522180 - wiki.mozilla.org CSS should indicate when a Discussion (Talk) page exists

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Websites :: wiki.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[skierpage]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20091013  Minefield/3.7a1pre
Build Identifier: 

Most wiki.mozilla.org pages don't have any discussion on their Talk: page.  But some do, and the CSS makes no distinction for those pages.  So people have little motivation to click the [Discussion] tab for a wiki page, so feedback goes unread and/or people clutter up the main page with their comments.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Visit a wiki page that has discussion, like https://wiki.mozilla.org/XULRunner (click its Discussion tab to verify there's something)
2.  Visit a wiki page with no discussion, such as https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.org  (click its Discussion tab to verify there's nothing)
Actual Results:  
The [Discussion] tabs of the two pages look identical.

Expected Results:  
Existing/missing Discussion should look different to encourage users to read discussion, and to avoid wasted clicks when there's no discussion.

Normally a link to something that doesn't exist appears red (a.new sets to color:#ba0000 in https://wiki.mozilla.org/skins/cavendish/main.css ).

But https://www.mozilla.org/css/cavendish/template.css overrides this in
	#header ul a {
by setting the color white in these header tabs regardless of whether the link exists or not:
		color: #fff;

The fix is to have different CSS styling for <a class="new"> within #header ul a.  (I dunno if you can turn off the white color by saying "#header ul a NOT(#new)" .)  You could restore the red font color for a missing page, or you could remove bolding, or have a pink background, etc.

Comment 1

[Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW]]

"the CSS makes no distinction for those pages" is incorrect* - like other wiki links, links to missing pages (eg unused talk page) are shown in red, links to extant pages are in blue. You can override this in a personalised css file if you want to.

but considering this bug is over four years old, people have probably realised that since ;-P

Comment 2

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

(In reply to Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW] from comment #1)
> "the CSS makes no distinction for those pages" is incorrect* - like other
> wiki links, links to missing pages (eg unused talk page) are shown in red,
> links to extant pages are in blue.

This bug is about the "Discussion" link header, ul#nav > li#ca-talk, which is neither blue nor red.  It is white.  See comment 0 for details of the specific lines of CSS responsible for this.

Comment 3

[Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW]]

As I stated earlier, the talk page (aka discussion page) is _definitely_ modified in colour depending upon whether it has content or not *by default*.

There may well be the case though that in one particular skin it didn't (and, from your comment #2, possibly still doesn't) I've tried a few alternatives directly, but none appear to have worked upon testing. As such, I'll test on another system before trying again here. Are you aware of the issue on any other skin apart from Cavendish?

Comment 4

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

Yes, this is also reproducible in the default wiki.m.o skin ("GMO").

Comment 5

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

Attachment: screenshot

To be clear, the bug is about this link, which is colored light gray in the default theme on all wiki.mozilla.org pages.

Comment 6

[Christie Koehler [:ckoehler]]

In general, I don't think we should be fixing non-critical bugs on deprecated themes. However, this one was quick. Just need the PR reviewed and merged:
https://github.com/mozilla/mediawiki-skins-gmo/pull/3

Comment 7

[Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW]]

Just tested it on the Cavendish skin but doesn't appear to work (though might be a caching issue somewhere in mid-atlantic) https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=MediaWiki%3ACavendish.css&action=historysubmit&diff=971766&oldid=971757

(and yes, it is non-critical but sorting UX issues tends to make people happy ;-P

Comment 8

[Christie Koehler [:ckoehler]]

The fix is GMO-specific.

Comment 9

[Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW]]

Installed and works in GMO - now live :-)

Will look at what changes are needed to make it effective on Cavendish too.

Comment 10

[Christie Koehler [:ckoehler]]

(In reply to Alison Wheeler [:AlisonW] from comment #9)
> Installed and works in GMO - now live :-)

Confirmed, installed via override at https://wiki.mozilla.org/MediaWiki:Gmo.css. Thanks!

In general, I'd like to move away from apply style changes in this way so we can ensure a more consistent environment and workflow across dev/stage/prod. 

Let's keep in in the override while we wait for the PR to be reviewed, merged and deployed.

> Will look at what changes are needed to make it effective on Cavendish too.

That said, I could't figure out where the Cavendish files were in git. It might be part of GMO, but heavily extended from monobook or another theme. So, I've applied the cavendish-specifc fix directly in the override: https://wiki.mozilla.org/MediaWiki:Cavendish.css

We should be good now. Would someone be so kind as to verify?

Comment 11

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

Looks good to me, works on wiki-dev.allizom.org. Merged and deployed to prod. Thanks!

(FYI: pages with no talk content now have a red "Discussion" link... pages with talk content appear in the normal grey as always)