943526 - Improve discoverability of and access to the revision comment

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

What feature should be changed? Please provide the URL of the feature if possible.
==================================================================================
The revision comment function is slightly difficult to discover (due to its location near the bottom of the page), and is inconvenient to access (also due to its location way at the bottom of the page).

We need to come up with a way to make it more convenient to access while saving changes.

What problems would this solve?
===============================
There are a few possible solutions, among which are:

1. Make it so the review comment field is at the top, in an area of the page that doesn't scroll away (along with the save/preview/discard buttons).

2. Add a "Save with comment" button that prompts for the button.

3. Always prompt for a comment when saving.

I favor the latter -- sort of. I think the first time the user clicks "Save and Exit" without having entered a comment, they should be prompted to enter a comment. That dialog should include "Save" and "Cancel" buttons, a field for editing the comment (allowing it to be left blank), and a "never ask again" button or checkbox.

The user should be able to toggle this setting in their profile settings.

I suggest doing this only on save and exit because save and continue is typically a safety-measure checkpoint save rather than a meaningful point in the writing process -- but the user could enter a comment using the comment box in-page if they wish.

All that said, we should consider all the options, and come up with the best solution.

Who would use this?
===================
Most contributors.

What would users see?
=====================
See above.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
See above.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

In general, I think, if we can get to the point where the save button(s) and the revision comment field are always visible, and ideally the revision comment box is adjacent to a save button, we're in good shape.

Comment 2

[Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]]

(In reply to Eric Shepherd [:sheppy] from comment #0)
> There are a few possible solutions, among which are:
> 
> 1. Make it so the review comment field is at the top, in an area of the page
> that doesn't scroll away (along with the save/preview/discard buttons).
> 
> 2. Add a "Save with comment" button that prompts for the button.
> 
> 3. Always prompt for a comment when saving.
> 
> I favor the latter -- sort of. I think the first time the user clicks "Save
> and Exit" without having entered a comment, they should be prompted to enter
> a comment. That dialog should include "Save" and "Cancel" buttons, a field
> for editing the comment (allowing it to be left blank), and a "never ask
> again" button or checkbox.

I agree. Though I'd not let the user allow to disable the dialog. As mentioned in bug 818673 revision comments are important to keep track of the change history and to find specific revisions and the reason behind changes.

> I suggest doing this only on save and exit because save and continue is
> typically a safety-measure checkpoint save rather than a meaningful point in
> the writing process -- but the user could enter a comment using the comment
> box in-page if they wish.

Personally I use the save and continue feature when I want to do multiple unrelated changes to an article, e.g. add a new section and fix typos. Though I'm probably more disciplined than others in this area.
To cover the worries about data loss I'd say it would be better to extend the draft feature, for example by allowing to explicitly save the article as a draft additionally to the auto-saving feature as described in bug 1123616.

Sebastian

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

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