User talk:Jeff G.

Welcome
Tempodivalse [talk]  19:36, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Edits to archived article
I responded to your request at Talk:Getty taps into Flickr snappers. Sorry about the delay. --InfantGorilla (talk) 10:12, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Collaboration vs opinions
Our system (imperfect as it is) is that comments on the composition of an article go on the collaboration page (aka the talk page, which I see you did find), while discussion of the topic of an article &mdash; once published &mdash; go on the opinions page (aka the comments page). Because discussions can get badly muddled if the content of the article fundamentally changes out from under them, we don't allow the comments page to be created until the article is published ("Comments page of unpublished article" is one of our grounds of for speedy deletion).

So you understand, when your opinions-page remark disappears, it's an administrative-overhead kind of thing. :-) --Pi zero (talk) 17:47, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Ok, I'm done mourning my opinion, but I didn't see any warning about that.  — Jeff G. ツ 18:04, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, I did say it's imperfect. The behavior of the infrastructure is difficult to change (though I mean to partially redress that problem).  --Pi zero (talk) 18:45, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions or perhaps Lua could be helpful here, throwing up an error a polite notification of the comment's impending doom in develop if Comments: exists.  — Jeff G. ツ 19:05, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * When you set out to make that comment, did you go through the "opinions" tab from the article page? --Pi zero (talk) 19:14, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I saw the unclickable "Have an opinion on this story? Share it!", then clicked on that tab. In a perfect world, that text whould not exist on the page if the story is not published.  — Jeff G. ツ 19:35, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
 * There are two separate devices.
 * The message you're talking about is generated by the haveyoursay template, a required element of articles. Once upon a time that always provided a redlink if the comments page didn't already exist, which caused all kinds of problems because of course the user wouldn't know the special dweomer needed to set up the comments page correctly.  I upgraded it so it'd use a preload link to encourage the user to set up the page correctly, which was a slight improvement; then I upgraded it so when the comments page doesn't exist, it only provides the creation link if the article is published (which should only be true of really old articles, because our review gadget sets up the page when publishing).  You're right, the message should be changed before publication to avoid encouraging readers passing by.
 * The opinions tab is set up by some javascript somewhere. We're wary of touching our old javascript infrastructure; honestly, javascript is the most cantankerous PL I've ever had to work with.  In principle I agree that the tab shouldn't even be there if the article hasn't been published.
 * --Pi zero (talk) 20:06, 2 April 2017 (UTC)