do anything either.
  3. Ctrl+S doesn't do anything either.
  4. Alt+Shift+S (which works when editing wikitext) doesn't do anything either.

My suggestion would be to support tabbing out of the textbox.

(I see that turning off visual editing seems to work.)

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)

There is a request since a while to have a shortcut to post (basically Ctrl+Enter).

Some work will be done on Structured Discussion front end soon, and that shortcut may be part of it. The project definition is a work in progress.

Kaartic (talkcontribs)

I suspect the claim that it's not possible to "tab" out of the text box. I post this comment by tabbing to the "Reply" button and hitting the "Enter" key.

Skalman (talkcontribs)

I missed the initial response.

@Trizek (WMF), this task is one solution, but as @Kaartic says, a more general solution is to "tab" out of the textbox. This is impossible to do when the textbox is in "visual editing" mode.

Kaartic (talkcontribs)

Though I didn't imply that "tab" would be a general solution, it really might be ;-) (Yeah, I forgot about the "visual editor" when I commented, sorry.)

197.218.84.212 (talkcontribs)

That's likely because VisualEditor uses the "Tab" key for other functionality. Indeed, on an average editor the tab key should tab text, not jump from one menu / button to another.

A better idea is probably to add general keyboard accelerators see (https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:U3waidy55yn309t9&action=history). Operating systems have used these for years (decades ?), and they are pretty straight forward. Tabbing on the other hand can be rather tedious if the interface has too many items / options.

Kaartic (talkcontribs)

I don't think VE uses Tab for anything except when you're editing a table. It seems they are wantedly suppressing the "Tab" presses inside the editor to avoid losing focus of the editor.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/255452/

Though their rationale might have worked at that time, it doesn't seem to with the usage of VisualEditor in StructedDiscussions (aka Flow).

Kaartic (talkcontribs)
197.218.84.212 (talkcontribs)

VE does use the tab key to do what the tab key was actually designed for (indenting) and navigating. For example, the bullets below were indented (and can be unindented) an extra time using TAB:

    • buuu

It also uses tabs for navigating tables, and to create new rows. It would be even more unexpected if someone clicks tabs and it suddenly jumps to another interface item rather than the next table cell. Which happens in the "pre-formatting" dialog.

It just so happens that html formats indents differently, but it would be quite reasonable to expect the tab key to also work inside the pre tag input for example.

197.218.84.212 (talkcontribs)

Oh, it also uses it in various code editors (graph, map, <syntaxhighlight>, etc).

FF-11 (talkcontribs)

If I am useing the tab key in the source editor on flow ("2017 wikitext editor"), I can't get out. It would be nice to have the tab key used to navigate normaly when useing a flow page. But if the whole page is edited (as in an article, this is not needed, and it's more comfortable to use the tab key for indent/oudent, tabing in tables ore other things like that but in a single textbox it should work to tab out to help people useing screenreaders or on computers without mouse.

Reply to "Keyboard accessibility"

Wikilinks in Hide summaries

3
Be..anyone (talkcontribs)

Example, that could be rendered as usual.

Trizek (WMF) (talkcontribs)
Be..anyone (talkcontribs)

Thanks, but I think I got the basics now, no more confusion with what is what here (LQT or Flow), and my preview nit should be a known issue.

Reply to "Wikilinks in Hide summaries"