Talk:Talk pages project/Replying

The team would value any thoughts and/or questions you have about this new tool for Replying to specific comments on talk pages.

There is some bug in the "Add topic" functionality, at least in Swedish user talk pages. If there is a automatic message from WMF in the talk page:

• the new subject dialogue, both title and text, starts below the WMF message
• Also the title input frame ends up in more places.
• when publisihing, the topic is placed in the botton and an "Add topic" dialogue is placed under promting to write a new title.

This has been tested on several browsers, see here: w:sv:Wikipedia:Wikipediafrågor.

Please feel free to start a new topic on my talk page, to see what I try to describe and feel fre to experiment there:

w:sv:user talk:LittleGun, and press "Nytt ämne" for "Add topic"

Thanks, I filed T337476 and we'll get it fixed.

A prototype is ready for you all to try of functionality that will alert you, in real-time, when someone posts a new comment in the discussion you are using the Reply Tool within.^[1][2]

Below is the information you will need to:

• Try the prototype
• Share feedback about the prototype

---

1.@Sdkb surfaced the value in improvements to how the Reply Tool can more effectively resolve edit conflicts in Topic:Woomtgg3secx6r2h.

2. In Topic:Wov6fz5lqmm3nl3p, @Valereee and @Tol shared feedback about the approach the mw:Editing Team were planning to implement

Try the Prototype

1. Visit https://patchdemo.wmflabs.org/wikis/c555f5ca84/wiki/Main_Page
2. Create an account by clicking the Create account link. Note: this is a test wiki so you will not be able to log in using the same username you use on other Wikimedia wikis.
3. Visit an old revision of a talk page (e.g. Talk:Douglas Adams)
4. Click a [ reply ] link within a section that, in subsequent revisions, has had new comments posted to it (e.g. Looking for help from a Python dev to help getting ReFill to build and run)
5. Start typing a comment
6. Wait 10-30 seconds
7. Notice the ⚠️ ___ new comments... alert appears beneath the Reply Tool's text input
8. Click the ⚠️ ___ new comments... alert to reveal the new comments that have been posted
9. Publish the comment you started drafting in "Step 5."
10. ✅ That's it

Share Feedback

Once you have tried the prototype and you are ready to share what you think of it, please add a new topic to this talk page by doing the following:

1. "Start a new topic" on this talk page
2. Name this new topic: "Automatic Edit Conflicts Prototype Feedback: YOUR USERNAME"
3. Write your answers to these questions:
   1. What did you find unexpected about the prototype?
   2. What do you appreciate about the prototype?
   3. What do you wish was different about the prototype?
   4. What concerns you about the prototype?

I don't think this prototype is working any longer.

It ought to add an empty line between them. Otherwise people miss the first signature and attribute authorship to the second.

Specifically the "small" tag. Used when making an off-topic remark or joke. The whole reply can be wrapped in the small tag, but the signature will be added automatically at full size, which is wrong.

@Card Zero: You can sign inside the small tag, and the feature will not add a full size signature.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T265750

Hello! So recently, I often reply to comments and then it starts to get too deep. When this happens I end up having to go into the source editor and add the outdent template to the start of my reply (possibly with the parameter with the number of colons, depending on how deep it got). Maybe this could be integrated into the reply tool, with a button allowing you to outdent your reply, optionally with the parameter of the number of colons. I don't have a mockup of how I think this would look like (i'm not an artist and never intend on becoming one) so hopefully I'm able to get my point across like this.

Auto-outdent-template seems a reasonably uncontroversion automation. When it gets too deep, the reply tool could automatically insert an outdent template. We'd just need to decide on the wrap threshold.

I always outdent once posts exceed eight indentations deep. Eight indentations, in my experience, is the maximum indentation level where comments are still fairly easy to read on mobile.

+1 for outdent feature too.

In addition to the need for an outdent feature, using the outdent template used at English Wikipedia appears to break the ability to use the "Reply" feature.

For your information. CC @Wojsław Brożyna

I think it is a little bit anoying that it by default is written "svar" ("answer" in English) in the edit comment when you reply on a discussion with this tool. Is it posible to get it removed? Reason: I always writes edit comments, and when you edit articles you have to explain what you do. When answering in a discussion it is the same: Good to explain. If you then needs to remove the "svar", or so every time it is annoying. Better delete that and have a popup if you forget to write an edit comment, I think. Else it is a nice discussion tool. (If you answer, please ping me in so I will see it.). Best regards,

...or let the word "svar" be shadowed. Then you may choose to save without writing anythin, or you may start writing direct and it will be deleted and replaced direct. (it is differnet tecniques writing on cell phone or computer).

I've checked a couple of wikis, and it's not common for people to provide meaningful edit summaries on talk pages. At the Swedish Wikipedia, here's what I see in Special:RecentChanges for discussion pages today:

• (K3)
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• (Arkiverar min användardiskussionssidaför januari 2023.)
• (Arkiverar min användardiskussionssida för januari 2023.)
• no edit summary
• (Arkiverar 2022)
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• no edit summary
• (+ några referenser)
• (k3)
• no edit summary

I have excluded all edits from the Reply tool and its New Topic tool. If the editor includes the automatic section heading, but nothing else, I recorded that as no edit summary. 70% of my sample has no edit summary. If that is typical for the Swedish Wikipedia, then I'm not sure that removing svar would be an improvement. The choice really seems to be between svar and nothing.

(This page is in Flow, which auto-pings people who have commented in a thread.)

Would be nice if I was able to add two -- right before my sig.

You can put them inside your signature at Special:Preferences.

You can also use --~~~~ if you don't want your signature to have dashes in.

_{(edit conflict)} You can also just type --~~~~ – if you add your signature at the end of the comment manually, the tool won’t add it once again.

@Jeff G.Hi, do you mean special:Preferences -> User profile tab -> Signature section, then how? I see two options therein:

• [Your existing sigunature]: or the default one with (talk) link added;
• [New signature]: <- could you point me to a page where to learn and wikify your sig followed with "(user:talk link)", don't you?

@Omotecho: Please see Help:Signatures#Customized signatures.

The reply tool is not able to post replies on page with templated section titles (Buttons and input boxes can be generated, but cannot be published), like zh:Wikipedia:管理员布告板/其他不当行为, is this normal behavior?

Thanks for the report. This looks like a bug.

Section titles generated by a template should work fine. In this case, it looks like the problem is triggered by the language variant markup used inside of the template, and how it affects the section ID. MediaWiki's old parser (used when displaying pages) generates different ID than the new parser (Parsoid; used when saving replies), and because of that the tool doesn't know where to put the reply.

For example, this section: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:管理员布告板/其他不当行为#UjuiUjuMandan（討論_·_貢獻_·_封禁日誌_·_全域-{zh-hans:账号信息;zh-hant:帳號資訊}-）

…has a different ID in the new parser's output: https://zh.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/html/Wikipedia%3A管理员布告板%2F其他不当行为#UjuiUjuMandan（討論_·_貢獻_·_封禁日誌_·_全域）

I'm afraid this may be quite difficult to fix in the reply tool.

However, maybe you can avoid the issue by making some small changes to the {{vandal}} template or the page. I'm not an expert in language variant support, but I think you might be able to move the language variant markup outside of the template, to a global or per-page definition somewhere? That might fix the problem.

Thank you for your assistance in identifying the problem, and your suggested method has been submitted to the community for discussion, and I hope the Parsoid team can fix this problem.

Hi, o use Talk Page I need to add edit permission. However I cannot give write access to users. Is there a way to give edit access to Talk and not the page?

Yes, give write access and then protect the page but not the talk page.

protecting the page will only give sysop permission, need more groups to be able to edit

Yes, see Manual:$wgNamespaceProtection. You could enable edit access for all users, then use that config to restrict editing of non-talk namespaces to specific group.

I will follow this line, thank you

tanks