This board is for asking for help with the GlobalPreferences extension.
Questions about installation and development should go on Extension talk:GlobalPreferences, and bug reports and feature requests on Phabricator:tag/globalpreferences
Probably issue is not related to the board topic.
I no longer have access to the email address that I supplied when I first registered on Wikipedia.
Bizarrely, I can't find anywhere on the site that will allow me to update it. When I look at Email Options on my Preferences tab, it gives me lots of choices of when to receive emails, but doesn't say what email address Wikipedia has for me, or how to change it.
Help!
There is a text "change or remove email" and it links to Special:ChangeEmail. Try it.
I've created my global page on meta.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org. When I opt it out on another wiki, it is still displayed there. I expected it not to be wisible.
FYI, create a central user page on meta.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org displays that message before saving:
Error: Warning: This action has been automatically identified as harmful. Unconstructive actions will be quickly reverted, and egregious or repeated unconstructive editing will result in your account or IP address being blocked. If you believe this action to be constructive, you may submit it again to confirm it. A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: <div class="mw-parser-output"><p>Log possible Spam edits by new users II </p></div>
Thank you for working on it!
Global userpages still function the same way: you can set to have one and then the override is making a local page, or not have a global page. There are not local overrides for this feature in preferences.
That's a good find. I created task T188423 to keep track of it. Thanks!
Edit: Whoops, I didn't see Keegan's comment before commenting. I think we can make this less confusing though.. Let's discuss this on Phab.
It's simple. Try to update global preferences, it won't save. Clicking save won't do anything. Clearing cache still won't work. Tried on 2 devices, still won't work. Help?
I am searching for documentation on the Global Preference options with two checkboxes for each option.
They are in the Global References/User Profile/Email options and in the Global References/Editing options.
I am unclear about their purpose, and why they are needed. But in my case, they can be set incorrectly and saved. Thus displaying incorrect info in the Local Preferences. In either case, an incorrectly set option adversely affects the same options in the Local Preferences.
The cheapest suggestion is to, eliminate the grey coloration of the checkboxes and display their status clearly, would be very helpful.
Please see screenshot 1 of the problem uploaded to the commons
https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-editing has the following text "Make this setting global" but no checkbox and then "Select all" with a checkbox. So, what does the checkbox do?
Good question! The checkbox will select all the checkboxes below it (or unselect them, if it's unselected).
Just today actually we're rejigging this to be just a checkbox with "Select all options below to be global". Check out some screenshots at phab:T188358#4004802.
Do you think this will make it clearer?
No, because it sounds like it not only makes them global but also enables them all. Maybe it would be clearer to have a checkbox "Make all selected preferences apply globally" for this function?
Can we possibly just omit the "Make this setting global" check box, I mean if someone navigates to Special:GlobalPreferences then it's obvious that he wants to makes the preferences global and not local
You mean not have anything at the top at all?
Is it obvious that the left-side checkboxes are the things that enable each pref globally? (I think it is, but I've been looking at this form for too long!) Oh, and if you hover over those left checkboxes you do get a popup that says 'make this setting global'; that might help too, along with the background colour highlight.
And also, is it obvious that the checkbox at the top is just a convenience toggle thing that turns the ones below on and off and doesn't do anything in and of itself? And that it only applies to the current preferences tab?
I happy with whatever the consensus is! :)
This is a placeholder topic for what works well in GlobalPrefs. In a chat on #wikimedia-tech, I heard good things from Wiki13, revi, legoktm and addshore about it. :)
As someone who visits many, many different language wikis, I'm very much looking forward to setting my global language preference one time and never have to worry about it again, rather than having to change it with each new wiki I need to interact with in-depth.
This feature seems to be what I need. I want to disable email notifications for all Wikipedias except in those where I'm active. I don't want to get those messages from Wikipedias, where I can't read a single letter (because I don't know the language) and never did an edit. Waiting for deployment :)
Yippee! Funnily 'nuff, an english-us term to celebrate being able to set all my lang to -gb...
Or all my base to belongto-us.)
It will be good if I can share the same customized signature on every wiki.
@Octahedron80 There's several ideas and concerns on the ticket. The main concern is that users might customize their signature such that the links don't work in other projects. For example [[Benutzer: Blah]] works perfectly on German wiki but won't on other wikis and explaining this to users will be challenging.
Feel free to participate in the discussion and provide your thoughts. Thank you. :)
That might not be problem if we can convince users to use magic word like [[{{ns:3}}:Duh]], or make a new shorter symbol like %t.
There's no good reason why signatures should even be modifiable. It's good that in Structured Discussions you can't customize your signature because it's added automatically.
The reason is easy: they do not want to use default (boring) signature. It is off topic on Global Preferences though.
I'm a bit late, but I find there are a number of extant issues with the design. Overall the functionality is good but it's not as intuitive as it could be.
We decided not to use OOUI items because this is built on top of regular Special:Preferences which also does not use OOUI yet. We have an item on the backlog to address this when all of Special:Preferences is transferred — phab:T186842.
I agree that global should probably be default for new users moving forward (and even for most current users) but this is a much larger question that our team does not have the capacity to handle right now. We find that most new users only edit on one wiki and our hypothesis is that most new users do not visit Preferences at all [citation needed] so we believe this effort wouldn't really result in much benefit for newbies, given the work required.
Interesting point about allowing users to set the global preference to 'local wiki default'. I'm not sure it's necessary, since it's already the behavior if the "set global preference" box is unchecked. At this point the only overrides for defaults would be on a wiki-by-wiki basis via Special:Preferences.
I suppose the case where someone wants to change e.g. all of their interface languages back to the default, because they'd manually changed the option on multiple wikis to English, is probably rare enough not to be something that needs to be fixed. It's a shame that so many minor improvements like those couldn't realistically be done because of how limited WMF developer resources are.
@Jc86035 Can you tell me why someone would like to set all their interface languages back to default? Special:GlobalPreferences settings completely override the settings made on Special:Preferences.
I don't know, actually, but it was the first thing I could think of that would be different on most wikis. I suppose "reset all local settings" buttons could work better?
@Jc86035 Your global setting overrides your local settings everywhere - but in case you ever turn the global setting off, your local settings will still be there. We consider this to be a feature right now. The user does not have to worry about what they already set but if they have to go back, they still can. Resetting them would mean we don't remember their local wiki preferences anymore.
That idea is actually, technically speaking, better because it will help us save on database space if we don't store both the local and global values. It is on our list of things we can potentially implement if global preferences ends up taking too much database storage.
Currently at the first view it's hard to understand what do all these checkboxes. What about clearly distinct global conf ones and normal preferences ? Perhaps adding a vertical border, that separate the two kind of options. Hope I'm clear :)
Yes, this (the issue and the solution with a vertical border) does make sense, thank you.
I also agree that two checkbox in front of the same option is confusive. The first checkbox in each row should have the label "Global" or "Globally". May be it should even appeart below instead of before the option to which it applies, or the two checkbox should be below the option label, but each one with a specific label:
Option description [x] by default on all wikis [x] on this wiki
(the term "global" can be confusive, the top of the form)
It is also not clear what is the effect of checking the first checkbox when the 2nd is not; it could mean - "apply the following ON/OFF setting on all wikis as set in the second checkbox, but as the 2nd is not check this would mean "apply the OFF setting on all wikis" - "apply the ON setting on all wikis" independantly of the local setting specified by the second one.
When an preference is not an ON/OFF setting but some choice in a combo, or some text, it may be clearer, but then we cannot show what is the value to use globally (the local and global settings could be very different strings or choices or could not be defined at all to use the default site setting).
In my opinion each local settings (ON/OFF, combo choice, text) should be followed by a checkbox below it to say:
[x] Option description [x] apply this setting globally
Radio setting: (o) Option 1 (o) Option 2 (o) Option 3 [x] apply this setting globally
Select: [ Chooose v ] [x] apply this setting globally
Input text field: [ .... ] [x] apply this setting globally
When loading the form, local settings would be displayed and the second checkbox below each option would be always OFF. It should be clicked only to indicate that we want to copy the local value to the global settings.
In the Global settings however, the same form would display the same options but with their respective values, here also the second checkbox would display "[x] use this setting to override the local setting."
finally note that the "default site default" should not be taken into account: it is just used to define the local setting for the user içn case it has not been stored in the user profile. The same also applies to the global setting: an empty input field or absence of ON setting does not necessarily means "use site default", but just we want this setting to be OFF or empty even if the default site setting is ON or has some text. It may also happen frequently that many users will have a local setting stored locally which has the same value as the local setting, but it is not overridable/freely changeable by the site, if the site default is changed later. So site default settings, or global should be another option value we'll want to enable explicitly.
Some A/B test could confirm what is the best option for the layout.
The number of people using the beta feature does not appear on the beta tab for Special:GlobalPreferences anymore.
WHat about betafeatures stats ? With what statistics numbers present on the GlobalPref page correspond ?
Those who might know better can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Beta Features stats being displayed are/will be only for the local wiki. They are not global stats.
