My previous posting creates two entries on my watchlist: (diff | hist) Inconsistent statistics on Talk:Flow; 20:38 . . (+23) . . Deltahedron (talk | contribs) (diff | hist) Inconsistent statistics on Talk:Flow; 20:38 . . (+318) . . Deltahedron (talk | contribs)
Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions
There's one line for creating the topic, and the second one for posting the first message. We recently made that the same action, so we need to figure out whether to add an edit summary explaining it, or just combine those into one item.
Especially since there is no explanation for these in the watchlist, these should be consolidated into 1 "created a topic" entry.
Take a look into how it is done on ptwiki: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Esplanada/propostas?action=history&uselang=en The edit summaries (which appear both in the history and the watchlists) include three information:
- The fact that a new topic was created
- The title of the topic (with a link)
- As much content from that topic as possible
This makes it very easy to decide wheter I want to open the full topic or not from my own watchlist.
I strongly suggest that only a single line appear on the watchlist. As a contributor, my view is that I have done one thing, namely, starting a discussion, not two. And there's only a limited amount of space on my watchlist, especially if I'm using one of these new-fangled mobile devices that seem so popular now-a-days.
Yeah, I agree. I'm putting a task in the backlog to combine these. Thanks for bringing it up.
In my watchlist should only be one line per topic put there, currently I've got 5 lines about one single topic here, the \0 by Deltahedron. (NB: Why do we have to use those cryptic goobledigook instead of proper names in wikilinks under flow?)
It should be at most one line per topic, not the whole history of them. If I want to know the history, I go there manually. The current flooding of the watchlist with meaningless blabber is clearly a bug.
Indeed, that topic now appears five times on my watchlist.
It seems that every hiding and unhiding operation creates a new line in the watchlist which is not overridden by subsequent comment or editing operations. That is not right.
On the other hand: I've got the whole page on my watchlist, and only get lines from the single topics, that are explicitly on it, not about new threads or new posts. New Threads are mentioned in my notifications, but new posts to other threads nowhere. Not the expected behavior.
I expect the newest line from here to be included in my watchlist.
It's still the same. I've got the whole page here on my watchlist, but only get lines in either this or the notifications if a new answer to any of my specifically selected topics is written, or e now topic is created. The expected behaviour is a notification somewhere, I don't really now care whether in notifications or the watchlist, but preferably the second, but no mentioning anywhere is clearly a bug.
The short answer is: More options are needed, and will eventually be developed, for us highly-active-editors who have hundreds or thousands of pages watchlisted.
Overall, the Flow team are trying out various possibilities, because it's easier to make changes when Flow is only on a few pages and being used by a few editors who are interested in beta-testing, rather than when thousands of editors are relying upon it working and not changing much. It's currently a difficult balance, between "don't change anything", versus "improve everything possible", with different editors having different perspectives on every feature within.
However, yourself and Deltahedron are correct, that there are some frustrating bugs and/or inconsistencies, in the current watchlist output (even more so, with grouped/expanded changes enabled). I believe the team is planning on re-examining all aspects of the watchlist output in the next sprint (2 week work-plan), or the one after.
(Re: your earlier NB - There are a few ideas about how the URLs & wikilinks can be improved. The most recent set of notes, are at https://trello.com/c/7d2CciSA/446-add-extra-human-readable-text-to-topic-page-urls )
Hope that helps.