The Core Features team has enabled Flow on this talk page. (!!)

• Please use Talk:Sandbox for tests.
• Only use this for substantive comment about Flow.
• If you find bugs, report in Bugzilla if you can.

Previous feedback is on Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2 (using old Liquid Threads), and on our labs server.

Deployed!

Big thanks to Aaron, ^demon, springle, Reedy, greg-g ... and all the early bug filers and feedback providers. SPage (WMF) (talk) 23:24, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

S Page (WMF): And Roan! Bsitu (talk) 23:27, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Congratulations to the team. :) It's nice to see this first enter the wild. Mattflaschen - Talk 00:29, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

And thanks to Parsoid team. Flow uses Parsoid to store HTML and round-trip back to wikitext when editing a post or header. SPage (WMF) (talk) 04:34, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Wow! πr² (t • c) 23:28, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: I hope you don't mind that I edited your post to give it more emotion! Legoktm (talk) 23:39, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: Not at all! :D πr² (t • c) 23:48, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: Such deployment. Andrew Garrett (talk) 23:52, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Werdna:

such deployment      very different
   much comments
                          such Flow     wow

πr² (t • c) 23:55, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: I would thank you for that post but there is no THANK button! Legoktm (talk) 00:03, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: cf. this

BTW, the permalink URLs are horrible. Seriously. Nobody wants to see a bunch of hex stuff. πr² (t • c) 00:10, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: Regrettably cut from the MVP, the thanks button. It's coming, though. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: We're working the permalink thing but the issue is that Flow topics are designed to be divorced from individual pages/boards, and are going to be cross-wiki. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jorm (WMF): Flow topics are going to be cross-wiki? What does this mean? πr² (t • c) 00:37, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: It means that (eventually), you'll be able to participate in conversations started on here or meta whilst staying on enwiki or whatever. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jorm (WMF): Why can't they just go to the other wiki? πr² (t • c) 00:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

What an ugly abuse. Rschen7754 23:29, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Time to make a very appropriate post.

Yes hello. Rschen7754 23:32, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Howief: wow, such boss, so product, good message, much amaze, wow. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 23:33, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

\o/

Thank you, everyone! You all deserve some wiki-cookies :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:33, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Keegan: Hm, that didn't work... Keegan (talk) 23:33, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

All I did was type ! and saved. Sad panda. Keegan (talk) 23:34, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Aw yissssssssss! Jorm (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Keegan: Heh, interesting.. that shouldn't happen :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:38, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): ! MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:40, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Keegan: Yeah, I got the same thing. Good bug catch. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:41, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Max Semenik (talk) 23:42, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): No problem! Keegan (talk) 23:43, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Wow! It's great seeing this happen! Ypnypn (talk) 23:44, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Does wikitext work? Ypnypn (talk) 23:45, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

It does. I thought only VisualEditor would be used? Ypnypn (talk) 23:45, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Ypnypn: Nope, not unless you have it enabled in your preferences. Legoktm (talk) 23:47, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): This youtube-like style seems utterly nonsensical to me. Discussions can be had on IRC in this way, but onwiki one needs to be able to better trace what is a reply to which comment. πr² (t • c) 23:50, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Ypnypn: The VisualEditor isn't set up on Flow yet, but all the wikitext is run through Parsoid (which is the VisualEditor back-end). Jorm (WMF) (talk) 23:50, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: I'm pretty sure we turned VE off for now, because it wasn't quite ready for prime time in Flow yet.

Ypnypn, nope :) You can use wikitext, templates, math, you name it! MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:51, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: You're mistaken. VE is not enabled in PHP, for now.

$wgFlowEditorList = array( 'none' ); // EXPERIMENTAL prepend 'visualeditor' SPage (WMF) (talk) 23:56, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): Will replies to replies next infinitely? Arthur Richards (talk) 00:00, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

S Page (WMF): Oh darn. I was excited to use it :( Legoktm (talk) 00:03, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ebernhardson (talk) 23:54, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

πr² (t • c) 00:01, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: Ahh, you broke it! Legoktm (talk) 00:04, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: This appears to be a problem with mediawikiwiki itself, pasting the same content into a normal wiki page gets the same error result. Ebernhardson (talk) 00:38, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm:

(w:Symphony_No._5_(Beethoven)) πr² (t • c) 00:41, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ebernhardson: 216.38.130.164 (talk) 01:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ebernhardson: mobile post 2600:1010:B00C:D401:0:47:BC02:1501 (talk) 03:41, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Huzzah and congratulations! ☆ Arthur Richards (talk) 23:59, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Awjrichards: Thanks :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 00:06, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I noticed that by default, e-mails are sent whenever a post is replied to. This means that I got eleven e-mails in about an hour, which was fairly annoying. Similarly, I received 5 notifications, which could have drowned out more important news (such as a change in user-rights).

I think e-mail should be turned off by default. For Notifications, I don't know. What does everyone think?

Maryana? Ypnypn (talk) 02:06, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ypnypn: Since one of the many targets is new users who might not know how to adjust notification preferences, I think they should be on by default, users who are getting lots of notification probably have interacted with preferences at some point could adjust the settings themselves.

We've talked about deciding echo notifications defaults based on thresholds set up based on the number of messages received by a user Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 04:34, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): Still, I got two notifications from your response: one because of the reply, and one because of the link. Are both needed? Ypnypn (talk) 14:12, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ypnypn: nope, its a general echo bug that's being worked on, has nothing to do with Flow. Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 16:42, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Deltahedron (talk) 20:09, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Oh dear

:O MF-W 23:46, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

MF-Warburg: I think if you disable JavaScript it will look prettier. Legoktm (talk) 23:46, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Not really.

And it doesn't even have more than one intendation level? This is the end of useful discussions onwiki. MF-W 23:51, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I was going to write what Rschen wrote, but apparently that doesn't work for me :) πr² (t • c) 23:53, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

MF-Warburg: Really?

Apparently so. Rschen7754 23:53, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

PiRSquared17: There cannot possibly be a justification for this except that moronic developers think users are as stupid as they are. MF-W 23:56, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

MF-Warburg: Civility. :P

w:Wikipedia:Flow/Design FAQ πr² (t • c) 23:58, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

MF-Warburg: No need to panic. We can adjust the indentation as necessary if people find it's not working.

For the record, we've been using Flow to have pretty elaborate conversations both within the Flow team and with other community members pretty extensively for the last month, and two levels of threading has not proven to be an impediment. See our design retrospective, engineering retrospective, Flow talk page, and other pages on ee-flow, our test wiki. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:58, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Ypnypn: Apparently not (yet) Done {{#ifexist:uiceicujeiu|asdf|ghjkl}}->ghjkl

blah

unclosed div MF-W 00:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

MF-Warburg: See "adjust the indentation if necessary". Personally I agree it's probably a needed thing. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:31, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): Do we need to investigate IRC indentation? 12 levels? Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 04:22, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): what? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 04:23, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): I was just thinking that maybe all of our forms of communication need more indentation. Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 04:37, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): reasonableness and an absence of trolling is a behavioural standard for staff, too ;). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): I beg to differ with your thoughts; it would be sufficient, imho, if those forms of communication which currently have intendation would keep it. MF-W 08:01, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF) & MF-Warburg Not all jokes are trolling, the whole team's goal is to make the best discussion system we can, that is most appropriate for how the community currently uses and wants to use it. Which means we'll listen to, investigate, and pursue whatever design or development changes we need to to get there. I'd like to reframe a bit and say lets focus on what the issue is rather than jumping to a solution. Increased indentation levels are one of many possible solutions, but certainly not the only one. I'd urge everyone to think about identifying problems rather than assuming a single solution. Thats all.

Thanks everyone for the awesome constructive feedback (positive & negative!) keep it coming. Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 08:30, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jaredzimmerman (WMF): what other solutions can you think of? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Mhm… somehow this seems pretty overloaded. These few lines above already take more space than my entire screen provides. Moar scrolling … yay Vogone talk 23:58, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Vogone: Try playing with the little buttons at the top of the page, under the header area... MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 00:06, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): They can only collapse topics, not reduce the needed space, it seems. MF-W 00:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): Yes, thank you. It's already a bit better with collapsed topics. But I imagine it will be way harder to follow a longer discussion on flow than on the talk pages we had before as the discussions are simply taking much more space as the "boxes" (or which word ever describes this the best) around the comments aren't really space-saving. Vogone talk 00:15, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Vogone: We're working on making the collapsed view even more compact and space-saving; it's still a bit too big.

RE: "I imagine it will be way harder to follow a longer discussion on flow than on the talk pages we had before as the discussions are simply taking much more space" – you may be right, and we may have to adjust the design as necessary (everything is still early stages, very much open to change). I think it'll be helpful to get some real-world usage of Flow and evaluate what would be most helpful: more compact visual design, or search/browse/filter tools (search in board for keyword, filter by discussions I'm part of/unanswered threads, etc.), or some combination of both. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 00:50, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Check me out, I'm FLOWing

Wooo hooooooo 216.38.130.164 (talk) 00:00, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Congrats Everyone!

Using flow is oh-so easy. Howief (WMF) (talk) 00:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Howief: Editing a talk page, on the other hand, is not :((( MF-W 00:03, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Whitespace galore! (yes, I read the justification thing, but still -- whitespace!) Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:04, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

DGarry (WMF): Thank you for your insightful post!!! Legoktm (talk) 00:12, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: so pretty! 216.38.130.164 (talk) 01:23, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Eager to see this on Wikipedia next Tfinc (talk) 00:07, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia needs this! DEPLOY TODAY!!! 209.49.110.163 (talk) 00:10, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Tfinc, 209.49.110.163: See Flow Portal#Roadmap. SPage (WMF) (talk) 04:20, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I fucking love images.

Images in Flow! Cats and dogs living together! The apocalypse is nigh! Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:06, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, very nice. Vogone talk 00:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Something...something...

Hey look, my name's Dan Garry and I edited your message. sux 4 u Legoktm (talk) 00:10, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Looks a little weird on mobile

but probably wouldn't be too hard to make mobile friendly :) 70.190.33.64 (talk) 00:12, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I will claim responsibility for that anonymous drive-by comment. Arthur Richards (talk) 00:13, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Awjrichards: it would be interesting an feature to "claim" posts as your own after they've been written Tfinc (talk) 00:22, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Tfinc: That's difficult for compliance with our copyright licence though; without performing some verification that you actually did make the post (which would be tricky if you've made it from a device with a different IP), you could hijack ownership of an edit made by someone else and therefore violate the licence. Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:24, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

DGarry (WMF): Sure, but in this case it would be a 1=1 match and how many of us have edited only to realize were not logged in ;) and then went Doh! Tfinc (talk) 00:27, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Tfinc: Arguably, this has always been a possibility, but history don't lie. Rm w a vu (talk) 05:43, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Tfinc (talk) 00:27, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

We're going to rethink some of the hover icon stuff to make it more mobile-friendly (have reply and edit always available, add a junk drawer for moderation actions and linking). Stay tuned ;) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 00:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): \o/ Arthur Richards (talk) 01:57, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): Also, will Flow support emoji beyond the unicode set? Please say yes. Arthur Richards (talk) 01:58, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Awjrichards: 💎 Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 04:17, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Awjrichards Might be a browser thing… https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromoji-emoji-for-google/cahedbegdkagmcjfolhdlechbkeaieki Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 04:19, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Awjrichards: Who needs emoji when you have Commons gifs? ;)

MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:31, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Very cool

This is very cool. Looking forward to this. Well done, all who have been involved in this. Hannibal (talk) 00:24, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 00:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I fucking love templates

Gerrit change 100932

and

bug 57696

both seem to work. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

RFC 2324

ISBN 9781552465707

wikiindex: πr² (t • c) 00:34, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

i fucking see what you did there Rm w a vu (talk) 05:42, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

History has posts from "last week" from 15 minutes ago.

Congrats on deploying this. One thing I noticed is that the "view history" tab has some weirdness. There's a section for "last week" that is apparently populated with posts from just recently.

Some other thoughts...

• How does one edit the header?
• It would be useful to either include a TOC, or have the collapsed view be the default for the first visit to a busy page like this. Otherwise, how do you know where the discussion you want to read or add it is? Ragesoss (talk) 00:26, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragesoss: To edit the header, hover your cursor over it and click the image of the pencil. For some reason it takes a little while before it brings up the box for you to edit it, but it does eventually happen. Note that, due to a bug (or a feature, as some people put it), if you change a template that's transcluded in a header, those changes are not reflected in the header itself. Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:27, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

DGarry (WMF): Thanks. I got two Notifications from your reply, one for the reply and one for mention.

I noticed that in preview for that header, there's styling (an orange background) that doesn't show up the same way when viewing the page. Ragesoss (talk) 00:31, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragesoss: The header on Talk:Flow? I don't see any styling in either version. Strange. Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:32, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragesoss: RE: "I noticed that in preview for that header, there's styling (an orange background) that doesn't show up the same way when viewing the page" – we wanted to make sure preview looked different from the live version, so there was no confusion about whether or not something was previewed or posted. This is just an early stab at a visual indication without much design input, so we'll probably work on making it prettier in the future :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 00:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragesoss: RE: the "view history" tab has some weirdness. There's a section for "last week" that is apparently populated with posts from just recently – yeah, the time-based rollup is a little off :-/ Gotta work that out. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 01:14, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I try to press the V at the top right of an expanded topic, which I assume is supposed to collapse the topic, but it doesn't do anything. Ragesoss (talk) 00:33, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragesoss: Oh, apparently that's just the button for extra options (ie, hide) and to collapse the topic you click the rest of the title bar. This was counter-intuitive on first use. Ragesoss (talk) 00:35, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragesoss: Yeah, that is actually the moderation menu. I've been pushing for us to make that consistent with the moderation menu for posts, which is a flag on the RHS. Andrew Garrett (talk) 00:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ragesoss: Thanks for the feedback. Did you figure out that the entire gray topic "bar" acts as a collapse/expand button? Did you try the three little icons at the top of the board? SPage (WMF) (talk) 04:17, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

S Page (WMF): Yes (see my self-reply above) I figured out that the title bar as a whole is how you collapse/expand them. As for the three icons, if you mean "Full view", "Collapsed view" and "Small view", yes I tried them. I found the difference between collapsed and small to be very minor, and was frustrated not to have a way to see all the topics on one screen (as even small view takes up a lot of space per topic).

Another thing I notice is that it's not easy to find my way back to my comment-in-progress if I have to refer to somewhere else on the page (such as those icons at the top, right now) while composing it. There's a big virtue in wikitext preview mode for composing a message while scrolling up to refer to various parts of the page, and then knowing precisely how to get back to the message you were writing (since it's always at the bottom, and the edit window scrolls independently of the rest of the page). I'm not sure how to solve for that sort of use case in Flow, but I definitely do that sort of thing a lot, moving back and forth between what others have written at various places on a page and my own new message. Ragesoss (talk) 15:37, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Werdna: Yes, switching that to the flag would be much more intuitive. It would also at least partially solve the issue mentioned by someone else (I dare not scroll around the page to find it, in case I can't find my way back to this comment) that it's not obvious that "hide" is in fact a moderatio action rather than a synonym for collapse.

I first assumed that Hide was indeed a convoluted way to get to the collapse action I was seeking, and then when the popup asked my "why", my first thought was that this was a mechanism for collecting usability data in the beta phase about why I wanted to take that action (collapsing the section). It took me a bit to grok that it was asking for justification because I was going to hide something in a way that could affect others.

One more thing I notice as I write this: I clicked "reply" to your post, but my reply box didn't show up immediately beneath the comment I'm replying to. Instead, the "thanks for the feedback" post by S Page is in between your post and my reply box. I'm curious now about where this comment will be once I save it.

EDIT: It showed up at the bottom. If I Reply to any post in this thread, even one further down beneath S Page's, the reply box shows up immediately beneath that same comment by S Page. So if I try to reply to *this* comment, the reply box will appear *above* the comment I'm replying to. Ragesoss (talk) 15:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Spacing and size options?

I do think it's a bit big (particularly the topic headlines) and could do with less whitespace (particularly vertical).

Perhaps you can add a display density setting like Gmail. I would prefer the default were more tight as well. Mattflaschen - Talk 00:33, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

+1 for less whitespace by default. Helder 11:13, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

+1 for some way to make the designer friendly spacing more "geek used to staring at high density text" friendly. BDavis (WMF) (talk) 01:48, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Also: great job folks. I think that this project will have a great impact on making on-wiki discussions easier for n00bs and seasoned veterans alike. BDavis (WMF) (talk) 01:52, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I think there should be a smidgen more spacing between the text of the last reply, and the floating copy of my name ready for me to start a reply – right now it's not totally clear that they're distinct. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 04:28, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree about the text size: I'm typing in 13pt, which matches the article text, but my comment will be displayed in 16pt which is a noticeable difference.

As to distinguishing replies I would quite like to see something imaginative done with background shading to maybe indicate depth of comment-nesting, which would accomplish the same thing ;-) Phil | Talk 09:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

tables ftw

How do i delete the above table again? 216.38.130.164 (talk) 00:55, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

216.38.130.164: Edit the comment and delete it, really. You can also hide it. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Jorm (WMF): As an anon user, actually they can't do much there. Only logged in users can edit their own posts. Ebernhardson (talk) 21:15, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Ebernhardson: Huh. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Italian Greyhound

EBlanchard (WMF) (talk) 01:27, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

EBlanchard (WMF): Lovely! :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 01:32, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

EBlanchard (WMF): where's the like button? ;P 50.184.94.220 (talk) 04:24, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_view_of_White_House_with_snow41950v.jpg 98.163.68.34 (talk) 02:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I brought some kitties for the A team to pet!

Enjoy them little fingers! MGalloway (WMF) (talk) 04:43, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

nawwww Rm w a vu (talk) 05:41, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Cute! Aubrey (talk) 08:07, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

kittens!!! :) Aude (talk) 12:15, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Editing comments

Would it be possible to display some sort of footnote if a comment has been edited by another user? Right now, it's very easy to fake statements from other users, which could be problematic... Rschen7754 05:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Rschen7754: This is planned; I guess it just hasn't made it into the master codebase yet. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 06:23, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Spacing

Everything is much bigger in Flow than on normal pages, especially the spacing.

Especially the space between my name and field for adding a new comment is too big. It looks like I have already responded, except my response is empty. Skalman (talk) 14:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Seconded, there is far too much vertical whitespace. And having a larger font here than in the rest of the wiki is also strange and annoying. The text also seems very washed out, especially in this comment box.

And even with less whitespace between by username and the comment box, having my name hovering at the bottom of every section seems incredibly strange and makes me think I somehow already commented in the section. Better, IMO, would be for the name to appear when I enter the box just like the various buttons do.

Also, the interface does not seem to encourage the usual nesting of replies. I almost posted this response as a new "top-level" comment in this section. Anomie (talk) 15:41, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Anomie: "makes me think I somehow already commented in the section" Yup. It also makes it impossible to search for my own name to see what I've responded to.

Avoiding nesting is on purpose (read the design document). It makes it easier for mobile, and makes it less likely that discussions lead astray. Skalman (talk) 15:50, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Avoiding nesting is going to make the discussions harder to follow when they involve more that a handful of people, IMO. Anomie (talk) 17:22, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh look, I did use "Reply" and this isn't shown as nested at all. That's really going to make it hard to follow the discussion. Anomie (talk) 17:22, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: I tend to agree with you.

Quora does a fine job of addressing vertical whitespace and font size, with a similar design. Also effective: their use of horizontal whitespace -- the right-hand margin is used for things like related links (or possibly, in our case: a table of contents?) In general those pages feel tight and context-rich, even though they never use a font as small as the one I'm typing in now (inside a nested textarea replying to someone else).

And we may be able to reduce the total amount of whitespace by dropping the gray background on the section headers. If you make all of the backgrounds white, there's no need to add 'additional' spacing between them. Kudos & rgds to the Flowers. Sj (talk) 00:35, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Sj: There's a mockup of a ToC idea that they're currently working on, at http://area51.yar.gs/wmf/flow1/ which also contains some of the ongoing whitespace refinements.

Anomie: The over-use of usernames has been fixed (just "reply" links now). You'll also be (somewhat) happy to see a 3rd level of indentation! They haven't gotten much feedback on that yet, though...

Skalman et al: Re: the font-size and leading - I assume they'll be standardizing to match the Typography refresh font-sizes, but I haven't nagged anyone about it recently. A lot of the current details are out-of-date, because they were delegating that work to the new front-end dev (he who made the mockup linked above). So, updates to all this are coming, sometime soonish. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Hiding a topic

It is not at all clear that hiding a topic will hide it for everybody. I thought it would be the same as collapsing it for myself.

I suggest using the term "Archiving", and having the collapsing feature always available as well. Skalman (talk) 14:45, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Also, it's much too prominent. The downwards arrow indicates that it's just temporarily collapsing it. Skalman (talk) 15:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Animations

Maybe my computer is slow, but the animations often make everything come to a halt for a few seconds. You should probably auto-detect if the system is too slow, but at the very least provide an option to turn it off. Skalman (talk) 14:48, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if animations are the only problem. Sometimes (not always) scrolling is horribly slow, starting a new topic is painstakingly slow (1-2 sec), as is cancelling it, and occasionally focusing/blurring the text area for entering a new comment is equally slow. Skalman (talk) 15:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Connection between heading and content

The gray heading area is really closed off and it doesn't look like it's connected to its content. You should find a way to connect them.

One reason might be that the gray area is so big that it feels like it already has content.

What about having only the title in the gray area, and info about who started the topic, number of comments and when it started immediately below? (Perhaps on one line instead of two.) Skalman (talk) 14:59, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Last updated/created date doesn't update

It looks really weird now that I have created 4 topics without reloading the page, also added a couple of comments: apparently all of them were created either "1 second ago" or "just now". You should either update them every other minute, or simply show the time they were created.

Not updating is okay when reading, but when I dynamically update the page by submitting comments, you need to dynamically change the timestamps. Skalman (talk) 15:07, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Also, it doesn't make sense to show "12 seconds ago". Just go with "just now" or "less than a minute ago" or "a minute ago". Skalman (talk) 15:09, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Table of contents or smaller "small" view

The small view is so big that even on my laptop I can't see all the topics. Either it should be made much more compact (make the heading smaller?) or you need a separate table of contents. Skalman (talk) 15:13, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: yeah, we're making it smaller. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): Great. Skalman (talk) 18:45, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Support having JavaScript disabled

There are several issues when JS is disabled:

• Cannot submit anything, since all submit buttons are disabled
• The comment text areas are very big, making reading discussions very annoying. I suggest having either a link from which you can comment, or making the text areas at most three lines high

Other than that, everything is much snappier and faster: I can scroll freely, focusing text areas is instant etc. Skalman (talk) 15:19, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I think basic functionality is planned to work without JavaScript, but it would be helpful for the Flow team to confirm. See also bugzilla:58019. Mattflaschen - Talk 22:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Superm401: Yes, basics should work find with no JS.

Skalman, what browser are you using? Another user reported that posting was working fine with JavaScript disabled... MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:24, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): It turns out turning off JS doesn't work. It seems like there is some cookie that remembers that I previously had JS on, and then e.g. disables submit buttons by default, even on a new page load. I guess it's okay to not consider people turning JS off... Skalman (talk) 05:40, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: Are you using Firefox? It caches some things from form pages. If you do a hard refresh, it may fix it. Mattflaschen - Talk 06:15, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Superm401: Yup, that's it. Why would it cache a button's disabledness? Skalman (talk) 07:30, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: In some cases it probably makes sense, if for instance checking a checkbox caused a button to become disabled.

But there can obviously be issues. It might be appropriate for the code to have autocomplete="off" for the button here (which affects the caching behavior). Mattflaschen - Talk 09:06, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Support previewing the heading

When I try the preview feature, the heading isn't specially marked. I would expect it to be bold. Skalman (talk) 15:21, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Accesskey H for history

Normal pages use Accesskey H for history, but it doesn't work here. Skalman (talk) 15:23, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Usability for visually impaired

The contrast for some things is much too low. My grandfather wouldn't have a chance of reading the placeholder for inputs and text areas, and also other items are problematic: the title area has gray text on a gray background, comment text should be darker, and the same goes for the toolbar icons.

You really should have a usability study with visually impaired people. Skalman (talk) 15:53, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Seconding. The grey text in the input box is virtually invisible on my laptop screen, and I have no vision problems. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:44, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

(Is it possible to bump a topic? This still hasn't been addressed.) Skalman (talk) 20:29, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

History improvements

• Links should be blue
• Normal histories try to be compact and abbreviate every aspect. At the very least you could:
  • Keep one contribution on one line
  • Don't make (talk | contribs) bold
  • I don't think you need a full sentence. "New topic: Topic", "Changed topic title: Topic" etc. would be enough
    • I would even prefer single letters, like it's currently
• Usually you link the topic name, but not for hiding/restoring a topic
• I expected every comment to be present in the history view. If you don't intend to show comments here you at least need to link to topic histories.
• Topics/comments should show up in Special:Contributions
• How do I find archived topics?

  Edit: It looks like old topics are available via an "older" link in the bottom, which enables "infinite scrolling". I'm a fan of having the URL being a link to the content I'm viewing. Skalman (talk) 16:11, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Seconding the idea that all comments should show in the history. Making this system so different from the way normal talk pages function (including edit summaries and proper page history) might improve usability for newbies, but makes it dysfunctional for those who are familiar with the current talk page format.

And I got the bug where replying after previewing wasn't permitted again, on my first attempt at this reply. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:20, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Topic summaries

The previous extension Liquid threads had a feature for summarizing a topic. That would be very useful for some types of discussion. Skalman (talk) 16:11, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: That's being actively worked on :) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): Great. Skalman (talk) 18:43, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: That's a great idea! MGalloway (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Warn when leaving the page

If I start writing something and then click a link or otherwise try to leave the page, I expect a warning to pop up, just like when editing other pages. Skalman (talk) 16:25, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

that's a really good point - I'll throw a bug into bugzilla about it. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

bugzilla:58402. Done! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanking

The new thank you feature doesn't work for topics and comments. Skalman (talk) 18:41, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

We've got a "thank" button in the works :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:33, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): I would like to like this post. MGalloway (WMF) (talk) 22:45, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Add loading indicator

Everything AJAX-y should really have a loading indicator. There are some missing:

• Older topics (for infinite scroll)
• Preview Skalman (talk) 18:54, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Design team is working on the visuals for this, but we could probably just reuse an existing spinner as a stop-gap. Good catch! MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:36, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Modal dialog should be "fixed"

E.g. when hiding a topic a modal dialog is shown, which darkens the rest of the page. It shouldn't move if I try to scroll (if I scroll up or down I won't know why everything is dark and there is no clear way to get out of there) Skalman (talk) 18:59, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Tracked: Bug 57220 MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:32, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Hiding a comment

Hiding a comment also hides who wrote it. The author's name is replaced by the hider's. Skalman (talk) 19:37, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: *Nod* – working on this. Here's a mockup of how it'll look soon:

... where JareBear is the hider and K-Hammerzine is the author of the hidden post. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 20:30, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: PS, I'm sad we don't have the thank button live yet – I want to thank you for all these bug reports! :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 20:30, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): It's a bit difficult to tell what it would be like in real discussions, but does it really make sense to show only the hider? Also, it's not entirely clear what hiding is for: is it for spam, incorrect content, no-longer relevant content...? Maybe that's up to each community?

I'm submitting these reports since I want a really awesome system. And for me it's quicker than searching for bugs and if I don't find one, file one. Plus, it's a good way to test the system.

Thanks for your work. It'll make communicating easier in most cases. Skalman (talk) 20:38, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Skalman: I'm also not sure that this "hide" functionality is what we need. On Flow FAQ, I read:

"Hide", "Delete" and "Suppress" - analogous to revert, revision-deletion and oversight

And in Flow functional specifications, I read:

Hide - The content in question is hidden from view. However, a marker of some kind is left to indicate that the content is there and can be restored. All users will see the markers, which remain within the Board or Topic.

Such a marker left within the flow is for me fundamentally different from the revert mechanism on standard wiki pages where one can find out about the existence of that piece of content only by looking at the history. So far, I don't like the "hide" at all. Any user should be able to help counter vandalism (so "delete" is not an appropriate solution for this), and vandalism should be reverted without leaving any traces visible to everyone. Klipe (talk) 21:26, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Klipe: I see what you're saying; leaving a marker that something was hidden does make it more prominent than removing a comment from a talk page, where (to a non-experienced user or someone not watching the page) the comment truly disappears. But is this the behavior that we want? Do we want new users to think their comments (which may simply have been off-topic) were deleted, since they're not likely to think to look in the history or be watching changes to the page?

It's important to note that instances of overt vandalism and spam on articles are far, far higher than on talk pages: AbuseFilter hits to all talk namespace pages on English Wikipedia make up a teeny-tiny fraction of those that happen on the article namespace, less than 0.001%. The problems you're much more likely to face on talk pages are probably more along the lines of overt or subtle personal attacks and off-topic/nonsense posts. These might not be things that are as unambiguous as vandalism/spam, and having a hide feature that leaves a visible trace may help to educate newer users about the social norms and conventions on talk pages, rather than confuse them about why their comment "disappeared." MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 23:18, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): I agree with you: the author of the "removed" (whatever the mean) comment should indeed be notified and understand why this was done.

And you're probably right about the percentage of vandalism on talk pages vs article pages, today. This may however change a lot as soon as Flow makes the talk pages "accessible to normal people". On WP:fr, we're so much disappointed about how the ArticleFeedbackTool got abused by our readers. If we would get such comments in talk boards without a mean for regular contributors to remove them, these would become completely unusable. Relying on admins/sysops to have them "Deleted" (Flow terminology) would overload them and slow down the reaction against vandalism and spam.

The reverts notifications in Echo provide all what we need: user-friendly feedback, including reason (edit summary) and quick access to what was removed (link to the diff). All this targeted to the concerned user while not leaving traces of the useless (at best!) content in the board. I don't understand why a different mechanism should be developed here. From what I read, Echo represents one of the most successful MediaWiki changes in the last few years: brand new and modern, yet well accepted by the community! Why not capitalise on this? Klipe (talk) 11:10, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): Actually it's 3.7 percent (where is the 0.000... coming from?) FWIW, I think that Flow changing things could make things more susceptible to vandalism, but I'm not entirely convinced. Talk and mainspace pages both being unstructured wikitext means the likelihood of vandalism shouldn't change between the two; we should have a lot of vandalism on talk pages.

Obviously, the reason we don't is that talk pages are still very hard to find, and under Flow they'll still be just as hard to find. While there will be a smaller cognitive load to edit constructively, the cognitive load to blank text and insert silly vandalism is already pretty much zero, so I don't think we're going to be looking at run-of-the-mill stuff. Some increase in subtle vandalism, maybe, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

With AFT, of course, the problem was that it surfaced the vector to a large number of people. We're not changing how talk pages are surfaced (to my knowledge, anyway). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:15, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): Sorry, for some reason I misremembered the 150 talk namespace AF hits per day figure from your analysis to mean that 150 talk ns pages per day have AF triggered on them (divided by all pages on Wikipedia = teeny-tiny fraction). My mistake! MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:43, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): ech, I should've been more clear :) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Looks enormously spacy, is extremely slow, and nonfunctional in many other ways

The output is extremely spacy and therefore very hard to follow in anything but the most trivial of discussions. I can't imagine how it will be usable on heavily edited discussion pages. The heading level for the new comment will break up the discussion in this context.

I agree with someone above that the greyed out text will be extremely hard for those with vision problems. It is close to invisible on my laptop screen, and I have normal vision.

Adding my username to all the discussion threads is extremely distracting and confusing, and makes it impossible to search for my username.

Where is the list of topics?

The interface hangs for several seconds when one first clicks in a box, enough to make me think it I'd mis-clicked. It also takes a noticeable delay to represent my typing on the screen. There's another noticeable delay every time it runs onto a new line.

Trying the preview, it seems to wrap the header into the message text. It also doesn't add a header line with my username, so I don't know whether I'm meant to sign or not. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:32, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Espresso Addict: Where is "above"? I mean as in your sentence

I agree with someone above that...

Thanks to you, I realise that we'll have to adapt our vocabulary with this tool ! Klipe (talk) 22:27, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, "above" no longer makes much sense. The post I was referring to was by Skalman "Usability for visually impaired". Espresso Addict (talk) 01:00, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Also how do I edit my text? It doesn't seem possible to do more than edit the title.

There also seems to be an intermittent bug. When I tried to reply to someone else below, (can't find who because of the searching problem) after previewing, the reply button was repeatedly greyed out. It seems to be working on this comment. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:47, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

And having clicked on Change title and decided not to edit it, how do I exit? Lots of this interface is hugely unintuitive.

vandalism vandalism vandalism Espresso Addict (talk) 01:49, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Are you using javascript or not? (And: what browser/OS?) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): Javascript is enabled. Firefox/Windows XP. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:56, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Show-hide topic vs go to history listing

Eventually, after a lot of random clicking, I figured out the show-hide topics switch was clicking into the grey header box. But, when one clicks in the most obvious blank place in the box, it often takes you to the history instead. I think this is because the "49 minutes ago" &c expands to a long clickable link that visits a history page; however it expands sufficiently slowly that I've repeatedly clicked into the blank space before it's expanded underneath me.

ETA: And I found the editing pencil -- yay!

I do think one major problem this entire implementation has is that it is so slow showing things that are animated that I've moved on long before whatever animation was meant to pop out actually appears.

ETA2&3: Even avoiding inadvertently clicking the time indicator, a lot of the time that I click in the grey header box it doesn't do anything. I can't figure out whether I'm clicking in another wrong region or it's just taking more time than I'm prepared to wait to do anything at all. (Perhaps when it's running some automated process? Some of the time it seems to work reasonably quickly.) Espresso Addict (talk) 02:57, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Hrm; browser/OS/machine data?

FWIW, I think (and sincerely hope) we're not going to have expanding/contracting things be linkable like that. The timestamp, particularly, is annoying. In terms of expanding/contracting via grey box - personally I always assume it's going to be the arrow, and then get confused. What were your hypotheses before you found where it actually is? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): I'm using Firefox/Windows XP on a Lenovo T60 PC. Like you, my first hypothesis was the down-arrow. After that I tried hovering on the grey bar and looking for symbols to appear. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:54, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Espresso Addict: probably a machine speed thing, then; aw :(. One of these days I'm going to replace half the engineers' machines with 3 year old windows boxes and see if their standard for 'it works' changes ;p. Bugzilla:58660 seems to do an end-run around the problem; we could make it faster, but frankly I think that's just a stupid place to have a link. Bugzilla:58661 covers the header. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): I don't often get a noticeable typing delay with other interfaces, either Wikimedia or elsewhere. Maybe I'm a dinosaur (probably) but I don't think we should increase accessibility of talk pages by making everyone buy new kit. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:59, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Espresso Addict: as my comment suggests, I agree with you :). So there's a delay with typing as well as things like timestamp expansion? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:13, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): Indeed! I think I mentioned it in my other post? It's like typing into a search box when it's trying to autocomplete. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:35, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Espresso Addict: blargh. that shouldn't be happening :(. Any chance you could take some sort of video? I can inquire about how to do that if you're interested (not done it myself). Seems like we should have some sort of 'speed Flow up' general bug. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:07, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

I remember seeing the down arrow before but I do not see it now (using Firefox on Windows 7) and I do not think that is intuitive that grey means collapsible (also gray just seems like an odd color to use here). Also, the font-size seems oddly large, although it might just be the font style. Shouldn't that be aligned with the font used elsewhere?

I find myself missing now the table-of-contents for all threads in the page, and I also find myself thinking that it would be nice to be able to view A. all posts in a per date format, as well as B. sort threads by last modified - so I could see which threads are most active.

One last thing - The permalink icon is a little odd, it should not be diagonal, but rather horizonal. I also think it makes sense to put it below the post (in the same line as "Cancel" / "Preview" / "Reply") as opposed to on the left side. 96.235.185.203 (talk) 13:43, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

I seem not to be able to edit the post I just added - that could be an issue.

Also, it is weird that the little keyboard thing appears as a button hovering above the text, I really would rather have the buttons in a line at the bottom, and not appearing / disappearing 96.235.185.203 (talk) 13:52, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

96.235.185.203: Hi. In random order:

• The down-arrow in the topic titlebar is going to be replaced with a different icon soon
• We/they're still working out the available/best options for collapsing single topics
• Yourself and Ocaasi and a few other editors have commented on the grey color of the topic titlebar. A simple color-switch could be good. More complicatedly, changing it to signify various things could be an interesting direction to explore - dozens of possibilities, from "topics I'm mentioned in" to a heatmap of activity levels.
• Table of contents and pagination and topic re-ordering - all definitely at an experimental level right now. Many options and possibilities. Suggest freely!
• IPs are not currently able to edit comments once saved. (Which has some pros and some cons). There was a brief discussion about potentially configuring some sort of timelimit within which an IP might be able to alter their post (eg 5 mins), but I'm not sure if that was just at a brainstorming level, or a technical level.
• The keyboard icon is not a part of Flow - it's Universal Language Selector's "Input method contextual menu" kicking in, as it does in all textareas when we type. (Disabled-as-default on Enwiki, but visible on most other wikis, afaik)
• The permalink icon is going to be moved into an "action menu" (or "junkdrawer") along with the moderation options - see mockup at File:Flow type-style-updates-26.png (and iirc the down-arrow there will also be replaced with a menu icon)

HTH. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 07:14, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

I broke it

It looks like I broke the sandbox test page. I added a link to an older discussion like this [[Talk:Sandbox&workflow=050b9046b282b234bf36842b2b774df2]] and it messed up the formatting. it also looks like it lost all the older discussions. At least that's the way it looks to me. I don't have javascript, so I don't know how it looks to others. 64.40.54.101 (talk) 04:55, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

I can still see (and get to) the older discussion from the history page. But the threads don't show up on the main Talk:Sandbox page. 64.40.54.101 (talk) 05:04, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

This might be several errors on top of each other. All the stuff I was doing is documented in the thread titled "Some serious tesing (chaning title)", which you can get to from the history tab of Talk:Sandbox. 64.40.54.101 (talk) 05:23, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Can someone correct the sandbox?

Internal error - MediaWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

[cef0fe0d] 2013-12-13 09:42:39: Fatal exception of type MWException

And of course, file a bug about this, it would be great for vandals if pages were this easily to crash in a live environment :-) Fram (talk) 09:44, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Anybody home? Fram (talk) 15:39, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: just morning here, looking into it :) Ebernhardson (talk) 17:25, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Seems to be fixed, thanks. I presume that the devs are taking measures to prevent pages being broken that easily? Fram (talk) 08:54, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Contributions

Extremely annoying that comments made in Flow don't show up in "contributions". Fram (talk) 15:42, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Indeed.

NB: I know that this comment isn't very useful but I'm interested in any possible replies to this and, as far as I know, participating in the topic is the only mean that I have today to be notified of further updates to a topic (include topic on watchlist? KO: it watches the board instead... and nothing appears in the standard watchlist anyway. Subscription? yet to come...)! Klipe (talk) 16:17, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Klipe: subscriptions will be coming :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): It will be welcome. I feel already a bit lost with just a few Flow boards enabled here and on wmflabs. Subscriptions should help a lot, as will integration with Contributions (the next ones being integration with Watchlist and improved History, but I understand that not everything can be done at once!). Thanks. Klipe (talk) 22:21, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah; Werdna is working on that patch now (it's pretty annoying to me, too) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

This is working now, though there are still some kinks to iron out with regard to what information gets displayed. Stay tuned... MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:36, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, testing now Fram (talk) 09:32, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Technically, it woirks. But seeing " Fram (talk | contribs) added a comment." in someone's comments is still next to useless of course, we need to see at a glance "where" that comment was added, not only when using the link. And that one is still better than " Fram (talk | contribs) edited the board header.", where there is no link whatsoever to show which board header was changed. Fram (talk) 09:36, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: Re: the details in RC/Watchlist/Contribs and edit-summaries: there are a few new details at w:Wikipedia talk:Flow#Edit summaries in case you haven't seen that. There's also bugzilla:58722, and another one (or two) that I can't find at the moment (I'm dashing out the door for a bit). –Quiddity (talk) 20:14, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

The Flow entries at Special:Contributions/Qgil have a very different format than the rest. Is this also under your radar? Qgil-WMF (talk) 19:28, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Qgil: Contributions, history, recent changes, watchlist... are essentially useless wrt Flow edits for the moment. It is better than it used to be (insofar as useless is better than nonexistent), but that's about the best I can say about it.

Mind you, Liquidthreads was probably as bad, a post there was alsways "current" no matter if someone had replied or not. Now Flow comments are never "current"... Fram (talk) 20:03, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Fram: See this thread between Klipe and I, for links and details about the forthcoming overhaul of those 4 page types. (Also, Maryana is going to be re-visiting those cards to update them again, and add AF tags in the appropriate spot, in the next few days) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 02:57, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Resolved: special characters cause fatal exception

Typing @π will consistently causes a fatal exception error when replying.

Internal error - {{SITENAME}}
[05962511] 2013-12-14 03:12:52: Fatal exception of type MWException 64.40.54.93 (talk) 03:17, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Now in at bugzilla:58538. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): thanks for filing the bug on this. 64.40.54.26 (talk) 07:20, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

64.40.54.26: no problem :). Let me know if you find any other problems. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

@π MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 22:31, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): @π MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 22:31, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Looks like that's fixed :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 22:32, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Bug: edit filters don't catch CSS problems

I broke it again. It looks like the edit filters didn't catch problems with CSS. This probably needs a Flow dev to fix. I'll see if I can find the edit filter that was supposed to stop this. 64.40.54.93 (talk) 04:57, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Looks like mw: doesn't have the CSS edit filter. on enwp it's Special:AbuseFilter/56 but links to enwp don't show up for some reason. 64.40.54.93 (talk) 05:10, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Here's a link to the history file incase that helps.

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Sandbox&action=board-history 64.40.54.93 (talk) 05:20, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

The problem is Flow doesn't currently have abusefilter set up, to boot. It's on our list of things-we-should-do-before-deploying to enwp, I think (User:Maryana (WMF), was that resolved? In which direction?) Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:02, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): It's not in our current sprint but will definitely be high priority in the next one, which means it should be done at or a few days after the 1st release to enwp. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 18:55, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): yay! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

@Okeyes (WMF): and @Maryana (WMF): thanks for the update. The CSS bug is not a big deal on normal talk pages because those edits can easily be undone by simply clicking "undo" from the history file. But on the new Flow talk pages there is no "undo", so this is more of a problem. A mailcious user can use this bug to stop most other users from using a Flow talk page. Of course, technical users can get around this. Thanks for looking in to it. 64.40.54.26 (talk) 07:14, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): Please, not " it should be done at or a few days after the 1st release to enwp.", but before it. Fram (talk) 09:38, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: The CSS issue is being fixed separately. We already filter for other malicious code injection. The only thing that leaves is spam and overt vandalism; given that Flow will only be live on 3-4 talk pages that are monitored by experienced users, I don't see an absolute need to have AbuseFilter integration before launch. We know that edits triggering AF are extremely rare in the talk namespace (only ~150 per day across all talk pages on English Wikipedia). So while this is still important to have sooner than later, it's not a blocker for a limited release. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 18:15, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): Why do level 3 comments show up in significantly smaller text? It *really* deemphasizes them. They're already indendented; do we want to make them even harder to read? So proud of your work on this, all of you! Ocaasi (talk) 14:24, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Ocaasi: hmn; it's not significantly smaller to me (can you email me a screenshot?) although it is smaller. I think the designers might be doing some work in this area - Maryana will know better than I. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:59, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF): http://prntscr.com/2ce00e Ocaasi (talk) 18:06, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Ocaasi: ta :). Yeah, that is smaller: it looks okay to me, but we probably shouldn't base font size on 'what works for one staffer'. Hopefully M will have an update. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Ocaasi: We're experimenting with different ways to structure the information hierarchy of topics, posts, and replies. The smaller size of the second level of nesting was meant to encourage people to stick to talking about the topic, not go off on tangents – discussions on StackExchange sites work similarly to minimize ((literally and figuratively) back-chatting.

In practice, I notice there's confusion among users as to which level to reply to (I find myself confused, too, honestly), so this system may need rethinking. But that's why we put stuff out there early for people to play with and test in a real-ish setting :) MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:29, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): "stick to talking about the topic, not go off on tangents" is one way of looking at it. Voting instead of discussing is what you'll probably get in reality, if you don't want people responding to each other but only to the initial post. Please seriously reconsider this, I haven't seen any regular editor asking for no indented replies or anyone actually applauding the only one indentation level. Some limit or technical solution, OK (although there is still half a screen to the right for more indentation), but not this or anything similar to it, and certainly not for this reason. Fram (talk) 16:27, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Glad Talk pages are getting the attention they deserve

Hey all, just wanted to drop a note and say that I appreciate the everyone's focus and hard work on Talk pages. Here are some initial impressions:

• Specifically about my first experience, I wasn't sure whether to start a new topic or leave a reply. There isn't a search, there's no table of contents, there's no pagination, and everything is really spread out, so even as I type this I'm worried this comment won't get seen.
• As mentioned above, things seem very loose and space-inefficient on my 1600x900 laptop. There's just too much whitespace. I only see maybe 4 comments per screen.
• Whether scrolling through or reading individual comments, the type hierarchy really isn't working for me. There are too many levels, too closely spaced on the emphasis gradient. There's enough variation to make it appear diverse (busy, even), but not enough to make things distinctive.
• Having my username default-included in every thread as a call-to-action is ok, but it doesn't need a whole padded row of vertical space.
• It's possible to create a topic with no title, that's no good.
• I'd like to see some high-level stuff like total counts of topics/comments at the top of the page.
• Another concern I've got is that this new talk page structure precludes more structured discussion patterns. For instance, I've seen wikis adopt conventions like top-level sections for "Page structure", "Factual accuracy", and other more general talk topics. In other words, not every page/wiki has a convention of every topic getting its own dedicated H2.
• How do you clean out talk pages? Deletion and archiving are critical, and can't just be left to automatic burying. Will Talk pages still have a wiki-editable area? Even forums have sticky topics, and that's a compromise they had to make, frankly. Talk pages can do better than phpBB.
• Minor thing, the multilingual keyboard widget causes my text box bottom border to oscillate by a couple pixels on every keystroke. Otherwise I think that feature is pretty cool.

All in all, I think this is a good start. The autosigning is very important. The threading is super important. The codification of these idioms is going to be huge for Wikipedia/MediaWiki, and I'm really looking forward to future developments! MahmoudHashemi (talk) 20:49, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

This is tremendously good feedback; thanks for submitting it! So, in order:

• We're working on search, and providing a pseudo-TOC; if you look underneath the 'start a new topic' header, to the right, there are some screen options that include collapsing down to topic titles. I find this works pretty well for that purpose, although we're working on making it even more compressed.
• What do you mean by 'padded row of vertical space' with the username default-included?
• Interesting thought on page structure: can you give some examples? I'm thinking of places like In The News and Main Page on enwiki as examples of non-standard structure.
• Deleted stuff can still be deleted; archiving is automated at the moment but dependent on not having activity in the thread. For wiki-editable areas, yep: each talk page will have a header at the top where vital information (sanctions, wikiprojects, that sort of thing) can live indefinitely.
• Hrm; any chance of a screenshot? I appreciate it's, well, oscillation, so that might not be possible. Browser/OS? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:52, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Okeyes (WMF):

1. The Pseudo-TOC at the moment is useless on any slightly longer talk page, as it only shows the first X topics, not all of them.
2. The padded row of vertical space: at the bottom of every topic, you get a line with your name in blue, and a line with an empty comment box. This is what I suppose the OP refers to, and is overkill
3. "Archiving is automated at the moment" Any examples of this? I haven't seen this anywhere yet. What are the options ("not having activity" = ?; archiving happens where and how?) Fram (talk) 09:37, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: In order:

1. Scrolling will show more than the first X topics;
2. Good point; I think the designers might be working on that (Maryana?)
3. Archiving is, well, as you say, threads move down the page and are less-loaded. At the moment order is on a per-creation basis, which I don't think is particularly helpful: it'll change to something algorithmic (say, the 10 will be 5 of the most-recently-replied-to, 3 most recently created, and 2 most-recently-created-and-not-replied-to, excluding closed discussions). Back-of-the-envelope writing, but you get my point. Ironholds (talk) 19:02, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Ironholds: Yep, here's a sketch of what the second iteration of the visual design will look like:

File:Flow type-style-updates-26.png

This is addressing a few things brought up by feedback here:

• making the reply and edit button always visible, not just on hover
• moving the timestamp up to shrink the padding between posts a bit more
• moving the permalink icon and moderation actions into a drawer

Some of the color choices/features (e.g., thank button) aren't finalized yet, but the three changes above should go live in the next couple of weeks. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 20:01, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Ironholds: "Scrolling will show more than the first X topics;" "will" as in "in the future" or as in "use scrolling and you see more the the first X topics"? If you mean, as I think you do, the latter, then that is exactly the problem. It introduces a waiting time, and makes it impossible to use the search before you have scrolled (and you no longer really need it after you have scrolled). If you would have a much tighter pseudo-TOC, with many more items, then it might be workable; but the current design and setup are not sufficient at all. If at the moment I search for "accesskey" here (e.g. using the browsers' search function), I get no results, even though they are here. Fram (talk) 08:08, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: Not very related, but I just got the notification for this post, 16 days later, somehow? MahmoudHashemi (talk) 07:32, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Ah, yes, Fram, thanks for reminding me of this. Agreed on #1, correct on #2, and I interpret your quote from #3 to confirm that archiving is still implicit, i.e., "stuff gets buried and you get to scroll at it." It is also implicitly unarchived when you comment on a thread, bumping it.

@Okeyes (WMF): Regarding the oscillation. I'm on Chrome on Ubuntu 13. Everything's more-or-less the latest version. The real issue is that the widget for the keyboard has an animation pending a timeout. Every keystroke renews the timeout by doing something with the keyboard element. I think the timedout animation is superfluous, and it might be better to just show the icon when the textarea is active (has a cursor in it). I just ran into another couple issues with this:

• Location isn't consistent, sometimes it's top right of the text box, sometimes bottom right. Which leads me to the next situation:
• When the location is bottom right, it overlaps the Reply button. Risky clicking if you've already typed something (might be a pretty slim case though).

As for examples of alternative structure talk pages, not off the top of my head. Most of my MediaWiki editing/talking experience is on non-Wikimedia private wikis, so maybe more active contributors would jump in.

PS I get a whole lot of scrolling weirdness when I type a reply this long. Very jumpy, up and down on every keystroke, not even sure how to describe it. Anyone else see this? Just paste my text in, scroll to the bottom, and continue typing. 107.3.131.216 (talk) 10:16, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

107.3.131.216:

3. is not correct at the moment (I think), nothing gets "bumped", if you comment on the 25th topic, it remains the 25th topic in the list, buried below the "older topics" barrier. Fram (talk) 14:18, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: Hehe, 107.3.131.216 is me. I just forgot I wasn't logged in, not sure if Flow can fix my observation skills. I question the non-bumping of things.

I also saw (via the notification email) that someone (MZMcBride) edited my post, but I can't tell what changed (if anything). Also, the email-on-reply is pretty standard, but I think it would be handy if the content (or at least an excerpt) was in the email, and the link in the email went to the post mentioned in the email.

Thanks! MahmoudHashemi (talk) 08:42, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

I think I see what you mean with the scrolling weirdness; it bumps up to show the top of the field when you type, even if you were at the bottom before? I'll bugzilla it. The timeout is indeed annoying: I'm not sure what we can do about it but I'm hoping it's something. Bugzilla:58657 and bugzilla:58658 respectively. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

(no subject)

Hello. MZMcBride (talk) 01:06, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

MZMcBride: test Shizhao (talk) 06:59, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Shizhao: test Shizhao (talk) 06:59, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Greets.

Edit: Testing editing a comment.

Edit edit: Whoops, totally didn't notice the "please test in the sandbox" instruction... oh well. — Scott • talk 13:12, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Hello.

what

MZMcBride (talk) 01:06, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Didn't realize this was the comment header :)

This is looking pretty great. Super clean. I'm slightly less enthused about the gray background on the first comment (correction, on the thread title bar/box). It looks a little, muted. Grayed out background is often for archived, old, past content, and to me it suggests lowered importance and attention is due. Maybe a different tone or hue would do the trick. Great work, keep it coming!

Now I see that I'm supposed to enter a title. The nice superbold title text helps a lot, so I largely retract the above comment. I'm still not crazy about the gray text on grayish background, it feels slightly light and low-readability for me.

Also a note on the "Comment" link. It's not clear to me that the Comment (#) is intended as an active link to "leave a comment". It feels like clicking it will link to previous comments but not to adding a new one. Perhaps that's because the (#) makes it feel like "Comments" as in link-to-comments rather than "Comment" as in "Leave a comment". The combination of "Action"(number) pulls my attention in two different ways.

I see that Comment (#) becomes Comments (#) if comments > 1. This still leaves me confused, though it's a nice touch in terms of responsive UI. I prefer active links (do this) to be static text. Ocaasi (talk) 11:14, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Top-posting. I love the fact that new comments appear at the top!

This is how the internet works :)

Or more fairly I should say, this encourages people to post rather than read, which may increase participation. It's more inviting and intuitive, though it's against our traditions and culture of read first, comment second perhaps. Ocaasi (talk) 11:21, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Ocaasi: Well, within topics, new things go to the bottom, and the most prominent reply box is at the bottom, too (we did this intentionally to make sure people read or at least skim the whole discussion before replying). MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 19:32, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

New TOPICS appear at the top, new COMMENTS appear at the bottom of whatever topic they appear in, and the topic stays at its position as well. No idea why this encourages people to post rather than read, everyone could add topics at the top already if they wanted to, and you could just use the "new section" button as well obviously. The prominent "reply" and the permanent "start a new topic" at the top" may encourage people to post instead of reading, but not the fact that topics now appear the top...

And of course, do we really prefer that people post instead of checking that the topic is already open or the question already asked and answered? That remains to be seen... Fram (talk) 09:42, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: I fully agree with your last sentence.

Maryana: For me, the big reason why people would post quicker instead of first reading, is because of the lack of overview, which encompasses

• no ToC for topic-level browsing,
• too much scrolling required to read within topics content,
• only one indent level.

At least that's my experience. I find it painful to browse all those comments almost one by one due to the lack of structure, and I hate scrolling while seeing so much white space around (not just vertically, by the way: most of the unused space is located on the right side. Actually, fixed width is exasperating: please allow us to let window content adapt to the window size so that we can choose our own preferred width by simply resizing one's window... which is possibly done already for reading pages in the main namespaces such as Wikipedia articles anyway). Klipe (talk) 23:56, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

History

Now that edits made in Flow have been added to "contributions" (not in a usable fashion, but it's a start), it seems that "history" is broken again... I don't know if the two are related though. At the moment, the history for this page starts at "Last week" , which is not really correct of course... Fram (talk) 09:37, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

The history now looks like this:

Today

Fram (talk | contribs) created the topic History.

5 hours ago Fri, 20 Dec 2013 09:37:50 GMT

Last week

Maryana (WMF) (talk | contribs) changed the topic title from Bug: special charachters cause fatal exception to Resolved: special characters cause fatal exception.

16 hours ago Thu, 19 Dec 2013 22:32:34 GMT

I love it that "last week" starts between 5 and 15 hours ago :-) Fram (talk) 15:32, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Fram: Yeah, that's no good ;)

This was a useful design experiment with an alternate history view, but I think we're all in agreement that it's not doing what users need. We're going to go with a more traditional mediawiki history view (minus the rollups and on one page, not divided between topic and page history). MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 00:34, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): "not divided between topic and page history"? Good news.

Do you however plan to keep topic history as well? And/or would we have such a consolidated page+topic history also include topics that were created on another board (e.g. have a consolidated history for a future "my subscribed topics")? Klipe (talk) 23:37, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Klipe: We'll keep a separate topic history and board history to start and do a lot of research on how people are actually using these features once they've had a chance to play around with Flow in a real discussion environment for a week or two. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 18:05, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Layout needs re-thinking

I just came to this page as it was on my watchlist. I realized I did not read the content yet and wanted to skim through some of the topics out of interest.

Sadly I quit the page after seconds because it is totally lacking clarity, e.g.

• I have no table of contents to get an idea of the current topics.
• Scanning through a thread is very tiring to the eye because of excessive spacing everywhere, while at the same time lacking clear visual separation of comments/threads. There's no "red line" that guides the eye through the topics. It's a wall of text with uniform padding everywhere
• Actually it's even physically tiring to the fingers (because it needs so much scrolling compared to normal talk pages)

I know, this is not what you want to hear about Flow, but what I described in the beginning happened to me multiple times now with Flow talk pages. Because I think this is a serious issue (if it happens to me, it probably happens to others, too) I came back to the page to report this issue. I hope you make something out of it...

P.S. My recommendation would be to look at classical talk pages and try to make Flow look as similar as possible. But I made that recommendation multiple times now and whoever is in charge doesn't seem to like the idea of Flow actually looking like Wikipedia...

P.P.S. I already tried "small" and "collapsed" views. It is a slightly better experience but at the cost of completely hiding content while still not nearly achieving the clarity of classical talk pages. Patrick87 (talk) 22:31, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Patrick87: Thanks for the testing and feedback you've given. "Whoever is in charge" doesn't really apply to how the Flow team works; we consider design, engineering, and community to have equal weight on product questions. That does mean, however, that there are going to be situations (like this one) where the different pieces of that equation are not going to be in alignment.

In situations like this, it's my job as Product Manager of the team to try to reach consensus. Like on Wikipedia, that doesn't mean everybody's going to be happy (impossible!), but that most people can at least understand why a certain decision was made, and even those who don't personally agree with it 100% are okay with moving forward.

I'm not sure if you've seen our Flow Design FAQ or the WMF Design team FAQ items on our use of whitespace – if not, please check them out, as well as these external sources:

• Whitespace myth
• Best practices analysis

Usability and accessibility best-practices advocate for whitespace as a way to solve for the very problems you're bringing up (tired eyes, lack of rest spots, visual separation of information). Talk pages as they appear today break a lot of usability and accessibility best-practices. The fonts are too small and the density of informations is too high; the information is neither scannable nor easy to read in detail unless you've trained your eyes to read in the erratic zig-zag pattern caused by deep indentation. This only gets worse as you move from large desktop screens to small tablet and mobile screens.

If we only wanted Flow to serve the people who have trained themselves to make use of and enjoy talk pages, we wouldn't have embarked on a project to redesign talk pages at all. But the fact is, we don't want the people who currently use talk pages to be the only people who ever get to participate in discussion on Wikipedia. The point is to make a tool that works for everyone who has something valid to contribute.

All that said, this doesn't mean that our current implementation of whitespace, font size, or information density is perfect and you should stop complaining :) This is only the second iteration of Flow visual design; before Flow is widely released across all our projects, it's likely to go through about a dozen more. If you really love the way talk pages currently look and work, I can't promise you'll be 100% happy with the results each time, but I do hope that you will at least see where we're coming from and help us keep moving forward. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 01:14, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): Thank you for you reply. However I'm afraid that I'm not really happy with it:

Whenever the whitespace issue comes up (and it comes up a lot) you're pointing people at some blog posts and similar only partially reliable sources, which should justify the excessive whitespace used in Flow. I'm quite certain that the rules postulated there are moderately efficient if applied correctly. However I'm even more certain about the fact, that they are not applied correctly in Flow.

White space works and increases readability, if it logically groups text and UI elements related to that text. In the current iteration however every element (may it be text, UI-elements, headings, etc.) has more or less the same amount of padding and doesn't yield any grouping at all. Therefore all the white space does not increase readability any more, but does only blow up the page content, eventually resulting in reduced readability (due to limited display size).

As a general note, it seems you often include general typographic principles in your design guides, which are valid in continuous text or even printed media, but do not work at all in a discussion system, where every comment is often only 2-3 lines long. Patrick87 (talk) 01:51, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm afraid I have to concur with Patrick on this. The amount of whitespace present in the current appearance of Flow pages is too much. The font size is also too large (as Xolani comments, "It just looks like it's designed for my grandpa with his bad eyes"). The net result is difficult for me to read for any sustained period unless I set my browser zoom to 75%. — Scott • talk 11:52, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Should the size of editboxes be restricted?

Actually I like that editboxes dynamically adapt their size to the amount of text contained in the comment. However there are issues which might justify to restrict the maximum size of the editbox:

• When writing a really long comment (that is higher than the browser window) the buttons below the edit box get out of sight. One should consider keeping the buttons always in the visible page are and restrict the editbox size accordingly.
• The resizing results in "jumping" content. It doesn't feel smooth and could be conceived negatively. One should consider using a fixed editbox size (as in Wikieditor) if this can't be fixed. Patrick87 (talk) 03:05, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Patrick87: The jumping is a known bug (bugzilla:58657). Various aspects of the scrolling-code are being worked on at the moment, so possibly that will fix some or all of these issues.

A maximum height might be a good addition, if the former doesn't fix it. (Or in general). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:24, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Decrease Font Size by 1pt

I love the simplicity of it! Just one click and I'm adding this comment. And the design language is awesome (is that Agora?). Really amazing job!!

Anyway, one thing that is really bugging me is that the fonts are a little bit too big. I'm using Chrome on a 15-inch laptop, resolution 1440x900. It just looks like it's designed for my grandpa with his bad eyes. Maybe this is a bug, then I apologize. If it isn't, it would be nice to get some feedback from others, whether they feel the same. Xolani (talk) 22:49, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Xolani: A few people have commented with similar concerns (see

[talk:Flow/Design FAQ#Everything]

in particular, for Kephir's comment and my reply).

As far as I can tell, the 16pt size really does match the standard browser default size - we're all just very used to sites lowering that default. Eg. Mediawiki applies a "font-size: 0.8em" to div#bodyContent, and "font-size: 0.75em" to the interface elements. (See the ref that the designers linked for a few details.)

The style is being developed in sync with Agora, but there are a few differences at the moment. They aim to converge though. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:12, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Quiddity (WMF): well thanks for the reply. I guess I'm gonna have to get used to it. :) As I said, awesome job. Keep it up everybody. For me, this will be an incentive to be more active on talk pages! Xolani (talk) 01:28, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Xolani: That's great to hear :) And thanks for the feedback – we'll be making a lot of visual design tweaks based on this and other suggestions from users. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 21:55, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Bugs on (attempt to) restore topic

I could see the content of the posts hidden by Jorm (WMF) by clicking on their header (as before, and I guess as intended).

It didn't work with one of those posts (https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Flow&workflow=050c7cc4a6253280368590b11c278cd5), though, so I went to the actions menu and selected Restore.

Surprise! I got a series of 14 confirmation "dialog boxes" where to enter the reason for restoring. I closed them one by one (click on the X in upper right corner).

Then I thought I'd better take a screen shot, so I went to the actions menu again and selected Restore again (since I just closed all the boxes without completing the restore action).

Second surprise! Now I got the following message:

Internal error - MediaWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

[94710239] 2013-12-24 00:05:49: Fatal exception of type MWException

NB: I did this from within the Talk:Flow page. Klipe (talk) 00:14, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Klipe: Great minds think alike! I submitted bugzilla:58910 and bugzilla:58911 yesterday! :) Thanks for the added details and confirmation. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Having just tried this out to see if Klipe's problems happened for me (everything's fine in Safari 6.1 on Mac OS 10.8.5: one confirmation [only one message; maybe that's the difference] and no internal error), I have a question:

Is there any plan to make it possible for me to see the content, without restoring it? How would I know whether I should restore a section if I can't see what's in it first? In wikitext terms, can I see the diff in the history before I undo the removal/hiding? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:29, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF): Clicking anywhere in the grey "Hidden by Username" header box should expand the thread allowing you to see the hidden content. If that isn't working for you, I recommend opening a bug on it. Skizzerz 00:28, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Skizzerz: Perhaps I just picked the wrong one to try it on. When I click on the one now hidden by me, the box gets about two pixels taller, but nothing displays. On the other hand, I'm not sure that there's anything to display there. For the two hidden by Jorm, I can see the text. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:51, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

How do I remove my reply? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:49, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF): If you hover over your reply, there should be a pencil icon which lets you edit, a flag icon which lets you hide or (if you're a sysop here) delete your reply, and a chain link icon to generate a permalink to the reply. Clicking on the flag icon should present you with the hide option, the UI is (in my opinion) not very intuitive for this, as I typically associate a flag with reporting something or somehow bringing attention to it, although I don't have any ideas for a better icon at this time. Skizzerz 02:04, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Skizzerz: I tried to click the flag while I had the edit window open. It is visible then, but shoved down so that overlaps significantly with the chain icon, and it doesn't work. (I'm running Safari 6.1/Mac OS 10.8.5; this problem may not exist in other browsers.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:13, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Gray?

There has recently been some edit warring on Flow Portal about whether to make some of the text gray or not.

Jorm, it would be helpful if you could explain what the "point" you're trying to make, as mentioned in .

Also pinging User:Odder and User:Isarra.

I'd like to unprotect the page, can everyone agree to not revert until consensus is determined as what to do? Legoktm (talk) 02:29, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for starting this discussion, Legoktm.

Let me make one thing clear for all involved (and uninvolved) parties: take your drama elsewhere. You are more than free to edit war, but not on this wiki, not on my shift.

Jorm, you're a Wikimedia Foundation staff member. You should be setting a good example for people. Being provoked by silly trolling isn't that.

Odder, let's face it, you were pushing it a bit. I can see your point, but you didn't handle it like a pro here. You should've solicited for consensus on some Project: page here (I'm sure we have something akin to enwiki's community portal or whatnot) or on IRC.

Two things that deserve a clarification regarding this page:

1. why is it essential to have some parts colored (eye-straining, in the original version) gray? "Wikimedia Foundation Design/Typography" is not a sufficient answer; I've written several documentation pages (on this wiki and elsewhere) and so far I've gotten no negative feedback despite not using various shades of gray on said pages.
2. who, so to say, "owns" this page? I've been around long enough to know that Flow is a Wikimedia Foundation project, but:
   1. it's not obvious from the page, because this is just another mainspace page, it's not a subpage of "Wikimedia Foundation projects" or anything
   2. the page itself doesn't have very heavy "WMF branding" on it; nothing on the page screams, "community, KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF!" to me. So it's beyond me how come the "owner" of the page gets mad at people making constructive edits.

I'll admit that I might be surprised if we at ShoutWiki kept our project plans and whatnot here and someone would randomly edit them, sure. But in such case, our pages would be subpages of either "ShoutWiki", "ShoutWiki projects" or some similar page(s) clearly indicating the "ownership", which is not the case here.

Furthermore, reverting non-vandalism edits by estabilished contributors is something that should not be done lightly. Would it have been impossible to resolve this matter by talking about it instead of starting an edit war? Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 03:17, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Jack Phoenix: This is a Foundation project, and thus a Foundation page. There has been a rather pointless objection in the past towards any kind of "branding" or marking pages as being Foundation focused (thus there isn't any here). The concept of creating a "Foundation" namespace for projects was also loudly shouted down.

So here we are.

No one ever "talks" about anything. They just yell and revert. Jorm (WMF) (talk) 07:04, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Jorm (WMF): I think you missed responding to Jack's first question :)

Yes, it's a page describing a Foundation activity, but I don't believe the Foundation actually "owns" the page (in the sense of w:WP:OWN, not copyright), which is what Jack was getting at. Odder made an edit that is consistent with the rest of the site. Why is this page different from the rest of the documentation/help pages that exist on mw.o which requires it to have a different color scheme? (I suppose that is the answer to question number 1 ;)). Legoktm (talk) 10:10, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

I've unprotected the page. Jorm (WMF)'s actions were clearly out of line here. I'll side-step the question of whether we should be using gr[ae]y text for now and simply focus on the more relevant issue: any user involved in an edit war can't simply abuse his or her administrative privileges to protect a page to his or her preferred version. That's plainly unacceptable. MZMcBride (talk) 06:58, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

I feel the difference between 120% font size + bold and regular font size + not bold is sufficient to get out the idea that the headings are the main point of that portion of the text and the text below further describes it.

Another place where I see the light grey is in the Bootstrap library with the "text-muted" class. Even then, the color for that class is set at #999, which is a couple of shades darker than the #777 originally used on the Flow Portal page. While I'm not a design expert, I personally use the "text-muted" class in Bootstrap on non-MediaWiki projects to de-emphasize text that is not important to comprehend what it is attached to but merely provides extra flavor. In a MediaWiki example, I would use the class in Special:ListGroupRights to de-emphasize the actual permission name in parenthesis, so it would read something like "Create discussion pages (createtalk)". In the case of Flow Portal, the text underneath the larger headings further explain what was meant by the headings, and in order to get total comprehension one really needs to read it all. Skizzerz 00:24, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Flow versus Flow Portal

Flow currently redirects to Flow Portal, but Talk:Flow Portal redirects to Talk:Flow. Can we pick one of the names and standarize? I'd prefer "Flow". Legoktm (talk) 11:11, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: I nominate Flow Portal, In which the Flow project is laid out in writing and discussed on the relevant talk page :P Skizzerz 00:29, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Legoktm: I agree. It should simply be "Flow", and "Flow Portal" and its talk page should be the redirects. GeorgeBarnick (talk) 22:22, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

GeorgeBarnick: Seconded.

Legoktm, does this mean you've nominated yourself to fix this? ;) Go for it. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 21:43, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): Done! Legoktm (talk) 05:43, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Indent level clarity

I have been confused on indentation levels in Flow. As far as I can tell, there are two indentation levels for replies (level one, reached with the reply box at the bottom of a thread, and level two, reached with the reply link at the end of a post), as well as the initial comment. There are a few things that I think could be done to improve handling of this:

• The reply button on the first comment (level 0) should create a level 1 reply, not a level 2 reply as it currently does, as that skips over level 1. This is the source of most of my confusion.
• The style of level 1 comments is too similar to the original (level 0) comment. Level 1 should be at least indented once. This is also confusing, as there is no visual differentiation between original posts and replies. Jay8g (talk) 19:40, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Jay8g: I think the plans are to change how reply buttons work/improve clarity there, add additional levels of indentation and make more clear the different levels (I agree with all your feedback: I find it headachey myself to see what level I'm replying at, sometimes). Quiddity, do you have a mockup link or something? I can't find it myself. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:19, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Improvements

Through testing, there are some things that I think could be improved. These include:

• More reply levels (around 5 would be good) (it sounds like this is being worked on)
• Organize threads by most recent post, not thread creation
• Highlight unread posts/collapse read ones

If these things are improved, Flow would become a very powerful replacement for wikitext discussion pages. Jay8g (talk) 22:05, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Jay8g: Indent is definitely going to be changed from the current 2-level, I'm not sure what the next iteration will be exactly (still under discussion).

A way to [sort/organize/filter] topics by various criteria is definitely on the to-do list. I think these methods have been suggested so far:

• Chronological by topic-creation (current).
• Chronological by recent activity (post addition). ["activity" could also include post/title editing, or moderation. Or those could be separate. Or those could be overkill.]
• By status. (eg. Topics that have/haven't been "Closed & Summarized" yet. Topics that you watchlist/subscribe to. etc.)
• By my involvement
• By keyword/#tag
• By date-range
• other? (Please suggest!)

A way to show which posts have already been (hypothetically) read before, is also definitely on the to-do list.

• There are a lot of options (color/aesthetic changes of read posts, or collapsing)
• and complexities (does scrolling past a post mark it as "read"? or does each topic need a "mark all current posts as read" button?)

The difficulty, as always (and throughout Wikis and life), is balancing simplicity and complexity for the diverse demographics which hunger for both! We'll figure out what works best, in the long-run. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:02, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Why not users avatars?

I'm loving this but can't help feeling lost without an icon to show who's saying what, things can get messy with tons of text and at last an representative icon to guide the reading would be great... if custom avatars are vetted at all... Dianakc (talk) 20:51, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Dianakc: that's a problem with wikitext talk pages too :(. I imagine it's something we can work on in a few months, since it probably makes sense to integrate it with the work on user identity/profiles we're doing, rather than build it out separately. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:31, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Great suggestion Dianakc! Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 07:41, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

That's great :) Dianakc (talk) 01:49, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Please don't, it is even more "lost space", visual clutter. And either WMF will have to provide a set of avatars (with many users having the same avatar, so not helping in identifying who is saying what anyway), or people will have their own avatars, with massive fair use problems probably. The benefits some people see in this don't outweigh these aspects in my opinion. Fram (talk) 08:01, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Fram: I see, but at least a representative icon, to display that "someone is saying something" :) Dianakc (talk) 14:43, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Dianakc: The blue username on its own line shows that "someone is saying something", no? No idea, by the way, why the timestamp of the post isn't on the same line as the username, that would give us one more line of useful text per post on the screen... Fram (talk) 16:21, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Not sure about what are the most popular website where people can discuss but I bet they have avatars...some kind of. I find the current layout pretty disperse, the levels could be at last zebra-lists. Can't get it the hide-show on links that are important, could stay like t | c just that, then the date etc. can't get why things are scattered. Dianakc (talk) 18:11, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Dianakc: The Mediawiki software is used for so many wikis of all kinds... This functionality may indeed make sense for some of them and therefore it may make sense to add it to the software, but as an option that would have to be enabled on a per-wiki basis.

For the wikis of the WMF projects such as Wikipedia etc., I'd highly recommend not to enable this, for the reasons already well explained by Fram. Klipe (talk) 08:59, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

I understand that some things do not belong to some projects such Wikipedia, but as long as the users interactions are the main concern, there's no so much left for UX to do other than adapt some well known features into these projects. I think projects such Wikipedia should try to keep up with known accessibility and usability instead of create their own esoteric approach. Dianakc (talk) 19:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Closing a topic

One of the major missing features in Flow is the ability to close a topic. This is how I envision it working:

• There would be a close button in the header
• There would be a way to add a "closing comment"
• The comments, except for the closing comment and, maybe, the initial comment, would be collapsed
• Further comments would not be allowed
• There would be a way to reopen the topic, reopening the thread to posts and uncollapsing the posts; the closing comment would be kept
• There would be a way to add a "reopening comment"

There would have to be a way to allow bots to close discussions, as some already do. Jay8g (talk) 01:26, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Snap! We're working on it here, although it needs an updated spec; I imagine we'll build something basic and iterate on it from there. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Timestamps and diffs for editing comments

Currently, there is no way to tell when or even if comments have been edited. (It is shown in contributions, but without a diff, making it unhelpful, and sifting through contributions is not a logical way to find edits.) It would be helpful to know this. When a post has been edited, there should be a note, probably by the timestamp, that says "edited [timestamp]", linking to a diff showing the edit. If users are allowed to edit other users comments, this (with a username) would be especially necessary. Jay8g (talk) 03:55, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, that's in bugzilla/mingle at the moment here and appears to be awaiting final code review. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

This is now out in production (Jay8g, you'll see a little pencil icon next to your post in the topic above, which takes you to the diff of your changes).

We're working on updating the UI so there aren't two floating pencil icons when you hover over Flow items – there'll just be one edit pencil, which also includes a tooltip with link to diff when there have been any changes to the topic/post. MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped) (talk) 20:35, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Maryana (WMF): I welcome this possibility to view diffs from the pencil icon. Will we then also soon have a link to these same diffs on the topic/post history and personal watchlist pages? That's where I expect to access them from. Also with the possibility to see consolidated diffs for a topic (= all additions and changes on the topic and its individual posts within a certain timeframe). Klipe (talk) 08:56, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Klipe: Yup, there's an overhaul of the History page in the works (to make it look much more like standard History pages. See this Mingle card for details).

There's also an ongoing overhaul of the information in the RC/Contribs/Watchlist entries to make them both consistent and more informative (See this card and this card)

I'm not sure whether it is possible or planned to see "consolidated diffs", because all "posts" are individual elements now... This probably needs investigation, into what use-cases we need that for, and whether existing tools are usable for it, or if new ones need to be made. Your thoughts would (as always!) be appreciated. –Quiddity (talk) 20:39, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity: Such improvements are indeed welcome. Strange: it seems that they'll not be formatted in the usual way that we are all accustomed to... and this time I cannot imagine that this could be to better match what new/potential contributors would expect.

Anyway, at least I would strongly suggest to add the first N characters of a new comment in the edit summary (up to available space in the field holding the journal comment). This would efficiently palliate the lack of edit summary. It would result in "add comment" history lines like this one:

DateTime - User (t - c) commented on "Topic name" (+/- bytes): "RepliedToUser: Good idea, and I'd even add that..." Klipe (talk) 22:48, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Klipe: Yup, the cards I linked above are just the 1st step. Adding in the topicname, the repliedtouser name, and an auto-excerpt, are also on the to-do list. (I think there's a card for it already, but I can't find it, so I've made this one to consolidate all the info.) :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Quiddity (WMF): Thanks! By the way, I think that such snippets would also be very much useful to RC patrollers. Maybe it's worth to make it appear in the card narrative. Klipe (talk) 09:50, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

History and contributions entries are fairly useless

Both the flow history page and the contributions entries are pretty useless. The lack of edit summaries plays a part in this, but could be overcome. The biggest problem with the contributions entries it the vagueness: every new post has the note "[username] (talk | contribs) added a comment.", and every edit has the note "[username] (talk | contribs) edited a comment.". There should at least be a note saying what thread and page was involved. The thread-adding entries are somewhat better, but should still specify the page. Also, the "[username] (talk | contribs)" part is unnecessary, as you are already on the user's contributions page, and none of the normal edits show that. In addition, creating a new thread creates 2 entries-one for creating the topic and one for creating the post. The history page is even more useless, being more like a log, showing only newly created topics and when a post is hidden, etc. It should also show new posts and edits, like a real history page. Also, there is no obvious way of seeing the board header history and, more importantly, no way of reverting vandalism. It does get entered in contributions, but the entry is useless, not specifying the page or including a diff. Also, the byte-change entry seems broken: I added 3 spaces to the header of Talk:Sandbox as a test (which seem to have gone away anyway) and the contributions entry says "(+2,008)". Jay8g (talk) 04:44, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Jay8g: good points all over! So, in order:

1. The lack of thread/page entries is annoying me too; it's currently in bugzilla at bugzilla:58722 and looks like it's for us to fix in the next iteration (read: next 2 weeks or so). I hadn't thought of the username(talk|contribs) point; It appears to be in here but I'll keep an eye on it.
2. The history page is being reverted back to the Wiki Way of doing things, and we'll iterate from there (if we need to).
3. Revision history is also being worked on (one of the engineers implemented...something, at one point, but he was the only person who could actually find it).
4. Byte issue is now in bugzilla at bugzilla:59138 - hopefully it'll get picked up. Good eye! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 30 December 2013 (UTC)