Since my last post about LiquidThreads, I’ve given it a major visual makeover, making it much prettier, and more in line with what users are used to with comment threads, forums, and other similar software.
Here’s an overview of the new interface
Overview of the new LiquidThreads interface
The new interface relies on paging, rather than archiving. Instead of artificially removing a discussion from a talk page when it’s done, the discussion page is paged. Only ten discussions will be shown at a time, and anything beyond that can be accessed simply by hitting ‘Next’. Old discussions will naturally fall ‘off the bottom’ of the discussion page, as they do in forums, comment threads, and most other discussion systems in the world.
I’ve also redesigned the thread display. Instead of having a footer with the pertinent information, and using indentation to show threading, I’ve put the information at the top of an enclosing box, which includes all of the replies. It makes it much easier to see who’s replied to what, and when. It’s also much more consistent with other systems of threaded discussion.
Finally, I’ve streamlined the interface for ‘actions’ you can take with a post, like editing it, watching it for replies, checking its history, or deleting it if you’re an administrator. By putting these into a drop-down, the actions are within easy reach, but stay out of your way if you just want to read the posts.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be working on making the comment workflow AJAXy, making all comments searchable, and other miscellanea.
What do you think of the new interface? How can it be improved? Let me know in the comments.
The ten threads per page limit needs to be configurable on a per-page basis.
Is there any mechanism to fork threads?
Is there any way to archive only part of a thread?
Link | July 1st, 2009 at 1:18 am
I’ve seen you do a lot of work on this. Threaded discussions are potentially a huge usability improvement for discussion when using MediaWiki, especially for those with less experience in wiki editing.
What I like about how we discuss things currently on talk pages is that the threads are nicely ‘compressed’. There is little space between replies and topics.
Your screenshot still shows a lot of whitespace. Would there be a way to compress the current interface (further)? It looks to me like especially the ‘reply’ line is taking up a lot of space, but you might have some reason to have done it like this…
Link | July 1st, 2009 at 7:09 am
I’m not sure why ‘compressing’ the text would be at all desirable, but it would be easily doable with CSS. I think spreading things out and adding plenty of interface around it makes people not used to wiki discussions feel more at home.
Forking threads is not presently possible, but it’s an awesome idea and I’ve created bug 19482 for it.
As I’ve explained, there’s no such thing as ‘archiving’, just being pushed off the page by newer threads. If a thread were to be forked, the two parts behave as entirely different threads, and so one part might disappear off the page faster.
Link | July 3rd, 2009 at 1:36 am
Can the quoted text be a grey or light color?
This will make it look less cluttered and help find the actual content.
If users have a short reply, the quoted text gets too much in the way.
Link | July 3rd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
It would be great if there were an easy option for transclusion under the actions menu.
I really dislike how half the users reply on each other’s usertalk and the other half on their own and demand that their page is watched.
Is there and easy option to allow the same discussion to take place on different pages and still trigger watchlists and “you have new messages” template?
This is my foremost problem with our discussion system.
Link | July 6th, 2009 at 5:16 pm