Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

Good search can solve a lot of things, but I believe that structured auto-archiving is needed as well. Some scenarios:

• A user may want to see how many posts did he have on his user talk page each month.
• A user may want to check what things were discussed around the time of certain news events, holidays, MediaWiki software changes, etc.
• A user may want to find a conversation that is hard to find by words, because the relevant words are too common and yield too many results, but he does remember the time when the conversation happened.
• It may sound like circular logic, but own internal engine's search indexing is far from perfect even for English, and for most other languages its morphological support is even worse. An archive by dates would be a reasonable fallback for such languages.

It makes sense to me to see automated archives of Flow conversations by month. I imagine something like a box that shows years and months, and clicking a month would show a page with all the conversations from that month.

I don't have statistics about the number of conversations by month, but I imagine that even in the busiest talk pages a whole month could fit reasonably on one page. Maybe some especially busy ones could be split by weeks. I'd love to see statistics, if anybody has them.

Perhaps it would be more sensible to expand the options under "View Newest topics" to include an item that allows you to "View by date range". Then you don't have separate pages, but you can still see whatever you want.

I guess that the designers and the user researchers can chime in here, but a window with twelve links per year sounds to me simpler and more relevant than a range selector.

We're planning to build a date range into the search function. One of the really important use cases is "I know I was talking with Amir about X a year ago..." -- so we need to build a system with filters. For that kind of use case, you'd search for the keyword, and then filter for a user name, a date range, and conversations that you participated in.

This is an important feature for Flow, because it's one of the big examples of what Flow can do that wiki talk pages can't. I totally agree that just having an endless Table of Contents is not acceptable long-term for a busy page.

We're going to build the search feature iteratively, so it'll start with keyword search and then add the filters as we go along. It'll take a minute to build the whole thing, but we've already got the back-end work done, and we'll be starting on the front-end work soon.

See the wireframes and mockups linked at phab:T78790 for details.