#236 meta-ticket on usability

[Lee Worden]

We agree that improving WW's usability is very important to us.

This is a place to try to make sense of what the usability problems are, and what to do about them. Please add things with abandon.

[Lee Worden]

One wiki user wrote to me:

Lee, I love the idea of wiki clone/push/pull a la git ... it makes offline work practical rather than nightmarish.

ticket for that: https://sourceforge.net/p/workingwiki/feature-requests/25/

[Lee Worden]

When I create or merge a background job, and my browser just says "Connecting..." or "Waiting for lalashan.mcmaster.ca..." for a really long time and I don't know whether to reload the page or what... this is obviously bad for users' experience.

The only fixes I see for this are

• stop copying files, and do background jobs (and previews?) in the main directory while other make jobs are also being done there. Even though this could lead to files getting corrupted in the directory.

or

• create and merge jobs asynchronously, so it doesn't hold up the process of producing the wiki page that says it's happening. This is to be done using jQuery, which basically means it won't happen until after we upgrade to a contemporary release of mediawiki.

ticket for jQuery stuff: https://sourceforge.net/p/workingwiki/feature-requests/7/

[Lee Worden]

confirm before clearing working directory: https://sourceforge.net/p/workingwiki/bugs/227/

see the long-standing "priorities" page: https://sourceforge.net/p/workingwiki/bugs/153/

Some relevant things from the priorities page:

• "improve the prerequisite projects interface. Lots of suggestions, but the really important one is the ability to click through and see if your link is working."

• "The ghost Makefile problem. Somebody somehow deletes a .mk file from the PD, but it remains in the working directory. These have caused major nightmares on at least 3 occasions. The kind of thing that could make someone give up on WW, IMO."

• Import files forgets what it is doing

• edit buttons to add empty source/project files

[Lee Worden]

.latexml.html vs .latexml.xhtml vs .latexml.html5: https://sourceforge.net/p/workingwiki/bugs/225/

confirm before destroying a background job: https://sourceforge.net/p/workingwiki/bugs/207/

more and better documentation

better tutorials

bad behavior when importing an oversized file

[David Earn]

WW is great. One frequent minor annoyance is that there is often a long delay after clicking a link. I have become accustomed to clicking the stop button (X in the Firefox url bar) and then reloading, which normally then yields immediate success. I don't know if this is associated with WW, MediaWiki, Firefox or something else, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

[Andrei Akhmetzhanov]

I have the same minor remark as David
David, just a guess - what do you use for your Wiki: "lalashan" or "yushan"? For example, if my wiki is on yushan, but I use lalashan-url in my Firefox, then it might be slown down because of that (I think)

[Lee Worden]

Thanks, David and Andrei. I think you're running up against the 5 minute delay bug. This is caused by bad transmission on the network before the wiki software is ever given a chance to do anything. We've been trying to track down the network problem for more than a year now, and have made some progress.

One thing that would be a great help would be if you get a long delay sometime, especially while doing something that shouldn't plausibly take very long, if you could actually wait and find out if it takes almost exactly 5 minutes to resolve. If so, please report it to us along with the wall-clock time when it happened. This would let RHPCS look in the TCP logs they're keeping, and it might let us establish whether this bug is happening on campus (well, in David's case anyway). It would also help establish the urgency of this bug, because I think I've been having trouble convincing RHPCS that it affects a lot of our users.

I don't think lalashan vs. yushan makes a difference, but I could be surprised.

[David Earn]

OK - I'll try to keep track at some point.
Cheers,
David

[Anonymous]

Importing and updating files is a big barrier for a lot of people. Suggestions include:

• An upload button for each source file on the MP page
• A wiki button for inserting source-file and project-file tags (like the MW math button)
• Replace the "log" link on GPF pages for source files with an "upload" link

[Lee Worden]

I was thinking it would be nice to have a "tab" button too, since it's
hard to put tabs into makefiles in the edit form.

[Jonathan Dushoff]

I would like to reiterate my comment of six days ago, which I sent earlier by email, but is apparently not as sexy as APIs.

Easy upload links are really important. I just made one of my students' projects work, and I literally don't know what to tell her.

"Now that I've put the file on the wiki, all you need to do is go to the MP page, then click on "Import Files" (not "Import Project" even though the place it takes you to is called "Import Project Files"), then find your file on your computer, then manually (and carefully) type in the correct name (since you use a different form of version control) and hit tab."

Really, this has been a major obstacle for years, and it seems like the two links I suggest above (as Anonymous) would be a big step, that seems a lot easier than all the push stuff.

[Lee Worden]

Upload link/button are now added to GetProjectFile and ManageProject, as requested.

Is the suggestion about edit-form buttons unrelated to uploading?

Re the name of the link, do you think it should be "Import Project Files"? Or "Upload Project Files"? I figured "Import Project Files" was the right name for the Special:ImportProjectFiles page, to distinguish it from MediaWiki's Special:Upload, but on the ManageProject page, since everything there concerns a project, I thought it would be redundant to include the word "project".

I don't follow your comment about filenames and version control. Do people's files have different names on their computers than on the wikis?

[Lee Worden]

Edit buttons now added. See also https://sourceforge.net/p/workingwiki/feature-requests/11/ for an edit-button request that isn't done yet (i.e. make another one that inserts a skeleton LaTeX document).