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Disable Nearby Beta
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Description

Something that is Beta should be somewhat functional and at least be on an improvement path:

For Nearby I now count 4 large bugs in en.wp:

  • a non working close button for the widget
  • breaks all navboxes
  • completely broken "Read this article in full" links
  • A gazillion MF errors when you use ?debug=true

I also see very little interaction on the Feedback page for this Beta. I think a beta should improve (like MMV clearly is), not degrade. If it's not improving, but degrading because people are working on things that are judged more important, causing more breakage, then it should be disabled until a time where it can actually be improved upon again/get the attention a beta requires.

If we have the feedback that was desired and are planning to sit on it for a while, then it's end of experiment until you can run the next experiment.


Version: wmf-deployment
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz60039

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 2:53 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz60039.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

I would recommend splitting Special:Nearby and friends out from MobileFrontend to its own extension, which can integrate with MF as necessary for its mobile-formatted version.

Anyone interested in taking it on and fixing it up?

(In reply to comment #1)

I would recommend splitting Special:Nearby and friends out from
MobileFrontend
to its own extension, which can integrate with MF as necessary for its
mobile-formatted version.

This has also been suggested on bug 53552 comment 2 and 4, which I wholeheartedly support.

I think everyone is agreed this needs to happen at some point but alas right now that is not easy. Really MediaWiki needs an MVC type framework, standard template support and MediaWiki standard CSS library before this happens. Right now the code is too closely coupled with MobileFrontend and I wouldn't recommend this happening until the former has been taken care of. (This is it is breaking and until that happens it will always be like that)

To be fair I am maintaining this beta feature and wanted to use this experiment to explore what geo desires the community has with the view to (spoke to TheDJ about this in person Friday), Ive simply been too wrapped up in MobileFrontend UX changes and have been careless in maintaining it during the last deployment window.

  • with the view to create a feature rich geohack like service (doh mobile phone bugzilla commenting!!)

nearby is now disabled, until more time can be spent on it again.