Thoughts on replacing "Talk" pages with new system
Deb Richardson
actual discussion, so it has been suggested that we replace them with
another system more suited to the task. The idea would be that each page in
the wiki would link to an accompanying thread in the discussion system, and
each page would have its own automatically-created thread.
I like this idea quite a lot, and am leaning towards the idea of it being a
web-forum system. I'd at least like it to have RSS feeds and proper
threading.
I'd like to know what you guys think, and whether you have any thoughts
about system(s) we might use or requirements we should have in place when
evaluating possible solutions.
~ deb
Mike Shaver
> I like this idea quite a lot, and am leaning towards the idea of it being a
> web-forum system. I'd at least like it to have RSS feeds and proper
> threading.
Questions:
- would we require registration for the forum?
- would we be able to use wiki markup in the forum?
- what are the key elements that must be present for you to consider
it to have "proper threading"?
I think this is quite a promising direction, especially if we can keep
the user databases coherent.
Mike
Deb Richardson
> Questions:
> - would we require registration for the forum?
Ideally no, realistically yes.
- would we be able to use wiki markup in the forum?
Probably not, but it could be plausibly done given an extensible system (ie:
vanilla). Would this be a requirement do you think? Just a nice-to-have?
I'm not sure what we'd want it for, to be honest.
- what are the key elements that must be present for you to consider
> it to have "proper threading"?
People can respond to particular messages within the thread and those would
be properly grouped together. I'd also like the discussions to be
permanent, independently searchable, and archived, rather than the
willy-nilly anyone-can-edit-or-delete nature of the Talk pages. Wikis are
great for some stuff, but not so great for others.
I think this is quite a promising direction, especially if we can keep
> the user databases coherent.
Yeah, I'd like people to be able to send feedback (re: my other post today)
and leave comments without having to register, but I'm not sure how
realistic that is given the inevitable spam.
~ deb
Mike Shaver
>
> Probably not, but it could be plausibly done given an extensible system (ie:
> vanilla). Would this be a requirement do you think? Just a nice-to-have?
> I'm not sure what we'd want it for, to be honest.
I'd want it so that people could discuss format changes and such using
the same markup as the wiki, so that it would have relatively high
fidelity with what they ended up doing on the page. It would also let
people copy and paste from the wiki source into their message, to
quote and reference appropriately.
> People can respond to particular messages within the thread and those would
> be properly grouped together.
Natch.
> I'd also like the discussions to be
> permanent, independently searchable, and archived, rather than the
> willy-nilly anyone-can-edit-or-delete nature of the Talk pages. Wikis are
> great for some stuff, but not so great for others.
Natch! Though I would want MDC search to include forum content in
some/all searches (if we have to expose an explicit toggle for that,
we could, but it'd be nice to avoid it if we can!).
> > I think this is quite a promising direction, especially if we can keep
> > the user databases coherent.
>
> Yeah, I'd like people to be able to send feedback (re: my other post today)
> and leave comments without having to register, but I'm not sure how
> realistic that is given the inevitable spam.
A captcha might be enough to keep the spam down, or a moderation queue
for unregistered posts or something.
But I more meant that people's logins and preferences (?) from the
wiki and the forum should be unified, so that they don't have to
remember different ones or set their timezone prefs or whatever in
multiple places.
One nice thing about talk pages today is that would be a shame to lose
is that when you "watch" a page you also watch its talk page. It's
certainly possible to think of ways in which that would continue to
work, but we'd want to make sure it was possible down the road without
too much pain.
Mike
Eric Shepherd
the zillions of web board packages we select, this can be a great way
to improve communication regarding MDC.
Eric Shepherd
Technical Writer
she...@mozilla.com
Justin Wood (Callek)
page(s). Where anyone can leave a "message" on them, and the wiki
gives a "You have a new message" (or similar?) text at the top of
(nearly) every wiki page the user visits until he visits his/her talk
page.
That is the only thing I would not want to loose, (in addition to
shavers allready stated preferences in his comments).
~Justin Wood (Callek)
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Deb Richardson
actually much better than the wiki system. Personally the User talk pages
drive me nuts because in order to trigger the "you have a new message"
message, you have to post on that user's page, so maintaining unified
threads in a discussion is impossible.
~ d
--
Deb Richardson
Andreas Wuest
On 7/4/06, Deb Richardson <d...@dria.org> wrote:
> Many web forum systems have a similar concept in "private messages" that are
> actually much better than the wiki system. Personally the User talk pages
> drive me nuts because in order to trigger the "you have a new message"
> message, you have to post on that user's page, so maintaining unified
> threads in a discussion is impossible.
Although I would argue that user talk pages also should only be used
if you want to communicate with that user directly. If the topic is
about an article though, post on this article's talk page.
Now, I certainly don't want to stop your enthusiasm regarding a forum,
but for my taste, it should be *extremely* tightly integrated with the
wiki. I don't want to be bothered with another account and one more
password, nor should this forum allow to discuss any other topics than
directly related to the wiki. I fear that people would use this forum
as another user/developer support forum, whereas we already have
plenty of mailing lists, the mozillazine forums, the XULPlanet forums,
irc channels, etc.
In fact, I had even recommended to use your first proposal, adding a
mailto: link to every article, and route answers to *this* mailing
list (please, not one more mailing list...).
I, for one, am already annoyed by the multitude of forums I have to
check if I'd like to help users, not to even start about that I have
to search in 5+ places when I am looking for an answer.
YMMV though.
I haven't been quite active here lately, so you might not want to
weigh my opinion that heavy.
--
Kind regards,
Andi
Axel Hecht
Just as a comment from a outside spectator, please keep this group as
distant from any spam trap as possible. I'm watching this group in order
to follow architecture decisions, I'm not that interested in every-day
content arguments. Nor in penis enlargements, however appropriate. Make
it hang past my knees, to quote my favorite.
Axel
Deb Richardson
distant from any spam trap as possible."
Yeah the feedback list would have to be separate from this list as it would
have a completely different purpose and audience (and a much, much higher
chance of spam).
~ deb
Nickolay Ponomarev
shouldn't make dev-mdc too high-traffic by routing feedback here).
Also I'm not sure I understand what problem you're trying to solve
here. Is this idea a replacement for the feedback proposal you've made
earlier or a complement? If the former, I like shaver's idea of a
hendrix-like web form for feedback more (although when I first read
the message I thought it was intended as an addition to the feedback
system).
Nickolay
Deb Richardson
useful" have two completely different purposes:
Feedback system - meant to be a quick and easy system where any user,
whether registered or not, can send his/her feedback about MDC with no
intention of discussing it further or even expecting a response. This is
simply to get user feedback about MDC.
Forum-instead-of-Talk: Talk pages simply do not lend themselves well to
discussion, so it was suggested that they be replaced with a system that
does.
Talk pages
* ephemeral
* unstructured
* anyone can edit anything
* no threading
* no clear way to reply to particular parts of the discussion
* no time/date stamps
* no archiving or guaranteed permanenece
Forum system
* permanent
* structured
* comments are protected from random edits
* threading
* easy to reply to certain parts of the discussion
* time/date stamps
* archiving
I do agree that the replacement system be tightly integrated with the wiki,
particularly in terms of user registration and login etc. If users try to
use it as a support/wider discussion system we can gently guide them to the
right places for those discussions. If in the long run people end up trying
to use the forum for support more than they use the mail/news lists, well,
that's a whole other issue we can deal with if it comes up. I'm not
particularly concerned about either of these things at the moment.
~ deb
--
Deb Richardson
Benjamin Smedberg
> I like this idea quite a lot, and am leaning towards the idea of it being a
> web-forum system. I'd at least like it to have RSS feeds and proper
> threading.
Would it also send email? The major reason I dislike the current talk pages
is that when people reply to me, I frequently don't get an email (or only
get a "this page changed" email, which is just as useless).
For those of us whose life is organized around their inbox, the current
"watch" and "talk" system is incredibly painful.
--BDS
Eric Shepherd
Eric Shepherd
Technical Writer
she...@mozilla.com
Mike Shaver
> Deb Richardson wrote:
>
> > I like this idea quite a lot, and am leaning towards the idea of it being a
> > web-forum system. I'd at least like it to have RSS feeds and proper
> > threading.
>
> Would it also send email?
Email and RSS notifications would be requirements, yes.
Mike
(stamped it, no erasies)
Axel Hecht
And I was wondering about the double posts :-).
> I do agree that the replacement system be tightly integrated with the wiki,
> particularly in terms of user registration and login etc. If users try to
> use it as a support/wider discussion system we can gently guide them to the
> right places for those discussions. If in the long run people end up
> trying
> to use the forum for support more than they use the mail/news lists, well,
> that's a whole other issue we can deal with if it comes up. I'm not
> particularly concerned about either of these things at the moment.
>
Just to make sure nobody is suprised, the gentle pushing of users to
appropriate forums totally failed on sfx. That may have a totally
different target audience, though, so it may not be bad.
We have seen this in this newsgroup, and we will see it in the forums.
That's life :-)
But yes, a threaded way to discuss things would be good, just as I'd
heart to just comment a documentation enhancement request so that it
pops up in the eyes of writers. Filing a bug feels so BIG, and using the
Talk page is just background noise, I guess. My comment from earlier
today doesn't even show up anymore, I guess I do need to file a bug.
Axel
Eric Shepherd
person that sees the problem isn't comfortable enough to fix themselves.
Eric Shepherd
Technical Writer
she...@mozilla.com
Nickolay Ponomarev
> On Jul 5, 2006, at 4:43 PM, Axel Hecht wrote:
>
> > I'd heart to just comment a documentation enhancement request so
> > that it pops up in the eyes of writers. Filing a bug feels so BIG,
> > and using the Talk page is just background noise, I guess. My
> > comment from earlier today doesn't even show up anymore, I guess I
> > do need to file a bug.
>
> person that sees the problem isn't comfortable enough to fix themselves.
>
with. I used to use
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Category:NeedsAttention
We have a few other Need* categories, too.
Nickolay
Pete Morgan
php.net manual) which point out errors in docs (if the person
cannot/wont change themselves) .. And also bugs and code examples.
The most helpful resource for me whilst learning XUL was XUL planet
Tutorial.. the most VALUABLE was the user comments in the reference..
with code snippets
Think that a threaded "User Contributed Notes" system at the end of the
page would server well.. With comment categories as well eg doc error,
example correction, suggestion, etc..so they can be filtered
2 yens worth..
Pete
Myk Melez
> I do agree that the replacement system be tightly integrated with the wiki,
> particularly in terms of user registration and login etc. If users try to
> use it as a support/wider discussion system we can gently guide them to the
> right places for those discussions.
One way of encouraging only page-specific discussion is to modify the
forum system so that it doesn't allow users to create arbitrary
topics/threads. Instead, the forum system creates a topic/thread when a
wiki page is created, and the topic/thread is specific to that page.
Also, Pete has a point about PHP's "usercomments" system. It's worth
considering putting the discussion thread into the page itself (f.e. at
the bottom of the page) instead of or in addition to a separate page
that we link to with a "Talk"-like link.
-myk
Axel Hecht
Maybe not including, but I sure would like to have a clearer indication
of traffic in the forum page than we currently have for the talk page.
Limiting the topics to existing pages sounds like an interesting 'spam'
blocker, though we should probably expose some clear "get help
elsewhere" links in the UI of the forum part, too.
Axel
Mukunda Modell
What about this: put a few of the newest discussion threads at the end
of each wiki page. Maybe headers only or limited length previews to
avoid large file sizes / bandwidth waste (The php manual has some really
long user comments pages.) Comments / discussion threads could be
categorized but it does not seem too important if there is at least a
subject field. The most useful stuff from the discussion could then be
incorporated into the wiki manually.
After thinking about this quite a bit, I really don't see the need for a
bulky discussion system. Perhaps there is a lightweight script available
that will not take too much work to be fully integrated into the wiki.
I'm willing to volunteer to help develop the system, I would rather take
the time to create something really nice and useful rather than install
some generic forum script and live with it's limitations from now on.
I have a lot of experience with coding in PHP and I have been wanting to
learn more about MediaWiki so I am especially interested in this
project. Maybe we can make a really cool Wiki extension that integrates
the best features from one of the simpler open-source forum systems.
Anyone care to suggest a forum (or some library or other source?) that
is particularly well suited to this task?
Brion Vibber
Deb Richardson wrote:
> The existing "discussion" pages don't actually lend themselves well to
> actual discussion, so it has been suggested that we replace them with
> another system more suited to the task. The idea would be that each
> page in
> the wiki would link to an accompanying thread in the discussion system, and
> each page would have its own automatically-created thread.
>
> I like this idea quite a lot, and am leaning towards the idea of it being a
> web-forum system. I'd at least like it to have RSS feeds and proper
> threading.
What's your timeframe?
Just to make sure you're aware, we've got a Summer of Code student working on a
forum-style integrated discussion system for MediaWiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LiquidThreads
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Deb Richardson
suggestion that came up during the Mozilla all-hands meeting last week.
It's fantastic that you guys have an SoC person working on this -- certainly
saves us a lot of time and effort since it looks like it would be sufficient
for our purposes (on a first glance at least).
I think the wisest thing to do would be for us to wait for the SoC project
to be completed, unless anyone can see any reason that it wouldn't work for
us.
Thanks for pointing this out, Brion -- if it works out, you've saved us a
lot of trouble :)
~ deb
Eric Shepherd
great way to go, assuming it meets our needs, which we won't really
know until it's at least somewhat along the way toward done. Might
as well wait around and see what develops.
Eric Shepherd
Technical Writer
she...@mozilla.com
Jeff Carr
> The existing "discussion" pages don't actually lend themselves well to
> actual discussion, so it has been suggested that we replace them with
> another system more suited to the task. The idea would be that each
> page in
> the wiki would link to an accompanying thread in the discussion system, and
> each page would have its own automatically-created thread.
I really like the mediawiki system and hope you keep using it. For me,
it's worked very well for the pages I've had suggestions on. The talk
pages are very simple and straight forward. Better yet, I'm used to how
they work because of the wikipedia.
Threaded discussion systems tend to suck. For a bad example:
sourceforge. Frankly, I've never seen a good threaded discussion system.
If you are going to make one that works right, then you end up with
thunderbird & mailing lists.... And well, you already have that.
Maybe it's worth checking on the current thoughts and development
amongst the mediawiki developers. There are certainly a lot of people
there talking about how to improve the talk pages on the wikipedia.
Perhaps you can draw from that same well.
Enjoy & good luck on the firefox v2 release,
Jeff
BTW, the developer tab from mozilla.com doesn't go to the developer page
for mozilla.org. It seems like it would make more sense if that was
consistent.
Pete Morgan
each page.
At the moment I'm coding XUL and I spend sometime on MDC reference and
then goto the XULPlanet site for the helpful code snippets eg in JS.
User comments would allow users to add some important info that does NOT
mess with the main body of a page, and they can be edited or vetted,
even become part of the wiki itself at a later stage.
Find the MDC wiki very lacking in this area,
Pete