2015-09-02 3:15 GMT+03:00 MZMcBride &lt;z(a)mzmcbride.com&gt;om>: This is an exaggeration. The "Topic:P0q3m7vwysdezd2m" URL is not pretty, but this is remarkably unimportant: I've been using several personal and project-level Flow pages productively in three languages every day for the last few months. I never had any reason to think that these GUID URLs are a problem. Contrariwise, it's far more convenient to post them instead of an unstable URL with an anchor. Much more importantly, Flow very much does cover basic talk pages. You can write a title and an OP and get people to reply. This has been working for many months already. This is my definition of "covering basic talk pages". Even more importantly is that you can write a title and an OP and get people to reply ON THEIR PHONES. This is nearly impossible on the classic talk pages; on them you are lucky to even manage to read the existing discussions, and typing a reply requires extra finger-acrobatics. With Flow it's as easy as on Twitter. I do almost no coding for Mobile Frontend and apps, but I'm a kind of a volunteer mobile technologies ambassador in my home wiki, and good mobile support for talk pages is the #1 request that I hear from veteran editors with regards to using Wikipedia on their phones. This is another thing that Flow has been doing for many months already. As for new users, well, if I had a sheqel for every time that I had to explain about ::: and --~~~~ to new Wikipeia editors, I could buy a very good dinner to all the participants of this thread. With Flow I just don't need to do it - they click Reply and just reply. I received a lot of positive feedback about Flow from my home wiki editors, both veteran and newbies. There are nearly 900 Phab tasks for Flow, but the *only* thing that I really miss is a basic easy way to go back to old posts - be it auto-archiving with a calendar, search, filtering, or anything other way to access them, and even that has not been a blocker for productive daily use of several Flow boards. (Just as a reminder, going to old posts in classic talk pages is different on every page, according to their authors archiving style, so it's not much of a regression.) I wish that more discussion pages on which I wrote would use Flow, and I very much hope that Flow's talk page component would be more than just "maintained and supported". Thanks, collaboration team; I expect to see more of your skills and innovations soon. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

Amir E. Aharoni wrote: I think most of the points you raise here are true of LiquidThreads or _any_ prototype of a discussion system. Yes, you get a reply button instead of needing ":: ~~~~" wikitext. That's great, I agree, but after having watched LiquidThreads rot and then seeing a lot of time, money, and effort put into Flow, I'm pretty dissatisfied with the deliverable being essentially a very intricate proof-of-concept. I think not getting Flow fully deployed to Wikimedia wikis is objectively a large failure to deliver. Consequently, it seems most prudent to be asking what went wrong and how it will be better next time. The underlying reality is that we still need a better on-wiki discussion system and it now looks like neither LiquidThreads nor Flow are going to be it.