Hi,
I've added an extension we've been using at wikihow for awhile to easily post new messages to discussion pages:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Postcomment
It's pretty basic. You can see it in action here:
http://www.wikihow.com/Discussion:Transfer-Cassette-Tape-to-Computer
Travis
On 08/03/07, Travis Derouin travis@wikihow.com wrote:
I've added an extension we've been using at wikihow for awhile to easily post new messages to discussion pages:
* Is this not somewhat redundant, given that discussion pages can have "new section" links, and that InputBox can handle this, to some extent?
* The extension outputs a lot of invalid XHTML, which can *break the whole thing* if MediaWiki is configured to output the MIME type text/xml.
Rob Church
- Is this not somewhat redundant, given that discussion pages can have
"new section" links, and that InputBox can handle this, to some extent?
- The extension outputs a lot of invalid XHTML, which can *break the
whole thing* if MediaWiki is configured to output the MIME type text/xml.
It doesn't seem to be redundant - based on over 2 years of communicating with wikihow users, they seem to appreciate being able to type the message right below the one the are reading and hit post from the same page.
Feel free to change it if you think it can be improved. This extension works for us, I decided to share it, our users like it, it might not be useful for everyone.
On 3/9/07, Travis Derouin travis@wikihow.com wrote:
It's pretty basic. You can see it in action here:
http://www.wikihow.com/Discussion:Transfer-Cassette-Tape-to-Computer
I was a bit disappointed (and surprised) that "reply to ......." sends a message to their talk page, rather than an indented reply to the thread. The latter behaviour would have been quite useful (and unique).
Steve
I was a bit disappointed (and surprised) that "reply to ......." sends a message to their talk page, rather than an indented reply to the thread. The latter behaviour would have been quite useful (and unique).
Steve
Yeah, I can see why that might be misleading. To respond to the post, users just have to go use the textarea at the bottom, but to reply to a user directly, you can click on that link. Most of our users respond to each other's talk page on a discussion so the new messages indicator lights up for them, and this link comes in handy for that.
Travis
Yeah, I can see why that might be misleading. To respond to the post, users just have to go use the textarea at the bottom, but to reply to a user directly, you can click on that link. Most of our users respond to each other's talk page on a discussion so the new messages indicator lights up for them, and this link comes in handy for that.
It seems this extension doesn't support threaded discussion, which limits its usefulness.
No, it doesn't. We tried several different approaches to threaded discussions with the standard Mediawiki framework and none of them seemed effective for the complexity they required. At one point we had a drop down menu above the textbox that was populated with the section names of the discussion page and you could post a comment any particular section. For our purposes, it was overkill and ended up confusing enough of our users that we took it out and went back to a single-thread model.
This extension is by no means meant to be an extensive solution to discussion page problems (I'll leave that to Liquid threads), it's just a simple extension that works for smaller wikis. So far we've had over 150,000 talk page messages posted with it and our community seems to like its simplicity.
Travis
On 3/9/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah, I can see why that might be misleading. To respond to the post, users just have to go use the textarea at the bottom, but to reply to a user directly, you can click on that link. Most of our users respond to each other's talk page on a discussion so the new messages indicator lights up for them, and this link comes in handy for that.
It seems this extension doesn't support threaded discussion, which limits its usefulness.
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