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With ReplyTool, the indentation of the preview of discussions is confusing
Open, Needs TriagePublicBUG REPORT

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

  • open a discussion and click on the Reply link (exemple)
  • write your answer in the box and look at the preview
  • then click on the Reply button and look at the result

What happens?:
*the indentation of the reply is not correct.
The reason is that the design of the reply box, with the wikicode mode activated by default ("Source"), is suggesting that the indentation will be done by the ReplyTool, and I have only to write my text, but it doesn't happen.

Instead, for a correct indentation when saving, I have to write as usual my wikicode with colon (ponctuation mark " : ") before the text. But if I write with colon before my text, the ReplyTool preview a double indentation, which doesn't correspond to the result of the saved page.
The design is suggesting the wrong behaviour to users.

What should have happened instead?:
Two possibilities:

  1. the ReplyTool could retain the current design, but do automatic indentation too (adding the colon?)
  2. the ReplyTool prevent the indentation preview unless user writes the colon " : " explicitly

Software version (skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):

Screenshot 2022-12-06 at 11-56-37 Discussion utilisateur Patafisik (WMF) - Wikipédia.png (597×1 px, 47 KB)

Event Timeline

It is supposed to be adding the indentation, so it not doing so is a bug.

Reply tool always adds indentation, but in this case it only added one :, because it detected the previous comment as unindented.

The edit and comment for reference:

You can visualize how the tool understands the discussion using the dtdebug parameter: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipédia:Le_Bistro/6_décembre_2022&oldid=199266280&dtdebug=1

image.png (2×3 px, 718 KB)
image.png (2×3 px, 643 KB)

Basically, the entire sub-section (the template at the top, the list, and the real comment by J-P C.) are all treated as part of the comment, and as not being indented. We don't really handle "interjections" like this very well, and I don't think there's much we can do about it.


Then there's the second issue, of how this looks like in preview. We don't handle the custom French Wikipedia styling very well. In your screenshot, the blue frame around the whole reply tool correctly represents the indentation that will be used for the comment; the white frame inside the "Preview" box is misleading. We have a slightly messy HTML structure that doesn't play well with the on-wiki styles. We could fix this more easily, although I'm not sure how the frames should look like.

ppelberg moved this task from Backlog to Triaged on the DiscussionTools board.
ppelberg moved this task from Untriaged to Upcoming on the Editing-team board.