Topic on User talk:Krenair/Phabricator projects

All the recommendations/requirements on the page make sense... when addressed to members of the maintenance community (should I say "developers"?). But to ordinary, even experienced, Wikipedians trying to report a bug they constitute a daunting barrier.

Projects? How should I know? Oh, yes, look at the list of projects. Um... Where is it? When I go to the menu and search, I can get a list of projects I've joined... which of course is empty, because I'm not a developer ("member of the maintenance community"?) Noticeboard? Blocked? Blocking? This is an absolute maze, to which I have no clew.

How many reports have you been getting from non-devs/members lately, anyway?

Seriously, --Thnidu (talk) 19:36, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, discovering projects is likely not as easy as it should be right now. I think that's at least partially due to our organisation of them, but also I suspect Phabricator could be better at this.

When you click on the 'Projects' application on the Phabricator main page (or find the application via search), it takes you to your list of joined projects by default. I agree this is not useful for new users (Phabricator is built for power users). What you can do is select the 'All' query or the 'Active' query in the sidebar on the left.

I don't have numbers on non-developer task creations, but I see multiple filed every day.

Ok, thanks, this is helpful. So I guess my practice will be to tap "All" projects. Or does "Active" mean projects that are active instead of dormant or closed or archived? If so, I'll use that, bc there's no use posting to a project that nobody's following.

I believe the criteria for 'Active' means non-archived projects. It doesn't take into account whether anyone is actively using it.

Thanks. That's still better than "All", isn't it?

I think so, yes. If you don't find anything under 'Active', you might try 'All' to see if something related has been archived.

You could also click 'Advanced Search' in the sidebar and search for part of the name, in some cases.

Can you put this advice onto the phabricator site, with a link from somewhere that non-developers like me will see without having to search for they know not what?

Which piece of advice and where would I put it?

We already link to https://mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug (and the Security form) from https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/...

Well, yes. Including

Select the tags (project(s)) in which you've found the bug:

Projects are how developers find tasks to work on. To identify the right project(s), use the search function (in the top right) to find its description.

And as I said earlier, the search function, as described and presented, works for developers who have signed on to projects that they want to work on. For us users/editors who have encountered a problem and want to report it so it can be fixed, that search function is just one big WTF?!!

To quote Krenair, above (emph. added):

When you click on the 'Projects' application on the Phabricator main page (or find the application via search), it takes you to your list of joined projects by default. I agree this is not useful for new users (Phabricator is built for power users). What you can do is select the 'All' query or the 'Active' query in the sidebar on the left.

You have (AFAICT) a good maintenance and development management system for maintainers and developers, but it is not very accessible to end-users.

I'm away from home right now and using my Android phone to write this. Later, back home, I'll look at phabricator further on my laptop to continue this and hopefully come up with more specifics. But at least you could add the advice (insertion underlined)

What you can do if you don't know or can't find the name of an appropriate project is select the 'All' query or the 'Active' query in the sidebar on the left.

Discovery of project pages was also touched on in the upstream tracker: https://secure.phabricator.com/T11034