Hi Svetlana,
Yes, what you're describing is the problem that we've had with "Close".
In the feature that's live on the site right now, any user can Close a
topic, which means:
* The topic header turns white, and there's a "Closed by user name" line.
* The posts are hidden by default, so all you see is the topic header. You
can click on the topic header to view the posts.
* The main entry field for replies is suppressed.
* The Reply links still appear on the individual posts, but if you try to
post a reply, you get an error message.
This is a broken feature, and it doesn't even align well with what wiki
communities mean when they "close" a discussion. It was a decent first
draft, but it didn't land.
Redoing the moderation actions has been on my list of things to do since I
joined the Flow team in April. Hide doesn't hide enough, and Close closes
too much. These problems have come up several times recently, on Talk:Flow
and on the mailing list.
We're going to be testing out Flow on a couple of mentorship spaces in the
next month, and I've been concerned that when someone answers a newbie's
question, they'll think that the next step is to "Close" the discussion, to
mark that the question has been answered. (Wiki people like to keep things
tidy.) That would lead to exactly the broken experience that you describe
-- people closing and opening topics with every response, which would
confuse and frustrate everyone.
Meanwhile, there's a bigger and more interesting idea that we're working on
-- using "resolved" as a way to celebrate successful decisions, rather than
hiding them or pushing them away. We're also starting to think about how to
use the "Summarize" feature in a different way -- maybe encouraging people
to use it as an editable scratchpad built into a particular spot in the
discussion. That idea hasn't quite come together yet, but there's something
interesting there that we're talking and thinking about.
So -- while that idea is still percolating on a back burner -- I wanted to
take a step that would discourage people from using "Close" to penalize a
successful conversation that's reached a happy conclusion. That's why we're
changing that word to "Lock", which expresses more clearly that cutting off
replies is a negative act which people shouldn't do very often, if at all.
It definitely should not be the typical way for a conversation to end.
We're going to keep making changes like this -- small shifts and iterations
that build over time. We have an unbelievably long list of features to
build, experiments to try, horrible mistakes to make and learn from. We
will be periodically breaking and fixing and re-breaking Flow on a regular
basis, from now until a long while from now. That's the only way to build a
big complicated feature like this. It's more of an art than a science, and
it's not even that much of an art.
As a team, we're trying to be more open and transparent about the work that
we're doing -- that's why we've started sending these emails out to a
public list. We want to talk more about the problems that we're wrestling
with, get more ideas and questions from the community, and then channel
that energy into actually making changes and trying things out.
If you're on this mailing list, that means you're interested in seeing how
the sausage gets made. It is not always pretty. But I'm glad that you're
here, and that you're into it. That means you're on the team.
Danny
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 6:02 PM, svetlana <svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote:
Hi,
FYI I'm not very satisfied with these plans. They are not in line with
existing feedback, partly, and partly are not in line with the practices
I've observed at various on-wiki village pumps. Please look at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Prior_discussion-thread-roundup#Post_Mo…
a bit more. I would like to encourage more thought put into this while
performing programming work. And put early.
S Page wrote:
* To deal with spam topics and posts, we're
going to append "(hide)"
(and delete | suppress for admins) to "created new topic"/"commented"
lines on
board and topic history pages. These will work
the same as
hide|delete|suppress actions do on Flow board and topic pages.
"Concerns about access to viewing or editing others' posts" in the link I
gave has a bunch of topics about this. Looks like people want anyone to be
able to delete others' comments. I haven't seen this as a problem for
years. Please don't restrict delete to admins. (Suppress is another story
and limiting it to admins makes sense.)
S Page wrote:
* We're going to rename Close topic to Lock
topic. This better matches
what
it actually does, which is prevent new posts and
changes (with lots of
bugs
currently). To make it more obvious what Lock
does, we'll remove the
Reply
and Edit links from a locked topic, instead of
them failing on submit.
Note many use case of "This topic is closed" fit well with the Summarize
topic action. People can and should put {{done}}, {{abandoned}},
{{answered}}, etc. templates and markup in a topic's summary.
This wasn't discussed with people at Talk:Flow before, but I plainly think
that's a wrong way to do it.
The reason is that I follow-up a resolved topic rather often. "Hi this
template is broken" "I fixed it in this edit" "thanks!"
"[locks thread]" -
and then I want to ask how to fix another one a day later, I tried the same
fix but it didn't work?? I should spend hours of my time pressing UNLOCK
when nothing should have locked it in the first place???
Hm. On the other side, with Flow, we don't have archives. We don't want
old topics to resurface with 'thanks!' and go all way to the top of
'recently active' list.
OK, please redesign the LOCK feature a little. :-)
0) Please add a 'this answer solved the problem' button - anyone should be
able to click it. It could go to 'this topic has 3 comments and 1 solution'
subtitle in the topic title.
1) When a thread is active recently (less than N days), it can't be
locked. People are able to follow-up within the same thread.
2) When a thread is inactive recently (active more than N days ago), it's
automatically archived. This means it takes extra effort (and warnings
dumped onto your head) when you try to reactivate it.
3) The number "N" should depend on a page activity. If a talk page of an
article is dead, it makes no sense to archive anything, even if it's a year
old.
4) It should be possible to 'HAT' a topic if it's inflammable before the N
days time.
I hope this will ease usability too - it's much easier to click a specific
message and click "it solves the problem" than go through the process of
locking down the entire thread.
Related topics:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:S0duk9t3t90a4c67 - Stop making reply
impossible to closed topics
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Gryllida/Flow - thoughts on
moderation in Flow - DONTs: "Nothing should prevent anyone from replying to
a message under any circumstances."
We'll probably begin developing these in the next two-week sprint.
Hope this helps.
--
=S Page Features engineer
svetlana
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