Topic on Help talk:DiscussionTools

most pages on this wiki (including this one) don’t use DiscussionTools yet, but Extension:StructuredDiscussions. The good news is that StructuredDiscussions is deprecated and will eventually be replaced by DiscussionTools

Please help me.

I like the way Talk pages used to look, and still look on English Wikipedia. On Desktop, mind you, not on Mobile.

In particular: load and present the entire page at once, allowing you to for instance CTRL+F text search anything on the page, in any section (except content manually collapsed by an editor, I guess). With zero need for the incredibly obnoxious requirement to first open up or load each talk section, common to social media sites like Facebook or Reddit! :-(

I have tried my very best to find ANY information on how to opt-out of the new look you have here on Mediawiki, and haven't found anything. Not even "it's not possible, we are forcing you to use the new look."

I have tried setting the Appearance back from Vector (2022) to Legacy Vector (2010). It got rid of some of the right hand stuff, but the "About this board" sidebar still remains. I can collapse it, but not get rid of it. I find it useless, but it's a minor annoyance and doesn't revert the big change.

I have tried disabling all the checkboxes on the Editing tab under Discussion pages (Enable Quick Replying, Enable Quick Topic Adding, and Show Discussion Activity), but still talk pages (like this one) STILL persists in using a graphically voluminous look that I find clearly inferior to the old "boring" look.

About the only other relevant difference between Mediawiki's Preferences and English Wikipedia's Preferences is the Threaded Discussion tab. But there I find nothing useful. I tried setting both values to zero thinking that might disable the new look, but that wasn't possible "Please enter a value no less than one".

What I find most frustrating, however, is how I can't find any help or documentation on this issue.

I didn't find anything in your FAQ. I tried googling various iterations on how to opt out of threaded wikipedia discussions, structured discussions, and flow, but found nothing.

CapnZapp (talk) 10:07, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

I know it’s very confusing, but most pages on this wiki (including this one) don’t use DiscussionTools yet, but Extension:StructuredDiscussions. The good news is that StructuredDiscussions is deprecated and will eventually be replaced by DiscussionTools. On talk pages already using DiscussionTools (e.g. Talk:Talk pages project/Usability) you can see the whole page at once. (I think there are no plans at all to collapse sections on desktop, but even if there were, DiscussionTools can be opted out of.) By the way, if you use Chrome or Chrome-based browsers on mobile, Ctrl+F now works on DiscussionTools-powered talk pages even when topics are collapsed, the section in which the searched term appears opens automatically! It doesn’t work in Safari and Firefox yet, though, and other things (e.g. searching in the page manually, without Ctrl+F) can’t be achieved with this new functionality.

Thank you... but I didn't understand what I need to do to restore Mediawiki talk pages to the classic Talk format? And where is all this documented? CapnZapp (talk) 22:46, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

You personally can’t, StructuredDiscussions is a whole different system. Discussions cannot be converted losslessly back and forth between the two systems, so only privileged users (administrators and developers, as far as I remember) can turn it on or off on existing talk pages. All you can do is commenting in this topic, agreeing with switching to the new talk page tools (i.e. DiscussionTools).

The good news is that StructuredDiscussions is deprecated and will eventually be replaced by DiscussionTools. That seemed far from a done deal at the linked Village Pump discussion. I wish I could share your optimism. CapnZapp (talk) 12:14, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

You can. :) Newly created talk pages no longer use StructuredDiscussions. Migrating existing ones will probably be a long process, and maybe a few will remain in the longer term, but at least something has begun.

Thank you. But why oh why isn't this stated clearly somewhere??? Sigh... CapnZapp (talk) 09:49, 4 January 2023 (UTC)