Hullo!
Last year we created a new feature called Flags, which has been live on your community for a while. As I'm sure some of you have noticed, we've been quiet about development on this front for a while. It's time for an update.
- A visit to Shady Pines retirement home
The brief summary is: we're planning to retire Flags in the near future. While the feature had some aspects we really liked, it simply hasn't been as beneficial as we hoped, especially now that Template Types has been launched sitewide.
After careful consideration over whether it makes sense to spend time to build out the feature further or to simplify article editing by removing it, we feel the latter makes the most sense.
However, we do not think this was wasted time - we learned a lot while creating this feature, and it's quite possible we'll use some of the code in other features in the future.
- How we'll retire it
In essence, we will run a bot that will switch Flags back into being a normal part of your article wikitext. We want to make this process as smooth as possible - ideally, viewers should see little difference, and editors will go back to editing notices just as they did in the past.
We will provide an update when we have more specific timing for this switchover, and feel free to continue using flags in the meantime.
I want to thank you all for helping try out this feature - we really appreciated all the feedback, suggestions and bug reports we received while it was available. If you have more thoughts and feedback about the feature, we'd still love to hear it - for example, was there some aspect that you really appreciated? Just let us know either below or via Special:Contact/feedback!
Kirkburn (talk) 18:42, February 11, 2016 (UTC)
Discussion[]
It's too bad this didn't work out, but I can understand. It was really convenient to be able to just click on the flag tab and then check off all the templates that needed to be added to the page, but it was definitely a drawback that they didn't show up in the page history or the recent changes page--which was a major drawback when making deletion nominations. --♫ Kelcat Talk 01:18, February 12, 2016 (UTC)
- Yeah I was just getting used to the flag system. Cést la vie
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HD3 (Talk) 01:21, February 12, 2016 (UTC)
- @Kelcat, yeah that's one kind of complexity that was becoming an issue if we wanted to develop this further - how to let people know about these changes? Should there be notifications and diffs, should it appear in article histories, etc.? It's entirely possible that we'll revisit this kind of concept again in the future - article metadata is a concept we quite like. Kirkburn (talk) 12:58, February 12, 2016 (UTC)
An update: we're planning on running the retirement process this week, tentatively tomorrow. Kirkburn (talk) 16:46, March 7, 2016 (UTC)
- Not sure if you're completely done with the transition, but it looks like there's some problems with what's been done so far. Several pages now have the templates listed twice on them. See Disciple Staff Schematic, Masterwork Lockpick, and Arming Sword Schematic for examples. --♫ Kelcat Talk 23:04, March 10, 2016 (UTC)
- Hi! We are done with the transition, but it looks like some pages haven't quite caught up. A quick null (no-change) edit fixed those pages for me, which means that it's basically just a lingering cache issue - if you spot more pages with this issue they should fix themselves over the next few days, or you can give them a quick edit to fix them now.
- I hope this helps! Kirkburn (talk) 19:02, March 11, 2016 (UTC)