769366 - RFE Need a warning or visual clue when using double brackets around text in a forum reply doesn't create a valid KB article link

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozilla.org :: Questions, task, P3)

Description

[John Hesling [:John99] (NeedInfo me)]

The request is to provide a warning or visual clue when using double brackets around text in a forum reply doesn't create a valid KB article link. 

STR
Open a new forum thread or an existing one in order to and reply to it
Attempt to add a link to a KB article using the double bracket method, either by using the formatting icon or by entering the text manually.
A currently valid entry would be [[Firefox crashes - Troubleshoot, prevent and get help fixing crashes]]
An invalid entry would be [[Firefox crash - Troubleshoot, prevent and get help fixing crashes]]  {omitted "e")
make the post and look at the links
Result
The invalid link is offering to create a new KB article. 


Background information
This is more important now that a large tranche of KB articles have been renamed with long names which contributors will be unfamiliar with, and are more difficult to remember accurately. In the example above the old title (which will still at present redirect correctly) was [[crashes]]  

This problem is discussed in thread "[site-issue] Site Suggestion, check for incorrect links" https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/708481

I specifically mention the questions support forum, the same problem will occur on the other sumo forums and the Private Messages

Comment 1

[Alice Wyman]

Bad links originating in the support forum might be one reason why support requests get submitted as new KB articles and reviewers have to defer them and then ask an admin to delete the "article".  Ref: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/article-review-guidelines#w_spam-and-mistaken-edits

Comment 2

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

Yeah it would be good if we had this. Maybe something like the "page does not exist" tool tip you get on wiki.m.o and/or a different color for the link (red?).

Comment 3

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

This issue came up again https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/708879

Can we evaluate and prioritize a fix?

Comment 4

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

It seems to me that the urgent problem is that people create new KB articles without wanting to, which leads to unnecessary work to clean that up, and doesn't solve the user's issue.

Verdi, does it make sense to let just about anyone create a KB article? Would it be possible to restrict that to the group "KB contributors"? 

Ricky, any idea how many points you would assign to the solution described above, where we give non-existing wiki links another color?

Comment 5

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

(In reply to Kadir Topal [:atopal] from comment #4)

> Verdi, does it make sense to let just about anyone create a KB article?
> Would it be possible to restrict that to the group "KB contributors"? 

The original solution has the benefit of preventing links that don't go anywhere helpful. I wouldn't want to restrict creating an article any further. Right now creating an article is limited to registered users. Requiring that you also have to be in a certain group seems like it would do more harm than good. It would require new users to contact us and request being added to a group and then waiting for that to happen.

Comment 6

[Kadir Topal [:atopal]]

Yeah, the original solution is more comprehensive, but probably more time consuming to implement. I was trying to see if we can get away with a simpler solution. Since restricting the permissions to create a new articles doesn't seem to be an option, let's figure out what else is possible. 

For starters: Can we get the standard behavior of media wiki to color non-existing links in a different color?

Comment 7

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

(In reply to Kadir Topal [:atopal] from comment #6)
> For starters: Can we get the standard behavior of media wiki to color
> non-existing links in a different color?

Mythmon will be looking at the parser soon and will keep this in mind.

Comment 8

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

The parser already detects when a link already exists or if it will need to create a new article. It adds `class="new"` to these documents. This will be a remarkably easy change to just change these links to red, and maybe add an icon or a tooltip. This will only show up in rendered documents, not the editing window.

Easy CSS change => 1 pt.

Comment 9

[Michael Cooper [:mythmon]]

Ricky deployed this earlier today.