Template talk:Discussion page
Currently, if you open an older version of a page from its history (not the comparison view) that has this template at its top, then the content of this template overlaps with the link to the next newer/older version in the history. I guess that's due to some hard placement of the <div>. I don't trust myself to fix this myself, can you? --popcorn (talk) 17:15, 24 July 2023 (PDT)
At it again?
You're at it again, User:THE OWL? Why aren't you satisfied with how they already look?
No, there doesn't need to be a big button all the way to the right that duplicates Add Topic that's shared across virtually every wiki.
- Addendum: oh, and the way it works - hides the whole page slowly and unrolls a list of links? Why would anyone want it when they could middle click the old button to open that list separately? (the tabs can't even be middle-clicked!)
No, moving archives to a tab instead of a button isn't helpful.
No, orange underlining of tabs isn't good.
You've already made Discussion worse once. And there was a big mess with the Message template that wrecked Talk pages going back in time to the foundation of the wiki. (no, it doesn't matter that it technically wasn't yours - it was incorporated into the process)
In words of the Half-Life Science team, stahp. Cvoxalury (talk) 06:53, 17 July 2024 (PDT)
User:Nescius, please roll back the edits to the last version before today and consider protecting the template. It's used on hundreds of talk pages and only a short while ago the 'unholy things' done with templates were called out as damaging the wiki going 20 years back. The further improvement of this template (which there's definitely room for - I'll start a new topic on that later) ideally should be done only through communication with the moderation staff. Cvoxalury (talk) 07:23, 17 July 2024 (PDT)
- I could see that you reverted the changes yourself after this topic was opened, but I'm assuming you intend to implement a later iteration at some point. I do feel uneasy about making sudden changes to this template with no consensus considering recent events. It might be better if you actually explain what you want to change, and why.
- If I understand the edit summaries correctly, these changes originated from a Discord server. Out of curiosity, what is this Discord server? Is it associated with the VDC in any way? Is it open to the public? --Blixibon (talk) 11:13, 17 July 2024 (PDT)
- I've reverted the changes since I checked what was needed. I was wondering how quickly all the discussion pages would update. It was almost instantaneous.
- The template isn't finalized yet and I can't save it now. The recent changes were for the sake of the test, as mentioned in the change comment. I edited the template code a bit during the test, but that's because I was too lazy to go to my sandbox, so I made some edits before finishing the test.
- In the comment about undoing recent changes, I meant what the template looks like now. I originally made it by copying a message from the beginning of any Discord channel. It's not an afterthought or anything, this template is a literal copy of a part of Discord that should have been replaced anyway (it just doesn't look good on this wiki). Aside from that, this template shouldn't overlap the page title, language bar, top icons, and subpages, so this won't happen in the new version.
- Also, I'm annoyed by this hunt by other people for any change I make. Calm down, it's not normal when you almost instantly say "No" to almost everything I've added.
- I'll be editing the template here from time to time.
- it's not normal when you almost instantly say "No" to almost everything I've added - which isn't what happened. You were making maintenance and adjusting edits for the past few days without a single comment or interruption from me. As you noted yourself, changes to the discussion template are almost instanenous, so I noticed it quickly, and went here, to warn against messing with it.
- The template in your sandbox doesn't look promising. That's your territory, and I don't care how you do it there. But I still say this template should be protected, including from your changes. Moving the archives into a tab is not a functional idea. Renaming Help as Documentation is confusing. And the current design issues with this template aren't being addressed. Cvoxalury (talk) 13:20, 17 July 2024 (PDT)
Current flaws of the template
1. It repeats itself. Example A. Repeating the talk page title two times in a row. That's in the tested new version.
- Example B. The old/current version. It only repeats itself once, but with a huge icon on the side. And huge header. Why?
- If people clicked on the talk page, they probably know where they are. A small reminder is okay. A huge header just assumes people can't read normal-sized text.
- What the template should be doing is informing them what the talk pages are for, with quick reminder about how to use them.
- Example C - a good talk page. A short template says what the talk page is, explains how to start a new topic, reminds it's not for debating the lore/etc, and the policies (can be swapped with Help page).
2. It for some reason calls Help "documentation". Documentation is more about how to use technical templates on pages. "Help" is about how to properly participate. A person who's new to it would look for help. And that's exactly what can be linked to in a small brief notice a la COW's pages.
3. What we can see right now on Talk:Main Page is that the template that's meant to help, managed to push the actual conversations almost out of the screen (yes, half of that job was done by TOC). EVERYTHING it needs can fit inside its first three lines if it weren't for the huge header and icon.
- Basically, someting about the size and style of {{Correctpagequery-top}}.
To conclude. It should be smaller, not wordy, not do things it doesn't need. It doesn't even need to welcome users, actually. They're talk pages. They don't have to hug people. They need to get to the point.
P. S. It is manual, right? It needs to be added on a talk page, otherwise it looks like this one does - "bare"? So, how's that going to be achieved? Cvoxalury (talk) 13:45, 17 July 2024 (PDT)
- Agree with these points. Liking how the example C looks brief and to the point. Nescius (talk) 14:12, 17 July 2024 (PDT)
- The fact that someone else designed the page very messy and added a not very useful description to the template is not the template's problem. Below I've attached an example of what that template was, as well as what the Main Page discussion page should be.
- Yes, something needs to change, however you are now looking at broken pages and saying it's wrong and a broken template ruins everything. Oh, come on!
- Broken how? Your "what it should be" has all the problems listed already.
- The real "oh, come on" is about you introducing half-baked changes, then not fixing them, then arguing that people don't like them because "they hate everything new" and "like staring at grey text". And saying you'll work on it in the future. The wiki doesn't run on constant ad hominem and promises or "if no one argues in 1 month, then I'm right". It should run on consensus, and right now there's the consensus between me, Nescius and popcorn Cvoxalury (talk) 01:54, 22 July 2024 (PDT)
- I'd highly suggest the removal of the Welcome text replacing the default wiki page title. This replacement by shifting some div up just has the potential to completely unnecessarily overlap with things like the forward/backward links while viewing older versions of a page (not the comparison view). Furthermore, replacing the page title is just not useful and gives the top of the page a different look that it absolutely doesn't need and that is confusing compared to any other pages with a default wiki title. I'm fine with the icon, declaring a talk page and the sentence "This is the start of the [page name here] discussion page." I personally would also remove that sentence for simplicity but naming the exact page that is being discussed may be useful to have this "You are HERE", to get less confused with namespaces (or is it?).
- Why use a button "Documentation" to link to Help:Discussion? I'd remove it and instead add some clear sentence like "To learn more about how to use discussions, see Help:Discussion." This is much more intuitive. If I press a link, I can tell that I will land on some page, ideally on the page named in the text I clicked. If it's a button, it can't be a simple link, can it? What funky stuff may happen when I click it? The button just says "Documentation", where exactly will I land? Is it related to the text above? - If that button just acts as a link, then make it one...
- I'd also like to ask questions about the "Add topic/reply" button. Am I missing functionality? Currently it says "To add a Reply, [click on "Add Topic/Reply" button below], but leave the "Subject" blank." But how do I control the section that I reply to? If we can't supply a sufficiently simple way to reply to a specific section, then we don't need that button - there are edit buttons near every section. I'd remove the button. The wiki already offers an "Add topic" button at the top. This new button may be a tiny, tiny bit better, but it does not justify the duplicate in my opinion. That preload text may add the tildes by default, which I like, but discussion editors should know and understand this anyway. The better solution in my opinion would be to instead add another bold sentence like "Please sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~)."
- To sum up, I think the code of the discussion page template could be something as simple as the following (8 lines of wikitext):
 |
This is the discussion page of Template:Discussion page.Please sign your comments with |
- Yes, quite on point. The part about adding a reply without specifying where it goes, I believe, is now a leftover from when a more forum/social-like system was used (again pushed by THE OWL & Co), where there effectively were no sections, just a vertical stream of phrases with huge profile pics and icons. it looked like this. (okay, it had sections. Then I don't even know if it ever worked.)
- The icon as a concept I'm not that against (my example from COW has one), but it is really big. Cvoxalury (talk) 01:54, 22 July 2024 (PDT)
Thanks for simplifying the template, User:Popcorn.
There should also be a case for when it's a User Talk page rather than discussion page (currently it says "this is a discussion page of [username]", which feels off. It's used on numerous user talk pages and it did have a case for that previously. I assume it worked by
{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style=display:none>{{{title|{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|User talk|{{Discussion page/strings|UserTalk}}{{{user|{{PAGENAME}}}}}|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}}}</span>|noerror}}}}It was one of the things that stopped me from messing with it earlier myself. The complexity of the template. Cvoxalury (talk) 02:38, 25 July 2024 (PDT)
- Sure!
Ok. I have no idea what that DISPLAYTITLE thing is supposed to do (other than messing with the displaytitle), especially with the display:none-span. I'd simply check whether NAMESPACE equals User talk and change the sentence depending on that (probably the whole sentence due to strings). For a moment I thought, you could also remove the User: prefix from the user name, but I think going away from the precise page name defeats the purpose of that "You are HERE". --popcorn (talk) 09:32, 25 July 2024 (PDT)
