Hi, as asked by Quiddity I explain my reasons to request converting my Flow talk page to a wikitext page. I've requested this conversion because a wikitext page is more flexible and lighter, and additionally is much more easy to treat, at least for me. Thank you very much to Quiddity for helping me.
Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions
To be fair with Flow I have to say that in my opinion a Flow page is easier for newbies and also requires less maintenance when is edited by them due to its automatic placement of headers, comments and signatures. As a conclusion I think a newbie will prefer a Flow page but an experimented user will prefer a wikitext page because of its lightness and flexibility.
Thank you for your feedback, Syum90!
In your opinion, what is missing on Flow to have it adopted by experimented users?
I can't speak for other users, but there are several other things important for me: 1. we cannot restore one revision of the page directly, instead of this we have to hide all the further edits one by one; 2. the impossibility to use the rollback tool; some time ago we suffered a great spam attack by spambots here at mw, and it was very heavy for us to remove all their edits manually one by one instead of using the rollback tool; 3. the impossibility to use the edittools.
Some time ago we treat about Flow on meta at this RFC, you can get more feedback there.
Thanks!
There is another thing that I forgot: I heavily use popups and I can't use it to see edits on Flow pages at Special:RecentChanges; this is also an inconvenient.
Yeah, we know about that. Having a better way to deal with pages' history and RCs is something we need to prioritize.
In my opinion, the Flow is a system of excellent and flexible talk, but for me the downside is that it is not very customizable (e.g.: I can not put a header like I do with my user page), if the developers could give that option and do not so limited, it would be excellent. For example, pages Semantic MediaWiki or TranslateWiki have a similar system in the talk pages, but if allowed to put headers on those pages. This is for now the only deficiency that has Flow, but for newbies, is an excellent way to manage more comfortably messages and not have much complication with using wikitext.
That header has been reported to the sidebar, because on certain pages, people didn't knew they were conversation due to header's height!
I use Flow on my volunteer talk page, and, with appropriate colors, things I want people to notice are perfectly seen, even if it is on the sidebar that may be perceived as not as visible as a header.
I personally didn't like the long line of deleted comment messages before the next appropriate comment.
Collaboration team is going to release a survey soon, in order to collect suggestions and feedback and define priorities to support Flow. Your feedback is helpful to confirm the questions we ask. Thanks a lot!
Trizek, there are two years worth of detailed community feedback at the En:Wikipedia talk:Flow archives. Will you be keeping track of that, or are we starting anew? Should we repost it into the new survey?
I am keeping track of that, Diego, but, as you know, there is not only English Wikipedia's opinion in the wikiverse! ;)
Some other communities are using Flow at the moment and they tell us they are very happy with it or don't give us negative feedback. We want to know how can we improve structured discussions for them, based of their requests for new features. Of course, feedback from any other interested users from any community will be welcome.
That survey, gathered with all feedback we already know about (from the page you linked and other resources), will help us to define a strategy for the future, in order to give a good and relevant structured discussion system to communities (called Flow or not) if they want one.