Topic on Extension talk:RevisionSlider

Slider extension would be much better without a slider

3
Stjn (talkcontribs)

Re phab:T163685 and since I was asked there to provide feedback on this feature here:

I think in the current version it just looks like an example of software bloat. Sure, ability to move through diffs with AJAX is a lot better than the current way for the most editors, I will not dispute that. But the whole premise of RevisionSlider is wrong for one very major reason: this is not normal, the fact that the previous revision is +23 and it is almost half the height of the +984 one is not normal.

The bars don’t represent any real information in any shape or form, the graph isn’t showing anything, therefore it should’ve not been done in the first place. Developers could’ve just made an insert of history page and a scroll in that exact space and it would’ve not been such a mental disaster as parsing this thing through.

(I am not going to excite a riot or anything in my local community about turning this feature on by default, but it is really a sad state of affairs that communities are being notified about the future change in 1 day timeframe. Consider this my last comment on the situation, I am really disappointed with WMDE developers conduct and replies [such as repeating question ‘Did you care and provide feedback?’ over and over again as if we had any timeframe for turning it on by default], even if my messages might’ve come across as angry at IRC.)

Malyacko (talkcontribs)

Hi stjn, just a clarification if you refer to our IRC conversation yesterday (the last sentence sounds a bit like it): I am not a WMDE developer and your messages did not come across as angry but rather direct (a communication style that I also prefer, so I hope I didn't come across as angry or such either). As I said, from my personal point of view it's a good idea to make it clearer whether a feature which is about to leave its beta status will become enabled by default or not. My two cents. Again, thanks for your feedback!

Lea Voget (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Hi @Saint Johann,

thanks for your feedback. You say that the height of the bars as shown in the RevisionSlider is misleading, since the height is not linear to the actual change size. We discussed this issue when designing the RevisionSlider. The issue we had was that on a linear scale one big revision made the whole slider unusable. Either the slider would suddenly be really high (which we don't want, since we still want to see the contents of the compared revisions below) or all other revisions would suddenly be really small, and differences between them would not be visible. Since we thought that it is more important to see a difference between a 2 Byte change and a 4 Byte change rather than between a 1000 Byte change and 1002 Byte change, we decided for a logarithmic scale.While this solution solves the issues I described, it of course has the drawback of what you described.

To the timeframe of communication: We decided to notify the community 2 days in advance, because we wanted to make sure that people still remember the announcement when the RevisionSlider is enabled. In many village pumps, information is out of sight quickly. We made this decision based on the very good feedback we had received until then. We even had self organized community consensus tickets by 3 communities (apart from the German one). We expect the RevisionSlider to be a positive change for the broad majority of users. If wanted, users may also disable the RevisionSlider in their user settings. And as I said in the phabricator ticket, we will disable the feature if a community requests that - we develop software to support users, not to hinder them.

I am sorry you had an unpleasant experience on IRC, but as @Malyacko said, this was not with anyone from WMDE.

Best,

Lea