Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

With Echo rolled out, these things happened.

• People started typing user mentions into message text because it does not pick up user mentions in edit summary (yet).
  • That's a change which adds clutter.
    • That's a change. People will resist.
    • It loses focus on message content. (Meta:Karma; "I was mentioned but she wasn't", "I should get more social")
  • When I saw other peoples messages source code, I could copy paste [[User:Yadda yadda|yadda yada... etc bits from their message. It's manual work and it sucks.
• With current Flow, if people desire to add someone in addition to whoever the reply button added, they appear to need to type them manually with nowhere to copy from.
• It would be nice to visualize who's notified, perhaps as a list of contributors at (the right or at the left bottom of, or a nice 'show notifyees' button and a popup) a message box: defaults to a list of everyone who participated in a section, with parent messages authors ticked, and a box at the bottom to type someone to add.

Gryllida: Frequency of messaging (Echo Notifications), and how messaging is both triggered and displayed, are definitely a set of complex issues, that will take time and experimentation to perfect. Thanks for your good ideas here.

Which bug should I copy paste my thoughts, or link to this section in, for them to not get lost in this chatty page?

Gryllida: Ideally reply here, both to test out Flow (helping to find it's flaws and strongpoints through realworld usage), and because it's generally best to discuss things before submitting a bug.

Is there a single place, as opposed to multiple threads here, where you draft ideas which aren't sufficiently precise and specific for a bug report?

Gryllida, Quiddity (WMF): Perhaps a separate notifications box, the content of which would just be plaintext usernames and would not be shown, would be a useful addition, to mitigate the clutter and formatting issues.

Yeah, and interface to such box. However, I think that the list of people mentioned should be visible. (Just so I can remove someone whom I added accidentally.)

Gryllida: Re: "Is there a single place [...]" - That's one of the problems that Flow will hopefully eventually solve - fragmented discussions! However, that will require upcoming features like "merge topics".

For now, the best place to draft/discuss complex feature ideas is at this page, or Enwiki's en:WT:Flow - anywhere else would suffer from a lack of page-watchers. Regarding the multiple-threads issue, we can link to prior threads in this topic.

Quiddity: Thanks. I think that there is a third feedback place, the labs server wiki instance's Talk:Flow. I suspect you may want to [soft-] redirect 2 of the 3 places to one, preferably so users can use their CentralAuth and not sign up again (so not the labs instance for actual feedback, it's for testing only).