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Guinea Pigs' Feedback
    Keywords: SL description

On this page you can share and discuss your thoughts about SL's technical features.

An index for discussions on other topics is at the Library Lobby.

2004 May 21

DJ: Help!
It's been a while since I last edited any page... And a few moments ago I've edited Fujitsu 17 Yi - Wang: but, despite the preview was OK, my contribution is a total mess, with diagrams in the wrong places... What is happening? Can anybody help?!?

Arno: can't find anything wrong. Can you describe the "total mess" in more detail?

DJ: Well, on my Netscape 7.0 (on a PowerBook? with MacOS 9.2.2) the text I've written appears to be followed by some previous txt by Dave and HolIgor, then by my two diagrams (Korean magazine 1 & 2) and again by another diagram.
When I go to the editing page everything is at its proper place...
Seems as Netscape doesn't visualise properly?

Arno: at my end (Mozilla 1.3) everything is ok. Before your "Hullo everybody" I see Holigor's and Dave's comments about B9 and W10 (in both edit and page view) and Dave's comment about "B3 looks severe" for diagram "Alternative B 29" is after your diagrams (in both edit and page view). Looks ok from here.

Blake: There was a line in one of the diagrams that was making things look a bit odd. But.. is it just me, or is that whole page really, really ugly? :-) Seems like it could be a candidate for some edits.

2004 May 15

iff: I am not sure if this is the proper place to put it, but will there ever be a new version of the SL snapshot (the most recent one is from Feb 1)? For a while snapshots have been made available every 2 months or so, but that seems to have changed!?

Blake: This is a very minor feature request, but I was wondering if "small stones" notation could be extended to W20/B20. There seem to be a decent number of "W11"/"B11" references, especially.

2004 May 11

unkx80: Badly formatted SL diagrams generate a large number of warnings when saving page. For example:

  $$ title
  $$  ---------
  (blank line)
  $$ | . . . . |
  $$ | . . . . |
  (blank line)
  $$  ---------

Fixing such badly formatted diagrams (i.e. removing the extra blank lines) will also generate a warning message when saving page.

Arno: fixed.

unkx80: Thanks.

2004 May 5

Bill: The discussion about discussion pages has reminded me of something I would like, and that is some sort of cross-linking similar to footnotes. In a parallel discussion page, where people are talking about material on another page, it would be nice to have a reference to something on the original page which would operate like a footnote. When you click the link on the original page, it returns to the same place on the discussion page, and vice versa. OC, you can always use the browser Back button, but that would be nice. :-)

Also a minor nit. When people link to a page with a long title, particularly if the text is displayed alongside a diagram, my browser often clips the text on the right rather than creating a scroll bar. I have sometimes edited such places with here?, but is there a technical fix? Thanks.

Dieter: IIRC, such an issue was already raised and IIReven moreC Arno responded that it is impossible for him to solve browser behaviour. I think someone should filter out these browser/SL code issues and summarize on a separate page.

I found the page: is Bill suffering from the SLPageEditingCutoffProblem ?

Bill: Well, my browser (IE) creates a bottom scroll bar for this page and for this page, but not for others, where it cuts off text on the right side. I think it has to do with the fact that there is no diagram here. Can anyone explain? Thanks.

(Later): Thanks to unkx80 for his helpful comment (since deleted), which was based on my lack of clarity (since corrected). :-)

2004 May 4

rubilia: Same here, with slightly different numbers.

Jan de Wit: I get the following message when opening Recent Changes:

 Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted
 (tried to allocate 33 bytes)
 in /home/www/senseis.xmp.net/private_html/lib/recentchanges.php on line 66

Arno: our server lost track of time and thought it was 2003. And RecentChanges tried to show you 1 year full of edits. Time fixed. Timestamps in database fixed too.

2004 May 1

unkx80: There seems to be a minor error in the way time is displayed in full recent changes. Apparently the minutes field displays the month instead.

Arno: fixed.

2004 April 21

axd: Not unexpected, but surprising was the use of the random page function of SL: if you want to go back to a previously visited random page, you just get another random page - LOL. It's weird when you try to go back to a page that did look interesting by using the browser history: does anyone see a way to solve this (small) problem?

2004 April 16

axd: About FullRecentChanges: would it be possible to add the number of lines changed, to better find wikivandals? I assume this is not done in order to limit the load on the server/database. (BTW - I still think we could use a SLWishlist? page)

Arno: Won't do the addition to FRC. It uses a completely different approach to generating the list and it would cause some trouble to add that information. Instead use RecentChanges and add the minor edits to one of your profiles as well (if you set 'most recent only' too, then the list should be identical to FRC).

rubilia

  • About [ext] Watched Pages: I donīt really expect whole SL to change this wording to something clearer, but anyway, "watched pages" to me seems quite misleading. I would prefer something more intuitively understandable like "My SL Bookmarks". On march 12th I got a sufficient answer asking here, and I pretty much like to bookmark pages (particularly in order to highlight it in RecentChanges). Since I donīt see anyone else asking about it, I suppose most people donīt understand nor use this feature at all. (Please, correct me if I am wrong.)
    • axd: I don't agree. First of all, these are not really bookmark pages because they are rather "far" to reach, and cannot be categorised (unless one uses one's own home page, for example). I create my own bookmarks in my browser - with the additional advantage of Folders. So, for me, "Watched page" better expresses its purpose. I'd like to use this occasion to reiterate my question (see Feb 28) on limits in number of watched pages, and possibly other limits.
    • I don't claim to know the best wording. :) What I have in mind: When talking to an average SL newbie about "watched pages", he/she is supposed to think of something very different to what it is - it sounds like being similar to the "history" in browsers. "Toggle watch" seems even less self-explaining. AFAICS, at SL, "watched pages" are more like bookmarks/favorites, albeit they can be organized in a rather simple structure (three categories) only. I guess seeing "add to my SL favorites", the user would at least get an idea of the actual meaning and feel invited to use it.
      • axd: you probably know, but the term "bookmark" has already a specific meaning on SL; "Watched Pages" better expresses what they are for: to be kept informed about changes, to highlight pages in RecentChanges. Furthermore I don't call the three categories a way to categorize the list of watched pages.
  • That issue aside, it would be nice if in the user's settings were some options to choose where to go to
    • when clicking the link currently named "toggle watch", as well as after logging in.
    • E. g., I use to have a look at RecentChanges first, whenever I have logged in. Also, I return to the actual page every time I just have bookmarked it, without feeling any need to see the status page in between. The present behavior should be default, of course, because itīs the fully informative one and most suitable to users being new to SL.
      • Arno: I don't see much value in changing the behaviour of toggle-watch. All you need to do is press e.g. 'hotkey+v' (or your browsers back function) to get back to viewing the page. Don't forget that for every new pref etc. I have to maintain the feature throughout the future. About logging in: I'm surprised that you do not keep permanently logged in?
  • I perceive the "diff in page" view as a remarkable enhancement to the "standard diff" view, because the context of changes is shown entirely and correctly. However, thereīs a disadvantage: in big pages, itīs a little awkward to find relatively small changes - although highlighted -, and even harder in cases the changes are spread over the whole diff. Wouldn't it be possible to add floating "jump to next/previous change" buttons, or (supposingly more realistic to be implemented ever :)) make two SL Shortcut Keys working that way?
    • Arno: Unless I add Javascript this function will not work - and I am not too keen about that. Maybe I can think of something else.

2004 March 20

axd: Is it possible to search in the page histories? This is interesting, for example when I want to know about every contribution someone made, not only the most recent one; and also, if for example a link gets deleted, creating an orphan, to know where the orphan was last referenced before it got deleted.

2004 March 15

Fwiffo: Is there a Wiki markup for making strikeout text?

Arno: no.

2004 March 4

mAsterdam: I copied this from the sandbox:

Why don't B1 W2 B3 become graphics here in diagram titles?

2004 February 28

axd: Small question: is there a limit in the number of links that appear in the sidebar (not the bookmarks), and in the number of watched pages? (Somewhat less small question:) Do other limits exist? (e.g. size of pages, other limitations by decision or related to server space and what-do-I-know)

2004 February 17

TimHunt: I really like the diff-in-page view, but it would be even better if it took you to the first diff automatically. Is there a way of doing that? My approach would be to sitck an id="firstdiff" (or <a name="firstdiff">) a few lines before the start of the first diff in the page, and then make the links to the diff pages actually point to (old url)#firstdiff.

2004 February 8

axd: I often add a page to my watch list, to discover that it has been removed because I already added it before. As an alternative, replace "Toggle watch" by "Watch this page"/"Remove this page from watchlist".

Arno: fixed link-bug in list of watched pages.

About making the "toggle" link more descriptive: a valid request, however I did not include it on purpose, because checking wether a page is watched costs another DB query per page view. I wanted to avoid that. I have to think about this again.

2004 February 1

bojo: Is there a way to track searches that have zero hits, and rank them? It would be nice to grab the higher ranking negative hits and create aliases to real pages for them, so people searching have a better chance of finding what they were after (hopefully).

2004 January 23

When WME-ing a page, I often make a statement like "please recover undesirably lost material from the previous version", making "previous version" a version link. Therefore, it would be nice if the edit window shows what version I am editing.

Dieter

2004 January 12

    • Dave "Start a double-list" seems to include leaving a blank line between entries. This detracts greatly from the editor usability, especially in long pages like KGS Wishlist. :-(

Arno: true. What to do about it? I think that it's very bad to have illegal HTML. If you can think of something, I'm happy to talk about it.

2004 January 6

wms: Arno, think I found a bug. I made a change, with a summary. Then I saw a typo, so I fixed the typo, put in "fix typo" in the summary, and checked "minor edit". Well, "minor edit" worked, since only one change is in the recent changes list, but the summary there is for the minor edit, not for the edit that should appear there! Not a huge deal, but does look like a bug - the "minor edit" summaries shouldn't appear in "recent changes", right?

(Sebastian:) I think this is partly the bug I described below[0104], and partly by design. AFAIK, your changes get saved only once, and the Minor Edit has no use in that case.

Arno: the behaviour changed. The way it happens now is more "correct" as to what actually happens. When you re-edit a page then the previous version is not saved to the archive. If you look at the history of pages you will see that some versions are missing - this is when people reedited the same page multiple times (see WikiNews for example, I'm notorious at that). Therefore the change summary should apply to the final result, which includes your major edit and your minor edit. As Sebastian points out there appears to be a bug that the summary is not always shown. I don't know why that is and have a hard time tracking down the bug.

2004 January 4

mgoetze: That should take care of almost every wish regarding RecentChanges. (WikiNews) -- not quite, I'd like to be able to ignore all ongoing games...

(Sebastian:) Generalizing this: In the watchlist, assign categories according to page type or keywords. (We're getting close to XPath ;-)


2003 December 27

(Sebastian:) Speaking of changes: When viewing a diff, the paragraphs before and after an inserted paragraph are displayed to give context information. This is a nice feature. Unfortunately, when one of these paragraphs contains a minor change then it is abbreviated to less than a line. Please display the whole paragraph in that case. (Example: [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?diff=LongBambooJoint&new=40, where Bill's paragraph is shortened to "have the play at b".)

Arno: I don't think I will fix this. The reason the paragraph is shortened is because soemtimes only 1 letter (correction of a typo) is done in a 9 line paragraph. What we can talk about is if a little bit more should be shown of the paragraph.

2003 December 12

Robert Pauli: Regarding your work on linear boards, however - those intersections separated by empty space - I hate it completely. My wish is a straight (horizontal or vertical) line with hoshis on it:

 *
 *-*
 *-*-*
 ...

2003 November 4

SnotNose: When adding comments to pages, are there tricks people have for remembering or quickly finding the names of other pages so as to include them as links? The best way I know how to do this is to open a new browser and look for the page (sometimes using the search function). One way to make this easier is if there were a quick search-like function on the edit page. It would need to return results right in the edit page and not mess up the edits already done. (Is this clear or too vague?)

Arno: I have been thinking about that already. I'd like to have something like this myself.


2003 November 1

Bill: Request: Let the creator of a page edit the title. Why not? :-)

Charles Renaming is restricted to Librarian-status people - presumably because sorting out the backlinks needs to be done and requires a responsible attitude. Bill, if you have a list of pages to rename I'll do it for you. Or you could apply for the step up to Librarian, with a request to Arno and Morten (which I suppose should be done off-site by email).

Bill: What if the creator could rename the page if it had only one link? As a rule, that would be the one she used to create the page in the first place. That would make the job of creating pages a little easier. Power to the people!

Arno: I think that renaming pages is a sensitive function: for one thing, the action is (currently) not archived anywhere and it does not show up anywhere, thus a vandal could create havoc quite easily. But even well meaning users could do quite some damage by renaming pages that are linked from the outside. One incident of that was BasicRulesOfGo getting renamed to RulesOfGoIntroductory, not taking into account that there are at least 20 webpages out there directly linking to that page. One could go as far as saying that renaming is not a wiki thing. I like the idea that pages here have a "permanent" name and URL. Apart from typos I don't think that there is much need for renaming.

2003 October 17

Tim Hunt: Thinking about Page Churn, how about adding a "page of the day" link to Recent Changes that is the page that was edited least recently at midnight at the start of that day. This could go just under the date heading, or at the end of the list of changes that day.


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This is a copy of the living page "Guinea Pigs' Feedback" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.