Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/New topic/Flow

1. Compare the prototype to the current Add topic experience: are there particular workflows you use the existing Add topic / New section workflow for and that the prototype does not support?
   1. Not off the top of my head, but if you're usurping action=edit&section=new then there's bound to be something that breaks.
2. What do you wish was different about the prototype?
   1. I'd like to be able to choose whether I launch the Discussion Tools editor or the Classic editor. (On w:en I have the gadget that shows both visual and source edit links to avoid SET, so for me choice > clutter). For replies, I can decide to do either a section-edit or use the Reply link. I think it has helped adoption that people could enable DT and still do things the old way.
   2. If I ignore the warning and leave the heading/subject blank, my new topic gets smooshed under the previous topic's heading. I think if someone does ignore the warning then we should insert some kind of default heading, even if it's "<no subject>" like you might see in some email tools.
   3. It wasn't clear to me whether "Topic" in the heading box was default text or just an inline prompt. (Yes, it's greyed out so I should have known, but I wasn't really expecting it to allow me to add a post without a new topic heading, per previous point. In other words, this may reflect my own particular bias rather than anything about the visual presentation.)
   4. It felt inconsistent that when I typed a heading without content (not uncommon to see at Teahouse etc.) then the Add Topic button stayed disabled, but when I typed content without heading the button became enabled. I get the idea of coaching people, but I think that having a heading is the more important of the two.
   5. It felt surprising that line-break handling is different from that in Reply (see 3.2.3 below). But if you made it the same as for replies, then people would be surprised that it's different from normal wikitext line-breaks. I don't see an easy answer for this one.
3. What do you appreciate about the prototype?
   1. Using the edit summary as the heading was unexpected but interesting. Don't ask me in what world a normal user (I evidently don't consider myself normal!) would expand Advanced and fill out the edit summary box but not fill out the Topic. If I was a designer it wouldn't have occurred to me; evidently it's something that you did think of.
   2. Generally works smoothly. I'm already familiar with Reply Tool so few surprises typing in the main box:
      1. I can no longer edit user-talk-page links in visual mode after inserting them via the person+ button, though I've noticed that already in Reply. Just now discovered that if I cycle to Source and back to Visual then I can edit them.
      2. To get my signature on a new line I now have to insert a blank line above, the punctuation trick no longer works. [oh, this is because of the next point]
      3. Newlines without a blank line (in Source mode, New Discussion) behave like normal wikitext and don't create new paragraphs, but in Reply they do create new list-items.
   3. Visually, the topic-heading box doesn't feel disconnected from the content / description box, even though there is toolbar space in between. [Edit: probably the consistent box outlines from phab:T267442 help unify the two?]
   4. /* Section name */ in edit summary updates dynamically as I type in the topic-heading box. (Until I edit the summary to say something other than "new section".)
   5. Using Timeless on a phone, everything still works.
   6. On a narrow touch screen (phone) I can side-scroll in the topic heading by dragging. (There are some one-line text boxes in the MediaWiki UI where side-scrolling doesn't work.)

Other thoughts:

The subst:trim template gets substituted when you cycle to Visual and back to Source. Not a problem, just something I noticed.

Teahouse preload isn't really necessary, since the tool auto-signs. But it detects the four tildes and doesn't double sign, so all is fine there.

Non-subst'd templates like {{Tq}} show fine in the Source Preview but prevent me from switching to Visual mode (not specific to New Discussion, happens in Reply Tool also).

Still have to scroll to the top of the page to add a topic.

Is there a better prompt text than "Description"? I can't think of one, but others may have ideas.

After clicking Add Topic, the heading box shows and below it the "Loading..." message stays for several seconds. Assume/hope this is just because it's a prototype and that it would be fast in production.

I like that you proxied or faked my IP address to 172.16.x.x, thanks!

Thank you for this detailed write up, @Pelagic. You can expect comments in response in early January. The team, myself included, will be on holiday until then.

Enjoy your break and Merry Christmas, happy Solstice, or wonderful whatever-you’re-celebrating to you and the team!

Some of my observations may duplicate others’ comments: I went in blind and recorded my observations before reading the other threads here.

@Pelagic:

Using the edit summary as the heading was unexpected but interesting. Don't ask me in what world a normal user (I evidently don't consider myself normal!) would expand Advanced and fill out the edit summary box but not fill out the Topic. If I was a designer it wouldn't have occurred to me; evidently it's something that you did think of.

This turns out to actually be an old bug in the API that we're running into: T54747.

To get my signature on a new line I now have to insert a blank line above, the punctuation trick no longer works.

What is the "punctuation trick"?

Non-subst'd templates like {{Tq}} show fine in the Source Preview but prevent me from switching to Visual mode (not specific to New Discussion, happens in Reply Tool also).

Thanks for pointing this out, this will be fixed (Gerrit patch 623117 patchset 32). It's intentional for the Reply Tool (Help:DiscussionTools/Reply tool visual mode limitations, this page is linked from the error message), but these limitation don't apply when starting a new discussion and switching with templates should work.

I like that you proxied or faked my IP address to 172.16.x.x, thanks!

It's accidental, traffic reaching wmflabs.org sites is somehow proxied internally (I don't really know the details) and we didn't do anything to record the real IP address. I'll keep your comment in mind though and avoid fixing it. ;) (I believe similar proxying happens in production, but the real addresses are forwarded, although there have been a few instances where they were recorded incorrectly.)

turns out to actually be an old bug

Oh, haha. That flips the common saying on its head: I actually thought it was a “feature not a bug”.

What is the "punctuation trick"?

Just my name for it, not a term that's used by others. When I'm posting a multi-paragraph comment I like to put my sig on a line by itself to show that it relates to the whole thing and isn’t visually bundled into the last para. Reply Tool seems to strip off trailing whitespace before adding the sig (which makes sense), so I type return followed by an em-dash. Punctuation makes the last line non-blank and my sig (which doesn’t have the dash baked in) appears after.

— Pelagic (talk) etc.

Like that.

In Reply Tool, each linebreak creates a new <DD>, no need for a blank line between “paragraphs”. But in New Discussion, it's not creating listitems, and you need to type a blank line to create a new <P>. I just happened to notice it first with the signature scenario.

That emulates normal wikitext behaviour around blank lines, even though I imagine you’re doing it in the DOM with JS and pushing it back through Parsoid? For a user who's approaching it as just a box to type in, what they experience is different newline behaviour in RT vs. ND.

Thanks for the explanations.

For new discussion tool, we actually don't use Parsoid (except to convert from visual mode), so it's just the normal wikitext behavior without any trickery. We did that to make it consistent with the "normal" editor's way of adding new sections.

I agree that the inconsistent behavior in wikitext is annoying, but something has to be inconsistent, as long as we can't embed normal wikitext markup inside a list item.

At least the visual mode behaves the same for replies and new discussions…

Yeah, sorry @Matma Rex. I slept on it and came back to self-correct, hoping you hadn’t seen it. I had myself confused: only happens in Source mode not Visual, so Parsoid not DOM for Reply. Interesting to know that New Discussion feeds source in the other way. Agree that something has to be inconsistent. If you put in extra magic for linebreaks, the result would still run counter to some group's expectations. E.g.for Reply do people expect to press enter once or twice when the leading ::: aren’t displayed?

> If I ignore the warning and leave the heading/subject blank, my new topic gets smooshed under the previous topic's heading. I think if someone does ignore the warning then we should insert some kind of default heading, even if it's "<no subject>" like you might see in some email tools.

@JKlein (WMF), I think that we probably want to require a subject heading or insert a default. @Pelagic, if "No subject" is the default, the Teahouse will end up with accessibility problems. What do you think about a default subject like "Discussion started by User:Example"?

I’d prefer requiring the subject and body both be non-blank. It won’t avoid multiple sections called “Question”, or gobbledygook topics, but at least it will be obvious that a new discussion thread exists.

Teahouse hosts tend to add headings when none were provided, so they might also clean up “No subject”. “Discussion started by User:Example” is a good idea, but if you have a page where those kind of headings dominate, then it sends the message that style is desired, and might discourage descriptive topic titles.

Also, if you go with inserting a default heading, then that’s another string that would need to be localised for each wiki.

You could grab the first four or five words as a heading – like “Hi I was wondering what ...” – but I expect that would have problems too.