Fwd: [econsensus] Split title and body of discussion/proposal (#89)

[Jo Paulger]

I've switched to the discussion list because I suspect Tom may not be getting notifications of the comments on github issues.

So, for context, here's the github issue that Chris raised a month ago, with several comments further down the page: https://github.com/aptivate/econsensus/issues/89#issuecomment-15409470.

Here's the kanban card I created for the issue: https://aptivate.kanbantool.com/boards/5986-econsensus#tasks-1296911. It's an orange Question in the "New tasks for review" column at the moment.

Sarah's just commented that having an auto-generated excerpt based on the start of the description has been a feature request for econsensus at some point, but I can't find anything in the kanban or github issues list describing this.

Tom L, can we have your input on this please?

Jo.

[Jo Paulger]

I quite like the idea of showing the field in the form so that the user has the option of filling it in, or if they leave it blank then it gets auto-populated with the first 140 chars of the first sentence/line.  An editor can subsequently choose to supply a better excerpt manually.

Apart from the reasons given by Chris, I'm not keen on the fact that the excerpt gets refreshed each time the description is edited so even if the original author was careful to start the description with a representative sentence, someone else could easily come along, edit the description and insert a line or sentence at the start which causes the excerpt to become unhelpful. Significantly, the editor won't necessarily realise that their change will cause this behaviour.

The change above won't play nicely in my mind with maintaining this refresh-per-edit functionality because in order to prevent a manually entered excerpt from being overwritten, at each Decision.save() working out whether to auto-update the excerpt will mean a comparison of the new excerpt value from the edit form against the start of the description of the Decision from the db. I suspect this behaviour would confuse users, plus it's subject to bugginess - consider the case where a Decision is created with a manually entered excerpt, and then an editor copies the excerpt into the start of the description ... 

In short I think we'd have to abandon the refresh-per-edit functionality if we went this way.

Jo

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Chris Wilson <notifi...@github.com>
Date: 26 March 2013 10:30
Subject: Re: [econsensus] Split title and body of discussion/proposal (#89)
To: aptivate/econsensus <econs...@noreply.github.com>
Cc: jogwen <joanna.wake...@gmail.com>

Maybe if people leave the title blank we can set it automatically? Or have a button to "add a title" to an item (show the hidden field)?

Some features are not just features, like "I want it to do my job for me" or "make me coffee" or "not make me think about how people are going to identify my proposal in the list."

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[Tom Lord]

For the record:

when we first made the very rough-and-ready version of the software, it
had a title field. My memory of this is that in an early review by
Aptivate as a whole, a couple of people seemed to feel that this field
was confusing, or getting in the way of them getting their proposals out
into the world.

At that time we prioritised auto-generating titles as a solution to
this. I think it is a triumph of the agile process that we are now
talking about some third way combining the best of both worlds :-)

cheers,
Tom.

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