Description
Details
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add thanks to the beta feature | mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools | master | +13 -5 |
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | EAkinloose | T366095 Deploy comment thanking to all wikis | |||
| Open | None | T400849 Enable "Thanks" from talk pages as an opt-in beta feature |
Event Timeline
Change #1174569 had a related patch set uploaded (by DLynch; author: DLynch):
[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Add thanks to the beta feature
When would this Beta feature be available?
For how long would it be available as a Beta feature?
I'm asking the latter question as we've all seen some features staying for ages as a Beta feature. We should define now when the feature would exit the Beta state (suggestion: one quarter).
Given the popularity of Thanks, I still believe that this feature can be released as a default feature. What led to this decision?
Patch rolled it into the existing DiscussionTools beta feature, rather than creating a new one.
My understanding is that this'd just be something running alongside the next month-or-two as @ppelberg's phases go through a few rounds of wikis.
Another argument for default release is that it’s not really a good fit for beta: it’s about communication between two users (as opposed to the reply and new topic tools, which are about communication between one user and “everyone”, including the sender), which has two consequences:
- A user cannot meaningfully test it, as they don’t see what the receiving end sees (when the reply tool was a beta feature, the user who used it could check the resulting edit), except of course if they control both accounts, but that kind of testing can be done on Patch Demo, locally etc.
- I think it’s more confusing for the receiver to get a type of thanks they cannot send than it was seeing reply tool edits when the reply tool wasn’t available by default.
I am all for releasing it more broadly immediately, but if we're not doing that then there is a useful thing that beta-feature users can experience and give us feedback about: the overflow menu on talk pages.
I don't actually think this is likely to be controversial, but discovering such things from a wider audience can happen.
It's also worth noting that because this feature is gated behind the reply-button visual enhancements, we can't roll it out to the following wikis right now anyway: cawiki, dawiki, elwiki, enwiki, euwiki, fiwiki, lvwiki, nowiki, plwiki, ruwiki, simplewiki, svwiki. (See: T379264). The beta-feature works around that because turning on the visual enhancements is one of the things it already does.
(And because it's possible to turn off the visual enhancements via a user preference, there's always going to be some users who can't see this.)
Good point. While I also hope it won’t be controversial, it’s very well possible that it conflicts with some gadgets or user scripts. So my first point (not testable) doesn’t stand. My second point (confusing for the recipient) does stand, but testability probably outweighs it.
(And because it's possible to turn off the visual enhancements via a user preference, there's always going to be some users who can't see this.)
So the confusion I mentioned will remain even after the beta phase. Could the preferences description of visual enhancements (I link translatewiki.net because the thanks feature has long been enabled there) be updated to mention the thanks feature in addition to “discussion activity”? I’d also mention this in Tech News entries about the feature.
For context, the current preferences checkbox controlling this is:
- Show discussion activity
This will enable a new talk page appearance that includes information about the activity within each discussion.
The description does say what's going to happen ("new appearance that includes"), but "show discussion activity" as the top-level label admittedly undersells it.
I (as a non-native English speaker) understood – and translated – this “includes information” as “adds this information to the page” (“includes this information in the page”), not as “contains, among others, this information”, so the description undersells it just as much as the label does, at least for me and probably for many others. (In fact, I don’t think it undersells it considering what’s currently available on WMF wikis, only after the introduction of thanks.)
Totally agree it's too subtle / ambiguous as-is. Ultimately, it's because we wound up bundling a few other visual change features under the general release we did with the header changes, because those were the most drastic, and it didn't seem worth calling out that we were also changing the display of the reply buttons. It just picked up a functional effect now because the overflow menu was built on the new buttons...