Timwi wrote:
While I can surely understand your frustration with
the error
message, I am not entirely sure I understand why it makes you lose
your motivation for the entire patrolling task. What browser are you
using? I hope that you are using some browser that has tabbed
browsing features (i.e. not IE).
As I said before, I am using CrytoDerk's Vandal Fighter 2.1 for
following the RCs on de.wikipedia.
This has nothing to do with the browser (which is in this case Firefox
1.0.$current).
The reason for losing motivation is simple: Whenever there is a
replication lag, it prevents me from doing good work. Nobody will notice
if it took me one click or 5 clicks to access the actuall diff. I am
willing to do some good work (and actually I like the idea that someone
comes along my contributions and says "wow, you did a great job"). The
more boring a job gets, the more fun/honored it should be. I am sorry
not to say something altruistic but I assume that there is nothing wrong
in this kind of behavior.
Whenever I get the error message, I would just press
Reload and
move on to the next tab immediately; by the time I have patrolled all
the other tabs, it will have reloaded.
This morning (while the servers were indeed relatively fast reacting, I
had up to six times to reload to actually get a single diff from one
edit.). "I would just press Reload" could be acceptable if this was a
unique or rare phenomenon (1 out of 100 or less).
I hope that there are people who are willing to do RC patrolling under
even worse circumstances and I know that no-one of the developers is
actively making this job harder. But it is my firm belief that in order
to enable wikipedians to respond fast on vandalism, they should not be
distracted by a diff tool that has a x>50% chance to destroy your work
flow at least once every minute.
Doing rc patrolling means that you more or less watch every edit (this
is still possible even on highly active wikipedias) so we could start in
thinking about more elegant ways to do this job. For example I would be
happy to omit to have click on a diff link...
Okay, I am getting Offtopic now..
Mathias
(and sorry for being so nasty this morning)