就搞个设置得了

我们这些编者经常说「就搞个设置得了」之类的。本论文旨在总结这种想法的一些难处、益处、与复杂度。

难处

多余的设置都会：

1. 提高（核心/扩展）代码的复杂度
   1. 提高出现 bug 的机率
   2. 增加要做的程序维护工作
   3. 成倍增加需要被测试的情况
2. 使设置变得更复杂，让萌新找不到各种玩意儿
3. 增加需要翻译的东西
4. 增加已经要把人压垮的文档
5. 给已经太大的用户选项数据库再加几行（工單T54777）
6. Adds to the quantity of things that need to be considered, when contemplating any additional new features in the same feature-set
7. 让我们更难找到 bug
8. 要避免缓存碎片化

所以，开发者、设计师、老板、啥啥啥都不太想把所有要求要有的设置加上！

益处

就算这样，我（以及我们中的很多人）很爱设置。我感觉火狐的选项，至少对于超级用户来说，刚刚好™！

以下是我之前在讨论：重新设计用户设置写的东西：

《选项颂/偏好赞/设置夜曲/配置呐喊》

“	<甲> 让第一个问题为“您想要用默认设置还是要自定义设置？” <乙> 合格的呆子都会回答“自定义”	”
—两名开发者，在IRC上对于MediaWiki安装过程和文档的改进的讨论，已翻译 ~2014年。

我想让我们的Special:参数设置菜单分类得更好。这样它就能成长，吸收一些编者永远需要用的微调与工具——也就是那些重峦叠翠的社区在过去20多年中不停地建造、创造、完善的东西。这样新手不被压垮就能找到他们想要的东西，而新的高手能找到他们不知道自己想要的东西。

When I sign up for a new website, I immediately go to the settings menu to see: What things I can turn on, and what I might want to turn off (either now, or in the future). When I install a new program, operating system, or game, I immediately look through the Toolbar and the Preferences/Options menu. They tell me a lot about the software, e.g.:

• Technical vocabulary (concepts, keywords, and groupings),
• which settings the developers thought were "useful enough to include, but not crucial enough to set as default",
• which options the specialized-power-users might need, that I might want to investigate or use once I become proficient with the basics.

---

“	One way to make complex systems easy to use is to remove the functionality. But that isn't really solving the problem, is it?	”
— @MrAlanCooper[1]

This wiki endeavour, requires tools that are as complicated as Photoshop or Autocad, for many editors but not all. Newcomers often need something simple, as do casual-editors.

我们需要一个给新手的P图和一个给萌新的金山画王。

• MS Paint is great! It's Welcoming, and easy to learn via experimenting, and easy to create simple (sometimes even complex) projects in!
• Photoshop is great! A dense abundance of menus, and a profusion of tiny and detailed-metadata, for those who need it! For those who spend many hours every day, for many years, working hard within it.

We want and need both ends of the spectrum, and a migration path for users to slowly learn about bits of the complexity without being overwhelmed.

Footnotes

Further reading

• "You Won’t Use That Cool Feature. So why do all these settings even exist?" at The New York Times

  "[…] three culprits behind ever-growing features. […] Second, products with many millions of users must appeal to people with widely different needs. […]"

• "Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all." Study results from Jared Spool

  "[…] We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn’t, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program. […]"