Talk:Structured Discussions/2014/08

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Testing Flow on French Wikipedia

Hi Flow team,

After your Wikimania presentation I hope to talk with you directly. If I can't, I put my request here.

First, thanks a lot for this amazing project. As a newbies-wikifriend, I can't wait for the day when Flow will be widely deployed!

My request is about the Forum des nouveaux on french Wikipedia, which is a place quite like the Teahouse on enwp. This place is a very busy place, and we currently experienced a lot of problems which may be solved by Flow (structured messages, no mess about how and where answer, etc.).

So is it possible to have a deployment on the forum des nouveaux, in order to help us on our new user support, and help you for the development of this tool?

By the way, the francophone communauty will appreciate this little privilege : the full-focus on English Wikipedia is not always appreciated! :-)

Thanks a lot! Trizek ^{from FR} 14:28, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi, I'm Charles from Switzerland, and I can only confirm what Trizek says! We develop a lot newbies workshop and we would really like to be able to improve our communication strength with the newcomers. Chandres (talk) 14:30, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

That would be fantastic! I just looked at Forum des nouveaux, and saw all of the special instructions that you're showing people when they post a message. It looks like Flow could be very helpful there. :)

We're planning to release the full new version of subscriptions and notifications at the end of next week -- I'd like to show that to you, and the other people on that forum. Are there more people who are part of the newcomers group? DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:10, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF), thank you for this positive answer!

Most of people involved on the newcomers french project (~30 people) can be reached on the Projet:Aide et Accueil. Do not hesitate to post in English there, Charles or I will translate. Trizek ^{from FR} 22:10, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Okay, great! We'll start posting there when the next release is live on Mediawiki.org, so we can show everyone the full new feature set. The plan is for that to be out next Thursday. Does that sound good? DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:40, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, DannyH (WMF)! Sounds perfect!  :-) Trizek ^{from FR} 22:42, 13 August 2014 (UTC)

Innovative Frenchmen! Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 14:21, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Watchlist

Why is only one thing per page shown? This has caused me to miss many posts as they weren't shown. (Or are topics/posts not watched when the board is watched? Either way, many things that should have shown up on my watchlist haven't.) Jay8g (talk) 16:46, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, we're halfway through making a change to what watching a board means. In the last release a couple weeks ago, we changed what appears on watchlists to show the individual threads that you're subscribed to.

The second step is that watching a board will mean that you're automatically subscribed to all new threads created after you start watching the board. You'll still have the ability to unsubscribe from new threads that you don't care about. The watchlist and the Echo notifications will show the threads that you're subscribed to. We're working on this now, and we're planning to release it here by the end of next week.

The idea behind these changes is that we want you to be able to pay attention to the discussions that you care about, and filter out the ones that you don't. The system is probably going to need more fine-tuning, so definitely let us know how it's working for you. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): Right now its not working for me at all, but the future plan seems quite good! Jay8g (talk) 23:21, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, it should be (some version of) good soon. :) DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:24, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Voting for pictures

The voting system at commons:Commons:Photo challenge/2014 - July - Tools of the trade/Voting is pretty clunky. You have to paste in just the right wikitext and manually keep track of what you've voted for and whether you've already placed your first-, second-, or third-choice vote.

I want Flow to fix this. I want to be able to put up a whole bunch of pictures, set limits on voting, and then go vote by ticking boxes. I want to be able to find my votes easily. I want it to automatically prevent me from accidentally giving two second-place votes. I want to be able to flag my favorites for further review before I place my votes. I want this to be easy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:08, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

I love that idea. Flow definitely needs to make voting easier. It's complicated, so it's going to take us a little while to get there, but it's a good goal. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

replying does not unclose a topic

close to test if reply uncloses topic -- reopening because it does :)

but it did before Gryllida 06:44, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Should it? I need to check on how that works on talk pages. We're planning to look at the moderation actions again soon. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Nothing ever should prevent someone from replying to a topic. This is an unfortunate consequence of archival, with the "classic" system, but it is not an intended effect. It should be possible to keep talking on any topic a contributor likes to find relevant, even after someone else said he already fixed it in some way; if the fix is truly sufficient, the topic will simply end up inactive enough to sit in some corner.

Even in that corner, it should be possible to easily (i) view the full discussion and (ii) reply. It should not hide contents of discussion, and it should not make me do extra effort to reply. Gryllida 00:57, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

subtopics are not supported

I filed as a bug.

Many many times a discussion needs to be split, such as into two subtopics marked by '==='. Flow needs to support this. Gryllida 06:46, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, multi-part split discussions are definitely on the roadmap. It's a requirement for Flow being useful for complicated, RfC style discussions. I don't know exactly when we're going to get to it, but it has to be done. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

Stop collapsing closed topics

Where a topic is closed, a 'done' icon may appear next to its topic header. But it should not collapse. Everyone reading a talk page should be able to easily, by default, see past discussions.

The solved ones can go to the bottom, but they should be fully readable by default. Hiding or removing things is not transparent and leaves others with no chance of disagreeing with past solution (as more effort will be required to view the past decision, and fewer people will be able to disagree.) Gryllida 05:58, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree with you. We're going to do more work on close, summarize and hide soon. Thanks for your thoughts, here and in the other thread about replying. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

To re-iterate:

Nothing ever should prevent someone from replying to a topic. This is an unfortunate consequence of archival, with the "classic" system, but it is not an intended effect. It should be possible to keep talking on any topic a contributor likes to find relevant, even after someone else said he already fixed it in some way; if the fix is truly sufficient, the topic will simply end up inactive enough to sit in some corner.

Even in that corner, it should be possible to easily (i) view the full discussion and (ii) reply. It should not hide contents of discussion, and it should not make me do extra effort to reply.

Hiding should not be needed at all.

• Current users only hide discussions when they're unethical or rude.
• Discussions are not hidden just because someone deems them solved. Doing so is rude as it forces people to stop discussing a past topic while it may still need extra insight.
• When moderating something rude, a part of conversation may be hidden. This happens VERY rarely and should be a small button somewhere. It uses the hat template while leaving the meaningful part of conversation visible.
• Meaningful part of conversation is always visible. It is important, so I'll say it again:

Meaningful part of every conversation is always visible.

(I hope you go in line with that sort of philosophy as I've encountered my discussions closed on this wiki, which hid their contents and prevented further discussion. I was not even rude. The discussions should have remained clearly readable and open. I've dedicated this topic to the issue of hiding things, and another topic to difficulties with replying.) Gryllida 01:03, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I want to change the way that close, summarize and hide are being used. The current version of Close hides things, and the current version of Hide doesn't hide them enough. :)

Hiding is supposed to be purely a response to spam and vandalism. On wiki talk pages, if somebody posts something that's clearly unacceptable, any contributor can edit the page and remove the vandalism from sight. The vandalism is still visible in the page history and the vandal's contributions, but it's taken out of public view.

Flow needs to give people that caretaking power, so everybody has the ability to hide a spam/vandal topic. But I think the current version that you see right now doesn't do enough to actually take the bad conversation out of sight -- there's a big shiny clickable header that shows everyone the bad stuff. I want to try out actually taking it off the board, and then making sure that it's clearly marked in the board history.

I agree with you that "closed" conversations shouldn't be hidden from view. I'm hedging a little on replying to closed topics, because I haven't had a chance yet to look into that part deeply, and I don't want to say something foolish. But we're definitely going to be looking at that too.

We're finishing up our work on the new Flow notifications, and then doing another pass on all of the moderation actions is high on the list of what we're going to work on next. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:21, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Stop making reply impossible to closed topics

Old or solved topics may go to bottom or to a 'archives' tab, but replying should be easy. Disagreeing with a past solution must be the easiest thing ever.

No past technology with classic talk pages involves closing right of users to reply, other than archival. Nothing ever makes replying harder.

You please don't make replying harder, either; archives can exist, but only by means of a topic going old/inactive, not by means of a topic being thought as "resolved" by a single contributor. Gryllida 06:00, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: I'd like a "start a new discussion" option here, that automatically keeps a back link in it metadata to the original closed topic. that would be rather cool. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 11:53, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I disagree. It is not always worth starting a new topic where replying to an old message is worth it. Gryllida 12:08, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: TheDJ did write "option"... ;-)

I agree that both options are desired. Which option someone decides to use, would probably depend on various factors. I might Revive the old topic itself; or Link-to the old topic in the first post (or summary-area) of a new topic, depending on -

• the age of the original topic
• the length/size of the original topic
• the focus (vs off-topic tangents) of the original topic
• the clarity of writing in the original topic
• the location itself (eg. I might revive a very long & old topic on an article talkpage, but not on a villagepump...)
• etc

That said, they're going to open up the default close for later replies (so that it's more like just adding a {{Resolved }} template), and then consider those more complex options for later. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Messages (not entire topics) should carry metadata such as status (Done, not Done)

I would personally do this by implementing means of saying Done in a Flow thread. The entire thread should not be marked as anything, only a specific message, as extra attention may still be needed to things a contributor forgot to do. Gryllida 01:05, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

To be specific: if we implement means to mark an entire topic as something that's been done, it's very easy to miss some things. (You ask me to paint a fence and a door, I paint a fence and leave a Done note, everyone else sees a "DONE!" in topic header and doesn't bother reading.) I'd like to only see this feature in replies somewhere, and it might be hard to design it without clutter. But it's much much more needed than the current "it's fixed so let's close the entire topic and make it unreadable without unhiding" system. Gryllida 01:07, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Topic merge?

I see few related topics, is merge already available or is it under development? Gryllida 01:09, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: Merge/Split are planned, but not currently under development. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 05:39, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Pinging people in a reply metadata instead of reply text

I clearly recall this being a bug on file. Would you please do it? It's a nice thing to avoid cluttering text with nicknames of other people. Gryllida 01:11, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: You'd filed that as bugzilla:59231. You wrote:

"a setting for pings to not be displayed, either

• hidden where the pingee is a parent message author, or
• hidden entirely."

As well as those options, perhaps pings could be:

• A different color (eg. near-black instead of bright-blue) so that they're less eye-catching.
• Shown as a list of "who will be pinged" for the post-author whilst they're typing, but not in the saved-post itself.
• Made smaller, like en:Template:Tiny ping (I would disagree with this one, but listing for completism)

What else could we do, or do other sites do? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 06:29, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

"Shown as a list of "who will be pinged" for the post-author whilst they're typing, but not in the saved-post itself." -- yes definitely; cluttered post text is the primary concern here.

" A different color (eg. near-black instead of bright-blue) so that they're less eye-catching." I don't really care.

"Made smaller, like en:Template:Tiny ping (I would disagree with this one, but listing for completism)" -- when you do such list, you can make them smaller if you like; I don't care.

By all means please try to keep it readable. More on this in a next message. Gryllida 09:37, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Please keep it readable.

• The "by clicking reply, you agree to..." message is not something my elderly relatives would be able to even notice.
• The 'cancel' and 'preview' are light grey on white background. This is hard to read.
• The 'reply', 'edit', '25 seconds ago' are all light grey on white. They're all hard to read in the small print. Gryllida 09:38, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

[nojs] Edit link next to my message takes me to topic edit box instead

Which is a bug. Gryllida 04:21, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

[nojs] Topic menu is missing

I disabled JavaScript. The wonderful menu containing things like adding the topic to watchlist or closing it is gone. Please make the functionality available in the non-JavaScript interface. :-) Gryllida 04:22, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: how come jo disabled js? Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 14:16, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I disabled JavaScript specifically to test Flow's behaviour without it. Gryllida 00:12, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: One of the developers is working specifically on non-js issues. There are a whole bunch of bugs with that mode currently, but they are being looked at. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 05:25, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Red border on empty fields

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Why do empty fields have a red border when the focus is out of them? This looks quite odd, especially on the new topic form when you first click into it--the focus is in the title field and the message field is highlighted red. Jay8g (talk) 18:51, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

Jay8g: That's a new bug. Notes at https://trello.com/c/zpk1lene/ It will be addressed via https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/154940/ Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 05:29, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Please detect a thread or message language automatically

I would like Flow to automatically detect a thread or message language, so that I can filter out this entire board for Russian messages. (I.e. when I don't speak English and can't participate in English threads.) Gryllida 11:40, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

thank you Rajubohora78 (talk) 04:33, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Thoughts on moderation in Flow

Put them here. You're welcome to add yours or share thoughts, or collaborate. Gryllida 01:49, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

User:Gryllida/Flow - now updated and more structured.

Brainstorming, anyone? Gryllida 09:50, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Oh, thanks for posting your thoughts! We're planning to change the Hide, Close and Summarize features soon -- and the current plans are very similar to what you've proposed. :)

The first change will be not collapsing Closed conversations by default. I agree with you that Closed topics aren't bad conversations that should be hidden away -- they're often successful conversations, where a decision was reached. That change should be out in a week or two.

We're also planning a larger redesign on Close and Summarize. We want to give more emphasis to the summary as editable text, and not discourage people from participating in conversations with a summary. We'd also like to make Closed feel more like Resolved.

For Hide -- I think it's clear that right now, hidden topics aren't hidden enough. Good faith editors should have the ability to remove spam and vandalism from the page, without leaving a huge "click here to see the upsetting thing" button. To make that work, we need to do some more work on the board history, to make it easy to unhide a thread that was hidden inappropriately.

Basically -- it should be easy for a good person to hide bad topics. If a bad person hides a good topic, then it should be easy for a good person to put it back on the board. We need to do some more UI work to make sure that we've got both sides working. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Here's the Trello card for not collapsing closed threads. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:50, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Please make it possible to translate (and read translations of) someone else's message

Sometimes there are major announcements or newsletters that get translated into one or more other languages. I'd like to have proper support for translating them.

I don't necessarily want to integrate the translate extension here. What I really want is to have a button on the original post that says "Look, there are translations available!", and when you click on them, they show the translated version (maybe side-by-side with the original?).

This feature would help people who don't all speak the same language to participate in the same conversation, instead of having discussions split up according to language. Since Flow will work on multiple projects, I believe this will be an increasingly important issue. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:37, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

OT: Why post announcements or newsletters through Flow? I'd think they're content pages.

Making messages translateable should be a config option, off by default. I can see merit and use-case for this idea. More on this below. :-)

• It's useful at Meta-wikis.
• In majority of Wikimedia projects discussions happen in one language in the first place, and meaning of a discussion is easy to lose in translation.
• There would be a need in a lot of effort to review the translations which I suspect (in my personal view, anyway) would not be worth it on most wikis.
• I also envision, personally, meta-wikis for each Wikimedia project (one meta wiki for Wikipedia, one for Wikibooks, one for Commons, etc), where all news and collaboration for this family of projects is located — and I also expect some of mailing lists to migrate to Flow if they like. Gryllida 09:56, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: "Why post announcements or newsletters through Flow?" For the same reason that we post them on people's user talk pages or on central noticeboards now.

I think that "off by default" is fine. I think that if, say, the WMF legal team needs to make an announcement or hold a discussion, that having the option of translating the messages (or at least the main announcement) would be handy for them. Something like Tech/News, which is routinely translated, would probably also benefit from it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:07, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I've added a mockup of an idea by Qgil, to Extension talk:Newsletter#Drafting_specs_33250.

I prefer the idea of having Newsletters delivered via Echo, because

• that way everyone comes to a centralpage to read the one main copy (as with The Signpost, or Books&Bytes), and any corrections can be made at the central location.
• It would prevent usertalk pages from being constantly bumped in everyone's watchlists.
• The newsletter copies on usertalk often clutter search results
• The newsletters fill usertalk archives, or have to be manually pruned.

but I think having both as options (and possibly "email" too) is ideal, so that people can choose what suits them. –Quiddity (talk) 03:27, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

We're definitely going to do some work on newsletter support in Flow -- probably not in the super short-term, but probably in a few months. I don't know if the idea for translation support has come up yet; thanks for sharing the idea! DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Huge headers

I have an impression I've talked about that already, but can't find it.

Why are headers so huge and contain so much information? This is probably useful when topcis only view is used. Maybe some information can be hidden when discussion is opened? I'd say that actually none of that information (i.e. anything but topic) is needed when discussion is opened. You can reply below and see activity yourself.

Also it would be nice to drop background color for the headers (that would also remove the need for padding and make them smaller). Whitespace is enough to separate topics (or at least I hope so).

Please take a look at http://practicaltypography.com/websites.html Maybe some of that could be incorporated into general design guidelines? Lazowik (talk) 18:24, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Something like http://snag.gy/FKKLJ.jpg

That would need some indicator (wide arrow?) to show that discussion is hidden/shown. Icons would need a bit realign too. Maybe smaller headers icon also.

Anyways, just my thoughts. Feel free to ignore them :) Lazowik (talk) 19:00, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

+++++ thank you so much for this idea Gryllida 03:23, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Filed bug 69880, should be trivial to program imo Gryllida 03:25, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree that the the headers are too big and overstuffed with info. We're going to take another look at that design soon. Thanks for posting your thoughts about it; it's helpful. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:41, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

DannyH: Can I work on this bug or would your design work interfere with it and render fixing this specific issue useless? Gryllida 03:29, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida and Lazowik: As a first step, they're implementing part of this in the next sprint, for all the 3 expansion states, by the removing the line that is currently in the middle (who started the topic, and the number of participants). Tracked at https://trello.com/c/C2y2NWCE/691-topic-title-bar-remove-clutter Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity (WMF): You're implying that I can't work on this and someone else already is? I could try to resolve this as a first bug, but we'd be speaking of scale of weeks as I go through installing and reading the relevant things.

Volunteer participation is hard. :) Gryllida 23:05, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: You could start by developing user .css and .js that make for a better experience, and offer them to others to try out.

If you can run MediaWiki-Vagrant, you can be up and running as a developer in a day. Getting gerrit, bugzilla, etc. accounts is more time consuming. SpageWMF Echo Test3 (talk) 00:35, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm yet to check again, but I appear to lack virtualisation support in this BIOS. Gryllida 08:58, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

There's already a fix for it :) -- see https://trello.com/c/C2y2NWCE DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:27, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Is it in production (here) already? Gryllida 01:17, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

BTW, I would like to not only take out the line "Username started this topic and there were 2 other participants", but also take out the stuff "Reply • 13 comments • Active 1 minute ago".

1. Surely one would reply to a topic after reading the entire thing. Reading the entire thing should be encouraged. (I would also like to encourage replying to individual statements, if at all more clear, although in some cases after reading the entire topic.)
   • Do some research about how many "classic" talk pages replies were pertinent to place at the bottom. Not many really!
2. The number of comments may be better shown at the right in a small thing. It doesn't warrant a separate line.
3. The activity again may be shown in small print at the right bottom, like it is shown for Flow messages now. It doesn't warrant a separate line. (It is possibly interesting enough to be spelled out in full.)
4. I'd like to show both date when the topic was started, and when it was last active. Is this possible?

Thanks. Gryllida 01:46, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I would definitely agree with removing the header reply button, but I'm not sure about the other things-- I do find them helpful sometimes for seeing if I need to read that thread. Jay8g (talk) 03:26, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah. Notice I'd not suggest removing the timestamp. I do find a need to remove 'N comments' bit though. Hm. How is the number of comments helpful though? Often people discuss but end up not finding a solution (which means your look would be as useful as if it had 0 replies). Gryllida 06:02, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I logged in to Trello, but appear to be unable to comment. Aw. :-( Gryllida 01:50, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Terminology: you're talking about the topic titlebar. The "header" is the wikitext area at the top of each Flow board.

Anyway, the shrunk header titlebar is deployed, the middle line

Cyberpower678 started this topic and there were 2 other participants

is gone .

• The first post under the titlebar is the person who started the topic (and it's in the topic history)
• We lost the metadata "2 other participants", you only have "5 comments". We thought about keeping it in hover state of "5 comments", but it's klunky.

One reason for the background color is to suggest that the entire topic titlebar is a button that collapses/expands the topic (we didn't want to fill the left side with collapse/expand indicator). For some reason the titlebar is not as button-like as it used to be. SpageWMF Echo Test3 (talk) 00:31, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

> Terminology: you're talking about the topic titlebar. The "header" is the wikitext area at the top of each Flow board.

I don't get the difference; please post a screenshot... Gryllida 12:01, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: I agree that reading the conversation before writing a reply is very important. Right now, clicking on "Reply" scrolls you down to the open edit field, so there is a sense that your reply is part of a larger conversation. Functionally, it's just a shortcut to the bottom of the thread, which I don't know if we actually need. That link is still in play.

The rationale for the other two pieces that we retained -- the number of comments and the time it was last active -- is that they could help you decide whether you want to start reading that thread. If a conversation could be 6 posts long or 600 posts long, that's a helpful thing to know on your way in. :) The same can be true for the recency -- a thread that was active 10 minutes ago is different from a discussion that happened two years ago. You can't divine either of those pieces of information from the top of the thread, so I think it's useful to have them there as a guide. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:32, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

New watch star issues

• On topic pages, the new watch star has issues.
  • The star is misplaced, shifted down and crossing the header line. (Firefox 31, Windows 7, Vector)
  • When you click the top star, you get the "You're subscribed to this Flow board! You will be automatically subscribed to all new topics created on this board." (board) message instead of the "This topic has been added to your watchlist. You will receive notifications on all activities on this topic." (topic) message.
  • There are multiple stars very close to each other. Removing the top star would stop its issues, but removing the bottom star would keep consistency with other pages.
  • When you click one star, the other doesn't update.
• It is misplaced in Monobook and doesn't show up at all in Modern or Cologne Blue as far as I can tell.
• Its hover color is inconsistent with any other MediaWiki UI colors, and is too low contrast, especially against the grey of topic headers.

PS: Why is Flow not using the standard watch button any more? This is annoyingly inconsistent with all other pages. Jay8g (talk) 01:54, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the star at the top shouldn't appear on Topic pages; that's a bug. The fix should be released next week.

We're not using the standard watch button on Flow boards to signal that the interaction is actually different than putting a wiki page on your watchlist.

Watching a Flow board means that you're subscribed to new topics created on the page (or it will mean that, in the next release). You don't necessarily get notifications for all of the existing topics on the board, so it's not quite the same thing as watching a page.

That being said -- this is a new element, and we're trying it out to see if it makes sense and feels useful for people. We went back and forth on it for a while, before we landed on trying this version out. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Here's the bug ticket for taking the star off of Topic pages: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69764 DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:40, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Aw great - because I unstarred tone of them... Rdicerb (WMF) (talk) 01:09, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

The star also overlaps with long titles. This shows an issue with having it in the title bar instead of the header. Jay8g (talk) 22:06, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for catching that. I made a bug ticket for the Flow team backlog: https://trello.com/c/79wZHihV DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:24, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Blue bar doesn't show up initially

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

When you first click in input boxes, the blue bar doesn't show up. It waits until there is content in the box. (This seems not to appear in post reply boxes, but that's because they have content by default.) (Firefox 31, Windows 7) Jay8g (talk) 02:04, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that's a bug that we're fixing. The fix should be out next week. Thanks for reporting it! DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): as a courtesy, can you please link to bug reports when confirming them ? It helps in keeping track of stuff for everyone. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 22:44, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Oh, sure. I probably should've been doing that all along. I just posted a couple of links in other conversations -- embarrassingly, I can't find the ticket for this one at the moment. :) I'll find it and post it... DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/155809/ Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:59, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Multiple issues related to collapsing of topics

There are some issues related to the collapsing of topics:

1. When having set the most compact view (only header lines), the header stays in this compact state, even when expanding the topic. This means that essential information (most notably the topic summary) is not accessible.
2. The collapse state is remembered across boards – which is good!
   However when directly accessing a topic by its permalink, it's also collapsed. When following a direct link to a topic I'd expect the topic to be expanded automatically (collapsed view of topics doesn't make any sense at all in my opinion).
3. Even worse: Combination of 1.+2.
   Since there is no collapser button on topic-only pages, there's absolutely no possibility to expand the header.
4. The issue mentioned in Talk:Structured Discussions/2014/07#h-Collapser_–_Set_default_state_of_Flow_threads-2014-07-13T22:33:00.000Z was apparently not addressed so far although it seems quite obvious that there should be done some improvement. Patrick87 (talk) 03:39, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

User:DannyH (WMF), can you file bug reports for this... ? —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 21:30, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

The collapse feature was originally an experimental one, to see if it could replace the need for a ToC. They're now planning on adding a ToC (notes at https://trello.com/c/82lQgJ3Z/), and so the collapse feature will probably be removed (or drastically changed) soon thereafter.

For the "drastically changed" possibility, do you have any suggestions as to how the idea could be revamped, given the future existence of a ToC? I'm thinking it might be a good idea to retain a 2-state toggle, but possibly that wouldn't really be broadly useful enough to take up permanent space at the top of the Board. (Where more controls will be added over time) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:32, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Search functionality?!

How do I search for a phrase on this board? Gryllida 02:53, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

BTW related: Talk:Structured Discussions/2014/01#h-Search_box?-2014-01-31T15:17:00.000Z Gryllida 02:56, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

We still need to build it. Your incredulous punctuation is correct; it's a hole in the feature right now. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

"User" contributions

Please do not use the word "user", if possible. For instance when I move mouse over a nick, it says (talk | User contributions) - just take it out :-)

BTW in Russian the word 'User:Gryllida' is translated as 'Contributor:Gryllida' (Участница:Gryllida). I would recommend all the English language projects to do the same, it'd make people more inspired. (The Wikipedia page 'User' has details on the implications of this term.) Gryllida 03:44, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Участник/Участница is one possible translation of the English word "contributor", although to me as a Russian speaker it sounds more like "participant" - something who is possibly as active as a "contributor", but not necessarily so. So it's kinda mid-way between "user" and "contributor".

The problem with not using "user" is that there should be some kind of consistency (hi May) with the namespace name and so on. It's actually conceivable to rename the "User" namespace in English, and suggest the translators to make it sound more active and participatory in all languages. We did it with "Image" to "File" and it wasn't painful, so we can do it again. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 06:35, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

In this context, "user" is really just unnecessary-- simply "contributions" would work, and would make the expanded text shorter. Jay8g (talk) 21:47, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

I think we had "contribs" before. Would that be a reasonable thing to go back to, or is that contraction too confusing? Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:23, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity (WMF): Possibly. "Contribs" is used in some places. However, Flow is supposed to be targeting new/inexperienced users, so spelling "contributions" out completely is probably better. Either way, "user" is unnecessary. Jay8g (talk) 16:41, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, good call. I filed a ticket in the backlog to change to "contribs", and also fix the user name link so it doesn't include an extra underlined space. Thanks for bringing this up. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Searchability & Visibility of topic tags

How can this RfC be structured? A lot of ideas are related to

• people
• development
• communication
• ...

I would like to add tags, but it's a plain static page...

I can see Flow useful for mainspace in such cases - if only it showed each topic categories visibly and allowed to filter by categories... Gryllida 05:40, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Issue tracking

I see a lot of ideas discussed here, but no bug numbers for them, presumably you're using your own internal bug tracker... that's so inconvenient for /me/ to track things this way.. Gryllida 05:41, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

All systems are summarized on the project page. Planning is on Trello and bugs/features are tracked in bugzilla. I'm not sure if there is an official list of 'community suggestions' that is assembled for the project...

Whenever comments are left, do not hesitate to ask people to give you links back to the tickets. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 21:29, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Please write a migration script for LQT and classic talk pages...

I can see all 3 of them — LQT, classic talk pages, Flow — in use on this wiki. Please write a migration script so that everything becomes readable in Flow, and migrate to it.

It'd of course be a pity to lose past talk page history (or not have it converted) for any Wikimedia project, and this task should be a priority before any kind of deployment (even beta). (Doing otherwise forces past discussions to be archived and not easy to contribute to, effectively saying a big 'we do not care' to all past collaboration, and this is unacceptable.) Gryllida 09:55, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: The last thing I heard was that 'classic talk pages' could only be migrated as entire section=single Flow post. There's no way to figure out who is replying to whom, or even to reliably determine where each comment starts and stops (e.g., if someone forgot to sign, quoted someone else, or used a different number of colons accidentally). I think that this would be good enough, though: a human can make sense of it even if it's all in one post (and ===subsections=== could be set as "replies" to the main section, I guess). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:01, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: Having personally written a perl script that was designed to parse a talk page into a semblance of a Flow Board, I can tell you that This Way Lies Madness.

The regular expressions required to parse signatures alone are insanely complex. That doesn't even account for trying to understand colon-indented replies, which are rarely, if ever, trustworthy and are hopelessly broken with large threads that use out-dent templates.

It is theoretically possible, but then, all things are "theoretically possible". It would almost be easier to construct a Flow Board by using the history and revision tables and grind one forward. But then, we still have the "who is replying to who" problem. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Just have the server parse the entire message. Don't parse it in Perl. Then pick up the last link which is to a user page. ... This is complicated.

If you find it hard, please, consider opening a call for funding volunteer work for this through a PEG grant or a grant from a chapter. Gryllida 23:00, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: Feel free to take this work up yourself, if you like.

I've got 20 years experience as a software engineer and I think it's a nigh-impossible problem. I can't imagine paying anyone to do it, let alone anyone volunteering to do so. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 04:30, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

This work has been in progress in this script since March. I agree, it'd be really helpful to get this done. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

LQT is going to be converted to Flow; we just need to talk some more about how and when. Thanks for nudging about it. :)

Converting a wiki talk page into Flow is really just asking for trouble. As WhatamIdoing says, there's no reasonable way to parse wikitext edits as discrete messages. We talked about a few different schemes for making it work, including the one that WhatamIdoing mentioned, and they all basically amount to creating sad Frankenstein monsters that are neither talk page conversations or Flow discussions.

That being said -- talk page conversations are an important part of the history of a wiki, and old conversations should never be thrown away, or put out of reach. In fact, one of my biggest problems with the sad-Frankenstein conversion ideas was that they would break the links in Contributions, which would make it harder to see what an editor has done and said on the wiki.

My current thinking about old wiki talk page conversations is that it's more respectful to move the existing talk page conversations to an archive page, and include a clearly visible link to the archive on the Flow board. This is common practice for old talk page conversations anyway -- going into an archive doesn't mean that they're forgotten. (We're starting to work on search for Flow boards -- I don't know if it makes sense to search a Flow board and a talk page archive using the same tool, but we do have the responsibility to figure out how to keep talk page archives at least as as easily searchable as they currently are.)

However -- on the day that a Flow board takes the place of an active talk page, there will be a moment when a current talk page discussion will need to pause and restart as a Flow conversation. That moment will be irritating for everyone. It's not the end of the world, obviously, and worse things happen at sea, but it will be an annoyance that we have to take seriously as we plan that process. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:59, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

I guess that migrating old discussions has to happen before enabling creation of new threads and topics. See my message above, too - I should perhaps ask around and find who'd like to do this. Gryllida 23:02, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

"The last thing I heard was that 'classic talk pages' could only be migrated as entire section=single Flow post." -- Can someone please add this to the migration plans? I gather it's searchable, it has means to add new posts -- which is fine. In theory, we could have some means to trust contributors with manually splitting such thread into separate messages, but avoiding vandalism here is a complex process. Gryllida 12:04, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

"and still needs work to add history" from the linked gerrit - AUGH. I was planning to throw that away. I would really appreciate you doing this in signle-post mode and writing a means of semu-atomating the process of split. :-p

I.e. have people select a message, select the timestamp, and type in a name and its indent level.

In theory, no more vandalism potential than with classic talk pages. Granted Flow allows to move messages around, anyway, which it should and LQT does. Gryllida 12:12, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Important goals for refactoring

This means that

1. people should be able to edit others' posts
2. people should be able to change others' posts authorship
3. people should be ableto change others' posts indent level and move them round
4. we should assume that this is normal and is allowed, since both lqt and classic talk pages did this
5. also useful for cases where I leave an msg and IP and want to sign that again
6. possibly restrict to autoconfirmed but I would personally allow for all (since currently this is o, and we should firmyl assume good faith and willingless of IP folks to help out with refactoring conersations without breaking them)
7. possibly put the interface for this into an obscure place. i.e. "enter refactoring mode" for a given thread Gryllida 12:15, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Jorm, you mentioned that you tried to write a markup-to-flow migration script in the past. How hard would it be to migrate entire sections without parsing them, while preserving history, and allow means for people (end users who would like to revive a discussion by adding their message somewhere in-between old messages) to manually split a Flow message into a few messages (with correct old timestamps) by hand? More details on this is mentioned above.

Where automating a task is hard, it might make sense to semi-automate it. Gryllida 00:24, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I guess this is also doable by migrating entire talk pages as a single post signed by 'Flow-dummy'.

----

Important goals for refactoring

Flow has to be able to allow people to refactor discussions, including letting people do things like these:

• split a thread into two
• split a message into two individual messages
• sign a message for someone else ('posted by Flow-dummy, re-signed as Bob by Gryllida' or at least ability to display these in history without showing this info in signature)
• change indentation level of a message
• ...
• whatever you find missing after you deploy this and try to manually parse a wiki talk page on your playground wiki Gryllida 12:40, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

I suggest everybody should take a look on how "refactoring of text stored in separate snippets" is done in Microsoft's OneNote. That's the model of editing content we should strive for IMHO. Diego Moya (talk) 11:00, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity, please see the two messages above. They contain information crucial for planning of how Flow should be able to refactor conversations, and 1 big suggestion how to handle the issue of migrating old talk pages. Gryllida 12:42, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Please link to specific messages because the "two messages above" can change when other people comment on this. Helder 14:09, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Admittedly the history would all be left over with the first message: suppose we have a talk page containing sections '1', '2', and '3'. Its life is like this:

1. someone writes sections 1, 2, and 3, and participates in discussions in wiki markup
2. flow-dummy posts all that as one big post on a flow board, preserving history
3. users split it into 3 topics
4. in history of topics 2 and 3, it'll say 'split from topic 1' as a first entry — people interested in history of topics 2 and 3 will manually browse history of topic 1 (which will be the entire history of that whole talk page) Gryllida 12:48, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

Are we still planning on moving existing classic talk pages?

To my understanding we just need to be able to migrate them as one post, with appropriate split functionality (I split a discussion in two, its history entry of one of them will say where I split it from, all history will remain in the oldest post and be linked).

I.e. I create topics "foo" and "bar" on a classic talk page which has archives. Then:

1. We move it to a single Flow board post titled "Migrated".
2. We move archives to single Flow board post titled "Archive 1", "Archive 2", etc.
3. Users split the discussions by hand.
4. For each thing they split out of the big post, the history says:

   Gryllida split Topic:43546554DSF from Topic:FDGFD34534

   Gryllida split Topic:FGH345 from Topic:FDGFD34534

5. Anyone who wants to see history will consult a post history which will, in its first edit, link to the original Topic:FDGFD34534 post (the oldest one on the corresponding page) which holds the whole talk page history from the classic talk page.
6. The end result is that all discussions are searchable, they are more or less correct headlines and proper TOC. Where people want to reply, they need to do some more splitting of a single thread into invididual messages.
7. All this functionality is not redundant, because a lot of this will be useful for refactoring Flow-enabled discussions in big RFCs.

(Cross posted at Talk:Structured Discussions/2014/10#h-Will_Flow_ever_be_the_real_LQT_4.0-2014-10-27T09:38:00.000Z) Gryllida 05:03, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Are we still planning on moving existing classic talk pages?

Yes, but as Danny says "move the existing talk page conversations to an archive page". The maintenance script will copy the talk page header to the Flow board header so all the templates and annotation are there, and there will be a template linking to the archive, something like {{Flow header from wikitext | date=2014-11-17 | archive = [[Page name/Archive 23]] }}

This is pretty much what Quiddity has done when we enable Flow on an existing talk page; when and if we do it for an entire namespace it'll be automated. As Flow/Converting talk pages says, the first place we'll do this is officewiki, WMF's internal wiki.

To my understanding we just need to be able to migrate them as one post, with appropriate split functionality

Someone could certainly copy and paste an old talk page section into a new topic, but it's not what the conversion will do.

As an aside, expert wiki users love split functionality, to me it seems odd, and crazy hard to undo when it involves editing one topic and creating another. A "Start a new topic quoting the selected post" is more e-mail like and I suspect would make more sense to casual commenters. SPage (WMF) (talk) 02:19, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

I agree that developing an undo function for a post split is not trivial. But it can be done, and I think it's worthwile to do it, because a split function would not only support weird power user habits. It would also enable some interesting applications which could help closing the gap between Flow's abilities and current talk page usage (see my latest wall of text). — HHHIPPO 22:27, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

That said, I agree that we shouldn't try to convert all existing archives to Flow. That would need enormous amounts of manual work, since our current wikitext talk pages don't have a consistent structure. As long as we have a convenient way to search the archives from the flow board, it should be fine to leave them as they are. — HHHIPPO 18:06, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

The current plan is still to (very simplified):

• move all existing classic talk pages, to /Archive n (with localized name, and incremented archive number if any older archives are detected)
• Copy the classic talkpages' section=0 (banner templates and messages) to the Flow Board header (with link to history for attribution)
• Add a link for the newest archive

For search, the plan (or at least desired goal) is to have the in-board search also search the classic archived subpages.

I personally really quite like the idea of importing just the currently active wikitalk page into Flow, and splitting it up with one Topic/Post per old Thread, much as you describe. I'm not sure where it falls on the spectrum of practicality, but I'm definitely urging that possibility forward, and it has been "batted around" a bit by the developers (staff and volunteer).

I'm hesitant about the idea of attempting to import all old archives, and even more hesitant about asking editors to split up or annotate any/all of the old threads into individual posts. It's a good "ideal" situation, but that would be a staggeringly large amount of effort, that could perhaps be better directed (partially for the work itself, and partially for all the accuracy-checking that other editors would inevitably feel obliged to do...). We (all the projects) are already backlogged in so many areas, that this seems like it might not be the best thing to add to that pile. You do make a good point that "refactoring" tools will be needed, in some form or another, but I don't think "splitting a single post" was one that had previously been considered.

Thanks again for describing this in detail. There's some damn good ideas in there, even if the flow team can't implement them all. And sorry again for the delayed reply. (I have many threads from Deltahedron, that still need answering, too. :( Eventualism is my only/ongoing hope.) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 02:21, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

• What if a wiki doesn't follow that convention for archiving talk pages?
• Has anyone checked if there are any wikis in this situation? Helder 15:48, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

The English Wikivoyage might use a different (manual) system. It seems like "village pump"-type messages end up being swept to more topic-specific pages, rather than being archived in the place where the discussion happened. (Flow would be very handy for that system, because you could just re-assign the topic to another page.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:17, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity, SPage, Hhhippo:

I strongly disagree with "move the existing talk page conversations to an archive page". In my understanding this means that

1. Old conversations are not Flow'ized. Participating in them is hard.
2. Old conversations are not searchable. (We can hack in a subroutine which does both a Flow search and a classic search, but this is ugly.)

While we get these disadvantages, we really don't gain anything, because:

1. All the features I mentioned, which look hard to develop or implement, are required and desired in order for Flow to pass the "flexibility" requirement. I maintain that it is better to plan them early.
2. There is not much effort about converting archives. They'll only be converted as people need them, gradually, not the whole thing at once. Gryllida 23:14, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

I'm not saying we shouldn't do any conversion, just "that we shouldn't try to convert all existing archives to Flow."

1. Yes, re-opening an archived discussion by un-archiving rather than linking is one of the use cases for a conversion procedure. The most common case are likely the archives created from the active talk page the moment Flow is enabled. (Like Quiddity said, currently active discussions should be imported to Flow.)
2. The main search function will be enabled to search an entire wiki including the Flow part anyway. Going from there to searching within a single Flow board and its wikitext sub/archive pages sounds like a very minor step.
3. I agree we should have at least most of those features. I'm a bit undecided about the ability to change a post's author, but that might also be needed to fix accidentally logged-out posts. We might want some kind of log for such author changes (or other safeguard mechanisms), since there's quite some potential for abuse.
4. Your second "2." doesn't play well with your first "2.": if the archives weren't searchable, and searchability is a need, then we would have to convert them all at once. But they will be searchable, so that's not a problem.

Btw: regarding a migration script for LQT, I understand that exists already. — HHHIPPO 21:52, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity, SPage, Hhhippo:

Thanks much! I would like to see this done before we deploy Flow widely, because it's an important backwards compatibility for two reasons.

1. Such flexibility of refactoring is provided by existing classic talk mess.
2. People will want to unarchive stuff and keep talking in it, and not supporting that locks them out.

Could someone please confirm that the features this thread is talking about are given adequate priority? Gryllida 22:19, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

If people want to un-archive old discussions, then they can do that under Flow exactly like they are doing that in wikitext: manually copy the old discussion from the archive and manually paste it into a new post, with themselves listed as the 'author' in the page history. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:20, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

And all post will have the same indentations and name-tags as in the original discussion? Or will they be limited to the restrictions and inflexibilities of Flow as well? Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 11:16, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

The wikitext formatting will not be changed; it will only be placed inside a Flow box. These boxes support association lists, and they even support the common (and painful to people using some w:screen reader software) abuse of association list formatting to produce indentations, like this:

One colon

Two colons

Three colons

Four colons

If you paste over an old discussion, complete with indentations and signatures, you will get the old discussion, complete with indentations and signatures, inside the Flow message. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:23, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

So the whole discussion will be treated as a single post? Or did I get this wrong?

If a discussion thread will be resurrected, it should look like a discussion thread, not like a post. I know, usual talk page discussions can be a bit hard to convert, as some may answer with good indentation in the middle of longer posts, and this stuff here doesn't even get indenting and linking right in any manner, see-saw answers should be a nightmare for those programmers, while totally acceptable and fine in a real discussion.

Something like this:

Long elaboration part 1

Answer to long elaboration part 1

Long elaboration part 2

Answer to long elaboration part 2

Answer to this answer again

And another answer more indented

Long elaboration part 3

Answer to long elaboration part 3

Answer to this answer again

And another answer more indented

And yet another answer more indented

Another answer to this answer again

Long elaboration part 4

Answer to long elaboration part 4 Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 16:06, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

RTL support?

Hello, What about supporting RTL languages? Neukoln (talk) 12:12, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Neukoln: Thank you for testing it. :) One of the developers was discussing this morning, some of the ongoing work (and difficulties therein) that he was doing towards better RTL support, so hopefully there will be obvious improvements in the next few work-cycles. (They're currently doing 2 week sprints, and one of the focuses in this sprint is a round of i18n fixes).

Would you be willing to give further feedback, once the basics are fixed? I could ping you, at that time. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity (WMF): Hi, sure I would.

Actually the testing was writing down my impressions and describing my experience with Flow.

• Writing Hebrew sentence that has English within it is impossible. The result is unreadable due to directions problems.
• I wasn't able to delete my own comment.
• The lack of Index is prominent. Sometimes you enter a page and wants to get the feel of whats going on quickly. The switch button is nice but you still have to scroll quite a bit instead of having one quick look at the index.
• There are only 3 levels of indentation.
• The spacing between the replays is way too big, makes it hard to follow long and ongoing discussions that has many users involved in them. (constantly need to scroll the screen up and down).
• Same goes for the indentation - lots of unused space causing the sentences to break too many times. Keep in mind that wikipedia's discussions and comments by users tend to be long. brake the lines too many times and you'll increase the total screen length you have to scroll.
• Changing lang interface into Hebrew caused the following:

• "Reply • Edit" moved to the right, vertical lines moved to the right (as expected), while Replay, Preview and Cancel Buttons didn't.
• Worst of all indentations were still on the left, though this time they were about the same as the normal ":" wiki indentation. It would have been great if it wasn't for the vertical huge space between comments.
• User name didn't moved to the right while the 3 dots menu moved to left and is hidden by the user name. Neukoln (talk) 09:50, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Neukoln: Thanks! I'm not sure what issue tracker is being used for Flow, but I'm sure everything of your comments would eventually go to the issue tracker and get fixed. I agree with 100% of what you said (except Hebrew things, which I didn't test; I don't read the language). Related topics:

about search:

• Search functionality?! 26 Aug 2014
• Search box? 01 Feb 2014
• So how do I search? 17 Jan 2014

about not saving space:

• Huge headers 21 Aug 2014
• Needs some refinement 28 May 2014
• Readability 20 Jun 2014
• please make the interface more compact 20 Jul 2014

about toc:

• Contents table 19 Jun 2014
• Where's the table of contents? 17 Jun 2014
• Needs some refinement 28 May 2014
• Table of content 21 May 2014

limited level of threading depth:

• Threading 02 May 2014
• Threading 12 Jun 2014
• Multiple threading levels 07 Mar 2014
• Thread structure of Flow needs improvement 05 Mar 2014
• bug 59230 - missing thread depth setting

deleting a comment:

• Deleting a comment? 28 Jan 2014
• Deleting own replies? 11 Jan 2014 Gryllida 11:01, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

That's immensely useful. Thanks again, to you both.

(Note: As I replied to Gryllida in another thread, there's a compendium of related major discussions at Flow/Prior discussion-thread-roundup, that I'll slowly add these topics to that, if they're not there already. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:18, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

next/previous buttons on single thread view

Like in email, useful for browsing threads Gryllida 03:02, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Where a topic belongs to two boards, the next/previous pair of buttons should be accompanied by a dropdown saying which board to browse. Gryllida 03:14, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida 03:21, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Left or right sidebar with TOC in single-topic view

I'm not sure whether there are any plans to move to Flow for things such as RfCs or RfC sections, but I feel that having a table of contents at the right (with single-thread view) could be useful. Gryllida 03:14, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

It would be nice to link topics to eachother

This page contains a lot of duplicates and related topics. I'd like them to remain open, but perhaps be grouped together. Gryllida 11:05, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Passive notifications

(i.e. where I am not watching a thread or board)

Does Echo notify people when someone...

• ...links to a Flow thread they started? (Echo notifies people about new edits to a page they created.)
• ...links to a Flow thread they participated in? (Iirc the software automatically adds any page I edit to my watchlist.)
• ...links to their message? (not sure if that's possible)

Some of those could make sense. I did not test which ones are implemented. Gryllida 11:08, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, you're thinking of Echo's "A page you started has been linked at ..." feature. However, this only happens for pages in Mainspace. (See a few more specifics at Echo (Notifications)/Feature requirements#Started Page - Linked) Hence, none of the 3 types you've given above, currently exist, though it might be possible to implement the 1st type, if there was a strong demand. I suspect the other 2 would be far too database intensive (and even the 1st type might be, given that Flow is a cross-wiki database) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:11, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, thanks.

Hm. Where does Flow store its data? Gryllida 22:55, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Notifications?

How do I subscribe to a topic Downjohn (talk) 21:39, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Downjohn: Click on the star in the top-right of the grey subject box; it will turn green. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Jdforrester (WMF): Could subscribe maybe be added to the hotdog menu? Having it there would improve discoverability, and further associate the star glyph with watching/subscribing. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 08:39, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Martijn Hoekstra: I like that idea – not sure what the Flow team think, though. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Downjohn: Click the star at the upper right of the header, across from the topic title. You are also automatically subscribed to threads, like this one, that you posted on, and all new threads on watchlisted pages. Jay8g (talk) 21:44, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Actions on hover

• hovering on any time thingy shows timestamp. Showing different text on hover is unexpected and causes reflow (most iritating when you have “Edited 1 day ago • 1 day ago” and hover on “1 day ago”)
• hovering on header makes text in that topic a bit grayed out. Or at least you could expect the whole topic to be grayed, actually it's only first root with all it's children (see http://snag.gy/YvPrq.jpg). What's the idead behind graying out at all (i.e. I would not gray out anything)? Lazowik (talk) 13:41, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

You're right about the "Edited 3 hours ago • 3 hours ago" being a confusing element, especially when you hover on one and then the other. That needs some more thinking.

The tricky thing with the timestamp is that "3 hours ago" is more readable/helpful for most casual situations, but we also need a way for people to get the exact date and time if they need to refer to it. Showing all of it as the default state is not ideal. Can you think of a different way to handle that problem?

For the gray text when you hover on the header -- I had actually never noticed that. You're right, that's annoying and probably accidental. I just added a card to the team backlog to fix that: Hovering on the topic title bar -- don't make the text in the first post gray. Thanks for asking about it! DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:04, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@DannyH (WMF):

Actually I intended to write some options for timestamps but forgot to :)

I see two immediate solutions:

• use html title attribute http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_global_title.asp Downside is that you leave handling of this up to browser. Delay until popup shows up can be quite long
• use javascript to show a tooltip. Then you can set delay yourself, maybe even to 0. Lazowik (talk) 17:15, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Lazowik: wouldn't tooltips be bad for tablet users? Helder 18:00, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Helder.wiki: hmm, right. Still, that's not a regression. Lazowik (talk) 19:06, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Infinitely expanding watchlist

The new system of watching Flow pages, where all new topics are added to one's watchlist individually, results in an infinitely expanding watchlist. Every time a new topic is added to a page you are watching, a new entry is added to the watchlist. Just in the few days since this change went live, I have amassed about 30 new watchlist entries in the topic namespace, and I don't have that many Flow pages on my watchlist. Over time, this is likely to cause issues, especially for people with many pages on their watchlist. (As a side note, it is hard to deal with Flow pages in Special:EditWatchlist because they show up with just their codes, making you click on each one to see if you want to keep it.) Jay8g (talk) 16:58, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, the fact that these names are meaningless makes it very hard to clean up my watchlist. Helder 17:29, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, we're going to have to retune the way subscribing to a board works. There were two possible definitions of what "subscribing to a Flow board" would mean -- a) You get an Echo notification that a new topic has been created, or b) You get automatically subscribed to every new topic created on the board.

Basically, a) works better for people who look at Echo more than their watchlist, and b) works better for people who look at their watchlist more than Echo. We needed to try one of them and see how it feels, so we opted for the version that was more watchlist-focused.

Over the last couple days, I think we've heard clear feedback that b) feels too much like spam. So I'm going to talk about it with the team, and we'll hash out the details to switch to the a) approach. Thanks for posting your thoughts; it makes a big difference. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:25, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

@DannyH (WMF): What about option c) that was commented at en:Talk:Flow? Allow the editor to select which boards or topics should generate a notification, and which should have silent updates (so that the user has to be actively search for them at the Watchlist).

I would love to have a small selection of a few talk pages for which I get a notification every time they are updated, even if they're posts to existing topics, but that would be overwhelming if I get an alert for new topics at *all* the talk pages/boards to which I'm subscribed. Diego Moya (talk) 16:48, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I think we're going to need to provide more options. (When Nick reads this, he's going to say "Yessss!" because he loves options.)

We released a version of the new notifications, because we wanted to get feedback once people were actually using it for real conversations, not just from team members on test pages. The feedback that we've had has been surprisingly varied -- some people see Echo notifications as requiring immediate notice, and getting more will be a big distraction, and other people don't pay attention to Echo at all, and only want to see things on their watchlist. And even then, there are differences between what and how much people want to see on their watchlist or Echo.

So -- right now, it looks like we're going to have to come up with a more sophisticated system, which gives people more choice about what and how much they want to see. Having a bunch more options in Preferences is always possible, but I'd like to see if we can build the choice into the UI, in a way that feels powerful and not intrusive.

This is a very tricky thing to build -- but that's the tricky thing that we have to build. We'll keep talking about it and asking questions about it. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

If you take a look at how discussions on Village Pump of Portuguese Wikipedia works (topic subpages transcluded in a main page), you'll notice the following: users who watch e.g.

https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Esplanada/geral

will see the edit which creates new topics appear in their watchlist, but edits to the subpages of those topics will not appear in their watchlist unless they choose to watch the specific topic. This works well as a workaround for the "watch a section" feature (bug 738) and avoid cluttering the watchlist with edits from very active topics we are not interested in. Helder 21:46, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that is what Flow will have now/very soon. You can watch the specific topics that you're subscribed to, and you won't see the conversations that you're not interested in. We're going to make a change within a couple of weeks that makes subscribing to a Flow board work the way that you described -- you'll get a notification when new topics are created. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:00, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

Preview differs from saved

http://snag.gy/x6InM.jpg

• author is not rendered as link and not bold, thus looks like if it was a part of message
• minor: is the left margin on preview intentional? Lazowik (talk) 17:31, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Lazowik:

• We recently added author name to the post preview to fix bug 69257. I'm not seeing a blue bold username on this preview either, even though I think the code is in the template.
• Your second point is bug 69715, we fixed it. SPage (WMF) (talk) 22:23, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

On design for one-line messages.. more compact...

JFYI w:ru:Википедия:Форум/Технический contains a lot of short but informative one-line replies - with the signature they remain only one line. With Flow, that would look ugly. Thought I'd mention that for your next design work to succeed. Gryllida 11:26, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

+1. Helder 13:48, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

For example, we really need to avoid wasting three lines for short comments like the one above (the problem would be the same if instead of "+1" I had written a short answer) Helder 13:51, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Can you take a screenshot of this thread and move things around in a painting program until a point you like it? You can upload to Commons. Gryllida 22:40, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

one line reply (see, it's 3 lines here) Gryllida 11:26, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

From a quick look at a Twitter page and a Reddit page (bah, its design scales well ; those are social networks that quickly come to mind), I think this issue has to be solved by

1. grouping nick and time together
2. making the message text clearly black
3. making the reply/etc buttons a bit pale and (as mentioned) small, but bold
4. grouping stuff like nick/time/reply button closer to the message and leaving margins between messages
5. not using borders (they clutter)

Some other things to try:

1. a "[-]" button at the left of nick collapses a message and its children
2. "+/-" (up/down) are small arrows at the message left (enableable per-namespace)
3. please use serif font for the topic title!!!!!1

some minor notes pictures... :

It would be nice to be brave and shove both nick, time, and buttons in one line

Gryllida 12:19, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: I like this view. Whitespace can also be saved in the title, as you imply in your screenshot.

Another possibility: replacing second/minute/hour/week/month/year with s/m/hr/wk/mo/yr would be reasonable and could fit the attribution into the same line. Sj (talk) 21:36, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

The really bold thing would be to go 1 line if it fits. Like this:

one line reply Gryllida 1 minute ago (33 seconds ago) Reply Edit ...

Note that I also dropped the "Edited". If there are two timestamps then you don't really need to say it's been edited. Alsee (talk) 12:06, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

I'd also like a more compact design, with username and time stamps together, as well as actions grouped together and not taking even one more line.

I like the username and time stamps below the message, because I feel that the content is comparatively more important than its author and time (I see this as a major difference between collaborative working and social networking).

What about indenting them from the post text, to better distinguish this meta-information from the actual content?

What about moving the actions to the right "margin" (that huge white space that's still totally unused after so many month of Flow experimentation and development)? We could have "reply" at the level of the last line of the post content, "thank" at the level of the line containing the username and time stamps, the dots triplet (= other actions menu including permalink, hide, edit...) between those two.

Moving the actions to the right "margin" would even allow for the username and timestamps to be right-aligned instead of just indented. That would be my preferred option because I like to focus on content (arguments and replies), with meta-information being readily available without actually interfering with the content as I feel it does right now. Klipe (talk) 15:55, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps a +1 button, incrementing a counter field in the title? Deltahedron (talk) 18:31, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

"+1" is indeed a common type of very short answer. However, I think that reducing it to a counter increment has several drawbacks. For instance:

• We would not have meta-information at all: we wouldn't be able to distinguish between "+1" from a serious contributor and "+1" from a usual spammer...
• It would not be possible to change mind. Unless having also a "-1" button.
• It would be possible to "+1" (or "-1") several times.

So, in my view, such a basic counter would be totally useless. If you have other ideas, maybe you could explain how such a counter would effectively work?

NB: A more sophisticated counter mechanism for sure makes sense in some other workflows than the basic discussion ones, e.g. voting workflows that Flow will probably support one day. Klipe (talk) 08:22, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Deleted topics

Even if a topic has since been deleted, you can get notifications for it. These include links to the topic page, like this, which give you a page with an unhelpful error message: "Insufficient permission to access the content. Return to MediaWiki. [0aa7d0a5] 2014-08-28 16:36:52: Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\PermissionException" Jay8g (talk) 16:43, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for posting about this. Where was that notification -- in your Echo flyout, the All Notifications page, or in email? A deleted topic should be removed from Echo at least -- if you saw this notification there, we'll have to figure out what went wrong.

I put a card into the backlog to create a better error page, that at least has a link back to the board and/or board history. 1 Thanks! DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:00, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): In Echo (and Special:Notifications). Interestingly, I only got the started a thread message, not the posted on a thread message. Jay8g (talk) 02:36, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Getting things readable when edit and post times are roughly the same

It says "edited 11 hours ago - 11 hours ago". This is unhelpful, especially where I'm reading the message first time now; I don't care whether it had any previous versions.

I see some merit in this for the case "my sister read it 11 hours ago and told me about it, now I'm reading it and see different thing from what she told me", I think it does not need to repeat the time twice when I'm reading.

Possibly when

1. the time is the same and
2. I didn't read the revision before the edit was made,

then

• show the 'edited' thing only on-mouseover (on-hover).

Please share thoughts and perhaps implement this.

As before, I find this perhaps a good first bug; you're usually too quick though.

Thanks! Gryllida 22:47, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

On a related note, when mouse hovers, the approximate times expand into exact timestamps. This may make the design a little more complicated. Nevertheless with some hints this could still be a good exercise for volunteers to get started with contributing to Flow. Gryllida 22:49, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: Which, btw, is extremely impossible to copy/paste (the first time stamp; Edited x hours ago) Christian75 (talk) 08:12, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

I agree that this ought to be changed -- having two time stamps is odd, especially when they're within minutes of each other. I think the answer is to combine them into one -- just have it be "Edited x hours ago" and then that's a link to 'the Topic history page.

Now, this is just me talking off the top of my head, without actually talking to our designer or community lead, so, y'know. But if it magically happened I wouldn't be upset about it. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): Maybe not even 'edited x hours ago', just 'x hours ago', when their 'xxx ago' form is the same. When it isn't the same, then add the 'edited' word. Gryllida 01:26, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: in general, having the edited after the creation date seems to make sense to me. "2 days ago, edited one day ago" feels better to me than "edited one day ago * two days ago", which sounds confusing to me. If we want something really fancy, I would love something like "2 days ago, edited the same day" for a minor edit and "2 days ago, edited the same day: {{editsummary}}" for a non minor edit. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 09:03, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

A possibly known bug, trying to navigate to history here errors out: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:S1alcijao7wghh31&action=history&topic_postId=s1i881rim9mthh2w Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:02, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree. I'd perhaps also suggest to write the author nickname and the timestamp together, as it's grammatically coherent: "[posted by] Gryllida [at] so-and-so". Gryllida 11:10, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: the more I think about this the fancier it becomes. Replies made before the edit could have a small "after this reply was made, edits have been made to the original post (parent? or is that too jargon)" Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:56, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): Sounds like a good plan, i've also been a bit annoyed by this. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 14:09, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

BTW, who is our designer and our community lead? :-) Gryllida 02:44, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

JavaScriptless Flow does not allow listing back

I see a "load more" button (something JS users usually experience as infinite scroll). Clicking it takes me to the next page of Flow topics on this board.

• I would like to also have a back button.
• I'd like to be able to set how many results to see per page.
• I'd like to be able to browse to the 'oldest' and 'newest' page.

See how LQT does this on this page, for example.

(On a related note, I'd also like to have a readable URL for these things. But that's cosmetic.) Gryllida 09:55, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Flow takes away the ability to edit (or create) multiple threads at once

Hi. Suppose someone wrote something like this:

---

Hi. I need help with wiki markup, I think it needs me to install Notepad.exe. --Foo~~~~~

Hello. What happens when you try to install Notepad.exe? --Bar~~~~

It is not compatible with my mobile platform. --Foo~~~~~

---

Now, I'd like to ask 2 questions. First, I'd like to notify (in response to the first line) that there is no need in notepad. Second, I'd like to reply to a third line and ask what mobile platform the folk's using. Typically that's possible in one edit, but I feel that Flow treats them as separate.

---

Also, I may want to create 2 topics at once. Previously this was doable by clicking ?action=edit&section=new, and typing an extra headline:

Subject: Foo
Content:

Foooooo! --~~~
== Bar ==
Bar~ --~~~

---

On a bigger scale, I may even click edit on a village pump and reply to all questions (this means multiple threads) in one edit. It is convenient, while not at all possible with Flow. I typically do this for my own convenience (how this decreases edit count is quite another question).

---

Please consider this challenging query. It's probably not even possible to resolve, and bears purely rhetorical nature. Or is it doable? :-) Gryllida 10:50, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

I would like improvements in this area too (but it seems flow allows one to click in reply for multiple comments in the same page, and save them separately - but without reloading the page) Helder 15:38, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

This seems directly related to the ability to refactor the comments of others. Both could use the same interface. Sj (talk) 21:27, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Flow does not provide edit summaries

I recall there was some discussion earlier about generating some, but I don't see progress. Not on this Flow instance at least. Gryllida 10:51, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

This is particularly important to provide attribution for snippets of content copied from other pages. Helder 15:34, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Helder.wiki: I was under the impression that you could provide this attribution in the body of your message as well. That's what most people do, anyway. I see a lot of comments that say something like "Here's what the article says right now:" and not very many talk-page edit summaries that include formal attribution. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:03, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

agreed Gryllida 11:59, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Then it won't appear in the history of the page, together with the other authors. Helder 03:00, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Is there a single feature-request/aggregator for the discussions / requests around edit summaries? Sj (talk) 21:26, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Flow/Prior_discussion-thread-roundup#Edit_summaries Gryllida 22:21, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

JavaScriptless Flow takes to topic title edit box when I'd like to edit my own message

. Gryllida 10:52, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

i don't fully understand this point, can you try to explain it a bit more thoroughly ? —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 14:02, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

This is tracked at https://trello.com/c/ycaDQdUj/358-non-javascript-mode-edit-post-workflow Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:44, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Uncomfortable path to linking to a topic

Can't find my past topic... so here it goes, a little again. I browse this board and decide to link someone to a thread. Currently:

1. click ...
2. click permalink
3. copy the topic:lalalala bit from urlbar or from the page
4. switch tab
5. type [[
6. paste
7. type |
8. switch tab
9. copy topic title
10. switch tab
11. paste
12. type ]]

...a long path. :-) Now, it is the same with old way, except that it doesn't take me to single-thread view to perform all these operations. This perhaps makes it easier to link to multiple threads at once.

Also, when linking to a thread before (with classic wiki markup pages), it was one of many on a page. It was not a single thread.

Perhaps steal design from here: https://docs.python.org/2/reference/lexical_analysis.html#physical-lines -- move mouse over the headlines and watch what changes :-) (it used to even highlight a currently selected header with yellow background, but no longer does). Gryllida 11:22, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Gryllida: frwiki uses something like that (see w:fr:MediaWiki:Gadget-AncreTitres.js), and I import their script for personal use everywhere. Helder 14:41, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Done but I don't see it Gryllida 22:18, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

There's a similar gadget available on mediawiki.org that I use - Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and called "HeadAnchor" - that one adds a hover-effect to all levels of ==headers== which makes a sideways "§" appear to the left of the heading. That § is a link to the heading. (So I can either: click it to change the URL in the addressbar (and then copy the bit I want from there), or right-click copy the entire thing as an external link directly)

I like the hidden-until-needed visual aspect of the gadget on mw. However, I really like the options that the frwiki gadget adds - and that's sort of what we were talking about at https://trello.com/c/zdt35anb/107-permalink-flyout and meetings and in other threads onwiki, but putting those 2 options in the actionmenu. Thanks for pointing it out. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 06:09, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion. This is the syntax you should use to import the gadget from French Wikipedia:

mw.loader.load( '//fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-AncreTitres.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' ); Helder 02:54, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I would like Talk:Flow#Topic:S1g7r6h4nj2o6un3 to work to link to this thread, not only Topic:S1g7r6h4nj2o6un3. Gryllida 11:27, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

That doesn't work once the topic is pushed below the initial load of N topics by other activity. We could hack it for JavaScript users but then it's not universal. There's a need to load a Flow board starting at a certain topic, but it'll be query string parameter(s) that work for no-JS. SPage (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree that we need a better way to link threads. It's not super high on the list right now, but I'm not happy with the long list of steps either. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:35, 2 September 2014 (UTC)