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It's allowed for compatibility with existing workflows that were designed for the old "add section" interface. Disallowing it would probably be an unpopular change.

Some previous discussions about this behavior:

• T243248#6514134
• T272543#6829086
• T295509#7499209

That makes sense. I wasn't able to find the reason for this from searching through phab. The reason I raise this issue is that there's been lots of new users using add topic. While most set a header, there's quite a few who don't, and it is quite annoying, since that means either just reverting the user or manually adding a section heading. The cases you mention are where power users automatically add a heading through a template; I think the new topic tool should be able detect when a heading is automatically added (since it already generates a preview). I think T295509 should be implemented and what I'm asking for is when that's done, the contrapositive of "ask me to put a section heading in the section heading field if I'm not typing it in my new section" should also be done.

(It also makes it hard for the abusefilter to detect when new users are adding a new section, which is where I originally saw this problem, and is an additional issue.)

This is exactly what I was afraid of two years ago…

In T272543#6789217, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

Providing timely feedback is good UX-wise, but I have two concerns:

• What if the user writes a very long message and the warning gets out of view (or just doesn’t pay attention to the warning)? As the patch is written, lack of the title doesn’t prevent sending the message, not even once, so it’s quite possible that the topic will be sent without title in this case.
• […]

My idea is to keep checking the presence of a title at send time (including the click-twice-to-override behavior) in addition to checking at blurring, and give an extra notification to the user if they actually try to send the topic without a title (e.g. scroll into view and highlight the warning).

I updated the task description with an estimate of how often new users add sections without a header, since I saw in T272543 that @ppelberg created T274221 to estimate this issue and mentioned that "If we observe this happening often [i], I think it makes sense to adjust the approach this ticket is implementing".

Thanks for the figures! 10% is a lot – when I feared of this being an issue, I thought of something like once or twice a week on enwiki. Although looking at today’s headingless edits, the vast majority of them are test edits, which would have to be reverted anyway (although if the users had to confirm adding a headingless section, maybe some of these test edits wouldn’t be published in the first place).

the vast majority of them are test edits, which would have to be reverted anyway

That's definitely true, but that's also why I mention "It also makes it hard for the abusefilter to detect when new users are adding a new section" - I created filter 1245 which blocks a decent portion of test edits, but it can only detect those with a heading. And yeah, hopefully prompting for a heading stops some portion of the test edits.

(Next step is for us to look through the old tasks and figure out why exactly we did it this way, and whether it would be harmless to change it as requested.)

I think we should make it harder to submit without a topic. Currently we just show a warning when the field is blurred, which is easy to miss. We should either:

1. Wait until the user presses "Add topic", then focus the subject and show the warning. Only if they press "Add topic" again do we post without a subject.
2. Add a checkbox to the "Advanced" section to "Allow posting without a subject". When the users tries to submit, show an error message that explains they will need to enable this checkbox to continue. This checkbox can be sticky so experience users need only do this once.

In T334163#8946955, @Esanders wrote:

1. Wait until the user presses "Add topic", then focus the subject and show the warning. Only if they press "Add topic" again do we post without a subject.

I still like this. The only issue is that it used to work exactly this way before @matmarex changed it in T272543, so we’ll need to convince him before returning to that solution.

I won't oppose that, although I still think it makes for a poor experience, especially in cases where you're legitimately posting a new topic with a header but without filling out the "Subject" field, like @Sdkb's T338390. Maybe if we could handle that without showing the error, I'd feel better about this. Let's see if I can make that work, and then I'll let y'all have it at the interface.

Change 932178 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Backend changes related to topic subjects in message body

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/932178

Folks, I recognize I have only skimmed through the discussion, but it seems to me like there is little debate on the opportunity for such a radical change.

The way you're pushing the new discussion tools in the ux make it that there are quite a few valid use cases for publishing a new section without a header:

• adding maintenance templates in new talk pages (or at the bottom)
• outdent a discussion
• adding any non-plaintext content to the page

IMO, it needs to be put under an option, to allow advanced users such use-cases.

Also, I see a lot of discussion around enwp and its needs. Maybe you should also look around smaller wikis and see what they have to say on the subject?

On the one hand, no one wants to make it completely impossible to add topics without headers, just require extra click(s) to make sure one knows what they’re doing.

On the other hand, neither of the above three are new topic additions and IMO all of the above three are better served by the other editing experiences:

• Adding maintenance templates: when creating a new talk page, just use the Edit tab. This makes sure the appropriate automatic edit summary is used. On existing talk pages, maintenance templates should either be added to the lead section (use the Edit tab, or the [edit] link next to the page heading if that’s available through a gadget or site script), they should be part of a topic (use section editing for appropriate edit summary), or should form a new topic (add a topic heading either manually or by subst:’ing the maintenance template if it’s designed to be used that way; DiscussionTools should recognize the heading in the latter case as well).
• Outdenting: use section editing. This makes sure that an appropriate edit summary is used.
• Adding non-plaintext content: I don’t know what exactly you think of; this doesn’t even sound like something you’d do on a talk page. Use the wikitext editor, VisualEditor or whatever you use to use to edit content pages.

In T334163#8958610, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

all of the above three are better served by the other editing experiences:

Not really (think about the lack of VE in your proposals), but you shouldn't take my word on it. Engage the communities and analyze the data. T274221 is a good start, but not enough.

Change 932178 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Backend changes related to topic subjects in message body

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/932178

Change #1026596 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; author: Esanders):

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Show confirmation prompt if trying to submit a new topic without a title

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1026596

Test wiki created on Patch demo by ESanders (WMF) using patch(es) linked to this task:
https://patchdemo.wmflabs.org/wikis/192c01ddcf/wiki/Talk:DiscussionTools