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Creation of new thread fails silently if no content is entered, but this should be possible. Solution: add automatically thread title as HTML comment(!) to new page, or throw error message
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Description

When adding a new thread, for example as a placeholder to motivate new comments to a subject, or to ask a short question, the current Lqt implementation fails to create the new thread

  • if only the discussion title ("Subject" line when clicking "Start a new discussion") is given ; and
  • if no content is entered in to text input field for the content

observed in Liquid Threads (Version 2.0-alpha) (r89075)

As far as I understand, the technical reason is that the underlying sub page creation for the subject fails - when no content is present.

However, in the framework of creation of a better user interface of Wikipedia and MediaWiki Talk pages, this should be possible, though.

I suggest to create in this case automatically page with a placeholder content, namely the given Lqt thread title subject as HTML content in the sub page body.
Thus the page looks empty, but has (relevant-to-thread) dummy content.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads

Details

Reference
bz29200

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 11:34 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz29200.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

(In reply to comment #0)

When adding a new thread, for example as a placeholder to motivate new comments
to a subject, or to ask a short question, the current Lqt implementation fails
to create the new thread

  • if only the discussion title ("Subject" line when clicking "Start a new

discussion") is given ; and

  • if no content is entered in to text input field for the content

observed in Liquid Threads (Version 2.0-alpha) (r89075)

Show at least a warning to the user that they forgot to enter any text in the body and therefore the new thread will not be created.

I'm not going to prioritise this bug for fixing before the backend rewrite is done. It will probably be fixed by that.

But is is very easy to fix in the present version using my ad-hoc solution. Please.

(In reply to comment #3)

But is is very easy to fix in the present version using my ad-hoc solution.
Please.

Not really. LiquidThreads' edit form is, at present, too tightly coupled to the page editing code. It would require hackery or substantial refactoring. I'm happy to look at patches, but given the (lack of) use case, I'm finding it hard to make an exception to my general strategy of focussing on the updated backend.

r89958 looks like a workaround for failure to handle error conditions in the JavaScript code.

The error info from the dieUsage appears to perfectly correctly make it back to the 'doneCallback' function in 'handleAJAXSave' (via the actual call in liquidThreads.doNewThread).

However, doneCallback tries to handle error conditions by submitting the same form as non-Ajax in the hopes that that code path will show an error as well, which apparently isn't ending up having the expected results.

It should instead probably show the error message directly.....? Does this need more general or more specific handling for particular kinds of errors that we can't report back cleanly through this interface?

reopened ! because today's reversion of r89958 bring this bug back again. Sorry, friends.

Attention Andrew: please fix this problem "Creation of new thread fails silently if no content is entered".

shealen.clare wrote:

This bug has not been touched in at least six months. With this in mind, I've been asked by the bugmeister to bump this bug's priority down for "High". Concerns can be addressed to mah@everybody.org.

Valerie.m.juarez wrote:

When attempting to create a new thread on https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Xpd with with text in the subject but none in the body of the post, I got a message saying "You cannot post a blank message". I also tried to reply with a blank post and got the same message.

Closing as WORKSFORME.