Author: matthew.britton
Description:
LiquidThreads is full of bugs. Since it does not come with any way to turn it off, this means lots of unusable talk pages.
Taking http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Support as an example, here are some obvious problems just from glancing at the page:
- One of the threads has "-1165" replies.
- In their collapsed state, threads are displayed completely wrongly. As a small example, this thread:
- Gazeb 10:19, 3 September 2010
- MaxSem 19:21, 4 September 2010
- Gazeb 05:22, 5 September 2010
- MaxSem 19:21, 4 September 2010
- Gazeb 10:19, 3 September 2010
is displayed like this:
- Gazeb 10:19, 3 September 2010
- MaxSem 19:21, 4 September 2010
- Gazeb 05:22, 5 September 2010
- Gazeb 05:22, 5 September 2010
- MaxSem 19:21, 4 September 2010
This problem of lower-level posts repeating themselves when collapsed gets worse the longer the thread, making collapsed view for large threads unusable. A thread with 6 posts each replying to the last shows *32* items in collapsed view.
- Internal errors left, right and center. Here's an example: http://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Thread:Support/is_this_possible&lqt_method=thread_history
- For a given, small, amount of conversation the amount of scrolling required has gone up 2-3 times. For a given *large* amount of conversation the amount of scrolling pales next to the need to repeatedly hit "next" and wait for pages to load. Both of these are big usability hits.
- The interface is ugly, doesn't integrate well with any MediaWiki skin in common use, and outright clashes with some of them.
- If you collapse a thread, the title disappears and is not shown anywhere. So you can see all the replyers and timestamps, but not *which thread it is*. Collapsing more than one thread at a time thus leads to an incoherent mess.
- When collapsed, you can click on the usernames in the signatures of posts but you can't actually *go to that post*. To do that, you have to un-collapse the thread and then scroll down to find the post. This makes collapsed view even more useless.
- If a thread loads with just the first post, and "Show X replies" underneath, and you click to show those replies, then collapse it, it claims there's only 1 post.
- Watching is broken: you can only watch individual threads, you can't watch the page for new threads, like you would do with any normal talk page.
- Any bot that interacted with talk pages is now broken.
- Thread history view has a "comment" column. Since you can't add a comment, every entry in this column is "Reply to <thread title>".
- By default, signatures only link to the user page. Even on thread history pages, you have to click a silly little "+" button next to the username to get talk and contribs links.
- Go to http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Support and click the "Thread" tab at the top of the page. You'd expect it to take you to the same page, like that tab does for everything else. Instead you're taken to a seemingly random thread somewhere on that page. It isn't even the same one each time.
- Completely non-functional "Thread talk" namespace.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal