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Improvements to the layout and contents of Special:Preferences (tracking)
Closed, ResolvedPublic

Description

Tracking bug to capture bugs related to improving and simplifying user preferences interface


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50039
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52807
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58235
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58236

Details

Reference
bz58223

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 2:34 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz58223.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Is this not a dupe of something?

(In reply to comment #1)

Is this not a dupe of something?

This if it is feel free to merge.

(Sorry, I commented quickly in case you were going to pin 20 sub-bugs here, sending hundreds of emails :) )

I searched now and we have bug 52807 (User preferences in MediaWiki to be removed) and bug 50039 (Proposed changes to default settings). I think any bugs marked as blockers to this one would be better fit to one of these.

(Unless you mean this for proposed changes to Special:Preferences itself, in which case it's in the wrong component.)

yes, changes to Special:Preferences, if you could move it over to the right place would be appreciated.

Is this really only about Special:preferences? Anyway, blocker of tracking bug 31882.

(In reply to comment #6)

Now that I look at it, I think we should actually merge

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50039
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52807

and this bug into one

Sounds unlikely? Or I have no idea what this tracking bug is about.

This is to cover both the contents, layout & design, behavior, and defaults of Special:preferences

added as 50039, 52807 as dependencies rather than merging

(In reply to comment #8)

This is to cover both the contents, layout & design, behavior, and defaults
of
Special:preferences

Most of the default settings tracked by bug 50039 have nothing to do with Special:Preferences, are you aware of that? Just checking.

Bug 31882 is not about Special:Preferences so it's not a blocker of this.

(In reply to comment #11)

Bug 31882 is not about Special:Preferences so it's not a blocker of this.

thanks, make sense.

Jared, in case you don't know about this feature (it took some time for me to get familiar with it, some year(s) ago), here you can see at a glance how the dependencies look like and check if it makes sense to you: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencygraph.cgi?id=58223

(In reply to comment #13)

Jared, in case you don't know about this feature (it took some time for me to
get familiar with it, some year(s) ago), here you can see at a glance how the
dependencies look like and check if it makes sense to you:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencygraph.cgi?id=58223

Thank you, interesting, but hovering over each for a tooltip is a horrible interface, the tree view is ok https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=58223&hide_resolved=1 but not great either.

Well, while we're off-the-topic anyway :P, here's a piece of user CSS I use to make the interface bearable (looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/LCDUiRQ.png): http://pastebin.com/8wERtPUb . I've only used it with Opera, but it should work with other browsers as well if you find a way to make the use custom CSS.

I'm glad this bug was filed, it was being discussed in #wikimedia-dev last night actually (end of http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23wikimedia-dev/20131208.txt and beginning of http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23wikimedia-dev/20131209.txt)

I think trying to start by removing preferences and choices is not the right way, you're just going to piss off a bunch of users.

I would be interested to hear what you think we can do to make the preferences pane better without abolishing users options.

(In reply to comment #6)

Now that I look at it, I think we should actually merge

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50039
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52807

and this bug into one

Bug 52807 has been going pretty well... please don't jinx it! :-)

@Kunal, settings wouldn't be removed indiscriminately to be sure, the analytics group has be looking into how people are using preferences, what settings aren't being used, which are being switch to new values where patterns emerge.

Honestly, plenty of people have proposed that settings be removed in 52807 While I think that some things will be added and some removed, one of the biggest issues is the organization of the existing settings, which is what I hope to have fixed.

(In reply to comment #18)

Honestly, plenty of people have proposed that settings be removed in 52807
While I think that some things will be added and some removed, one of the
biggest issues is the organization of the existing settings, which is what I
hope to have fixed.

It may make sense to focus this bug solely on the layout/arrangement of Special:Preferences, then. That may even mean that this need not be a tracking bug.

we could, but likely the new design will take into account the bugs related to new pref requests, and removals, as well as a refactoring of the remaining prefs into logical grouping with mediawiki.ui styles applied. It seems odd to rearrange settings that are slated for removal.

This tracking bug appears to be superseded by bug 58223, which sees more activity.

  • This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 62559 ***