On 6 September 2014 15:33, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Flow doesn't automatically update template output -- it retains the
output as it was when the user posted the comment. We can argue
whether that's good or bad behavior, but it's worth doing so in the
context of real examples. When would this cause problems?
I noticed this a few months ago and I think that in almost every case it's
not actually a problem. Many common talk pages templates are meant to be
substituted – in fact, some even spit out an error if you don't substitute
them! – so in most cases there's no substantial difference between
substitution and the way Flow currently does it; in both systems, using a
template generates a snapshot of the template at the time the post was made.
There is one notable exception to the above, which is talk page header
templates. One expects updates to a template used as a talk page header to
update every page the template is currently transcluded on, which is not
happening presently. {{talk header}} is currently transcluded on over
250,000 pages, so were these all Flow pages it would be excessively
laborious to edit all of those headers to force a reparsing of the template
were it updated. So this functionality, or something similar, should
probably be included in the Flow MVP [1] if it's deployed on a larger
scale. I think it's fine for now.
I expect that the reason most people find this so frustrating is not
because it results in any problems in and of itself, but because it
represents an inconsistency in the way that templates are handled in Flow
compared to how they're handled everywhere else, and therefore results in
Flow not behaving as an experienced user would expect. As I talked about
above though, the actual severity of that inconsistency is minor bordering
on trivial [2] in most cases.
Dan
[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
[2]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla/Fields#Severity
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation