Talk:Structured Discussions

Structured discussions (Flow) is used on this page (documentation).

• Please test at Talk:Sandbox; this page is for discussions and suggestions.
• If you find a bug not yet tracked, report it in Phabricator, or here if you can't.

You can leave your message in any language, but answers will be made in English (or your language if we speak it).

Talk to us about talk pages!

An open a global consultation about talk pages is now open, where you can express your needs about talk pages.

Older comments can be found at Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2.

Is it possible to add discussion tools to Structured Discussions on a mobile phone (add a link, mention a person...) like on a desktop?

Hi. Keeps saying my IP address is blocked. I have never even been on this page let alone edit something. I’m very confused. I can barely use a flip phone. Can someone help me out please. Someone has been hacking my stuff for years and I’m just finding out about it. It showed me a page to edit but I have no idea what the heck all this is

Your IP address is part of an active range block placed on the English language Wikipedia for disruptive editing, which is set to expire in September. If you cannot appeal on your user talk page at that project, please see UTRS for instructions.

Hello @Flow talk page manager,

I would like to know the reason for moving my user page Discussion utilisatrice:Jade éternelle to Discussion utilisatrice:Jade éternelle/Structured Discussions Archive 1.

Thank you in advance for your answer.

Best regards.

That account is a bot and will not respond. The summary of the move contains the reason why. My French is rusty, but the gist is that it was moved (archived) to allow using a regular wikitext talk page.

French Wikiversity has Flow as a BetaFeature; did you disable it? (Or is it disabled? If so, re-enabling it should change it back, but the old page will still remain archived. If that is not what you want, contact a local administrator to move your talk page.)

Thanks for your answer, and thank you for the information that this account is a bot and won’t respond. I will follow your advice to contact an administrator instead to solve my problem. Have a good evening. Best regards.

Hi! Are those templates still needed or can be removed?

If there are no transclusions, you can go ahead and delete them. If there are transclusions, you can {{subst}} them before deleting the templates.

no transclusions detected so I deleted them. thank you!

Hi :-)

I really like how the discussion page for this project uses the StructuredDiscussions interface. Is there some documentation on how to implement that?

Kind regards

We asked the help of an administrator, and he found a solution by moving my page.

Hello,

When I have rencently tried to disable the structured discussions option in my preferences, the message "Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\InvalidDataException" has appeared. If anyone can help me to find a solution,

Thanks you in advance!

My discussion page

Fixed (template removed).

At https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Citoid, there is a notice at the top of the page asking me to comment on the "new" Flow tool "over he coming months". Can this be removed, unless the discussion is actually being reopened?

I'm apparently not allowed to fix myself:

"This action has been automatically identified as harmful, and therefore disallowed. If you believe your action was constructive, please inform an administrator of what you were trying to do. A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: Block editing board descriptions for project and help pages" HLHJ (talk) 19:12, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Resolved via AbuseFilter extension.

Hi! I noticed that there some users who spam and Structured Discussions pages making links to their websites. How can I prevent them doing this using AbuseFilter extension?

For structured discussions you'll need separate/duplicate filters with the Filter group set to flow (or whatever you set $wgFlowAbuseFilterGroup to).

One of the biggest secondary utilities of talk pages, such as WikiProjects on Wikipedia is the ability to easily search the archives and the talk page(s). This is ever so often used when linking to consensus, previous discussions and general tasks that have to do with using old discussions. Discussion with a sleek interface is great, but it's just as important to refer back to old ones.

So how would I go about doing this in Flow? For one, the "older topics" doesn't appear until scrolled all the way to the bottom (and ever then, only a portion), so I cannot free-text search. There isn't even a table of contents for headers that I can see. The default MediaWiki search did not have any hits to older topics I tried to search for. Of course, there are no obvious search boxes here, so I'm assuming it's not just me unable to locate it. In fact, how will the old content pre-Flow integration be searched (which is in some places 15 years of discussions and consensus building)?

I originally wanted to post this at local English Wikipedia WikiProject as this is a major impedance to an actual use case of the system, at least for me.

Hellknowz: Search in general, is one of the major features that they've been holding off on, because the new Extension:CirrusSearch is in the process of being deployed everywhere (details at mw:Search). Once that is in place and settled, the Flow devs will be devoting some concentrated time into implementing search for Flow content, and including old archived talkpage content.

Regarding infinite-scroll pages, and the difficulty of using ctrl-F, those concerns have been raised before, and there's no firm decision at the moment, but a variety of options. There are some technical notes at Flow/Functional Specifications/Search and Filter, and I'll nudge the team to discuss it again, or to update me if I've forgotten something.

Quiddity (WMF): Thanks for reply. I guess there is no way to search presently if deployed for testing.

Is there any news on this?

Flow (the software used on this page) isn't under active development, so new features are not being added.

As a work around, putting your search terms plus site:mediawiki.org into your favorite search engine usually works for me.

So if we're using this for a user talk page or a project chat page, there's just no way to provide an archive search?

At most WMF-hosted wikis, all the namespaces are indexed by all of the major web search engines, so it should work on both User_talk: and Project_talk: pages.

I think we must be talking at cross purposes here.

It's common practice on WMF projects to provide an archive search box, like the one seen at the top of wikidata:Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive. I'm not seeing how it is possible to add such a search box on pages that have switched to using StructuredDiscussions, and I don't see how to reproduce it with third party search engines.

There is no perfect method of recreating that, and it can't be done on wiki at all for Flow pages. However, you can usually get close to it with a search like whatamIdoing VisualEditor/Feedback site:mediawiki.org. That would find threads containing my username on the page VisualEditor/Feedback at this website.

OK. I'm still struggling to see how to set up an archive search link for, say, wikidata:User_talk:Bovlb. I don't seem to be able to find any of it in Google.

Unfortunately, if Google isn't indexing the pages, then that workaround won't work.

OK. The lack of search seems to be a major barrier to recommending wider adoption. Do you have any suggestions for how I could escalate this concern?

I agree that it is a major shortcoming. Unfortunately, active development of this software stopped several years ago. New features, such as integration with search, are not being added. The software will probably be considered for "sunsetting" (removal).

How do I disable this soul-crushing "feature"? – Ilovemydoodle2 (talk) 14:13, 20 July 2022 (UTC)