Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions/Flow

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).