Is there any point in this interface?

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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.

Stupid harmonic Hoover!18:14, 21 November 2010

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.

Stupid harmonic Hoover!18:18, 21 November 2010

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.

Stupid harmonic Hoover!18:25, 21 November 2010

Yes, that part is buggy, sometimes it shows every other thread except the one I clicked on RC.

-- Nx / talk18:32, 21 November 2010

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.

Stupid harmonic Hoover!18:41, 21 November 2010

Does your email provider/application automatically mark all emails as read as soon as you open your inbox? That would be stupid. What's broken in lqt is that it doesn't mark messages as read when you view them on the page they are on.

-- Nx / talk18:45, 21 November 2010

No, my email does not do that. That is because when I open my inbox I can't read the messages without clicking on them. I can read the new messages when I click the "new messages" link, so not marking them as read is stupid.

Stupid harmonic Hoover!20:53, 21 November 2010

Imagine this scenario: You open Special:Newmessages, start reading them, and then halfway through you have to go somewhere so you shut down your computer. You come back later but the messages you didn't get to yet have also been marked as read, so good luck finding them again.

-- Nx / talk20:56, 29 November 2010

That scenario is contrived and you know it.

Stupid harmonic Hoover!12:29, 30 November 2010

Not if you have a lot of messages. You might not be able to read them all at once, and if you just reload Special:Newmessages, you'll lose the ones that were marked as read automatically without you having read them.

-- Nx / talk12:36, 30 November 2010
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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?
-- Nx / talk21:03, 29 November 2010

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?

Kels (talk)21:26, 29 November 2010

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.

-- Nx / talk21:30, 29 November 2010
 

I know it uses MW syntax, my point is that it completely changes the method of editing discussion threads.

Stupid harmonic Hoover!12:30, 30 November 2010

But the current method SUCKS. It was never intended to be used for discussion.

-- Nx / talk12:35, 30 November 2010

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.

SuspectedReplicant retire me12:59, 30 November 2010

It was never intended to do what we do with the Saloon bar either.

- π13:03, 30 November 2010

I don't dispute that. But I think plain talk pages are better than this and that proper forum software would be better than either.

SuspectedReplicant retire me13:12, 30 November 2010
 

There's an extension to integrate phpbb into mw. want me to install that?

-- Nx / talk13:13, 30 November 2010

Personally, I think that would be the best idea. You've made this look much better than it originally did, and I can see it being useful once some of the oddities have been ironed out, but there's only so much you can do with it and forums ain't it.

SuspectedReplicant retire me13:16, 30 November 2010
 

Might be worth a look.

- π13:26, 30 November 2010