Description
Since the url parameter action=subscribe is used for BOTH subscribe and unsubscribe actions, it is very easy to accidentally toggle your subscription back off after subscribing to a page (for example if you refresh or use the Back button). There have been countless times that I try to subscribe to a page and find that my subscription has disappeared. It is very frustrating.
I propose that rather than subscriptions using a "toggle" mechanism, there be separate actions for subscribe vs. unsubscribe (action=subscribe and action=unsubscribe). This will greatly reduce problems.
The task is to split subscribe action into 2 actions: subscribe and unsubscribe, change the theme to use different links in menu.
This task is expected to need 10h of work. It has to be finished in 7 days.
Steps to reproduce
- Subscribe to a page (for example, this one)
- After the page reloads, you will be subscribed. Now refresh/reload the page, and note that you are no longer subscribed.
Example
Details
MoinMoin Version |
Current version |
Workaround
After subscribing/unsubscribing, immediately click on the page name in your page history or the navigation bar (or click the "view" link) so that the "action=subscribe" is removed from the url. Then avoid using the Back button?
You should never use the back button with moin (and many other form based web sites). And you should also never need to do that.
Discussion
I'm not sure, what the real experts in Moin say to this. But I think the menu items provided in the different themes should allow navigation without the need to use the back button. This includes a heavy use of wiki trails (breadcrumbs), this may also include adding a link "back to screen view" in the print view (see UsabilityObservation/HowToGetHistory) and a new menu item "View wikipage" to easily return to the wikipage e.g. after fileupload, viewing some diffs etc.(see UsabilityObservation/UserCannotReturnToWikiPageAfterPerformedAction). Concering usability sakes it might be also better to show the "raw text" of a wikipage in some editform (like TWiki does) rather than loading a textfile in the browser window. Of course this current solution is better to save the raw text file, but if you want to force the usability policy to strictly avoid the need to use the back button, on has to think of another solution like the current - and the TWiki solution is not the worst and could be enhanced by a "save to disk"button. Besides that, I would advocate to split the toggle in two seperate functions. The same is true for subscribing/unsubscribing quicklinks.
Move topic to UsabilityObservation and discuss solutions there since it's not a real bug??
If this is not a real bug, that means that using normal, seemingly benign browser functions is supposed to arbitrarily switch subscription states, and that is considered OK? To me, in light of how browsers work and how people are used to using them, it is a flawed design (or rather, an oversight) to make such an action be a toggle. Especially since in my simplest reproduction case (above), all you have to do is refresh the page. This may be a necessary action since it's possible that the page fails to load fully, for whatever reason (in fact, it is not uncommon at all).
Plan
- Priority:
- Assigned to:
Status: Fix on the page http://code.google.com/p/google-highly-open-participation-moinmoin/issues/detail?id=40, fixed in 1.6 by http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.6/rev/b3676f95c2dc
Note that quicklink action has a very similar problem. Fix: quicklink.patch, fixed in 1.6 by http://hg.moinmo.in/moin/1.6/rev/d101381a1874