On 6 September 2014 15:33, Erik Moeller erik@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