Talk:Structured Discussions/2015/03

The Collaboration team has enabled Flow on this talk page.

• Please conduct testing at Talk:Sandbox, retaining this page for discussions and suggestions.
• If you find bugs not yet tracked, report in Phabricator if you can, and here if you can't.

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

Suggestions

• Something I liked about the wiki system is I could correct others. I'm not talking about ortography mistakes but about broken links and something obviously wrong or missleading. Maybe an option could be added to propose a correction to the author, but I would like if this correction could be seen/accessible somehow before the author accepts or rejects the correction.
• I miss the "wiki" editing box, where I can add symbols (like « ») and formating like listing (*) or bold letters (that). Now I wonder if this is going to be like the old code editor or like the visual editor. Ssola (talk) 21:40, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

We're actually going to try out allowing users to edit other people's posts in a couple of weeks. There'll be a link to edit in the dropdown menu. If you edit somebody else's post, then the timestamp will say "Edited by Ssola 1 minute ago". DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:02, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

This has always been possible for admins. Is the plan to expand to autoconfirmed editors? I really don't believe that we are improving communication by making it easy for IPs to vandalize other people's comments. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Exactly. Autoconfirmed+ will be the next step that is tried, and just at the wikis that have requested it: phab:T90670.

(edited by BanjoDog (Danny) because editing is now available to autoconfirmed users -- sssh don't tell anyone) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Also, the link with text "March 26, 2015 5:33 PM" (whose text I was not able to copy because it keeps hiding when I try to select it!) points to

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Sdjk2ce202ud1fl0&action=history

where I didn't find an easy way to see what was changed. Then I tried the "prev" link to

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Sdjk2ce202ud1fl0&action=compare-post-revisions&topic_newRevision=sea6olf6raeposmg

and got

(same problem for the "cur" link) Helder 20:39, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

fix for this BadMethodCallException on compare-*-revision pages going out in ~4 hours EBernhardson (WMF) (talk) 20:49, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Interesting, I don't recall seeing a notification for this reply...

I guess collapsing notifications as in

"Foo and N others responded on Talk:Flow."

is not that useful... Helder 17:06, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

I reported the timestamp issue at phab:T94353. Helder 17:18, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

I reported the last issue at phab:T94087. Helder 20:41, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

The previous comment was edited by two people (BanjoDog and me), but it only mentions my username (I edited it last). Helder 20:34, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out -- we recently fixed the prev/next function for diffs, and it would make more sense for the "Edited by X" link to take you straight to the most recent diff.

The purpose of that text is to flag that someone edited the post who isn't the original author. I don't think that putting more than one name in that field makes it any more informative; you still wouldn't know who edited what. But linking to the diff would help you to browse through all of the revisions. I'll make a ticket. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:54, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

@Danny: Did you create a ticket for this?

If so, please merge with phab:T94355. Helder 21:04, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I did -- it's phab:T94090. I'll respond on your ticket, too. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org

See also: Discussion at wikitech-l and at Project:Current issues Planned process at Flow/LQT conversion process

LiquidThreads (LQT) has not been well-supported in a long time. Flow is in active development, and more real-world use-cases will help focus attention on the higher-priority features that are needed. To that end, LQT pages at mediawiki.org will start being converted to Flow in the next couple of weeks.

There are about 1,600 existing LQT pages on Mediawiki, and the three most active pages are VisualEditor/Feedback, Project:Support desk, and Help talk:CirrusSearch. The Collaboration team has been running test conversions of those three pages, and fixing issues that have come up. Those fixes are almost complete, and the team will be ready to start converting LQT threads to Flow topics soon. (If you’re interested in the progress, check out phab:T90788 and linked tasks.) The latest set is visible at a labs test server: http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Testwiki:Support_desk and http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Feedback. See an example topic comparison here: Flow vs LQT)

The VisualEditor/Feedback page will be converted first (per James' request), around the middle of next week. We’ll pause to assess any high-priority changes required. After that, we will start converting more pages. This process may take a couple of weeks to fully run.

The last page to be converted will be Project:Support desk, as that is the largest and most active LQT Board.

LQT Threads that are currently on your watchlist, will still be watchlisted as Flow Topics. New Topics created at Flow Boards on your watchlist will appear in your Echo notifications, and you can choose whether or not to watchlist them.

The LQT namespaces will continue to exist. Links to posts/topics will redirect appropriately, and the LQT history will remain available at the original location, as well as being mirrored in the Flow history.

There’s a queue of new features in Flow that will be shipped over the next month or so:

• Table of Contents is done
• Category support for Flow Header and Topics is done
• VE with editing toolbar coming last week of March (phab:T90763)
• Editing other people’s comments coming last week of March (phab:T91086)
• Ability to change the width & side rail in progress, probably out in April (phab:T88114)
• Search is in progress (no ETA yet) (phab:T76823)
• The ability to choose which Flow notifications end up in Echo, watchlist, or both, will be coming up next (no ETA yet)

That being said -- there are some LiquidThreads features that don’t exist in Flow yet. We’d like to hear which features you use on the current LQT boards, and that you’re concerned about losing in the Flow conversion. At the same time, we’d like further suggestions on how we could improve upon that (or other) features from LQT. Please let us know what you think! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

What happens to my LQT list of "New messages (123)", which I can check periodically at Special:NewMessages, once this conversion is done? Will I lose the list? Will it be moved to my "Messages (1234)" in Echo's menu, so that I can continue to check the list periodically to see what I missed in the last few days/weeks in pages I watch? Helder 09:27, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

We're going to be doing more work on notifications and watchlists over the next month. Right now, you can subscribe to a board and get Echo notifications for new topics, and new posts on topics that you're following show up in Echo and your watchlist.

There are several things that this notification system doesn't do -- one of them is giving the LQT-style overview of what's happened on the page since you were there last. That's one of the things that we need to spec out and build. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Filed as phab:T93109. Thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Who will be the main point of contact? How long is the entire conversion process expected to take?

Is there a compiled list of all pages which are planned to be converted, and has any thought been put into determining which pages will be after the first and before the last page to be converted? Is LiquidThreads Test Page going to be converted (it might be a waste of resources to undertake this in production, however it would be a useful test case for being undertaken in a test/qa/beta environment), or is there a list of pages which wont be converted?

Is there an opt-out procedure, where a person/group can opt to restore a page to wikitext?

Is there a process in place to rollback the conversion if bugs are found in the conversion script or Flow software (single page and/or entire conversion)?

Also, I request that user_talk: pages of unsuspecting (i.e. not opt'ed-in) users are not done *early* in the migration. While they might be smaller and easier to migrate, selecting them early in the process will cause a lot of grief as these are a cohort of people who are unlikely to be prepared to be beta testers on their own user_talk page. John Vandenberg (talk) 04:23, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the good questions and suggestions. User:DannyH (WMF) and I are the main points of contact.

There's now a (draft) of the planned process, including timeline, at Flow/LQT conversion process, which should answer all of your questions. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:30, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

An edit toolbar is definitively handy in Support Desk, and I assume it would be also handy in other boards. Specially to escape markup (<nowiki></nowiki>) and the charinsert extension with other things like <code></code> and <syntaxhighlight></syntaxhighlight> Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 10:38, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I understand it so, that you still can switch between the actual source editor and the editing toolbar. But i agree: We need a way to edit the plain wikitext (or the editing toolbar needs to support _all_ possible wikitext constructs (VE doesn't actually)). Florianschmidtwelzow (talk) 11:11, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

We're about to release v1 of a VisualEditor toolbar; it should be on Mediawiki in the next couple of weeks. This first version is only going to have four items -- Bold/Italics, Links, Mentions and a switch for wikitext editing. We're definitely going to do more work on toolbars, but we want to see how this first one works before making any solid plans. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:37, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Sure, but there should be always a switch to view the wikitext version of an answer :) Florianschmidtwelzow (talk) 07:01, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

If you're going to add Bold and Italics, could you please also add Code? That gets used a lot on this wiki, and it should be just as easy to add as Bold and Italics. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

You can check the current iteration at phab:T90764, and more related discussions in phab:T78346. Qgil-WMF (talk) 11:08, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Editing other people’s comments is also needed, since new people often paste PHP configurations or logs, without wrapping them inside <syntaxhighlight lang='text'></pre> tags, so someone needs to fix them to make the posts readable Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 10:40, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but i can edit comments from other people, so i think there is an user right, which is currently set to sysop only? Florianschmidtwelzow (talk) 11:08, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, flow-edit-post is only granted to administrators. Ricordisamoa 13:48, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

That is changing very soon, per phab:T90670 ("Enable Flow post editing for autoconfirmed users on MediaWiki.org, English, Russian") as a first step. (Currently in code-review, so nearly here). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:05, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T90670
Resolved

Special:ListGroupRights shows flow-edit-post for autoconfirmed today.

Edit by Sänger: And I had to try this asap, seems to work for typing, now the final click on save... –Be..anyone 💩 07:49, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi,

I think you all missed some old good rants. So here is one :) why the hell is the URL Topic:Sdoatsbslsafx6lw and not something easy to read and remember? Petrb (talk) 13:40, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree that's annoying. We need a unique ID for topics, so that we can do things like moving a topic from one board to another, or generating a feed of the discussions you're involved in. But that gives us ugly links that are impossible to make sense of. There are a couple ideas for how to make them easier to read -- either adding extra text at the end that has the topic title, or generating links that automatically display with the correct title. It's not at the top of the list right now, but it's something we'll need to build. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

phab:T59154. Helder 23:39, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes, please! Will an opt-in kind of feature ensue, or should I create some LQT discussion pages only to get them converted to Flow soon? 0 :-) Qgil-WMF (talk) 14:56, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Assuming the LQT conversion goes smoothly, we'll start talking about turning Flow on for pages that don't exist yet, and then the wikitext pages. But feel free to use your own workarounds. :) DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:48, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

phab:T90138 yay! Qgil-WMF (talk) 12:19, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Yeh this works on mobile! Liquid threads 0 flow 1! Jdlrobson (talk) 22:36, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I can haz togglezz? (phab:T93024) Helder 23:41, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Is there an equivalent to "Special:NewMessages" for Flow? I use this to keep important threads sticky in privacy. I probably could use personal categories for this once it is implemented (for MonoBook?) but these categories would not be private. I cannot really use my watchlist for this since I follow much more threads which only pop up when action takes place. So basically something inbetween inintial notification of a new post and watching all interesting threads will be cool. [[kgh]] (talk) 07:32, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Admittedly I did not read the talk following the initial post till now. So I am not the only one missing this and I believe that phabricator:T93109 addresses this. [[kgh]] (talk) 07:36, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Quiddity, have you tested Flow with MassMessage delivery? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:47, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes. It works, but the only problem is phab:T86812. (It pings the sender, if a signature is included) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Maybe not quite the only problem: See James F's talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:05, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

In general, please specify the problem you're referring to, as it may not be evident to everyone, or may be fixed later.

I'm assuming you mean {{subst:#ifeq:{{subst:CONTENTLANG}}|en||I apologize for sending this message in English.}} (no subst support). This has been fixed since that post (phab:T68307). Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 08:02, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Am I the only seeing that link as a red link (with redlink=1)? Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:20, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Nope, see phabricator:T105859, too, which I created this morning :) Florianschmidtwelzow (talk) 10:05, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you both for reporting the red link issue. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 08:07, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

I have another question: Why doesn't Flow use the entire screen width? There is a lot of free space on the right side :( Florianschmidtwelzow (talk) 17:37, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

@user:Florianschmidtwelzow: See phab:T88114 . Helder 18:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Oh, haven't found this :( But that looks good, would be great to have this design! :) Florianschmidtwelzow (talk) 06:56, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

After a number of more rounds of testing and tweaking, this has now started, with the first two pages converted per Flow/LQT conversion process.

Please let us know if you can see any problems.

I've heard one comment about there being too many notifications sent, and would like to get more feedback on that. [Update: Bug filed for getting too many notifications - phab:T98996

- they were only meant to show up for threads that we still had as

"Unread" in our Special:NewMessages list. Apologies for the noise.]

Thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Update: The "Day 4" list of the process has now completed.

Some more imperfections were revealed or better understood, and new blocking tasks filed against phab:T92303, particularly including:

• T101540: Flow talkpage conversion (LQT->Flow) should not send an email to users with enotifwatchlistpages about the page move or redirect creation
• T101923: LQT->Flow conversion should remove migrated notifications from Special:NewMessages

Please let us know if you have any other feedback or noticed any problems with these pages. Thanks! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 06:48, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

phab:T101979. Helder 13:17, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Are the "watch" stars supposed to be unchecked on each of the LQT topics which were still in my Special:NewMessages? (I continue watching the whole talk pages, but none of the individual topics are marked as watched) Helder 13:26, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

It should remain watched if the LiquidThreads thread was watched (we are copying this over).

Special:NewMessages is not the same thing as whether a thread is watched. If a LQT thread is watched, it will say "Unwatch", and otherwise "Watch" (since it's giving you a link to change the status). Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 21:44, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

@Mattflaschen-WMF: I believe He7d3r is concerned about pages where he had watchlisted the LQT page, without necessarily interacting with any of the existing threads. LQT would still keep notifying him of any new activity. We plan to do that as a user-option, via phab:T100528 ("Improve organisation and control for (flow) notifications" - see phab:F169936 mockup in particular - feedback there would be appreciated!), but it isn't ready yet.

In the meantime, it would be good to automatically add all old LQT threads to a user's watchlist, if they're watchlisting the whole page. Is that possible? (Both for already converted pages, and for future LQT conversions). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:45, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

My Talk page in Flow! I'm trying to suppress a show-off behavior here, staying civil and humble. :P

I got more notifications than needed this evening, but if I understand correctly all of them were related to LQT -> Flow conversions, right? Since LQT is not widely used in Wikimedia, this would not be a big problem or a problem at all in most wikis. For wikitext -> Flow conversion of discussion pages, no notifications should be sent for regular pages, but one notification would be welcome to notify users that their Talk page has changed to Flow.

Also, what happens with subpages of Talk pages with discussion? I don't think I have any (definitely not with LQT), but as a theoretical case... Qgil-WMF (talk) 07:35, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Mmm, in fact User talk:Qgil-WMF/LQT Archive 1 is not "an archived LiquidThreads page" as the template says. Only the wikitext part is there, the LQT was converted to Flow topics, and they are in User talk:Qgil-WMF. A small detail, since the text of the template can be simply edited.

Also, the format of the title of the converted LQT topics containing a link (Tech News) looks bad now, but maybe this is also a transitional problem? I'll wait till next Monday to see how the new Tech News topic looks like. Qgil-WMF (talk) 07:41, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Flow topics do not allow wikitext AFAIK, so all wikitext in old headers will be shown as raw wikitext instead. Apparently, LQT allowed links there Thread:LiquidThreads_Test_Page/Test_message_with_a_link_to_Extension:LiquidThreads_in_the_header Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:19, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

See T59153. Helder 13:01, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

All the LQT content is in fact archived (not just the Flow version, but also the original versions), but it is not shown on that page because it's no longer a LQT talk page. Like you suggested, changing the template is possible.

Flow topic titles do not support wikitext. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 21:45, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

The script leaves a comment in the description of the new Flow Talk page: "Previous page history was archived for backup purposes at User talk:Qgil-WMF/LQT Archive 1 on 2015-06-10."

In future migrations, I think it would be useful to use this chance to link to a Flow help page, for the owner of the Talk page and whoever lands there. The description can be edited, so users can just remove it whenever they want. Qgil-WMF (talk) 07:45, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

With LQT, following a talk page automatically gave you notifications on every LQT post/edit of that page. But this doesn't seem to be true with flow posts (at least in Project:Current issues in my case) Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:22, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Actually this is for me a key feature of Flow over LQT or wikitext discussions. While I am not able to follow i.e. en.wiki Village Pump Technical (and every time I watch that page I end up unwatching it because I can't cope with that rhythm of updates), with Flow I could receive notifications for new threads, and then subscribe only to those I care about. It makes a whole difference, which is almost critical for more casual contributors with less time to invest following discussions. Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:32, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that Flow notifies about new threads. If that's true, that's fine, then. A good idea, indeed.

The problem is that is a changed behavior over LQT, not sure if well documented, and unexpected over existing messages that were converted to flow which weren't automatically followed when the conversion was done, so I had to manually subscribe to them (after noticing I received no notifications) Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:31, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

FYI: that is the main feature of a gadget used on Portuguese Wikipedia since ~4 years ago. See

• w:pt:MediaWiki:Gadget-NewVillagePump and
• w:en:Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 93#Support or oppose a test Village Pump based on Portuguese VP Helder 11:25, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

No, you only have two choices:

1. Watch the whole page and get informed over new topics (but not new posts)
2. Watch a thread and get informed about any new post in it

If you want to get everything, you have to watch every new thread manually after being informed about it via #1 Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 15:42, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

At phab:T100528 there are some ideas around increasing the control that editors have, beyond what we currently have with wikitext/LQT/Flow. See the 3rd and 4th image in the description, for the TL;DR. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

You asked for comments here. Which shows a problem in that there is no-where to comment, only reply - and which comment should I reply to?. I'm not sure if this project has been abandoned or not but if not:

• I thanked someone I was then unable to reply to his thread.
• I can't see the date stuff was posted - oh it's a mouse over.- hidden information is not useful
• The use of a "..." icon is not intuitive, I stumbled across it. There's a reason we have "v t e" on navboxes, it works and is relatively clear. Unfortunately we were forced to have V T E which goes completely against the WP style..
• No preview WTF? - ohh unless I swap editors form the one it gives me - which breaks the markup even when I fix it.

Rich Farmbrough 17:21, 14 September 2015 (UTC). Rich Farmbrough (talk) 17:21, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

You can reply to a post, or reply to a topic. To reply to the topic, you can use the textbox at the very bottom of the topic.

The project has not been abandoned. Per the announcement, "Flow will be maintained and supported".

I was not able to reproduce the 'thank' issue, and I have not heard that reported before. Please provide exact steps, and your browser.

The intention with the dates is that you can see the most commonly wanted information (human-readable dates) immediately, while getting the exact dates by mouseover or on the history page. But see phab:T94648.

If you are having issues with switching to VisualEditor, please let us know or file them in Phabricator. We will track down the underlying issue. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 05:07, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

See [1] and phab:T100996-->phab:T69258 for the issues with VE. Helder 12:14, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Is there a browser support matrix for Flow? (I would have added this as a new topic, but it seems that my browser is imperfectly supported ...) Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 06:36, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't think this is explicitly listed anywhere, but our matrix is in practice similar to Grade A at that link (for JavaScript support). More browsers have full no-JS support.

To help us figure out the problem you experienced, please note your browser, browser version, what you tried, and what happened.

You can file on Phabricator or reply here. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 22:03, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Unusable when topics being loaded during scrolling

Looking good but when I scroll and topics being loaded, then I stop scrolling to read some topic, then after a few moments the topic above finished loading and is inserted, everything moves and I loose track of where I have been reading before.

This is a problem especially when using the "Browse topics" because there is mostly some stuff loading above the chosen topic. Danwe (talk) 22:46, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Edit summaries

So... the first thought is that edit summaries shouldn't be needed at all with talk pages in general and with Flow in particular.

But on a second thought, they may be useful. A Hebrew Wikipedia user said: "If from the edit summary I see that it's a welcome or a warning template, then I don't bother checking, but if it's a reply to a post that interest me, then I do. And sometimes talk pages are vandalized."

So I'm passing this on - although maybe the right thing is not to add edit summaries, but to somehow understand the different workflows and indicate them in recent changes and watchlists accordingly. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 23:38, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

There's Flow/Prior_discussion-thread-roundup#Edit_summaries which collects some previous discussions. I'll have to re-read it, on Monday... Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:51, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

What I'd like to do is reduce the need the write edit comments altogether. Things like adding and removing templates and categories are extremely common tasks and could easily be recognized by the software. If no edit comment is specified by the user, the software tries to write one for you, but you could always override it by writing your own summary. I've been meaning to write such a gadget at svwiki but I'm still too new to javascript.

Templates are used for so much (like welcoming and warning, as you mention) and I think we should really use that to our advantage.

Also, these Flow edit windows really need to be resizable. Why is "resize: none;" there? Nirmos (talk) 02:03, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Because it's supposed to resize automatically as you type. Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 04:26, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Auto-archive by month

Good search can solve a lot of things, but I believe that structured auto-archiving is needed as well. Some scenarios:

• A user may want to see how many posts did he have on his user talk page each month.
• A user may want to check what things were discussed around the time of certain news events, holidays, MediaWiki software changes, etc.
• A user may want to find a conversation that is hard to find by words, because the relevant words are too common and yield too many results, but he does remember the time when the conversation happened.
• It may sound like circular logic, but own internal engine's search indexing is far from perfect even for English, and for most other languages its morphological support is even worse. An archive by dates would be a reasonable fallback for such languages.

It makes sense to me to see automated archives of Flow conversations by month. I imagine something like a box that shows years and months, and clicking a month would show a page with all the conversations from that month.

I don't have statistics about the number of conversations by month, but I imagine that even in the busiest talk pages a whole month could fit reasonably on one page. Maybe some especially busy ones could be split by weeks. I'd love to see statistics, if anybody has them. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 11:24, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be more sensible to expand the options under "View Newest topics" to include an item that allows you to "View by date range". Then you don't have separate pages, but you can still see whatever you want. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:46, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

I guess that the designers and the user researchers can chime in here, but a window with twelve links per year sounds to me simpler and more relevant than a range selector. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 20:52, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

We're planning to build a date range into the search function. One of the really important use cases is "I know I was talking with Amir about X a year ago..." -- so we need to build a system with filters. For that kind of use case, you'd search for the keyword, and then filter for a user name, a date range, and conversations that you participated in.

This is an important feature for Flow, because it's one of the big examples of what Flow can do that wiki talk pages can't. I totally agree that just having an endless Table of Contents is not acceptable long-term for a busy page.

We're going to build the search feature iteratively, so it'll start with keyword search and then add the filters as we go along. It'll take a minute to build the whole thing, but we've already got the back-end work done, and we'll be starting on the front-end work soon. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

See the wireframes and mockups linked at phab:T78790 for details. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:41, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

13 new topics on Talk:Flow

I haven't checked in on this page in a while. Echo says, "13 new topics on Talk:Flow". That's nice. Which ones are they? Do you expect me to manually count down the un-numbered list in the (hidden) table of contents, make a note of its subject line, and remember that when I get to the 13th, that I'm probably done reading them? This really isn't functional. I need a way to see only the posts and threads that are new, and I need a way to mark the ones that I've read (so that if I get interrupted while reading all 13 threads, I'll be able to figure out where I was when I get back to it). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:49, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Heh ...and the "way to mark the ones that I've read" must not be automatically marking them as read as soon as I open them, because sometimes I can get an idea that the message is complicated to deal with even before finishing reading it... and I would want to mark it as unread, for resolving the issue later. Helder 23:31, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Reported at phab:T94061. Helder 16:57, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

Those are good use cases, and they're definitely things that we can work on. Are those things that you can currently do on wikitext talk pages? DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:35, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Yep! Depending on the edit summary (which appears in the watchlist) I can choose to open it or leave it for later (and it will stay bold in the list until I open the page). Helder 18:54, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

(You're already subscribed to it, but just for others/reference, that's phab:T68876 ("Flow does not integrate with watchlist "changed since my last visit" highlighting")) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

The current system has a way to indicate "new content", via the blue-sidebar at the left (in LTR languages) of each post, e.g.

• within a topic,
• and within a board.

The &fromnotif=1 string in the URL, is what triggers those highlights, based on the #ID of the post it is linked to.

For editors that use the Echo Notifications links, the Notifications about bundled-new-topics on a Board, and about replies-to-an-existing-topic, get this treatment. For editors that use the "grouped & expanded" preferences, that link is available in the "n changes" link (screenshot). There are possibly/probably other links, that should get this treatment... Suggestions appreciated!

(Sidenote: that does run into some problems, when the oldest "new" content is outside of the first 10 topics that are loaded. Anything loaded in the infinite scroll, will not be properly marked. e.g. here)

Re: wanting to not mark new content as read just by loading it, I've filed phab:T94061 ("Create a way to mark Flow Topics as unread") with a few extra details. (though possibly the use-case will be solved in a different way, per discussions at phab:T93109 and elsewhere.) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

There was a dif link in my Special:Watchlist pointing to

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Se14547daaj65kpa&curid=0&diff=0&oldid=0

which didn't cause any comment to be highlighted (I had to re-read the comments and remember which ones are old, to see what is new on this topic).

This looks like phab:T62645. Helder 20:28, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Testing mobile link rendering

Here's an inline link: [2]. This is a test to see if it appears correctly. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 08:52, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

And here's an inline link with a title: PHP: The Good Parts. Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 08:55, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Reported: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93856 Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 08:59, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

How do I indent an reply to a particular post?

Is see that people have maganged to actually indent their reply to a particular post within a flow thread. However when I click on reply I end up at the initial level. [[kgh]] (talk) 07:44, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

For posts already saved, there is no way to change the indentation. See phab:T78253. Helder 21:01, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for noting this. From my past experience with LQT is was quite rarely necessary to relocate a post. So in my opinion not a front burner thing to have if at all. [[kgh]] (talk) 22:04, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

This answer to the original post, that should be in the same indentation level as all other answers to the original post, is in another level, while my answer to a post down the thread, that should be one more level indented, as it's an answer to an answer, looks like it's on the same level as the original post.

You've got to plan this indentation for real discussions, not for simple two-post threads. If it's not capable of working something like a real discussion with several dozens of posts, diverse sub-threads, it's useless. It's definitely not a proper replacement of a real talk page. It's just one more step in the facebookisation, read dumbing down, of the WP.

Edith says: This looks like an answer to He7d3r, while it's an answer to Kghbln, because the indentation is fucked up. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 21:37, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

So why doesn't this post end up indented? [[kgh]] (talk) 07:45, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Either I am too stupid which may very well be the case or I am missing something. Dunno if I should be sad or grumpy right now. [[kgh]] (talk) 07:46, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Try to indent 1. level

Edith says: Didn't work as expected, was possible before. Something seems to have changed. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 08:31, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

And answer something in-between, let's see how this will be indented.

Edith says: This is at the proper indentation place, the other answers just look like answers to the original posting. definitely a bug. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 11:20, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

@Sänger: see phab:T93883. Helder 20:55, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Next level indentation.

Trying the usual colon to indent, lets see what happens.

Edith says: Lines do indent, the post doesn't. The second line (scnr) was somehow more indented as I did this edit, dunno why. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 08:34, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Seems to be bug then. Let's wait for the fix. I production this would be a near fatal bug if one cannot move particular post to a new location like in LQT but even then. Have not figured out how to relocate posts yet. Probably a matter of user rights. [[kgh]] (talk) 08:46, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

See the clearest explanation at I CAN HAZ IDNETATION? - which I'll try to condense down into an FAQ sized answer, next week. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Ah, now I get it. I guess there is something to it. Since this is breaking with classic as well as LQT talk (10+ years of habit) it will imho indeed be very important to note this change quite prominently. If people do not know this they will definitively bang their heads against a wall like I did this morning. To cut it short: The issue is not how it will be done here, but telling people that it is done differently. [[kgh]] (talk) 22:02, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. I like this indentation system, but it will only work if people understand what's going on, no matter which other systems they're used to. I suggested a very similar system half a year ago, including some visual clues telling the reader which way the conversation 'flows'. Maybe they can be implemented here? — HHHIPPO 13:44, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

i also wrote similar idea suggestion, in 2009-august-26 , for livejournal comments: http://qdb.wp.kukmara-rayon.ru/2009/08/26/a-suggestion-for-threaded-comments-of-livejournal/ . QDinar (talk) 21:30, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

and i have posted 2 images with 2 comment thread models in Talk:Structured Discussions/2015/04#h-New_indentation_&_threading_model-2015-04-01T22:27:00.000Z 1-2 days ago, and with idea to put threads one behind another, to make comments more compact (instead of, for example, collapsing them). these are that images: File:Compact-comments.png File:Compact-classic-comment-threads.gif. QDinar (talk) 22:25, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

there is a bug report page which asks about design: " With the new indentation model (T88501), should we make any visual design changes to the way indentation looks? " : phab:T88865 , - i have posted there about need of more informative labels. QDinar (talk) 21:24, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

There is a difference between answering to the last post in a thread, like I do now, and answering the original post in this thread, and now this big difference is blurred methinks. Just have to test it with another answer to the original post. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 21:32, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

$wgFlowOccupyPages is nice but ...

... something like the parser function <code>{{#useliquidthreads:1}}</code> is better probably with the difference that once enabled it will not be possible to change back. I guess this will increase flexibility during implementation and saves admins to add talk pages one by one in "LocalSettings.php". I e.g. would have loved to switch my talk page to Flow already some time ago, but I never made the extra effort of individually asking for it. [[kgh]] (talk) 11:08, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

We've already stopped using wgFlowOccupyPages for new pages, and plan to stop using it entirely soon (phab:T90977).

There is now a special page, Special:EnableFlow, which already exists and is planned for enhancement (phab:T72073). Mattflaschen-WMF (talk) 00:29, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Great, that's very nice to read. Just awarded a like token. Thank you for your feedback. [[kgh]] (talk) 08:44, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Topic not showing up after editing it

Topic:Sedrllzckauwfm50 does not show up here though it should. Probably due to the fact that I messed up by embedding a parser function without wrapping it into the "nowiki" tags as I should have. Stupid me. :( [[kgh]] (talk) 11:12, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Ok, now it's showing up. Probably some kind of bug fixed in the meantime. Thanks. [[kgh]] (talk) 08:46, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Never do an edit without leaving a summary

This is a golden wiki rule dating back to the very early days and I am very much into it. I teach this as the very first thing to new people interested in wikis. While this may not appear very important for edits in the first place for your own posts it is indeed very much so if editing foreign posts. That's actually one thing that irritated me on bugzilla and currently irritates my on phabricator or on TUX.

Edit: One could argue that providing a summery by adding an Edit: to the post like I am doing it now is enough but in the long run Flow supporting such a feature will be nice I believe. [[kgh]] (talk) 11:25, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the reminder. I've updated phab:T59894 to specify edits for any existing content. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing to the task on phabricator. As expected it was already there. [[kgh]] (talk) 21:52, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Same goes for Flow, I don't know where I could put my edit summary to, but hey, this is something new, they don't care about the Wikiverse and good experiences from the communities. In SF they want to invent all new from scratch without being bothered by the unwashed masses (who de facto do the real work here: content, not bling), that's more sexy then just evolving the very good stuff already there. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 11:30, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Your post moves this thread into a slightly negative mode which does not help I you would like others to (re)implement features. I see my post more like a strong reminder for important things that should be and most probably are already in the pipeline but have not been implemented yet because other features needed a better polish first. New things cannot have all features from the start. Also I would not like to blame the Flow programmers for things that have been done suboptimal by other programmers of different features in the past, like e.g. VE or so. [[kgh]] (talk) 11:42, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

You're right, it's "slightly to the negative", sorry for using your thread for this, but WMF (and it's programmers) have lost next to all AGF they ever had with the fiascos VE (first implementation), MV (with it's extreme aggressive implementation against the communities) and now this unwanted, useless Flow-forum-impersonation with complete loss of connection to the normal wikiverse. Flow is a move away from the wikiverse, towards unwanted facebookisation. It might be fine for programmers to build new things from scratch, it's completey wrong in a well functioning surrounding like WP, especially as requests from the communities are regarded with contempt. The WMF should improve the wikiverse, not build something new in parallel, and Flow is something new in parallel. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 12:04, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Your post offends me since I politely asked you not to use this thread for bashing of any type. All you are saying has been said on numerous other places and I deliberately did not participate there. Now I see myself ending up in such a discussion. [[kgh]] (talk) 13:09, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Highlighted messages

For some reason, when I clicked in one of my Echo notification, which was pointing to https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Flow&topiclist_sortby=newest&fromnotif=1#flow-post-s2gcx0zvqjwnp6ct, I got blue bars on the left side of many messages, mostly messages I didn't see before. However, some of these did read before, and should not be highlighted again. Helder 20:59, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Is there any easy way to embed a flow topic?

For example I want to promote a flow discussion on the main page. Reasno (talk) 03:09, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

No, there isn't right now; we haven't had a lot of requests for it. Is there a wiki where you'd like to use this? DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:15, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

As I think about it, embedding may not be what I want. Alternatively It will be helpful to be able to add some sort of hint, such as "there are 5 active discussions" to the bottom of article page so that new users can click on and take them to the discussion. Reasno (talk) 06:28, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Just trying to let users be aware of the discussion page. Sometimes people who are unfamiliar with MediaWiki may never discover the discussion tab. Reasno (talk) 06:22, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I think that's a good idea; thanks for suggesting it. With Flow, we can actually tell how many discussions are going on, and how active they are. It would be good to surface that information where people can see it. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

quoting users

Is it assumed there is any possibility for quoting parts of the posts of other users? For example, "quote" or such as in the BBCode [quote] ... [/ quote]. Сунприат (talk) 23:24, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

We don't have that yet, but it's something that we'd like to add in the future. Thanks for requesting it! DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:15, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Created phab:T94644 for that. There is also phab:T78346 which seems related. Helder 00:35, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Header undo fails

I was trying to undo this edit, but it failed with a "Header has no content. Content is required to save a header." error. Jay8g (talk) 03:14, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T94561

@Jay8g: I filed this bug in phab. That's the easiest way to resolve it. Tar Lócesilion (queta) 11:53, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Thread history

The "notifications" sent me to Talk:Structured Discussions/2015/03#h-Starting_conversion_of_LiquidThreads_to_Flow_at_mediawiki.org-2015-03-17T00:46:00.000Z. I missed that, looked at the thread, and then decided to click on "history", because I wanted to see if "thanks" works as expected. That click triggered an error message:<pre>A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.

Function: Flow\Data\Storage\RevisionStorage::findInternal Error: 1054 Unknown column 'topic_root_id' in 'where clause' (10.64.16.18)</pre> Is that as it should be? –Be..anyone 💩 21:54, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for reporting that! It looks like an intermittent problem, so it'll probably work if you check it again.

We filed a bug ticket at phab:T94632, and we'll get it fixed. Thanks! DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 31 March 2015 (UTC)