Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions/Flow

I have an impression I've talked about that already, but can't find it.

Why are headers so huge and contain so much information? This is probably useful when topcis only view is used. Maybe some information can be hidden when discussion is opened? I'd say that actually none of that information (i.e. anything but topic) is needed when discussion is opened. You can reply below and see activity yourself.

Also it would be nice to drop background color for the headers (that would also remove the need for padding and make them smaller). Whitespace is enough to separate topics (or at least I hope so).

Please take a look at http://practicaltypography.com/websites.html Maybe some of that could be incorporated into general design guidelines?

Something like http://snag.gy/FKKLJ.jpg That would need some indicator (wide arrow?) to show that discussion is hidden/shown. Icons would need a bit realign too. Maybe smaller headers icon also.

Anyways, just my thoughts. Feel free to ignore them :)

+++++ thank you so much for this idea

Filed bug 69880, should be trivial to program imo

I agree that the the headers are too big and overstuffed with info. We're going to take another look at that design soon. Thanks for posting your thoughts about it; it's helpful.

DannyH: Can I work on this bug or would your design work interfere with it and render fixing this specific issue useless?

Gryllida and Lazowik: As a first step, they're implementing part of this in the next sprint, for all the 3 expansion states, by the removing the line that is currently in the middle (who started the topic, and the number of participants). Tracked at https://trello.com/c/C2y2NWCE/691-topic-title-bar-remove-clutter

Quiddity (WMF): You're implying that I can't work on this and someone else already is? I could try to resolve this as a first bug, but we'd be speaking of scale of weeks as I go through installing and reading the relevant things.

Volunteer participation is hard. :)

Gryllida: You could start by developing user .css and .js that make for a better experience, and offer them to others to try out.

If you can run MediaWiki-Vagrant, you can be up and running as a developer in a day. Getting gerrit, bugzilla, etc. accounts is more time consuming.

I'm yet to check again, but I appear to lack virtualisation support in this BIOS.

There's already a fix for it :) -- see https://trello.com/c/C2y2NWCE

Is it in production (here) already?

BTW, I would like to not only take out the line "Username started this topic and there were 2 other participants", but also take out the stuff "Reply • 13 comments • Active 1 minute ago".

1. Surely one would reply to a topic after reading the entire thing. Reading the entire thing should be encouraged. (I would also like to encourage replying to individual statements, if at all more clear, although in some cases after reading the entire topic.)
   • Do some research about how many "classic" talk pages replies were pertinent to place at the bottom. Not many really!
2. The number of comments may be better shown at the right in a small thing. It doesn't warrant a separate line.
3. The activity again may be shown in small print at the right bottom, like it is shown for Flow messages now. It doesn't warrant a separate line. (It is possibly interesting enough to be spelled out in full.)
4. I'd like to show both date when the topic was started, and when it was last active. Is this possible?

Thanks.

I would definitely agree with removing the header reply button, but I'm not sure about the other things-- I do find them helpful sometimes for seeing if I need to read that thread.

Yeah. Notice I'd not suggest removing the timestamp. I do find a need to remove 'N comments' bit though. Hm. How is the number of comments helpful though? Often people discuss but end up not finding a solution (which means your look would be as useful as if it had 0 replies).

I logged in to Trello, but appear to be unable to comment. Aw. :-(

Terminology: you're talking about the topic titlebar. The "header" is the wikitext area at the top of each Flow board.

Anyway, the shrunk header titlebar is deployed, the middle line

Cyberpower678 started this topic and there were 2 other participants

is gone .

• The first post under the titlebar is the person who started the topic (and it's in the topic history)
• We lost the metadata "2 other participants", you only have "5 comments". We thought about keeping it in hover state of "5 comments", but it's klunky.

One reason for the background color is to suggest that the entire topic titlebar is a button that collapses/expands the topic (we didn't want to fill the left side with collapse/expand indicator). For some reason the titlebar is not as button-like as it used to be.

> Terminology: you're talking about the topic titlebar. The "header" is the wikitext area at the top of each Flow board.

I don't get the difference; please post a screenshot...

Gryllida: I agree that reading the conversation before writing a reply is very important. Right now, clicking on "Reply" scrolls you down to the open edit field, so there is a sense that your reply is part of a larger conversation. Functionally, it's just a shortcut to the bottom of the thread, which I don't know if we actually need. That link is still in play.

The rationale for the other two pieces that we retained -- the number of comments and the time it was last active -- is that they could help you decide whether you want to start reading that thread. If a conversation could be 6 posts long or 600 posts long, that's a helpful thing to know on your way in. :) The same can be true for the recency -- a thread that was active 10 minutes ago is different from a discussion that happened two years ago. You can't divine either of those pieces of information from the top of the thread, so I think it's useful to have them there as a guide.