dw_suggestions | Consistent entry-link list

Title:
Consistent entry-link list

Area:
entries

Summary:
Make the 'link' link (in the entry-management-links) consistent, instead of making it disappear once a comment's posted to an entry.

Description:
The 'link' link is a duplicate of the post's title (in most styles, at least), and once a single reply has been posted to an entry, this 'link' link goes away. That's bad usability, because when one gets used to looking for 'link' to get a clean URL for a post, it doesn't matter whether or not there's been a reply; the removal of the link interrupts the smooth usability of the learned process.

Either retain the 'link' permanently -- it's not harming anything to stay there, after all -- or remove it permanently.

My preference, personally, is to keep the 'link' link in the interaction list, all the time. If you think the best solution is to remove the link-link altogether, I'd count that as a yes-answer (in that you're agreeing it needs to have consistent appearance), but the poll won't let us do multiple options for 'yes'. I guess to clarify which you want (keep completely or remove completely), use the comments.

Poll #1723 Consistent entry-link list

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
23 (76.7%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (10.0%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (13.3%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't really have a preference for either options.

It would be nice if we could have 'Link' all the time in every style and go back to having unlinked post titles. That change has always bugged the crap out of me.

I like having the title linked, as it's a fairly consistent behaviour with a lot of other sites and aggregators, so someone used to reading blogs on Wordpress or Blogger, or seeing news headlines on a lot of newspaper sites, will be used to clicking titles.

But yes, link every time would be nice.

This. I want linked titles AND the 'Link'...err, link, because it's possible to delink titles with CSS if you absolutely want to.

I'm all on for consistency. I like having the title linked, but it does no harm to have a permalink at the bottom as well.

I actually like the #comments link, but I'd love for Link to remain available after people start commenting as well.

I'm not saying anything else should change, so the comments link would remain as-is. I'm just saying the Link option should either always be present, or never be present, but not this yes-and-then-no stuff.

I guess I was jumping ahead of the game a little, poll answer changed to reflect that, but I stand by having the permalink always show.

If the point is sheer consistency, why not remove the link tag from all views? Because you're still going to need the comments tag even if you kept the link tag, and I don't actually need another entry interaction link, to my way of thinking.

That's pretty much my point. Have it show on the list, have it not show, but at least pick one and stick with it.

Also, I don't even see it having anything to do with the comments link. I figured that'd stay no matter what, since that opens the page right where the comments start; it doesn't give you a clean URL for when you want to link to a post.

The comments link doesn't show if you have 0 comments, or if you have comments disabled.

Right, so you would have a comments tag that serves as an indicator that there are comments on the entry, and the clean link url kaigou wants in the title.

I actually don't support this proposal, but I'd rather get rid of the link link altogether than have it appear alongside the comments link.

If there's no link-link, then people learn to use the title instead. That's still better than a link that appears and disappears from the list without apparent reason, since it's not automatically intuitive that comments work as replacement for link, seeing how the two links serve different purposes.

The entry subject isn't guaranteed to be there, unfortunately *G*

(Also, technical issue, the linkification doesn't handle URLs in the subject well)

?? when there's no entry subject, it says (no subject) and that is linked. I believe that's true of all of the official styles.

??linkification?

it says (no subject) and that is linked

unless you set it up to remove the (no subject), which I just did. (Meant to only do it for comments!) Wow, okay, no subject at all. So I guess to answer your question, it's possible for there to be no title creating that second clean-URL link. By accident or bad user-design, but still possible.

Yep, or you can strip it with CSS.

If an entry subject contains a link or a user tag the rest of the subject behind that is not linked. It's in Bugzilla, but I don't think it's assigned at the moment.

I like that the title is linked as permanent link, but I can see the point of the "link" being consistently there, however right now its behavior is not that of a permanent link, because if you have "style=mine" enabled for viewing entries, the link link will be in your style, whereas the the page title will be the permanent link without such display additions. So there actually is no duplication. Also I think it is perhaps misleadingly titled. I think the change that almost all links add "style=mine" rather than cut tags hasn't been around so long, but in any case I distinctly remember that soon after that happened I frequently wanted to take the link for the permanent link (as I was used to that pre-title linking and hadn't adapted to the change yet) and had to manually delete the style addition in my link html.

Hmm, so you're saying the title should have ?style=mine, but the permalink shouldn't since that's meant to be the canonical link to the entry?

*grumbles* I'd rather neither have it, personally. I'm guessing someone's attached to the notion (to have added it) but I find it one of the most, if not the most, unhelpful DW-behavior ever.

It should only be there if there is already a style=mine appended -- though that won't help, I suppose, if you're following a link from someone else, which contains style=mine.

I like to have some link to see an entry in the site scheme (which is what I have picked as my style), though. If neither did that, I couldn't easily open an entry in another tab and have it displayed for reading, unless it had comments or a cut tag.

I'm not sure. By now I'm used to the title as a permanent link, and as others have said, it is similar to other blog sites. This switching back andforth probably won't make anyone happy either. But yeah, if I had picked how it was designed from the start without being used to some status quo wrt to what the links do I'd have made the link labelled as "link" the permanent link, because that is what is what is done with the comments and such when a "link" link is there, so it would be consistent, and would have made the title a link to get the entry displayed, with the style=mine addition if I had it turned on, like the cut links.

Actually I'd rather have that the other way around. Style=mine in the footer, title not have it. But that may just be because of my particular browsing habits (I generally skim long entries and open them in tabs to read later, so the #comments link is very much a pain; I want to click an link at the bottom of an entry that keeps all my viewing preferences (like style=mine) but that goes to the top of the entry, not the bottom.)

Not having an un-#commentsed link at the bottom of entries on my read page is probably my absolute biggest usability annoyance with DW right now.