On 9 September 2014 10:45, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 12:22 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Those of us who presently use talk pages to get the work done. What is going to make us *love* Flow, for all its imperfections, and demand to have it for ourselves? What's Flow's killer feature for us?
First, on the subject of "kiler features", generally - we can make educated guesses, but with software that's used by communities, you really need to experiment and iterate. We guessed that mentions would become popular, but their use has exceeded our wildest expectations. Go to any high traffic talk page and you'll see Echo pings all over the place. A feature that didn't exist before 2013 and that nobody, as far as I know, ever asked for (!) before we built it. And yet it's become indispensable.
Yes, I see what you mean.
If you want to go nuts, you could build a Flow<->mailing list or Flow<->NNTP (oldschool!) gateway. If we do our API homework, I mean literally "you" because we're sure as hell not going to do it anytime soon ;-)
This is tangential, but caught my eye. I've rambled before about how (I think) the unit of a forum is the thread, but the unit of email/NNTP is the individual message; and gateways between the two suffer from this fundamental difference: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/566555.html
So do you expect the unit (in this sense) of Flow will be the message or the thread? Or both, or either?
(Wiki talk pages don't have a unit really, which is their blessing for flexibility and curse for usability.)
- d.