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Forum:Use liquid threads in the forum?
Contents
| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Use it where? How? | 2 | 21:15, 26 February 2011 |
| First post! | 0 | 20:49, 6 February 2011 |
| Operation Underwired Jockstrap! | 2 | 01:13, 14 December 2010 |
| durfee insurance | 8 | 05:49, 11 December 2010 |
| Bleh | 55 | 17:06, 2 December 2010 |
| Ditto | 79 | 15:10, 2 December 2010 |
| Fugliness | 33 | 13:45, 2 December 2010 |
| Question | 2 | 20:08, 30 November 2010 |
| Is there any point in this interface? | 21 | 13:26, 30 November 2010 |
| collapsing a thread | 1 | 08:00, 29 November 2010 |
| ez edit buttom | 2 | 09:14, 23 November 2010 |
| On threads | 12 | 08:59, 23 November 2010 |
| Vote? | 7 | 06:56, 23 November 2010 |
| new thread | 10 | 04:48, 22 November 2010 |
| Has Nx changed how these appear in the Recent Changes menu? | 9 | 03:41, 25 November 2010 |
Use it where? How?
Are you talking about changing the forum creation template so that anytime someone goes to make a new forum it will make an LQT page like this one?
Are you talking about converting all the old forums to LQT or will some have it and some not?
Are you seriously raising this dead shit again? You see this --> 
, that is you. This issue is dead and buried and won't be discussed for at least six month as per BobM's far-sighted suggestion. Raising it now is just fucking trolling. I can't decide whether you are a simpleton or the net's most cunning troll. I mean you seem to fuck off anyone you talk to, rearranging comments, copying them else where, using your own language no one else understands. But mostly you seem to waltz straight into controversial issues, inflame the situation with your stupid antics and keep them going long after thy have died. You are the world's most annoy concern troll. Kindly fuck off.
FYI, I am answering Armondikov's question to me that was posted 18:29, 6 February BEFORE the beginning of this section. Of course I can't link to the specific post without digging through edit history because LQT is not in use on that page.
You, Bob, and "Relf" are funny cats. Many here would pride themselves on the "mobocracy" but then you attempt to shut down dissent with a bunch of silly personal attacks, ad homs, and acting like we are being disruptive. I am so obviously not trolling at this time. I make jokes just to try to lighten the atmosphere with all this ridiculous bickering. I am expressing my sincere opinions and participating in the standard discussion process in the most legitimate way possible. My comments have substance though you are free to disagree with my reasoning.
What I don't understand is, if you find the subject so uninteresting, why don't you just ignore it? Are you afraid that without your monitoring and input your homies will come to different conclusions? Do you need to make sure your wiki is run your way at all times? Quite a responsibility you have put on your back but if that is your choice I guess your options are to rally support to "ban" me or do what you are doing. You add little substance and create these off topical diversions that go nowhere.
Operation Underwired Jockstrap!
Wherein a confirmed alcoholic tries to draw comfort from his random flailing at the keyboard
While doing vaguely-related search stuff, I discovered that this page is #3 in the results for "liquid threads" on a certain search engine beginning with G!!! Olé Olé Olé!
That's because you guys keep calling it "liquid threads" when it's really called LiquidThreads.
durfee insurance
Where in our hero Human inquires about the new messages notice; Pi discovers click and drag and misuses it; and Nx encounters a large wilder-beast.
"there are new messages for you"
NO THERE FUCKING AREN'T
Please disable this piece of junk ASAP.
It's awful. Totnesmartin (talk) 18:55, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
and it signs the sig twice.
This is shit.new threads are supposed to at the bottom aren't they? Is this going to be spread across all of RW? Totnesmartin (talk) 18:56, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
Having to remember to sign posts in some places but not others is going to create a mess.
You can alter the listing order from the top of the page. You can select newest replies at the top or first posted at the top. It's added functionality but since you're either not used to it or unaware of it, you'll assume it's just shit.
I'm just wondering if I'm the only person who assessed the functionality of this before passing comment... yes, it's fugly, I'll agree every day of the week. But when I first started reading Wiki talk pages after years of using bulletin boards I had no clue as to what was happening. You had to invent an entire new piece of etiquette about indents and replying just to make it work. This automates and controls that with specific replies and notifications. The internet spent the best part of a decade working out how best to set up a forum system and it came up with something exactly like this - it's only on Media Wiki talk pages that you get anything different. So if people complain about this I don't see why they don't head over to every other forum on the internet and complain there too.
I wasn't interested in learning a whole new way to interact online this week, sorry. Especially on a site where interaction works just fine already.
As someone said somewhere, Liquid Dreads might work well on new sites, but existing ones won't like it.
You get a warning if you type four tildes. The text is cut off, but I think I fixed that, although it's still broken for me.
I never got any warnings. (EDIT:nor for this) Totnesmartin (talk) 19:18, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
I must admit, these are pretty hideous. I'm going to be a luddite on this and say we don't need to go this route. If you want to keep it in the forum, fine, but keep it off the rest of RW - including talk pages.
I looks hideous, navigation is screwed up - I clicked reply and then went on a tour of the other sub-headings. I think most of us by now - even newbies are au fait enough with wiki language and layout that we can move away from this format.
Nobody is going this route (well some people have but that is there problem). This a trial run of a very new feature. After having used it for less than an hour, it was already clear that it was not ready to be used across the whole forum space. After being here for nearly a week, sometime in the last twenty-four hour the chicken littles noticed this page and felt that this little experiment is too avant garde for them and want it burnt to the ground. This wiki is rational, unless the topic is the wiki itself, then all ends of emotional ranting is required.
Nobody is playing beta with day-to-day operation is my point, hence the chicken little analogy. There is only two pages were this is being trialled and the people here are acting like this is the final product about to be hoisted across the entire site. We are unlikely to implement this before Wikipedia does at least.
It's the people who are screaming "OMGZ LiquidThreads is ruining my wiki, delete it NAO" and who think lqt should be "uninstalled for a useless piece of junk, the bits that harbored it degaussed, burned over and sown with salt".
But to whom does it reply?
Top dude. Okay I guess.
Yes, in order to linearize discussions. You can go off on tangents if you want by using the other reply buttons.
This whole page is pretty tangential at this point.
The way the tangents get formatted is still confusing me a little. I get what it's trying to do, but here for instance, I read some trolling by Human then suddenly ran into this discussion.
This is not a complaint - it's new so I'm still getting used to it. The "parent" button is kind of useful, although a "Now take me back to where I just was" button would be useful after you've clicked it.
I have a feeling, though, that it would lead to some horrible spaghetti on complex talk pages: at the moment we usually just reply at the end of each topic but this will make it much easier to reply anywhere.
When this first appeared I had four problems:
- Looks - it's looking much better now; thanks, Nx.
- Size - still a bit tall, but I suppose that helps make things clearer. I'll probably get used to it.
- Speed - much better now; thanks, Nx.
- Confusion - I'll probably get used to it.
In other words, I'm about 90% convinced this is a good idea and will work.
Ditto
So far I have been finding it bit clunky, but can we use liquid threads on the forums to make them more forum like? - π 23:38, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
No, this is a hideous new interface available with MediaWiki 1.16. I was wondering whether we should use it on the forums.
Is horrid. But they always say that about new things. (It's still horrid)
I do like that you can reply to people at levels though.
I hate it. This is a Wiki; whatever happened to signing your posts with four tildes and actually having to hit "reload" to see replies?
You can reply at any level in wiki-lang too, just make the indent appropriate. I do it all the time. ħuman
17:46, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
The convenience I like. Can we fix the ugly a bit, throw some colours on it?
So do we like this idea or not?
NO! NO! NO! (But if they are to be used, the background color should be changed to be the same as the background color of the page.)
It is awful. I don't care what it looks like, I can't even follow this conversation, and my comments are ending up in places I don't expect them to.
The nice thing about using the wiki-syntax for our forums is it is the same as our talk pages and articles - ie, a new user only has to learn one way to have a conversation here.
The problem is that they have to learn how to have a conversation. Let's face it, MediaWiki is not exactly ideal for conversations.
Let's see, all you have to do is click reply, type something and click save. No having to figure out where to insert your comment, how many colons it needs, having to remember to sign your posts, and no edit conflicts.
But this has the added benefit of being incredibly fugly, in addition to being terrible at conversations.
Reminds me a bit of LiveJournal, honestly.
I don't like this. It's not intuitive, even for people used to forums. Things posted as a "reply" don't appear next to comment their replying to, & stacks of comments are hidden, only appearing when you click on "show 14 replies". It's not clear why some comments are tucked away like this & others aren't, or what you can do to make sure your comment remains on the page. This makes it particularly badly suited to what we're trying to do here: gauge the opinions of a wide selection of users, since so many people's comments are going to fall into one of these pockets of invisibility.
It place replies a level under the one you are replying to, in chronological order, like Wordpress blogs. I have it cranked up so that I can see all the replies at once and let me tell you the load time is unbearable. This software is still alpha, which means that the developers still have not settled on the features to be included and there are no plans to use this sitewide - I just wanted to test it in terms of a forum discussion and as the messaging system on my userpage.
How do you get it "cranked up"?
Go to my preferences and change your settings for Threaded discussions.
For instance, this should appear under Pi's comment as I'm second. It would save an edit conflict. But considering this is an experimental extension rather than a full fledged install of VB or similar, it's not bad.
The comments should appear expanded up until the newest one under "new messages" which highlights new replies. The ones tucked away are side-tracked threads without new replies. If someone makes a similar reply under the normal talk page system they're equally likely to be missed. Under the usual way of doing it with talk pages, the intuitive thing is to scroll to the bottom of a section - so if someone's indent etiquette says to post a direct reply in the middle of the discussion, you'll miss it unless you were lucky enough to catch it on recent changes.
Fuck, I just wanted to ask "WHERE DO I ASK TO GET THE "YOU HAVE NEW MESSAGES" THING REMOVED FROM MY WATCHLIST?" but I see no way to make a new section or such. Please kill this until it actually works...
At the top where it says, start a new discussion above all the threads.
I do like the idea of folding away old comments by default, but doesn't the new message thing do something similar to that any way? It is had for me to tell because I have set the folding default high enough that I don't get folding.
"There are new messages for you." Where?
This format FUCKING SUCKS ADMIT IT.
Christ, where am I supposed to look in this pile of shit for the "new messages for you"? I have a fucking talk page for "new messages for me". I also have a watchlist I use. This structure needs to DIE a quick death. Because every time I get the "There are new messages for you." I will come here and say this, since I can't find those delightful "new messages" that are supposedly "for me"
KILL THIS NOW.
And I think the new messages page is a great idea, I can see all the new replies to threads I'm following in one place, conveniently highlighted, instead of having to go through Recent Changes (or my watchlist) and spot the pages I'm interested in that have new messages. Going through new replies diff-by-diff is impractical because it is slow, and if I instead look at the whole thread it is hard to find the new comments, especially the ones that go off on a tangent and have been inserted in the middle of a discussion.
Then click "mark all as read" and it will remove them without you having to bother yourself. Have you not noticed that it highlights the new replies with a box around them? Something that isn't done with new posts anywhere else unless you happen to like trawling through diffs or are lucky enough to catch it on recent changes.
And again, I'm seeing nothing other than "it's crap" and a lot of capital letters.
Seriously, am I the only person that has figured out how to use this without any hand holding? It's not difficult.
Fugliness
In which a lively discussion is held, in full good humour, about the visual virtue of MediaWiki's latest offering.
better now?
My take on the fugliness has more to do with how chunky the whole thing is, and how much screen real estate each message takes up. It's got an unwieldy feel about it, if that makes sense. Although I know some folks were more motivated by the shaded background.
Still seems a bit buggy/clunky to me, though I very much like the overall idea. Just sayin'.
The idea is great, but it makes things take up far too much space. It's not just the sig/buttons, it's all the extra whitespace. With just 5 comments, this topic was already taking up half a screen. That will make long topics on WIGO:CP or SB almost unreadable.
I agree with you there - I'm not sure places like TWIGOCP and the Saloon Bar would benefit from this system. Perhaps for that type of informal discussion a modified, streamlined version of liquidthreads would be more appropriate, but they're obviously not developing something like that.
The forumspace, however, would benefit from looking more like an organized forum.
TWIGO:CP and the Saloon bar would benefit more because they have a lot of unrelated threads, with a higher chance of ECs, and a huge db size overhead. The Forum is actually a partial solution to the same problem LQT is trying to solve, because it separates threads into individual pages, LQT goes further and makes each comment a separate page.
Problem is, if you had the same amount of comment traffic we do now, this version of LQT would increase the screen length what, four times? That's a hell of a lot of scrolling, and to my mind that makes things less readable, even with the benefit of doing away with the occasional EC (and they only ever happen to me occasionally, so to me they're not a big deal).
This layout on those pages would be a total disaster. We'd make the World's Highest Website look like a speed bump.
I've decreased the padding and hidden the toolbar (the reply, parent, more buttons in the lower right of each comment) until you hover over a comment. Better?
That is actually quite a bit better.
I agree its looking pretty good, just the load times on this page seem excessive.
I think it looks loads better. It's also not much bigger than the usually talk page crap. And separating and boxing the comments makes it far more readable.
I assume that sectioning off threads properly would stop the massive load times. Loading something the size of the entire SB with this would be insane (I have issues loading it sometimes), but one section at a time wouldn't be too bad - indeed, it would be preferable compared to scrolling up and down it.
The biggest problem, IMHO, is that we're used to the "normal" system, so have gotten used to the quirks and can generally parse the horribleness and deal with the edit conflicts. This is a system that solves problems that we no longer notice! And because we're also used to talk pages running on, splitting it up into threads would be slightly different to get used to.
Solving problems that we don't notice while creating problems which we do notice doesn't seem like it's going to help us massively. I think there's still quite a lot that would need to improve before this could be used on wider scale, like the mess it makes of recent changes, user contributions & watchlists by having edits & comments in conflicting formats.
I'm still not convinced that this will be an ideal system for wiki-noobs. Most online forums have a straightforward system where users either reply to an existing thread or start a new one, but liquidthreads is more complicated. Being able to cut & move threads may be useful, but the reply button against each individual post is confusing. It's not obvious whether the right thing to do when posting in a thread is to reply to the initial post, or reply to the post above. Plus there's always the possibility that a new user, who is used to wikis but confused by liquidthreads, may just click "edit" at the top of the page & hence start a thread outside of the liquidthread & make a mess of the talk page.
I guess the best way to check whether it really is user-friendly for noobs would be to post welcome messages etc. using liquidthreads on new users' talk pages & if they respond to it. But it's probably a bit early to try this yet.
tl;dr version: There is no ideal way of communicating on the internet.
By "not noticing" problems, I suppose should have said "problems we don't care about and just begrudgingly accept". Don't tell me you like edit conflicts! :P
Some forum systems do have reply buttons to individual posts and thread the comments in a tree like structure. I will grant you that those aren't as popular anymore as the linear ones (and seem mostly restricted to old-skool newsgroups), but the alternative to specific replies like this is to go completely linear then add the quote box option as done in other forum systems - so you quote and then add your response and this sort of thing is built in. This method is nice and all but it's a bigger deviation from the usual wiki-way, and anyone who's seen a dozen nested quote boxes will know how bad that can get if it's not controlled! I think this system is an good compromise between the usual wiki-way of doing things and a more flexible and powerful forum system. It's certainly far more compact than a lot of other ones where 90% of the screen is taken up with sigs and avatars and post counts and quote boxes and loads of extra buttons about things. Once you've spent some time in phpBB or SMF or whatever (this is what I am/was used to in my pre-RW days), you find that LQT is a minimalist breath of fresh air.
I see your point about those used to wikis getting confused, and indeed I think people might if they're used to editing. But the way of doing it by wiki is something you need to get used to and learn anyway - it's a complicated piece of etiquette that was designed out of a system not meant for discussing things and as such is not an ideal solution. The talk pages are meant for brief comments regarding articles, where things are focused, to the point, and likely to get one edit every few hours, if not less. So in the case of RW where we may have faster paced discussions where people with larger entries (an entry this large would certainly get an EC in the Saloon Bar, I'd wager) there are areas where LQT would be beneficial and removes the farcical aspects of the wiki-way. "Retraining" back to threaded comments can't be too hard comparing to learning the system in the first place.
I also don't think the etiquette of what comment you reply to is anywhere near as complex as the manual indentations of the existing wiki-way (in big discussions, this is borderline farcical). Here you simply reply to the thread you're responding to; talk to the OP, reply to them, talk to the last commenter (as I'm doing now) reply there, talk to a person above specifically and go there. Excessive nesting may be a problem, but that's a problem anyway, hence the "undent" trope. This is something that can hopefully be fixed in LQT and perhaps added automatically, again this would be solving a problem we begrudgingly accept. I think that's considerably more intuitive for branching discussions compared to the usual wiki-way, where it feels like you're actively discouraged from replying to an earlier comment (or need to add a lot of exposition in to explain yourself). You get a new message either way, so it will be read by those in the thread.
With clicking "edit", that can be switched off to make it n00b proof, as I believe it is on Nx's talk page. Similarly, such an edit button isn't visible when responding via the "new messages" page.
I'd be against adding LQT to new users pages, but I can see that would be an interesting experiment to try if they opt in. It be interesting to see someone with no experience of wiki-way etiquette use it - I honestly think it won't be a problem.
Question
Can one use revisiondelete in lqt? Also, is there a way to rollback or revert to a previous version? I'm not necessarily saying not having these things would be a bad thing.
Each comment is a separate mediawiki page, with its own history. You can use revisiondelete on that, but usually you'll just delete the comment (revisiondelete should still be used to hide the deleted comment from sysops). Rollback and revert also only works on individual comments, e.g. if I were to edit your comment above, you could undo that. But you can't undo my addition of this comment, you'd have to delete the comment, or move it.
Is there any point in this interface?
Why not just make it render identically to the current talkpage format? The raw MW format is nicely minimalistic: it keeps things down to the content of the comment, a tag indicating who made the comment, and an indication of its place in the logical flow of the conversation and it was completely compatible with preëxisting MW syntax and interface. This format adds a huge jumble of buttons and lines and blocks of colour to posts, as well as making it impossible to edit anything on the page without hunting down and navigating through a quagmire of UI bloat. And god help you if you want to edit it en masse in a way LT hasn't sanctioned.
Oh, and it hides bits of the conversation by default for no good reason, making it necessary either to continually interrupt your flow of reading, or to rake through your preferences to fix it.
Continuing that theme, it insists on showing only one thread when you follow a link from RC, rather than letting you browse the whole conversation after checking the new post, for no purpose I can make out.
Yes, that part is buggy, sometimes it shows every other thread except the one I clicked on RC.
The "new messages" indicator is also incredibly stupid — even once clicked on, it does not automatically mark the posts as read, but requires that I click a button to say that I have read it. I should hope that I don't need to explain why that's utterly stupid.
The point of making each comment separate is to avoid edit conflicts and the massive overhead in storage requirements (guess why our database is 20 gigs but compresses to just 5). And I don't get this whole "OMGZ it doesn't use MW syntax stuff".
- What is this then?
If you put the same amount of text in a regular talk page here, say the Saloon Bar, and converted it into LQT threads, how much less space would it take up?
That's not how it works. (It would take up a bit more space actually, because of the overhead of having every comment as a separate page)
The problem is that when you edit the saloon bar to add, say, a 100 byte comment, what's saved into the database is the full page, which is usually above 30 kilobytes. Each edit you make to the saloon bar, even if it's just fixing a typo, adds a lot of redundant data to the database.
I know it uses MW syntax, my point is that it completely changes the method of editing discussion threads.
The current method is used on every wiki that exists at the moment, and the number of pages where it causes a problem is negligible.
TBH, this entire system is silly. If you want a forum, you know where to get it. Trying a hack to turn MediaWiki into forum software is trying to make it do something it was never intended to do.
collapsing a thread
collapsing a thread using the black triangle thing also disappears the header :( is that as designed or a bug ? Hamster
ez edit buttom
How do we insert an "EZ Edit Button" here?
Click drag to new location, grab the post you want and drag it to a new place. It would be nice if there was a new thread drop location at the bottom of the page so you don't have to drag it all the way to the top.
Actually there is a drop box at the bottom of each thread that starts a new thread.
On threads
The word "thread" in this context worries me. A thread is one-dimensional, a chain of replies to the immediately previous post. Here on RW, at least, discussions do not work that way: people go back, reply to earlier posts, expand, and the structure becomes branching and multidimensional. I'm not sure what bearing this has on anything, but I'm sure it's relevant somehow.
Gee, I wonder if there is a way to reply to an earlier post that has a reply button in the lower righthand corner?
You mean other than the fact it puts your post one indent in from the one you are replying to?
Yeah, but wherever the software decides to put it. ħuman 02:55, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
"It is not necessary to sign your post with four tildes. The signature is shown automatically." Fuck off. I sign so I can see my local timestamp.
Vote?
Going by the massive opposition to liquid threads I have seen here, I think it is fairly safe to settle this matter with a vote.
Vote on what? It is interesting technology that we are playing with. I haven't seen anyone really pushing to do anything with it yet.
The question in the title of this page, for starters.
Another question to vote on might be: Should the Liquid Threads extension be uninstalled for a useless piece of junk, the bits that harbored it degaussed, burned over and sown with salt?
I don't think the title was a hard and fast proposal merely a "lets see how this works." Also I see no problem with keeping it installed and letting people with with it if/when they want.
I have never intended this to be a formal proposal, just lets play with it and see if we like it. There has been some useful feedback and some of it can be passed along to the developers of the extension.
Uninstalling might cause some problems with the loss of archival information, e.g, comments left on my talk page.
We can update it periodically and see if it has improved enough for it to be workable.
If you don't like it click ignore on all the threads and never return to this one page.
Yes (To the "Should the Liquid Threads extension be uninstalled for a useless piece of junk, the bits that harbored it degaussed, burned over and sown with salt?" that is.)
new thread
Pi replies to ListenerX's comment here. This is comment and the following ones were forked just to show it could be done.
You can move the entire thread to a new page, it automatically leaves a note point to where it has been moved.
Actually it is quite fun once you get use to it.
Stuff like this is all about getting used to it. That's why people rejecting Vector off hand as soon as it was put in annoyed me, of course it won't feel as good as something you're used to. That's just plain obvious.
You know, people have put forward very good reasons for Vector being worse than Monobook, and the same applies with LiquidThreads, but you seem to be ignoring this and pretending it's just more luddism from the usual crowd who'll scream at the change of a few pixels.
Also, don't sign your posts.
What about just moving part of a thread? Moving it all is pointless, moving part is what we often do to bud a tangent into a new page.
Has Nx changed how these appear in the Recent Changes menu?
Because before they appeared as thread, now they appear as the page they are on.
I couldn't find the "new section" links, so I couldn't start one for this. The time stamps are displayed in UTC, not local time like everything else on the wiki.
Also, I think "having to" not sign here might lead to more accidentally unsigned posts on the wiki, but that might not become an issue. ħuman 17:55, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
Also, even though I had posted here, it didn't get added to my watchlist. This may be "fun" (for Pi at least) but it is not integrated well with the wiki. ħuman 17:57, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
The whole page is not on your watchlist, but this thread is. There's an ignore button at the top of the thread. If you watchlist the whole page, you'll get notifications about new threads too. If you only watchlist this thread (e.g. by posting in it), you'll only get notifications about new comments in this thread. Makes sense.