Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions/Flow

I'm a casual user, and accustomed to pages that don't dynamically expand themselves. I figure I'm at the bottom of a page, but then it force-feeds me. I'll say now that DuckDuckGo uses the same algorithm, but gives the user an opt-out. Youse need an opt-out at the top of each Flow-enabled page.

Where page content exceeds page size, it is better to permit the use of refills as used by most search engines, or chapters as used by How Stuff Works.

With Flow, the major turn-off is the ever-decreasing size of the scroll-button, coupled with the absence of the Light At The End Of The Tunnel.

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203.161.102.82: Thanks for the feedback. (I'm going to change the topic title, to something a bit clearer :)

I've listed a few of the more in-depth discussions about Infinite scroll, at Flow/Prior discussion-thread-roundup#Search and infinite scroll. As (the 2nd link to) Flow/FAQ#Components_of_the_discussion_system notes, the infinite scroll is an experimental feature.

We do already have a paginated system (seen by users who have javascript disabled), so there are possibilities... Personally, I really like preferences/options, but there are reasonable concerns about our current abundance of software-preferences (and the cost of maintaining them all, as well as the good ones getting lost amongst the less-utilized ones), so feedback is helpful. Thanks.

Quiddity (WMF): Seeing as I have seen nobody in the discussions in favor of infinite scrolling, and that some discussion pages will get insanely long if infinitely scrolled (imagine w:en:WP:ANI if it had been like this its whole existence), a page-based system seems logical.

Jay8g: The thing is, none ever reads page 642 of a page-based system either. Before figuring out what the best way forward is I would like to see search implemented such that you find what you want the same way you would in gmail, by typing a few words from the title/content/authors/etc.

Ebernhardson: That is a valid point, but is not exactly rebutting my point. My point was less about people getting to the end of the page and more about the size of a page where several hundred archives worth of comments are combined.

Quiddity (WMF): Thank you for listening :) I don't think we need a preference here, I for one would never be able to access it as I don't care to login. However, a simple {Flow|NoFlow} switch in the left margin could (ROFL) easily be implemented?

@Ebernhardson: You are right. Most people stop before they reach page 4, it seems only 1% get to page 7. I agree with the search facility, I thought Wikipedia (in the generic sense) has a fairly good one.

Another thought is perma-links on each post, but this could possibly consume a lot of database space, I'm not entirely sure of the technology.

I do like the input tools on the RH margin of this input box. Maybe the {Flow|NoFlow} could have a similar widget? OTOH, KISS!

Quiddity: If there isn't going to be a configuration setup, then the design should be paginated. Among other things, infinite scroll makes the footer impossible to reach, and there are important things down there - such as the license, and the disclaimers. The infinite scroll may have problematic legal implications because of this. (And I hope you won't use my comment as justification to place the footer in a floating div - those are even more annoying than infinite scrolling!, specially in mobile).

Ebernhardson: people *do* read old pages from paginated repositories if pages are grouped in coherent chunks; this is exactly how Archives of talk pages are accessed, and it's also in the archive.org's Wayback Machine that I have suggested should be used as inspiration for this design. The point of pagination is to allow random access to any old page so that it can be searched by relative position. Flow would only allow for sequential access or parameter-based search (by keyword or date), which is not enough to support all access flows.

203.161.102.82: Re: preferences: For anonymous users, I believe there's a possibility of using cookies. I'm not sure though, and that's still not perfect as many users who don't login also don't retain/allow cookies.

Re: Search, there's ongoing work (backend, design) between the Flow devs and the Search devs, to integrate with the new CirrusSearch system.

Re: permalinks for each post: Flow already has those! Click the "..." icons to access the permalinks (and other items). There are some tentative plans to enhance that feature, so that we can copy them along with the thread title to our clipboards more handily, but there are various backend changes that need to be investigated/resolved, first.

Diego Moya: Good point about the important info in the page-footer. I'll ask Design if there are plans already, for fixing or relocating this somehow.

Jay8g: I am also not a fan of infinite scroll. Between page load times with that much data and an inability to see where I am in a discussion and how much else there is, and difficulty in finding the same place again, it's a pain to deal with.

A search box would be better than nothing, but I'd like that in addition to pagination and not instead. Ditto a ToC.