Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

• I'm happy to see that editing is finally allowed.
• However, I have to stress this again: How to undo vandalism and spam? Not "hide", but undo a.k.a. revert, without being an administrator.
• How can I revert an accidental click on one of the "Thank" links? From other parts of the software I'm now used to a warning (it even warns that the Thank will be "public", which I find pretty scary, but that's an other issue).
• Where did the collapse feature go?
• When switching back and forth between visual and source editing (a feature I honestly applaud you for, VE itself is still missing this, which I consider a major acceptance problem that should not have been there in the first place, but this is off-topic) ... so if I'm switching back to source editing the edit window is sometimes to short (not always, seems it only happens when I do not edit in visual mode and only use it as a preview). It resizes when I start editing linebreaks in the source, but still.
• The watch stars are missing tooltips. Personally I would classify this as a bug since this situation leaves people with zero information. They have to guess and try.
• Same for a click on the timestamps (history). No tooltips.
• At the same time the menu items (e.g. "Edit title", "Summarize" and so on) do have tooltips that do nothing but repeat the text that's written on the menu item. Please remove such duplicates.
• The tooltip on "Permalink" reads "topic". Odd, isn't it?
• What's wrong with the page width on history pages? It just looks broken and wrong and doesn't make much sense to limit the line length on history pages to half of the screen. There is plenty of space. Please let me use it. This especially looks like a bug since the rest of the software is not restricted to a arbitrary width any more.
• Hovering all these "3 days ago" timestamps gets frustrating pretty fast, as already mentioned below. I like the fact that this saves space by hiding unnecessary information, but at the same time it becomes useless if all timestamps in a topic are identical. A very simple suggestion to improve on this is to show "3 days ago, 16:30" instead. Win-win.
• Same for "a month ago". If you scroll down, you find hundreds of posts with the same timestamp. Again, an extremely simple suggestion: Use short messages for seconds, minutes, hours and days, but then stop and show the full time when a post is 1 month old or older.
• How to scroll down to the links at the bottom of the page? I know, this is not a fair question, but since it's one of the reasons why Flow feels out of place I have to ask.

Thanks. Filed the timestamp one as phab:T101203

Sorry, meant to use my staff account.

• Great, I'm glad you like it.
• Hiding a comment or a post is the closest equivalent to reverting a bad talk page edit, especially for threads. It takes the bad post out of public view, but keeps it accessible in the history so that people can follow the trail of a vandal, or restore a good post that shouldn't have been hidden. Also, if the vandalism was an edit to a good post, you can undo that through the history/diff pages. Can you tell me more about the function that's missing?
• Thanks confirmation: That's a good question, I don't actually know. I created a ticket, and we'll figure it out. The ticket's at phab:T101196 if you're interested in following it.
• We took collapse out because it was originally intended to be a kind-of substitute for a Table of Contents, except it wasn't a very good ToC and people were generally baffled by the collapse icon. Now we've created a real ToC at the top of the page, so we took out the collapse. We're working on a new version of marking a thread as resolved, and that's actually going to bring the collapse function back for resolved topics.
• Thanks, I really like the VE/source toggle too. The small size of the source entry field is a bug, filed here: phab:T100074.
• Good point, I filed a bug -- phab:T101197
• Also a good point -- phab:T101198
• Good point -- board history is full-width, but topic history isn't. phab:T101200
• Adding a time after the 3 days ago is possible, but I think the usefulness of that information decreases as time goes on. When it's 30 minutes ago vs 9 hours ago, knowing the time helps you participate in the conversation -- the person who wrote the post 30 minutes ago is more likely to still be online to read your response. When the conversation was 3 months ago, how would knowing 3:00 vs 10:00 help you?
• We're going to put the bottom links at the bottom of the side rail -- that's phab:T97371
• Thanks for posting all your thoughts and questions; I appreciate you taking the time.

This weird indention behaviour can't be intended. Currently I see three "Reply" buttons in this thread. They are all on the same level. They look identical. When you are not expecting the difference (and why should you?) you are missing the small graphical difference of the input box not being indented.

The first two "Reply" buttons do what I expect and create an indented reply. But the last one is different from all others.

I'm allowed to write direct answers to older posts only?

The last "reply" button in a thread tricks the user into something he did not meant to do? And there is no way around, other than creating a dummy post, do the intended reply and delete the dummy post? This usage pattern is just broken. Sorry to say that. I do not want to offend anybody, I just want to express how this feels to a user.

I'm afraid you missed a point I wanted to make when you write: "When the conversation was 3 months ago, how would knowing 3:00 vs 10:00 help you?" What I can tell from this is that the 2nd post was written 7 hours later than the 1st. The current situation does not tell me anything. There is literally zero information because it looks like all posts in a thread are written at the same second "3 month ago". Please either fix this (as I suggested above) or just remove the useless timestamps from the individual posts and replace them with a single timestamp per topic.

Oh, what? Why is this not indented? I clicked "reply" on the last post by Danny and wanted this to be indented. I guess this is a known bug since quite a lot of topics here on this discussion page seem to cover exactly this confusing behaviour. Just wanted to add my +1 on this.

Hi TMg. The current indenting structure is intended to prevent long diagonals (such as those that consume reddit, and we avoid onwiki with {{outdent}}, or just starting at the root level again via a fuzzy 'social custom').

Hence, replies in this Flow structure will always be at the same level, if at all possible. They only add an indent, when unavoidable.

This is intended to encourage people to read and reply to the full topic, rather than considering every single post as being something to "fork off from". So, clicking the very bottom "Reply" link will always have the same result as just clicking in the Box. (Someone has suggested we just remove the bottom "Reply" link, or the Box, but either of those options might also be confusing... That definitely is a problem to be examined.)

The main topic discussing it, is Topic:Senq838us190rqlp, with some additional discussion at Topic:Sinpglgkf9wu3qlt and Topic:Siiavth54u8a0rm8. As a few editors there have said, it does make sense once we get used to it (but can definitely be confusing at first!), though it does need some small tweaks to be as good as it can be.

Hope that helps add some context and nuance. :-)

The last "reply" button in a topic is broken. It may be broken by design, but it is broken. Simple as that. "Encourage"? You call tricking people into something they do not want, do not mean and do not expect "encouraging"? And you expect everybody to get "used to" this enforced broken behaviour? Oh...

I'm afraid this discussion will not lead anywhere since we are using different vocabularies.

Note that I'm not exclusively expressing my opinion. I'm sure you are aware that the communities, especially the more experienced ones, love hating Flow. I always wondered why this is because I found and still find most aspects of Flow impressive and promising. I'm starting to understand...

I don't want to be unfair. I agree that it's a good idea to help users that carelessly indent no matter what. This is not the problem I'm raging about. I'm raging because I do want my comments to be indented because I want to express something with that. I care. A tool that thinks it knows better than I, without giving me a way out (oh, there is a way, see my hidden comment below, but this is obviously a hack), is not helpful.

My expectation is simple. Super simple: Writing something in the box that's shown at the end of each topic does not indent. Hitting a "reply" button does indent. It can't be much simpler than that.

(I'm also starting to understand why users love hating VE because this is the 3rd time in 10 minutes I have to delete unwanted <nowiki> tags. Part of this problem is that the two modes are nearly indistinguishable. Can you please make the source edit window light gray? This would help a lot.)

Thanks for the details, they do help, a lot.

At a specific level: I agree with and understand your expectation - the problem is: How do we balance that expectation, with the desire to keep the already indented subthreads, as flat as possible? E.g. if we always indented, then if we click "reply" to each other a few more times, in this subthread, we're back to the problem of "every discussion becomes a diagonal"...

The only obvious solutions (afaik) are:

1. to add an extra placeholder "box" at the end of each subthread -- However that would create a very cluttered UI... :-( (e.g. adding 2 more boxes, for flat-level replies, at the 2 subthreads in Topic:Sgopn8j210lt00xw )
2. to let editors choose their indent level for every comment -- However then some of us will just apply our old habits and preferences, which would lead to an inconsistent and even more confusing style!
3. the current system, where the bottom "reply" link (in the main thread, and subthreads) creates a flat-level response, but where any earlier "reply" links create an indent.

At a general level: Personally, I like reddit's long diagonals! Other people prefer the stackoverflow style, with specific indent limits, and font-sizes for each indent-level. Some other people prefer the completely flat style used in bugzilla and many bulletin board style forums.

The indenting style used here currently, is hoped to evolve into something that works best for all of us, whilst avoiding the limitations or flaws of the other 3 main styles. I believe (personally, as an editor) that it does have the potential to become something the communities can all accept (and adapt to), with a few more tweaks. But I'm not sure what those tweaks ought to be.

Sidenote: Each of the new ideas (innovations, experiments, etc) has to get feedback from a handful of people (because there's an understandable reluctance to "just change everything, about sub-feature [x]", based on only 1 or 2 negative responses...), so you adding your comments/perspective/individual-phrasing here, really is immensely appreciated.

>@Quiddity (WMF): How do we balance that expectation, with the desire to keep the already indented subthreads, as flat as possible?

With respect to that question, we have so far two models that solve the problem of keeping threads flat.

- The current "Flow style" (indenting the second reply, keeping the first flat and out of order) is known to freak the hell out of editors accustomed to threaded systems.

- The alternative - HHHippo's "Dynamic style" (indenting both replies, in order, when a single post gets parallel replies) maintains the same structure of the classic threaded system while solving the one-indent-per-comment problem. (This would be option 4 in your list of three).

Is there a possibility to explore the second model with some development support, or is the budget dedicated to this subject closed for now? I'm working on a mockup of how the dynamic style could look and behave (without the need of intermediate "post boxes"), I'll post it as a new topic one of these days.

My personal theory is that this idea (number 3 in your list) just can not work. You are creating a system that obviously supports indention. Users see it. Users expect it. But when a user tries to make use of this feature it won't work most of the time. But sometimes it will work. The user does not understand what's going on and is, in the worst case, pissed.

The system even creates the impression that the right to use certain features is bound to a user right or something. For example, look at the first responses I got from Matt. Why was he allowed to use indention before the later, unindented response by Danny was written? I just can't wrap my head around this. Does the system actually change the indention level whenever it feels like? Based on what information? Are posts moved??? This is sooo confusing. And again, this leaves users in a situation where they have no control over what's going on. They will even feel like they need to fight the system because the system actively disrespects what the user wants. There is a reply button. I click it. The system knows exactly what I want. Still it disrespects my decision.

Such a system is nice in discussions where thousands of users constantly come and go. Most of them do not care anyway. They just want to say something. They do not read what was written before. It's very unlikely they will ever respond. Most user are not even interested in getting an answer. In such a world indention is worthles.

But Wikipedia discussions are not like this.

The more I write the more obvious the answer becomes to me. Users love hating Flow because it disrespects well-established cultural aspects.

This is intended to encourage people to read and reply to the full topic, rather than considering every single post as being something to "fork off from". [...] As a few editors there have said, it does make sense once we get used to it

It does make sense, but it's inferior to a traditional threaded conversation, where the possibility to fork the conversation in several parallel branches is a boon - an advantageous possibility that's impossible to achieve in traditional spoken conversation. Having a single sequence of comments and forcing readers to read it in full is not a natural model for the way people participate in online forums.

People scan for content, and reply to the points where they have something to say that can add value, skipping sequences of ideas on which they are not interested. The current threading model does not support the way people wants to use it for best collaboration.