Author: lwelling
Description:
OBOD used to link to page sections. Echo should too.
Possibly applies to other notification types too.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46937
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48183
(In reply to comment #0)
Possibly applies to other notification types too.
Was already filed for email notification, bug 46937.
Related URL: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/62122 (Gerrit Change I2745ba194ba1f9b5b7c446588da6586e87d35b31)
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/62122 (Gerrit Change I2745ba194ba1f9b5b7c446588da6586e87d35b31) | change APPROVED and MERGED [by jenkins-bot]
On-wiki notifications have an advantage over email: the link to the diff could simply be the timestamp, as on most blogging platform and social networks, without cluttering the interface more.
This is about a section link (which is what you want in most cases).
However, I agree a diff link could be useful sometimes.
(In reply to comment #5)
This is about a section link (which is what you want in most cases).
:I believe OBOD was a diff link, not a section link (although it is now impossible to test to verify). If there were multiple messages in different sections OBOD had no way of choosing a sensible section link - it had to be a diff to show all of them. Diffs are useful when a user has posted in the middle of the page or the middle of a long thread. These can be a nightmare to find and may be missed altogether on a busy talk page where many messages are coming in at once. Don't see why we can't have both diff and section links as messages are now notified individually.
(In reply to comment #6)
(In reply to comment #5)
This is about a section link (which is what you want in most cases).
I believe OBOD was a diff link, not a section link [...]
Sure. And yes, as said on bug 46937 section link wold be "ideal", but in the real world diff is best option to start with.
lwelling wrote:
User feedback around this topic seems very mixed. A significant number of people claim they want an OBOD because they believe it is friendlier to newbies. Maybe friendlier is the wrong word. Perhaps because it is clearer to newbies and hard for them to ignore.
Requests for diff links have to balanced against that. Displaying a diff with bits of unparsed wiki markup in it is very opaque and unfriendly to newbies.
The two requests are incompatible.
(In reply to comment #8)
The two requests are incompatible.
Which two requests, section and diff links?
By default diffonly is false, so the diff loads the whole page, which for newbies is short and most likely contains the message, as well as the edit summary with direct link to section (if available). Besides, diff is a very basic feature and not even the n00best of the newbies can do without history and diffs.
lwelling wrote:
I was referring to the request to cater to new users receiving their first talk page message, and the request to give more advanced users single click access to a diff to see what happened.
New users can do without history and diffs for the first few communications on their talk pages. They will generally be a new section either welcoming them, or telling them off. For those users, a link to that new section is the least confusing, and best formatted interface.
For users participating in more complex discussions, they are going to need to view histories and diffs to figure things out, but being sent directly to that is going to intimidate new users.
The need for new user consideration and the need to experience user navigation efficiency are in opposition. I'm just pointing out that as with many requests, we should not simply queue and satisfy the request when time allows. It comes at a cost for other users, so some design should go into a compromise.
(In reply to comment #10)
I was referring to the request to cater to new users receiving their first
talk
page message, and the request to give more advanced users single click access
to a diff to see what happened.
I question this dichotomy. The current link goes to the top of the page, which means that the newbie may not see at all the message being notified, in the frequent cases when there's something else above it (100 % of the cases in wikis with mass-welcoming like it.wiki, Commons and many others).
So, both diff and section link are better than the current situation; section link is naturally ideal but can be done later unless a solution is found immediately, and diff is rather easy to implement: this bug asks either, so I don't get what the problem is.
Somewhere in the onwiki discussion I think it was said that the timestamp could be linked to the diff, and this followed the pattern on other internet sites. So what I am saying is there is no reason we cannot have both. The link goes to a section link and the timestamp goes to the diff.
Can we make this bug about the section link (as it was originally), and create a separate one for the diff link?
For the section links one, it should be doable at least for the cases where the section link is included in the summary. This includes the "new section" case.
(In reply to comment #15)
Diff link broken out to bug 48183.
Then this can be duped to the other bug, which has a patch.