User talk:Deryck Chan/Flow

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Thanks!

Previous discussion was archived at User talk:Deryck Chan/Archive 1 on 2017-08-22.

I heard that Flow is back in active development so I thought I should enable it on my user talk page for the fun of it.

It sounds like phab:T226708 is getting fixed because of you. Thanks.

You're welcome! It's my privilege to be the extra volunteer voice that tipped the balance...!

While we're here, I've recently found a related problem: VE doesn't seem to distinguish between the inside and the outside of a link when the caret is placed immediately after the last character of the link text!

This is a problem for Chinese and Japanese languages (zh, ja, yue, wuu, lzh) which do not put whitespace between phrases. So it is quite common for us to need to insert new text immediately up against the end of a link, or even shove two links directly up against each other without any whitespace in between. In source editing this would not have been a problem because the square brackets mark boundaries clearly.

VE users in this languages have a reliable workaround at the moment: insert a spurious ASCII space character to tell VE that I want to write something outside the link, insert the new text, and then delete the ASCII space. But now that we're in the process of changing caret behaviour to cope with single-character links, please consider putting two caret positions at the boundary between link text and the text after the link, one position inside the link and the other position outside the link, and for text added in the "outside" position to not be treated as additions to the link text.

VE should already work the way you describe – we distinguish cursor position inside and outside of a link with the blue highlight, and when you navigate using arrow keys, these are in fact two separate caret positions.

Here's a quick recording I made demonstrating this on zh.wp page 蒙娜丽莎: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X6GptGT9j6YZJs0_M-U5dXJOPyLd1yFa/view. If it doesn't work for you, can you give us more detail or a video of the problem?

You're right. I tried re-creating this behaviour again today and couldn't, and got the correct behaviour. I shall retract this report.

I'm glad that it's working again. Thanks for the update.

Hi!

You wrote: "News circulated at Wikimania 2017 that Flow is back in active development...!"

Can you explain more about that? Who told that to you? Is there any way I can verify if this information is correct?

Thanks in advance,

I think that was @Jdforrester. James - correct us if I have misheard.

Btw are you watching Talk:Flow just to make sure Flow stays dead? :0)

I like threaded discussions. The general sentiment among Wikimedia conference attendees and people who are involved with onboarding new users seems to be that the future of healthy communication across this sparse volunteer community will require something better than four tildes on a wikipage...

There is no causal link, but I am watching Talk:Flow and I want to make sure Flow stays dead.

I also like threaded discussions. Using [[:en:WP:INDENT]] works fine; and Flow does not.

I am also totally in favor of improving talkpages. I am not opposed to change, I am strongly in favor of it, but I know that Flow is not the way forward.

The way the WMF handled the Flow debacle was embarrassing, and it seems they haven't learned from the past.

In order to learn from the past one has to be willing to admit that he or she has made mistakes.

Ideally we would have a VisualEditor that is able to deal with talkpages. It would be a bit weird to ask newbies to learn wikicode, VE '''and''' Flow.

LiquidThreads made me facepalm.

This discussion should take place on the not-talk-page, where Flow is the topic, not on some users hidden not-talk-page. I started a thread over there. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 15:25, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Where's my selfie with you? :D

Our selfie!

I'm making the rounds, but you may skip the queue :D Here is yours! Thanks for hosting the ambassadors session and bringing lovely Italian chocolate!

LOL I look like a zombie :D TYVM for that, I am told you may also have taken a few shots during the meeting, if so I'm looking forward to seeing them, as I forgot to tell my colleagues to do the same.

I only have this one plus a few selfies. I categorised all of them into commons:Category:Wikimedia tech ambassadors.

P.S. Why do interwiki links behave like external links on Flow? Being a nosey contributor I started this discussion...