The Wikimedia Foundation is looking into the problems with talk pages/on-wiki communication. As a result, your comment about not seeing the later replies really interests me. What's wrong with the design, that the last reply in that thread wasn't visible enough?
Topic on User talk:Aron Manning/Flow
Tl;dr: It was a matter of perception and wasted effort. The latter replies were there, but we look at the first answers/search results first, and trust what we find there.
I saw your first comment, opened the link in it, read all the shortcuts, then searched for keyword "preview", then looked at the sidebar links just to realize the promised shortcut is not listed there. I spent 5-10 mins on this, thinking it must be there, if you linked it.
By the time I returned to the Feedback talk, I was a bit bitter and lost interest in spending more time looking for the shortcut, but I kept on reading the replies.
Only then did I notice that you posted an updated link that was a looooong list of ids, tiring just to look at, but I found "accesskey-preview" at least. Then came the next problem: finding the necessary modifier. There is no header guiding a person to that information, and even if one finds it, it basically says on windows it can be any modifier...
Then I somehow (probably searching) found WP:KB that finally presented the shortcuts **and** the modifiers in well-organized, human readable format.
Summary: If this was long, you can imagine how I felt... Thus I wanted to spare the burden for other users, and presented the relevant information (the shortcuts) and the most useful link in the first place, that was your comment. I would still suggest you do the same, but I just found the option to add a topic summary, and that is even better. Thanks.
P.S. an actual design / implementation issue I'd like to highlight is pasting text into the editor. Copying the shortcuts, or citations is impossible, I tried both visual and source editor last time. The html widget and the internal buffer / data model seems to get out-of-sync. The pasted content is visible (with full formatting even in source editor), but cannot be edited, and it was not saved.
This time I managed to copy the shortcuts from the messages into the topic summary, using source editor for both. I guess that improved since last time. Pasting formatted content, links is still confusing, see my reply to that topic.
It happens so that I did not distinguish between the Flow and the wikitext editor, and gave feedback to Flow at the editor...
Where should I post Flow feedback? [Talk:Structured Discussions] seems to be a support forum, not feedback.
@Whatamidoing (WMF) Please point me in the direction of the Flow feedback forum, if there is one, thank you.
I presume there is no way to move a full thread to another Flow page, but if there is, please indulge me.
There's supposed to be a way to move Flow threads, but it hasn't been built. Help talk:Structured Discussions appears to be the correct venue for feedback. I don't know how closely it's watched these days. The product is in a "maintenance phase" (keeping it running) rather than a "development phase" (new features being added).
I don't have a clear picture how much you're involved with Flow and Talk pages consultation, so excuse me if this is not your interest. 2 observations:
- Flow with an added feature to edit full threads or pages as wikitext would satisfy experienced users' primary concern with flow. This requires export to and import from wikitext, and could be used as a band-aid for moving threads too (without the guarantee that the mover retained the original discussion without alterations).
- To be fast enough to be usable, a network protocol refined enough to handle individual posts is necessary (with ajax/websockets). Flow has this.
Imo a prototype of the new talk pages could be built on Flow.