Talk:Talk pages project/Replying/2020/09

The team would value any thoughts and/or questions you have about this new tool for Replying to specific comments on talk pages.

Reversability

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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I like this project. One thing that'd be useful would be to make it reversible: i.e. if someone turns off the feature, can those comments still be seen in the vanilla mediawiki version of the talkpage. Currently when the beta is turned off, previous comments and the side panel disappear (example). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 00:03, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

I think you've posted this comment in the wrong place. Talk pages project/replying is about the "Discussion tools" beta feature, and the history of that example shows that you used the "Structured Discussions on user talk" beta feature, which is not the same thing. * Pppery * _{it has begun} 00:50, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) might know what happened to your previous comments. I assume that it's something that's come up a lot at the French Wikipedia over the years. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:29, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

It's perfectly clear what happened to the previous comments: they're at

fr:User talk:Evolution and evolvability/Structured Discussions Archive 1. There's no actual bug being reported here, only the inherent incompatibility of Flow and Wikitext. * Pppery * _{it has begun} 01:32, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Aha, I see now! I'd just gone into preferences on fr.wp and ticked the talkpage beta feature without realising I was just activating flow on my user talkpage! Have actually tested with this the thing I wanted to test now and all worked as expected. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 23:51, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

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

Cannot reply to a comment

@PPelberg (WMF) @Whatamidoing (WMF) Hello, try to reply here and here and here to comment by Whatamidoing. I see [ reply ] at user talk of Martin Urbanec, by I can not reply. And at my user page I cannot see any [ reply ] link behind comment by Whatamidoing. It is stange... Patrik L. (talk) 17:53, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Patriccck, could you please look at Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment? and tell me if you can find the explanation there? I need someone to read that help page and see if it makes sense. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:31, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF) Yes, it makes sense, but see coment by Matěj Suchánek. Patrik L. (talk) 11:38, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

I can reproduce this. There is really nothing to understand. The point is the [ reply ] link next to your signature is shown on Martin Urbanec's talk page but not that of Patriccck (despite your contribution being identical). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:50, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@Patriccck or @Matěj Suchánek: can you please share a screenshot showing a [ reply ] link appearing after the first comment in Editing news 2020 #4 on Patriccck's talk page?

I'm not seeing a [ reply ] link. This is expected to me considering the timestamp in this edit exists after the closing </div> tag. This leads me to think the software considers this to be a signature that does not contain a time and date. See: Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?#No date and time.

cc @Matma Rex in case they see errors in the thinking above. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:34, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Neither can I now reproduce this (but I'm sure I could). The post on Patriccck's page is now archived but when I navigate to the archive, I cannot get the link displayed (but I do get it displayed at other posts). And it isn't shown on Martin's page anymore. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:12, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

@Matěj Suchánek But in history I can see a reply link. In current version I could not see the link. Hmm, what happend? Patrik L. (talk) 09:24, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Confirm, me too. It's worth noting that it (still) isn't shown in the history of your talk page.

Note that it's Thursday today when the new version should be deployed. It might be better to wait for it and check again later. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:31, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Having taken another look, I can see an empty section "Editing news 2020 #3" with an unclosed <div>. Looks like the distribution of that newsletter wasn't correct and there may be other pages broken by this. That's irrelevant, we are discussing Patriccck's talk page. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:34, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

I've seen the bug on one of the cs.wp pages when I looked at this a few days ago, but I forgot to reply here. And now I can't reproduce it there :)

I was, however, able to reproduce a simplified version of the bug here: https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/User_talk:Yatu

Note how when you click "reply", the placeholder text is "Reply to Yatu" instead of "Reply to Test". Something goes very wrong, and the wrong username comes from the "edit source" link on the sub-heading rather than from the actual signature. (And then the reply can't be saved, because we can't find any comment by "Yatu" on the page.) Matma Rex (talk) 00:57, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

I filed T262573 about this. Matma Rex (talk) 18:08, 10 September 2020 (UTC)

Translation of the feature

I am an active user of Catalan Wikipedia, where this new feature is being implemented. I'd like to know where to help to translate it to Catalan, as it is displayed in English.

Could someone indicate me the strings to be translated in Translatewiki or in the appropriate platform? Thanks! Xavier Dengra (talk) 20:12, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Here it is: https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-discussiontools&language=ca&filter=%21translated&action=translate Patrik L. (talk) 20:30, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the quick reply! Xavier Dengra (talk) 20:57, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for translate! :-) Somebody "translated" some translations using copy + past. See this link: https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-discussiontools&language=ca&filter=&action=translate Can you please translate it correctly? Patrik L. (talk) 06:20, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Xavier, please see https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tema:Vr4vvu82i3f35i7i about next week's update. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:40, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Adding outdent option?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T265750

I am loving this new tool, it made discussions a lot easier to have, however, I suggest adding the Outdent template to the tool so we can use it when conversations get lengthy, or the tool adds it when the conversation reaches a certain point. Épine (talk) 19:29, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Hello, how it works? Patrik L. (talk) 19:38, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Check en:template:outdent. Épine (talk) 20:18, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Great idea. What do you think, @PPelberg (WMF), @ESanders (WMF), @Whatamidoing (WMF) and @Matma Rex? Patrik L. (talk) 20:38, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

It is actually very practical. What does the tool do if we continue a discussion for a long time? it can't indent it forever, we would need to outdent to the beginning of the page at some point, and we'd have to do it by using source editor because the tool does not contain the option. If it did the outdent at some point automatically, that would be even better. Épine (talk) 20:47, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

@Épine thanks for the suggestion. The tools support conversations that already use outdent templates. Having the tool insert these template is a bit more complicated because the template name can be different on every wiki, or may not exist. We will have to consider if this is a priority right now given that they are relatively rarely used and can still be inserted by experienced users using the edit button. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

The template can easily be exported to all Wikis where this feature is available and when it's available site-wide we can export to the rest. It is not a hard thing to do imo, minus the technical difficulties of actually incorporating it into the tool, which I do not know about. Épine (talk) 15:55, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

The templates don't change the formatting of the page. They just draw an arrow or some lines. You can stick them in the middle of a sentence like this:

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
As you can see, they don't change anything. What actually changes the "indentation" is that people learn to not manually type so many colons when they want to change the indentation. The template is a signal to the reader that this non-indented comment is related to the previous, heavily-indented ones, but it's just a visual symbol. It does not change the formatting. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

I know that, but when a pipe is added plus the colons corresponding the previous comment, it stretches from that one to the new one. I want it there for the visual cue likewise. 62.201.243.135 (talk) 10:16, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

I like the appearance, too. Some people prefer (←) or other signals instead. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:05, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

Other users rarely edit other people's discussions. I have never seen anyone outdent the comment of another person (I don't think that is even allowed according to the talk page policy). Anyway, I think it is very necessary to have. Speaking on behalf of the ckb wiki, we actually have redirects for all our templates from English to Kurdish, many of them still remain in English anyway. Épine (talk) 22:29, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

> I have never seen anyone outdent the comment of another person

I've done it. The rules at the English Wikipedia allow this in most cases. However, it usually isn't necessary to outdent someone else's comments. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

But why would someone else do it when the person themselves can do this with a click if the tool made it available? Many people skip doing it because of the awkwardly long time it needs to perform traditionally. Épine (talk) 15:57, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Because changing the colons in the existing wikitext is the only way to change the visible "indentation" for existing comments. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:59, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

For your info - we have the same request regarding usage of Template:Outdent in jawiki (see w:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端/subj/返信ツールをベータ機能として導入する提案). Also, according to d:Q5841554, Template:Outdent exists in 70 Wikipedias. As for usage count, enwiki has 60k, frwiki has 5.6k, ja/ko/nl/zhwiki has <1k (data per templatecount.toolforge.org).

I think there are much more usages where Template:Outdent is not called and users simply reduce the level of indentation when needed. ネイ (talk) 15:58, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

A suggestion from jawiki by User:お好み焼き星人: Perhaps adding a checkbox in the Advanced tab, for the user to indicate when to reduce the level of indentation?

Even if allowing Template:Outdent is difficult, there at least needs to be a way to reduce the level of indentation. ネイ (talk) 05:18, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

I think that ネイ has a good idea. We can skip the template (at least, in the beginning), and change the indentation directly.

Imagine a conversation that has reached 12 indentations: ::::::::::::. What should the editor do? Click a button to start over at :? Click the button 11 times to get to :? (Then you could click the button once to get back to :::::::::::, or five times to get to :::::::, or whatever you want.) Something else? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:03, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Answers from jawiki:

• User:Keruby: Click the button 11 times to get to :, then click the button once to get back to ::::::::::::. (12->11->...->1->12)
• User:お好み焼き星人: Perhaps make it a drop down box (where each choice is the level of indentation) instead of a button. If we use a button, then click the button once to get to :, and increase the indentation level by one per button click afterwards. (12->1->2->...->11->12)
• User:Portal18: Either of these two are fine.
  1. Click the button once to get to ::::::::::: (reduce by one level), then click once more to get to :, and increase the indentation level by one per button click afterwards. (12->11->1->2->3->...->12)
  2. Click the button once to get to :, then click once more to get to ::::::::::: (reduce by one level), and decrease the indentation level by one per button click afterwards. (12->1->11->10->...->1->12)
• My opinion is that if we start with 12 indentations, then usually we dedent up to 1 (lowest level) or 11 (same as previous comment), so we probably want one of them to show up with one button click instead of 11 clicks.

Numbers at the end of the line are indentation levels after each click, where it always starts with 12 before any button clicks.

All three users stated the need to have some kind of preview, presumably because the current preview screen of Reply Tool does not show the level of indentations. ネイ (talk) 06:08, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

The edit box itself is visually indented, but that can be non-obvious at low indent levels or if you’re not already aware of it. People who are used to working in wikitext can get confused that the ::: isn’t displayed. I recall some people mentioning it in the early testing stages of this project also. On the other hand, once you do know how it works, I feel the usability is pretty good. That's one of the reasons I thought having a [?] button with some hints could help.

Alternately, at the risk of more clutter, you could render the appropriate number of “:::::” in the space to the left (or right in RTL scripts) of the editing box when in source mode. (Would people find the indicator intuitive or more confusing? Should it be non-editable or click-to-edit?)

To increase/decrease indentation, you could have three buttons: [ |< ] [ < ] [ > ]. Do you hide them under Advanced? Or have a single in/outdent drop-down button in the toolbar, with three menuitems? Pelagic (talk) 20:19, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for raising this @Épine and for adding this additional context @Pelagic, @Whatamidoing (WMF) and @ネイ.

Before getting into how and when the Reply Tool could be augmented to address the issue(s) this conversation was prompted by, can you all please let me know what – if anything – is missing from and/or inaccurate about the "Situation" below?

===Situation===

• Comments, and by extension conversations, become difficult to read and understand once they contain comments that are "heavily" indented.
• To address the issue mentioned in the bullet above, wikis have created templates, like {{od}}, to outdent replies in order to preserve the semantics of conversations while making them easier to parse/understand visually.
• This issue around conversations becoming difficult to read and understand when heavily indented is fairly common across wikis, as evidenced by the number of projects that have created outdenting templates. See: Q5841554 (thank you, @ネイ).
• To adjust the indentation level of comments posted with the Reply Tool, "you" must do so in source mode (read: this cannot be done manually with the Reply Tool) which requires, what “we” see as, an unnecessary level of effort.
• If nothing is done to address this issue, “we” could end up in a situation where people who are not familiar with the outdenting convention (e.g. Junior Contributors) are likely to participate in conversations and unknowingly make it difficult for other participants/observers to follow said conversations. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:40, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

{{Od }} is not always used (probably not well-known enough) and in many cases users simply mention that they are outdenting in the comment itself, or just outdent silently. Other than that I think the description above is accurate. ネイ (talk) 08:00, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Template:Od is not always used (probably not well-known enough) and in many cases users simply mention that they are outdenting in the comment itself, or just outdent silently.

Understood. Thank you for adding this additional context, @ネイ.

Other than that I think the description above is accurate.

Okay, great. You can expect a follow up comment from me next week about what I think we should do to address the points being raised here.

If anything urgent happens about this between now and then, please ping me. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 19:51, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

@Épine, @Pelagic and @ネイ: thank you for being patient with us as we thought through this use case.

We understand outdenting as belonging to a broader category of issues that can make it difficult for people to recognize, read and understand conversations, particularly those with many comments.

Considering the above, we will plan to revisit this particular topic around outdenting when we focus on the visual enhancements to make the actions, activity and content within talk pages easier to understand. You can read more about this work here: phab:T249579.

By not addressing the outdenting issue at this time, we are acknowledging and accepting the following:

1. There is a greater risk that : "...people who are not familiar with the outdenting convention (e.g. Junior Contributors) are likely to participate in conversations and unknowingly make it difficult for other participants/observers to follow said conversations." See: https://w.wiki/nTB.
2. Senior Contributors using the Reply Tool in heavily indented contexts will need to take extra steps to outdent comments.

If you do observe cases where "1." is occurring, we would value you sharing a link to the conversation you noticed this happening in a comment on this thread or on this ticket in Phabricator here so we can decide whether work on this issue ought to be prioritized more highly. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 21 November 2020 (UTC)

Add support for highliting indentation

Hello, @ESanders (WMF), @PPelberg (WMF) and @Whatamidoing (WMF), I have got an idea. Can this script be added to the Reply tool css? I think that it makes the discussion clearer. Patrik L. (talk) 17:36, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks @Patriccck, we will be considering the appearance of talk pages in the coming quarters, and styles similar to those linked will be part of our considerations. Some wikis already have styles like this installed (for example French Wikipedia) so we will also need to consider how any changes we make interact with existing solutions. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 14:06, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

I don't think adding those exact styles to the reply tool CSS would be helpful. I used to use a gadget that did a similar thing and it was very messy in discussions that used a mix of : and * for indentation. It works much better if they are applied on the whole wiki and the users there consistently use only a single style on indentation because of that, but we don't want to force anyone to change their habits. Matma Rex (talk) 14:45, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

It could be voluntary turned off (I think that there will be settings of the Reply tool or no?). Patrik L. (talk) 14:47, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Hopefully we will be able to use our discussion parser to style the talk page is a more sensible way than the current CSS-only approaches can achieve. The output of our debug mode should give you idea of how we will be able to group comments more logically: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel?dtenable=1&dtdebug=1 (ignore the garish colouring!) ESanders (WMF) (talk) 16:07, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

@Patriccck can you share what inspired you to create User:Patriccck/Test.css?

I ask the above wondering what experiences you might have had and/or issues you've encountered that led you to start thinking about how discussions are visually treated.

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In case you're curious to know how we're thinking about the visual enhancements @ESanders (WMF) alluded to above, you might check out this Phabricator task: T249579. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

I think, we have the script as an gadget at cswiki. Patrik L. (talk) 19:18, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Understood. If you happen upon that gadget, please do share a link to it. We are collecting the different ways in which wikis have customized the way talk pages appear. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Here it is: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-ThreadedDiscussions.css Flow on mobile phone is terrible. I can't add normal link, I can't ping you, Peter... Patrik L. (talk) 19:49, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, @Patriccck; if you happen upon any other gadgets (at cs.wiki or others) that affect how talk pages look, we'd value you sharing links to them. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Another issue with just styling the lists is that it doesn't handle list-splits caused by extra linebreaks in the wikitext:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discussion_utilisateur%3AESanders_%28WMF%29%2FBrouillon&type=revision&diff=175026821&oldid=174803214 ESanders (WMF) (talk) 13:14, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Extra blank line when replying

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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There is an unwanted blank line appended in some replies: w:ja:Special:Diff/79507682, w:ja:Special:Diff/79506880.

Seems to be happening when the comment replied to has no indents. ネイ (talk) 14:45, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Yes, this is expected. What we call "indentation" is a list. Most (but not all!) editors think there should be a blank line before the start of a new list. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:28, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Let me mark this as closed then. ネイ (talk) 13:58, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

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

Suggestion: Show edit toolbar when replying with source editing

T257391: Add tools to DiscussionTools' source mode T249072: Replying v2.0: add support in toolbar for special characters

This is a feedback from w:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端/subj/返信ツールをベータ機能として導入する提案.

Currently, when using reply tool with visual editing, there is a small toolbar that provides features like adding links, mentioning users, etc.

The ask is whether this toolbar can be made available for source editing - for example, this talk page, which uses Extension:StructuredDiscussions, has this feature available. ネイ (talk) 14:57, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Good point! Patrik L. (talk) 15:03, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for this suggestion. The Editing team hopes to do this. I don't know when it will happen. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

+1, @Whatamidoing (WMF)...thank you for saying something about this @ネイand for linking to the conversation at ja.wiki where this feedback came up.

I have added this feedback to the ticket where we will consider introducing text formatting tools to the source mode: T257391#6475903.

In the meantime, I have two follow up questions for you, @ネイ:

1. I noticed on this page [i] @Keruby remarked [ii] that they would value if CharInsert was added to the Reply Tool...do you know what might be leading them to suggest this?
2. Do you have an idea for how people at ja.wiki use the CharInsert tool?

I am happy to ask @Keruby myself although, I thought to ask you here first since we're already talking.

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i. https://w.wiki/atr

ii. https://w.wiki/chP PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

I will check with Keruby and reply; CharInsert can be useful in talk pages if customization is done, but the customizations currently used by jawiki users do not seem applicable to Reply Tool. So the possibility is mainly in the markups and special characters that CharInsert provides by default. ネイ (talk) 06:56, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

From Keruby in w:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端/subj/返信ツールをベータ機能として導入する提案:

The main usage is for the markups in w:ja:Help:CharInsert#マークアップ. In particular, code, nowiki, and ref tags are the most frequently used ones (code tag is already available from visual mode so it is covered in the previous feedback; I think visual mode automatically adds nowiki tags when needed). ネイ (talk) 17:02, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for following up with @Keruby and offering this additional context, @ネイ.

I've added it to the Phabricator ticket where we are considering introducing this functionality to the Reply Tool: T249072#6495601. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Bug report: Indentation not applied correctly?

T264116: Reply inserted at wrong indentation level on ja.wp (after a comment with an empty paragraph)

Report (1): In w:ja:Special:Diff/79496531, the last line of the previous comment has one level of indentation, so the reply should have two levels instead of one?

The previous comment has irregular indentations (it starts with*, then #, and ends with :), so not sure if this can be handled correctly by Reply Tool though.

Report (2): Per phab:T252708 indentation is always done by :, but it does not explain the behavior in the following two diffs:

• w:ja:Special:Diff/79575146 - Replying to a comment with * results in indentation of :.
• w:ja:Special:Diff/79575218 - Replying to a comment with ** results in indentation of **:.

My opinion is that if we keep the behavior in T252708 then the first diff should have an indentation of *:.

Note: Both reports come from w:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端/subj/返信ツールをベータ機能として導入する提案. ネイ (talk) 05:16, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the reports, and sorry for the late response.

In (1), I think this happens because the reply tool treats the empty paragraph after the previous comment as a part of the second comment, and because of that it treats the second comment as if it was not indented. I think this is a bug; I filed T264116.

In (2), it looks like the page has been deleted, so I can't see the diffs any more :( but I am guessing it's a similar situation.

In general, when checking the indentation level of a comment (which affects the indentation level of new replies), we check the whole comment rather than only the last line. Checking the last line caused wrong results for comments ending with a bulleted list (T252702). Matma Rex (talk) 18:23, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Apologies - for (2) it was in w:ja:WP:SANDBOX so it got deleted. I reproduced it in another page:

• w:ja:Special:Diff/79760809
• w:ja:Special:Diff/79760810

My guess is the horizontal rule (----, which cannot be indented unless the tag is written directly, like :<hr />) being treated as part of the comment. ネイ (talk) 01:30, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, indeed. Matma Rex (talk) 18:36, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Indentation used in replies can be different per context

T263902: Enable Reply Tool to use context-specific indentation syntax

This feedback comes from w:ja:Wikipedia:井戸端/subj/返信ツールをベータ機能として導入する提案.

Per phab:T252708 indentation is always done by : and there are different expectations in ruwiki. jawiki also has different expectations, described as follows.

• w:ja:H:TP (help page on talk pages) expects : for talk pages in general.
• w:ja:WP:TPG (guideline on talk pages) also expects : for talk pages in general, except deletion discussions where * is used.
• w:ja:Wikipedia:削除依頼 and w:ja:Wikipedia:投稿ブロック依頼 (request for deletion and request for block) expect *.

The exceptions in request for deletion and request for block are likely because these discussions include votes. The difference between this context and the votes/polls context described in phab:T252708#6149739 is that comments are always expected in these votes. So they are more like comments that always start with a vote template, than a mere yes/no poll. Note that this is not specific to jawiki, and there are similar expectations described in w:en:WP:DISCUSSAFD and w:zh:WP:AFD.

If Reply Tool is to fulfill these expectations, then phab:T259864 (Enable wikis to customize the syntax used to indent comments) does not fully solve the issue as jawiki uses both : and *. The solution suggested by User:Keruby in jawiki's discussion is to allow users to choose the indentation in the Advanced menu of Reply Tool. I am not sure if this is straightforward enough for less experienced users, but I do not have another solution yet. ネイ (talk) 05:53, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

@ネイthe level of detail you have provided here is wonderful. It helps us clearly understand what is prompting this feedback.

A question for you: what – if any – negative consequences could you foresee with the Reply Tool enabling wikis to set exceptions for what indentation syntax was used on specific pages instead of individual people being able to decide this on a per comment basis? [i]

By the way, here is the Phabricator ticket where will think through how we might approach this: T263902. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:39, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for relaying the feedback to the team.

As an answer to your question, taking the former approach would mean that

1. Reply Tool will be aligning the indents used by all users (who use the tool) to the same syntax. Hence, some users might not be able to reply with the indent they are more used to.
2. Per w:en:WP:DISCUSSAFD, Comments are started and replied with * but expanded with :. Not sure if there are similar cases elsewhere, but it would mean Reply Tool will not cater to such cases where both indents are used in the same page.

For both cases there will be some users (may or may not be a majority) who think these are negative consequences. ネイ (talk) 03:44, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

These answers are helpful, @ネイ – thank you for taking the time to share them; I'm sorry it's taken this long for me to respond back.

I'd like to share how we are currently understanding of the issue you are describing (see the "Situation" section below) and what we are planning to do in response (see the "Next steps" section below).

Situation

• For a large number of discussions, on a large number of pages, on a large number of wikis, it is customary for the people to indent the comments they post with :.
• With the above said, there are clear and important exceptions to the above. Deletion discussions at the Chinese, English and Japanese Wikipedias for example specify that "comments" in these conversations have * prepended to them, instead of : as is done in discussions on other pages.
• While it is true that in these deletion discussions opinions or votes be prepended with * , it is important that it be possible to reply to these "opinions" or "votes" with comments that start with : .
• The way the Reply Tool is currently designed (see: T252708), prevents people from commenting in the aforementioned deletion discussions without breaking the conventions/guidelines wikis follow.

Next steps

Assuming the "Situation" section above accurately and exhaustively describes the issue(s) you are making us aware of @ネイ, here is what we'd like to do, *for now*:

1) Resist the draw of enhancing the Reply Tool to support more nuanced syntax customization and

2) Continue accumulating examples^[1] of the voting-style discussions you cited in this conversation (if/when you think of more examples, we would value you telling us!)

I think doing so will give us the opportunity for us to gather the broad and representative sample of the voting-style conversations that happen across wikis we'll need to design a dedicated tool [and potentially, implement new syntax] that will enable a range of editors, across experience levels, to participate in voting-style conversations that comply with project conventions with more ease.^[2]

We recognize that in suggesting the above we are also saying that, for the time being, it will be more difficult to use the Reply Tool in the kinds of voting-style conversations you mentioned above.^[3] We are comfortable with making this trade-off in the near term in service of creating an intuitive voting-style tool in the longer term.*

Please let me know if anything I've shared above brings to mind new comments or questions.

*Note: we do not have any concrete plans for when work on this voting-style tool is to begin. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:27, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Cannot use with "Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures" Gadget

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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ここで伝えるべきなのかガジェットの管理者に伝えるべきなのかわからないのですが、ガジェットの設定で「署名などのUTCで記入された時刻を、コンピュータのタイムゾーンに合わせて表示する」を有効にしている場合、返信リンクが表示されません。jawpにて問題を確認。 / Does not appear Reply links when if enabled "Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures, to be relative to local time" settings. (Checked by jawiki) Portal18 (トーク | 投稿記録)‎ 12:24, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

日本語：Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?#Non-standard date or time format（標準以外の日時書式）にあたるので、当該ガジェットは現時点で返信ツールと併用できません。具体的には、タイムスタンプがウィキペディア日本語版の標準である2020年9月19日 (土) 13:45 (UTC)という形でなければなりません（UTCをJSTに変更するのもダメです）。返信ツールがガジェットより先に読み込まれるという形になれば表示できるようになりますが、これが可能であるかどうかはわかりません。

English: This is a case of Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?#Non-standard date or time format, so the gadget (source code at w:ja:MediaWiki:Gadget-CommentsInLocalTime.js) cannot be used with Reply Tool. To be exact, the timestamp needs to be in the format of 2020年9月19日 (土) 13:45 (UTC) (jawiki's default format), and even changing the timezone from UTC to JST only is not allowed. If Reply Tool is loaded before gadgets then it probably could be used, but I am not sure if this is possible. ネイ (talk) 13:49, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

ヘルプページを確認しました。 {{Unsigned}} の時刻なしも現状では認識できないんですね。(jawpの場合は時刻を書いたところで末尾ではなく中央に追加されるので認識できるかは不明ですが)

とはいえ、既知の仕様だということはわかったので、閉じておきます。ありがとうございました。 / Thanks. I read the Help page and discussion closed. Also, I just learned no Reply link appears because using the {{Unsigned}} Template and not using the timestamp. Portal18 (トーク | 投稿記録)‎ 03:48, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

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

Thanks

I just look and admire the new interface. Sorry for flood. :D The222anonim (talk) 21:20, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

We're happy to hear you're finding the tool useful, @The222anonim and glad you decided to let us know!

I'm curios to know: how did you find out about it?

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Also: if at any point you notice things about the tool you think could be improved, please let us know. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Hello @PPelberg (WMF).

In 2017 or 2018 or 2019, I received a newsletter on my page saying that beta testing will start soon, and then, in 2020 I received an email about the new discussions interface.

I have an idea! What if you add keyboard hotkeys to increase the font size and decrease it? For example, by reassigning Ctrl+M and Ctrl+/. Also as I've spotted, in Microsoft Word 365 you can just click into the word and then use CTRL+B or CTRL+I to make the word bold or italic, but in this interface before using hotkeys, I need to select a word with the mouse and only then use CTRL+B or CTRL+I, which takes additional 1-2 seconds :D

Sorry for poor English, but I hope you understand what do I mean. :D The222anonim (talk) 20:25, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for poor English, but I hope you understand what do I mean. :D

I'm finding the English you're using to be great! If I've misunderstood what you are saying in any way, please do let me know.

What if you add keyboard hotkeys to increase the font size and decrease it?

Interesting. Can you please share what is leading you to suggest this? Is it that you are finding the text you are typing in the Reply Tool difficult to read? Another reason?

...you can just click into the word and then use CTRL+B or CTRL+I to make the word bold or italic

This is an interesting idea; I've created a Phabricator task [i] for this idea which you can review here: T263901.

Out of curiosity: have you tried double-clicking on the word you are trying bold or italicize? Doing this should highlight the entire word thus saving you the effort of needing to drag your mouse.

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i. Phabricator is the bug tracking tool we use here at the Foundation. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:47, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Also I've spotted a bug, if I paste image from clipboard it will be called "изображение.jpg" ("изображение" = "picture) and can't be loaded because file with this name already exists - I tried to paste that screenshot from my answer but there was a conflict with this image https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%98%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5.JPG, and I was unable to change name of my file, so I had to:

1. Save image I wanted to send
2. Rename it on my PC
3. Paste it here through Drag-n-Drop, because I can't find a button to add an image here :D

And more accurate result should be:

1. CTRL+V that image
2. I'll must to rename the file, but I'll can do this on this page, without requirement of saving the file and renaming in on my PC. The222anonim (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I've filed this as T264333. It should fixed next week. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

I'm finding the English you're using to be great! If I've misunderstood what you are saying in any way, please do let me know.

Thank you!

Out of curiosity: have you tried double-clicking on the word you are trying bold or italicize? Doing this should highlight the entire word thus saving you the effort of needing to drag your mouse.

Of course, but I mean that in Word 365 you need just put the cursor inside the word and click once, then use CTRL+B to make the whole word bold. Well I think you understand.

Interesting. Can you please share what is leading you to suggest this? Is it that you are finding the text you are typing in the Reply Tool difficult to read? Another reason?

I mean this (on picture), sorry for russian language in here :D The222anonim (talk) 21:29, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Of course, but I mean that in Word 365 you need just put the cursor inside the word and click once, then use CTRL+B to make the whole word bold. Well I think you understand.

I do; thank you for adding this extra detail, tho!

I mean this (on picture), sorry for russian language in here :D

Ah, now I see what you mean! You are saying, "Most of other other text formatting options within that drop-down list have keyboard shortcuts, why don't the "Big" and "Small" options have them as well?"

...this is a good question. I'll report back with what I find. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

You are saying, "Most of other other text formatting options within that drop-down list have keyboard shortcuts, why don't the "Big" and "Small" options have them as well?"
...this is a good question. I'll report back with what I find.

@The222anonim I think we have an answer here...

The reason the "Big" and "Small" options do not have keyboard shortcuts to them because:

• There is a limited number of memorable and easy-to-type keyboard shortcuts
• The memorable and easy-to-type keyboard shortcuts are currently "occupied" by functions that are used most frequently (think: command + B for Bold)
• We do not currently understand the "Big" and "Small" text formatting tools to be used as frequently as other functions
• As such, we have not prioritized assigning them keyboard shortcuts for the ones that are available are likely to be relatively complex and not memorable PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

how about...

preferences about replying? PArangSae (talk) 03:55, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Like? Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:00, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Too small font

Hi, the text under the reply window seems too small to me, I can barely read it. Why? Dvorapa (talk) 19:38, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Do you have a screenshot of this issue? J. N. Squire (talk) 10:26, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

https://ctrlv.cz/fcey Dvorapa (talk) 14:24, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

How does this compare to the font under the normal article-editing Editor window? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:37, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

It is actually a lot smaller than the "small print" in the editor. The reply tool footer font comes out as 10.5px, while the editor footer font is 12.6px. (And the reply tool also uses light-grey color instead of almost-black.)

I don't know about the "why", though. We apparently took the styling directly from the Flow interface (the one used on this page), it has the exact same font size and color. I don't know the history behind it. Matma Rex (talk) 17:47, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, it seems Flow shares the same issue, but conditions in the new talk page editor make it even more visible. The major difference between Flow and new talk page editor is that in the new talk page editor there are also two buttons (Feedback and Summary) in the same font size. Dvorapa (talk) 12:33, 14 October 2020 (UTC)