A few questions/bugs/suggestions for 1.6

Question

Just taking a quick look at version 1.6 beta in more detail and I have a few questions/issues.

Are you planning to redesign the user answers list? (I think I mentioned this here somewhere or maybe via PM.) I don't like that it shows questions on the answer list, instead of answers. It's confusing to say "+10 votes" when your answer actually has +2 votes for example. All we need is one box for the answer votes, then the question title and date the answer was posted (and perhaps a snippet of the answer like my user activity plugin).

A second issue is that the answers page doesn't show all answers if I have multiple answers per question. It only shows each question once.

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I like the plugin page improvements but I feel it would be better if when the form comes up, it is more clearly separated from the surrounding plugins e.g. with a background. Or a horizontal line bewteen all plugins, like the questions list. Or since you are doing a whole new page load, why not just move the form to a page on its own?

On a similar note I spotted a bug - the class name given to the form when it appears is not correct, it has spaces in e.g. <div class="qa-part-form-editor-WYSIWYG Editor"> - I guess it's meant to be a number like the other divs are (qa-part-form-plugin-18).

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If you post too many wall messages, you get a big red error saying that (which is fine). But firstly it is at the bottom of the list instead of the top where you would expect it (since new messages are posted at the top).

And secondly, the message stays on the page when you reload or go to any user page. Once you've seen the message it's weird to have the site telling you that all the time. Maybe on later page loads just make it regular text.

Third issue - you can only see the latest 10 wall posts. If you post another one the bottom one disappears and I can't see any way to get it back. Is there going to be some pagination there, or maybe a new full page with all wall posts?

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Apart from that it's looking good so far! I've not had a chance to look at the image upload thing yet, will test it some time this week.

Comments

Your work is splendid!

Answer 1

Hi Scott. Thanks for taking a look.

Answers list: this is an issue that has always been there - how to represent answers (and comments) in a list. My thinking has been that users will assume the voting boxes in these lists are always related to the question whose title they accompany, rather than an answer belonging to that question, even if the answer is the reason why the question appears in a particular list. Doing what you suggest is not difficult, but then won't users expect that the voting box by 'answered' items on the home page will also be for the answer rather than the question? I don't know the right answer and am interested in views from other users. Maybe the solution is present a pure list of answers in quite a different way, more like the answers on a question page. As for multiple answers, I will look into solving that, if possible.

Plugin page: your comments are noted and I'll look into it.

Wall posts: I'll try to move the error message to the top. I don't think it's worth the investment in not repeatedly displaying it to the user, since this is an edge case (the same could be said for answer forms, etc...) As for showing them all with pagination, you're right and I'll look into adding that as another panel for a user (alongside activity/qs/as).

Comments

My opinion on the answers thing:
I feel that when you are showing the 3 boxes for votes and answers and views, and the question tags/category, it's obvious that refers to a question, wherever it's located.
When you are showing just a votes box with the question title (and answer snippet), no answers/views box, no tags, AND you are on the "answers by X" page, it's obvious to me that the votes refer to the answer.

Will it be possible to restyle that page with a custom theme, i.e. will the actual answer votes be available there in the data? If so then I have no problems making my own design. Edit: also, total answers and number selected would be nice too, so I can display that at the top.

Wall posts: fair enough. I think it was the boldness of the error message itself that was the problem, which wouldn't be as bad with my own theme. Have you thought about having a separate dedicated page for wall posts? That would seem more logical to me instead of pagination on the user page that only changes a small part of the page (and better for SEO).

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Yes, I meant the pagination for wall posts would happen on a separate dedicated page.