Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions/Flow

Lila said about a month ago this on her talk page on meta about the development of Flow:

As you know I am holding back planned roll-out of this feature pending internal review. What I am seeing above is that many requirements requested are satisfied by it at the expense of losing features some of you consider critical. I am asking for a full list of use cases that are to be/not covered and clear roadmap of those and will invite you to review. -- LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 18:32, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

I fail to see any new green hooks on the other side here lately. Do I get it right, that development has stalled until this is straightened?

Software development is continuing. Wider rollout (to major projects like English Wikipedia) is a different issue with a different timeline.

So if it's continuing, what was the result of those internal review? Flow is still just a rather useless blahblah-thingy, nothing really to brag about. In it's current state it's completely unthinkable to let it be anywhere on real talk pages. It fails to have any plus compared to normal talk pages. It brakes some must-haves completely.

I'm afraid, the WMF gets so deep invested in it, they will deploy it regardless of it's usefulness, just to sanctify the massive expenses in money and/or manpower (which to me seems to have been the main reasoning behind superputsch against the communities with MV).

Edith asks: Why didn't you just edited your first post, instead of hiding and reposting? Ah, I forgot, such simple tasks are beyond this software capabilities.

I accidentally uploaded it while logged out. Neither wikitext talk pages nor Flow allow you to change the author of a previously made edit/post from an anon to a logged in user.

Editing a post without changing the author is already possible. In fact, you edited the post I'm replying to.

On a normal wikitext page you had simply edited the previous post and made clear that it was you, for example by changing the sig and making some explanatory remark.

Here you had to write it again and hide the old one (that still remains there as a stumbling block). You probably even had the same IP as Mattflaschen (WMF) as in the first post, but still couldn't just edit.

Someone suggested that we should have a time-limited (perhaps 30-60 seconds) "log in and claim this post as your own" for IP edits, if the IPs match. I'm not sure if that's technically possible, or what drawbacks there might be?

The main concern is phones, i would have to check with oliver but he was complaining before about how his analytics data had tons of phones all behind the same ip due to proxying.

Time-limited anything is terrible from an accessibility standpoint. People with disabilities using special input hardware, or merely accessing from a very low connection may find themselves easily exceeding the timeout.

The ability to claim another post's authorship or reshape it in any way should be always present, for any user, and easy to undo to revert possible abuse. That's the way of the wiki, it has served us well for years.

But the guys at WMF claim, that he wiki-way is far too difficult to handle for all those dumb users out there, and so they want to eliminate it and put something like this there instead.

Everytime the absolutely required minimum requirements are mentioned, and that's at least all and everything the current discussion pages can do, especially the complete flexibility, they evade that requirement and how to implement it in this obviously extreme restricted software experiment called Flow by invoking some distant future when this will al fall into place.

Given the hostility and brutal force they used to force the MediaViewer against the explicit wishes of the community, a lot of people are rightful anxious that the same will happen with this piece of software again. They don't care about the community. If too much money and "Herzblut" was invested in it, they will use force, full stop.

The internal review is scheduled for this week. I'll ping you when there is more news on that.

Your "this week" was last week, so where is the review?

And another two-and-a-half weeks gone, still nothing from the WMF.

It's a pattern, they don't like to inform their real employers, the communities, until it's too late to do something about their weird ans ant-community decisions.

Or are you just that slow?

Lila answered a bit on her talk page:

We just held our first session right before the holidays. We are still working on the plan of action. But I can tell you in interim my thoughts, in no specific order:

1. Talk pages serve MANY diverse use cases; they have much of the power of a programing language. A single prescriptive/pre-configured tool such as Flow cannot (and probably should not) address them all.
2. Flow is a communication tool similar to many available on the web and for many sites would be great. It does not today address collaboration and complex wiki-usecases. As such it is not ready for "prime time" for us.
3. Flow in the current form is not a replacement for the current Talk pages. If I were to draw a venn diagram of Flow vs. Talk vs. Talk Prime (something super-user would seem to want Talk to become), the overlap would be very modest.
4. It is not clear if Flow could ever be/become a replacement for Talk in its current concept. We are investigating if this paradigm is too fundamentally different, or if we need different tools for different jobs. Flow may be useful as just a communication tool. This is to be validated. The team is doing some prototype testing.
5. Beginner users do need simpler on-boarding process. We need to solve for this on-ramp experience (both to teach new wikipedians and to no burden experienced ones). But we also need to keep in mind our super-editors that know and understand the powerful Talk system. We need to find a way to not break the experience for the super-editors while building a simpler one for newcomers.
6. Finally and most importantly we need to further improve how we conceptualize and build complex features like this one. More early validation and understanding our audience is a must.

Sorry this is not a "final" assessment. But I would be curious to hear your reactions. Thanks. Lila

Wrong link, right is this: Lilas talk page.

I could not edit the former post, only got cryptic error messages:

• An error has occurred while processing HTML/wikitext conversion. (propably too many :)
• Exception Caught: Unexpected end tag : i From source content:

Thanks, filed as phab:T86064.

This seems to be an issue with the gadgets "Site: General utilities" (default) and Hotcat (not default). Do you have both of those enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets? (just for reference, the default selection is http://i.imgur.com/aBGQVQI.png)

The only difference to default is the "Dot syntax highlighter". And in beta I have everything besides hovercards enabled.

I've made some screenshots about this:

First one is the HTML/wikitext conversion error:

I tried with several syntaxes, i.e :meta:, :w:, meta:, and even with the whole URL and just simple brackets, all the same.

Second one is about the unexpected end tag:

I've got no chance to save this, so I just created the new post.