Thanks for all of the questions and suggestions. Flow is still in active
development, and there's a lot of feature work being done right now. Some
of the features that have been mentioned in this thread are actually just
about to be released, and some are coming up over the next month or so.
Here's how it breaks down:
Coming out very soon:
-- The ability to edit other people's posts will be out on Mediawiki by the
end of next week. We’ve made a few interface changes to support that. Posts
that have been edited by someone that isn’t the original poster now say
“Edited by Username 3 minutes ago”, so that it’s easy for everyone to see
what’s happened. When someone edits an existing post, we fixed the diff
pages so that you can browse between previous and next changes. [1]
-- Sane threading model, with more levels for replies and tangents -- also
coming out next week. Talking about this feature gets super lengthy and
complicated, so I’ll write another post right after this one that will give
all the details for people who are interested. [2]
-- Admins viewing deleted boards without undeleting it -- coming out in
three weeks. [3]
Working on these next:
-- Moving topics between boards -- We’ve got designs and estimates for
this, and I’m expecting that to come out in April. [4]
-- More powerful watchlist/notification functionality -- This is a very
important feature that will be getting a lot of team attention over the
next month. We need to re-read the mountain of requests that have
accumulated, and reach out again to you for fresh feedback. Improvements
will aim to be continuous and incremental.
Future plans, not scheduled yet:
-- Full wikitext toolbar -- We’re going to release v1 of a VisualEditor
toolbar in the next couple of weeks. This version will just have three
functions: Bold/Italics, Links and Mentions. (Mentions will have
autocomplete with user names that have already participated in the thread.)
We’ll definitely be doing more work on toolbars coming up, but we want to
see how this first one works before we make any solid plans.
-- Make the links to threads look nicer -- Yeah, this is annoying. It’s not
in our top five list of annoyances at the moment, but we’ll keep checking
off annoying items. Nicer links will get its turn. [5]
-- No-JS and accessibility -- We’ve done some work on this, and there will
be more coming up. [6]
So there's a lot of work still to be done, but we're adding a lot of
features. I hope this helps explain where we are in the process.
We’re going to have an Office Hours Google Hangout on Monday at 19:00 UTC,
so we can answer questions and talk about the project. If people are
interested, we can schedule more of these.
Thanks again for all the specific feature requests and concerns. We’ll be
requesting larger and wider quantities of feedback in the near future, as
some of the upcoming features are planned and built.
Danny
Phabricator tickets mentioned above:
[1] Flow post editing for autoconfirmed users:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90670
[2] Prototype for new indentation model:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88501
[3] Admins viewing deleted boards:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90972
[4] Moving topics between boards:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88140
[5] Less ugly topic page links:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T59154
[6] No-JS tracking:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T60019
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 12:51 PM, Derk-Jan Hartman <
d.j.hartman+wmf_ml(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 17 mrt. 2015, at 19:45, Isarra Yos
<zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 17/03/15 15:32, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:17 AM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Indentation is a crappy workaround for when your communication system
>> does not support a sane threading model - it isn't a threading model or
>> a substitute for one.
>>
> Err, what's the threading model in Flow's UI? Or Facebook, phpbb, and so
> on, or whatever other site you were referring to that knitting
grandmothers
> use? Can you really call not having any
(user-visible) threading model a
> threading model?
>
> From what I've seen of those types of discussions, people have to either
> explicitly refer back to whatever they're replying to (e.g. Twitter
tries
> to, and doesn't very well from what
I've seen), quote whatever they're
> replying to (e.g. phpbb, email (especially how Gmail renders it)),
and/or
> just deal with having to dig through an
undifferentiated pile of
replies to
find the
ones that might be replying to the post they're interested in
(phpbb, Facebook).
On a lot of sites they can also get away with a lack of threading
because the
discussions themselves are relatively inactive, where you don't
have multiple people jumping in and replying to different points. Such
inactivity isn't the case on many wikis, where discussion is more key to
their functionality, and certainly shouldn't be an assumption here.
I still think that a threading and collapsing model as in
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/101962/google-maakt-leeftijdsrating-verplicht-vo…
<
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/101962/google-maakt-leeftijdsrating-verplicht-vo…
makes a lot more sense.
It’s limited in width, readable, collapsible, has threading with
indenting, has a maximum amount of indenting, and is a tech website that is
also very intensive, and all over the place.
DJ
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