Bleh

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)

Going by the heavy opposition here, I am inclined to doubt it.

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.

Hey, I didn't know about that. Cool.

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.

It seems to be crashing Opera 10.63 half the time after saving, however. That is a major problem above any visual fuglyness.

Opera crashes from a lot of things (from my experience, it's an unstable pile of crap, at least the linux version), it's not necessarily lqt's fault. Then again, sometimes you can't see your newly posted comment, maybe that's related. Oh btw, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions and select LiquidThreads from the list

Opera isn't that unstable, it just doesn't like things that are a little experimental. Often websites prefer to ban that browser than, you know, check their site actually works... but anyway.

I can't seem to consistently find what is the problem. It might be if it's trying to automatically update and reload the thread. If I can figure out the exact issue, I'll report it properly. As you can probably tell, I'm not the sort of person to just say "it don't work gud" and assume tech support can fix it like magic. I've been on the receiving end of generic complaints enough to find that isn't going to help at all.

Well yeah, but a decent browser shouldn't be crashing because some website has broken javascript.

Yeah, but sites shouldn't have piece-of-shit javascript.

Anyway, it's stopped it now so it might have been a background window being a dick.

Postel's Law: be conservative in what you produce, and liberal in what you accept from others. Opera isn't exempt.

I'd just rather use IE 5 than start worshiping at the Church of Firefox.

Who's making irrational, kneejerk opinions of something based on no evidence or reason now?

Yay, a browser flamewar. Because there wasn't enough DRAMA already

I believe you started it when you said Opera was a pile of crap. You have insulted my honour, sir, and I challenge you to a duel.

Yes, the battleship grey is ugly. I'll do something about it. But I have a million more important things to do right now. So if you want to do something about it rather than just complain (this isn't directed at you, Armondikov), right-click, inspect element, and play with it.

Could do. I can definitely spot some places where it could be streamlined a little, but I'm not sure how much of that would be in the CSS and how much would be in the software itself.

But when I first started reading Wiki talk pages after years of using bulletin boards I had no clue as to what was happening.

That is why liquid threads was developed, because people new to MediaWiki were unfamiliar with the system and prefered the blog/facebook/BB style thread.

I figured that much.

Now if ONLY the Facebook system was this useful...

I have just found that the new message thing Human was complaining about on my talkpage is a much better way of finding replies to your post.

I don't use facebook so I couldn't comment.

I'm finding it better than scanning recent changes and hoping I've caught the right one. And the fact it highlights new posts is useful if someone is sending threads off in different directions.

I'm in agreement that this thing is far from finished, but the potential is there and I think the benefits for running better discussions could be had now. It might not be best for the extremely short casual chit-chat of the saloon bar, but for where replies tend to be longer on average (with an increased risk of edit conflicts) and where threads go off on tangents this is a far superior way of doing it.

That said, it'd be nice if it could collapse the posts above the highlighted replies, rather than nesting everything and you having to scroll down to find them. But again, this is no different to scrolling down a tl;dr discussion in the normal talk page manner so it's more a problem that it doesn't solve than a problem it creates.

Isn't that what the arrow does? (Which should be a lot smaller and maybe down the bottom of the comment)

No, it just seems that clicking the arrow above a nest of comments collapses the whole thing into an outline of peoples sigs.

It's also messed up for me doing that, showing just a repeat of the same sigs over and over again. Unless you and I have had a conversation in this thread with 100 posts apiece without me noticing.

The repetition is obviously a bug. It is suppose to fold so you can see the next reply to the comment.

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.

Apart from the edit conflicts and the difficulty in directing tangential discussions, it works fine.

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)

File:Lqt_sig_warn.png

Let's see. Yup. I get the warning as soon as I hit the fourth tilde.

That is not a "solution", it's a hack.

This is alpha software, hacks become features.

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.

Well, it's not exactly SensibleWiki is it... But surely if I can figure it out other people can.

Doesn't make any sense to me. Who are the "chicken littles"? People who don't code geeks playing beta with the day-to-day operations? Asterisk (talk) 03:44, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

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.

Though I have to note that it's starting to look a lot better. Still haven't seen any other bugs myself.

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".

I don't understand, why does it say I have four new messages, and link here? None of you nice people are talking to me, as far as I can tell.

Shut the fuck up Human.

Sigh. Human, it's not that hard to understand. You have replied to this thread. This automatically watches this thread (similarly, when you edit a talk page, it's automatically added to your watchlist - I haven't tested, but lqt probably respects the preference option). If you don't want that, go to preferences->Watchlist, and untick "Watch threads that I create or reply to". Also unwatch this page if you are watching it and any individual threads on it. When someone replies to a thread you are watching, it will count as a "new message for you". Yes, the phrasing is stupid, it should be "there are replies to threads you are watching". You have to click Mark as read on Special:Newmessages to clear the notification.

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.

Thanks for all your feedback, your comments helped highlight specific problems that Nx was able to work on. Especially that slow loading problem, that would be problem with ever implementation of this.

I've just spotted the "parent" button. It's useful for navigation, but I'm not sure "parent" is the right word. We seem to have plenty of words for what the post is, but few for the ones it's responding to. Respondee?

I think this is an issue of programmer-speak not translating well. If you have a better suggestion, you can find the relevant messages using Special:Allmessages ("parent" is used in a couple more places).

I think it's doubly lost in translation because I was assuming it was jargon and was assuming it was being used as a verb; i.e., "click here to parent this comment to another"... d'oh.

"although a "Now take me back to where I just was" button would be useful after you've clicked it."

Such a button already exists. It's your browser's back button :)

As for the spaghetti, I agree about that. There are two solutions: Move that subthread out into its own thread, and the collapse button, which I've hidden for now because it was fugly and was taking up too much space.

Ah. Good point. Hadn't thought of that.