Oliver-
Okay, I hadn't taken into account the fact that people might overlook or fail to understand the "Discuss this page" link.
The problem is that this page does not actually take you anywhere obvious. Even if you find the link, you may be perplexed as to what to do next.
Well, that's why I suggested a feature for making archiving easier. It's an alternative way of solving the same problem, but the end result is that the page is shorter, rather than longer. I think that would be preferable.
How short can you get? We don't want to have just one thread per page. 30K seems like a reasonable length to me even for people with slow modems. Even at that length, however, the current system is inconvenient to use because you have to load the entire discussion into an edit window. That simply makes no sense.
Well, people might find it annoying to have to wait for a 100K page to load up, and then scroll through it to find the section they want to contribute to.
True, so you would have a new upper bound at which you would want to archive the page. But pushing the limit upwards is not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh, I know, we could just have an "Archive this section" link. When you click on it, ping! the whole section in [[Talk:Joe Bloggs]] headed "Joe Bloggs and New Imperialism" is replaced by the line, "Discussion moved to [[Talk:Joe Bloggs/Joe Bloggs and New Imperialism]]", and that new page is created at the same time.
Yes, I thought of that. The only problem is that it would be virtually impossible to move only the history of that specific section (edits don't have a section flag, some edits concern several sections etc.), so you would end up with the equivalent of copy & pasting the section without the history. Not good. The only way to preserve the page history is to move the page and then replace the resulting redirect with the new talk page. Then you can at least do
[[/Archive Dec. 2002 - June 2003]] contents: * Should Lir be banned? * Should Lir be re-banned? * Should Lir be unbanned? * Should Lir be renamed?
This kind of archive could be automatically generated from the section headings.
Oh all right, you've convinced me.
Yay!
But I'm not convinced that a feature to add new sections should be one of those reforms.
Grr...
Most additions to talk pages will be to ongoing discussions anyway, so the feature would rarely need to be used. Before you decided to remove all criticism of your feature from [[m:Layout vote]], Bdesham suggested that it would encourage people to ignore threading, which sounds a good argument to me.
Newbies will certainly use it this way -- they will click "Post a comment" and refer to a comment somewhere else in the discussion at the bottom of the page. Just like they do now: Newbies don't know how to change the indendation level, where to insert comments etc. But the problem will be more visible, because people who previously did not figure out how to comment will now do so. Instead of blaming the fact that newbies behave this way on the new feature, blame it on the real cause: It's damn difficult to properly post a reply. It tookm -me- a while to figure it out, and I consider myself an advanced user. And I -still- find it annoying to set the indentation level for each frelling paragraph that I type.
"Post a comment" is really only part of a larger puzzle. "Edit section" is part of the same puzzle and also makes discussions a lot easier. However, that's primarily intended for articles; what we really need is a "Reply" function to complement the "Post a comment" function. This is tricky to implement, because you need to auto-render the reply links somehow (my idea is to use the sigs as markers, but these are sometimes also used in a non-comment context). At that point we can also auto-sign comments that are entered using either feature, so we won't have to teach newbies the meaning of the four tildes anymore. This, however, will only be possible if we retain the "Post a comment" functionality, because that is one of the two ways to participate in a discussion -- reply in an existing thread or start a new one.
So it is really part of a larger scheme which I am working on, and any arguments you will come up with will be outweighed by far by the benefits of an overhauled discussion system. In any case, I would much appreciate a general attitude of "Interesting idea - let's see how this works" over "Terrible idea - let's vote on taking out this feature right now." Furthermore, I have always been a proponent of voting, but only within a proper process -- voting should be used when there has been a reasonable discussion period and a search for compromise, when most arguments have been presented and no consensus could have been reached.
The silliness of the whole thing is quite obvious from the fact that several of the voting options are not even relevant anymore -- the box is gone, the underlining is gone, the background is changed -- so what's the point of voting? Mav made a suggestion, I agreed to it, we try the new variant, talk about it, see if everyone can live with that, set it up, exchange arguments etc. Discussions should not be endless, but they should also not be cut short by an immediate call to the polling box. That's just frustrating for everyone involved and will not produce good results, because we need to listen to each other before we can really make a decision based on more than just gut feelings.
Regards,
Erik