For the Flow team, I'm definitely interested in talking more about it. I can't comment on the current state of the code, but surfacing active, relevant conversations to users is going to be a focus once we've got the feature built to a good standard.

I think discussions are especially good to show mobile users, because it's a comfortable way to contribute from your phone. Editing an article on the phone is challenging, but an open text field in a Flow conversation is perfect.

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 11:33 AM, S Page <spage@wikimedia.org> wrote:

(Cc'ing Flow list)

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 4:44 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

In the alpha mode of mobile we show a number inside the talk icon that
shows how many open talk topics there are on a page.
What do you mean by "open"?

Also I wonder if this is something Flow is thinking about.
Sure. A Flow board is a "window" onto all its topics, it initially displays the first 10. An upcoming rewrite will hint how many there are in total at the bottom of a TOC; I think Flow could update the same page property you're using. Flow can have topics in multiple states: closed with a summary and hidden, so we'd have to figure out what to count.

One issue is on a mature wiki there may be discussions going back years but little or no recent activity. Flow will soon give you an option to display topics by most recent activity as well as by date created, but you have to visit the talk page to explore this. There are ways to compute how "hot" a board is based on counts and recent-ness of topics/posts/contributors, but a wiki isn't a popularity contest.

I don't mind the number in the discussion icon and I think we should try it in the Winter Fixed header. IMO on the desktop Hovercards might be a better place to show more information about activity on a talk page/Flow board.

The code has been stagnating for some time, which is a real shame in
my opinion as it surfaces the talk page and discussions more. It works
by generating a number of sections on each save and storing them in a
page property to avoid performance implications.

I personally find it very intriguing when I see a high discussion
count on what seems like a non-controversial topic. e.g. Tofu has 37
open topics and makes me curious to click on it and read what people
have been discussing around it [2]

Either way can we make a decision and either kill this code, or bring
it into beta mode?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco?mobileaction=alpha
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu?mobileaction=alpha

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=S Page Features engineer