© Science Admins

• Chat Rooms
  • Typing Interruption Issue
    • We're still seeing occasional keyboard lags. Perhaps if the server is busy, you have to wait for the response. Would asynchronous ajax allow you to keep typing, and for the response to appear whenever it got good and ready?
  • Auto-refreshes shouldn't require full postbacks — they should just add new messages to the existing document.
  • Debate whether or not chats should use a bigger entry box.
    • Advantage: it would mean that long comments wouldn't have to be split into multiple posts.
    • Disadvantage: the [Enter] key doesn't submit the form, because big entry boxes allow carriage returns in the text. So you have to use the mouse to click the submit button.
    • Disadvantage: more users would enter comments covering more than one topic, making it more difficult to sort out the comments when condensing the chat.
    • Perhaps this should simply be a user preference.
• Make it easier to send PMs
  • Currently, wherever a username appears, it's hyperlinked. If you click the link, it takes you to that user's profile page. If you click the gear icon, one of the options is to "PM the Author" (which isn't really the correct label in this circumstance, but that's a different issue).
  • Forums generally have a button right there in the thread next to the username. At the very least, such a button could be added there.
• The Filter is awkward to use.
  • I think it should be made to work like most other websites search boxes work. Keep the text box for entering the search term, but have a two buttons to press, one saying Global Site Search/Filter and one saying Branch or something.
• Navigation isn't very intuitive.
• Dirk doesn't like the look, and started working on a new page design.
• A news section would be good.
• Jeffrey requested that people could be tagged like in facebook.
  • What, specifically, do you want to do?
• There needs to be a "what to do" for new readers of QDL.
  • There is the
    page. Perhaps this should be positioned more prominantly, and/or be more oriented around workflows than feature usage.
• You should be able to email people in your team.
• The "opened by" functionality in the Rank feature probably shouldn't scrub the total each time the post is edited.
• National Flags
• Provide workflow documentation.
  • How to cross-reference other topics, instead of copy-n-paste.
  • How to add footnotes.
  • How to do rights, for co-ownership of pages.
    • Drag the name of the person from the left pane into the right pane, and click Done.
    • This closes the Apply Rights window.
    • Now click Submit to save all of the metadata settings.
  • Setting up threads.
• LK: The process could be made clearer on the menus.
  • CC: Let's discuss this. I "think" that you're talking about purpose-built functionality, where features are designed and named for the role they play in a specific workflow. You can get into a lot of interesting discussions about the difference between purpose-built and generic functionality. QDL right now is totally generic. I designed it to support a wide variety of workflows, sociocracy being one of them (though I didn't know what that was at the time!). This was one of the main reasons for the sophisticated rights system, so that people could set up hierarchical workgroups, which is... sociocracy. ;) But there's a big trade-off between purpose-built and generic features. A "hand-holding" feature guides the user through a workflow, which is nice. But it gets in the way for users with a different workflow, who have to scratch their heads and figure out how to trick the software into doing what they want, even though it was obviously designed for someone else. Generic software just gives you features, and you figure out how to use them. So you don't get the hand-holding, but it's more flexible. Once you learn the features, you can use them however you want. To instantiate a specific workflow, you have to do process documentation. So let's define the process, and at least get the generic features in place that the workflow requires. Then, if we find that process-oriented features would be really useful, we can do that. But right now, we don't know what the process is!
• Work Order System
  • Lloyd & Charles tried to develop a primitive work order system for managing decisions and tasks. We never could agree on how to do it, and I think that we weren't ready for such regimentation. Maybe one day...
  • Guidelines