512661 - `Move/Copy to <folder> again` doesn't mean what it says! Remove the word "again"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Bernard Leak]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.23 (20090812) (old bug still current)

Move to "xxx" again
and
Copy to "xxx" again
fail to say what you mean. 

I suggest simply omitting "again".  It adds nothing useful,
especially if the target was last set so long ago that
the user has forgotten about it, and it can be very
confusing.
   "Again" only makes sense from a floating view detached
from the current selection.  It can seem natural to a user
who is working through the items in a folder, but if the
user has selected an item and is deciding its fate (applying
a method to the designated object) then "again" is
most unnatural.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Right-click on a folder item (e.g., a message) and move to some folder
2.Right-click on another folder item
3.Read the resulting context menu
Actual Results:  
The menu should include a
Move to "<target folder>" again
item

Expected Results:  
I'm not sure that I *expect* anything else, but I would *prefer*
Move to "<target folder>"

Nearly every time I see this message I start to ask myself "what do you
mean, again?".

The Severity code below ("Minor") seems right to me, but the *explanation*
of the code is, of course, quite inapplicable.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

magnus, bienvenu, your thoughts? (wontfix?)  This is mentioned in bug 350543 comment 20 (the bug which implemented this feature) and the bug has no discussion of the concern. There is a certain logic to removing it. On the other hand, we tend to prefer that features have unique names, and "again" adds uniqueness.

xref Bug 253964 - need GUI improvement for the file/copy to/move to/recent selected message feature

this doesn't in any way affect functionality, so sev=minor

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I tend to agree with reporter that "again" has little meaning, if any, and on the other hand, can be much more confusing than helping.

1) the intended meaning of "again" (as in: move/copy to the same target again) works only within a short time span: a week, or even a busy day after my last copy operation, "Again" will have no meaning whatsoever.

2) "move/copy to [afolder] again" might be grammatically ambigous (and confusing): Message commands always refer to selected message(s). So the label is shorthand for "Move/Copy *this message/these messages* to [afolder] again": Mind you, we are not moving *the selected messages again*, we are moving the selected messages *to the same folder *(again) where we last copied/moved a message to.

3) Due to the folder name inclusion, this is one of the longest command labels that we have anyway, and "again" just makes it even longer. Plus most other languages have longer words than English, so it comes out even longer (again). That's also the reason why some translations like German don't even bother translating "again": We just have "Verschieben in [afolder]". Adding "again" in German in a grammatically correct way would be very clumsy for the label: "Wiederum in [afolder] verschieben". Autsch.

So to conclude, fwiw, I'd recommend confirming this bug as I suspect we'd be better off without "again".

Comment 3

[:aceman]

I agree here. Only from these discussions I actually found out what that command means. Till now, I had the impression it should operate on the same message again. Something like undo/redo.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Wayne had an objection to this somewhere that on the downside, removing "again" from the label would make this Move/copy to <folder> command much less unique and almost identical with Move/copy to > <folder>; not good for support and documentation.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Doesn't seem compelling