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  1.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Anyone have any ideas about how to improve "latest changes"? It would be really nice if it were a threaded forum or something else with an RSS feed. But it should also be easy to link to nlab pages from it. How hard would it be to hack some forum or blog software (like here or the cafe) so that we could make links directly to the nlab, say just like this?

  2.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I thought about writing a simple filter that converted the current latest changes to an RSS feed. I've also thought that another option would be to dedicate an area of this forum (or some other forum) to it and link everything across. However, I've now learnt (thanks to Jacques) that Rails apps can be integrated in a closer fashion than Rails and non-Rails apps. I also was initially keen to base it in PHP so that it could run on a different server to the lab itself, but now that we've gone for a memory upgrade then I'm less bothered by this issue and think that the tighter integration would pay off.

    If we wrote (or found) a simple forum/blog app in Rails that did what we wanted, then we could link it in to the nLab so that the latest changes page was essentially a front to the new app.

    I've only just learnt about the possibilities with the integration so I'm not clear on what is and isn't possible, but the possibility of a close integration so that to the user it was all as if it were the same application gives me enough reason to investigate further and consider doing it this way.

    The integration stuff, by the way, goes by the name of 'ActiveResource'.

  3.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    That would be pretty neat. Could we also put a "comment" box on the "edit" pages on the nlab that would automatically post something to the latest changes forum?

  4.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I'm in two minds about this one. It would make it easier to log stuff to 'latest changes' but then would make it less likely that people would go over there and read everyone else's log (in particular, since not everyone is quite sure what RSS is for). Also, it may make it too easy to log stuff and 'latest changes' would fill up with crud. I think I'd rather put a link to 'latest changes' at the top of every page (perhaps in place of the 'recently revised' link) and maybe a short message next to the 'submit' button on the edit page saying "Don't forget to log significant changes at 'latest changes'".

    Apart from that one, it feels to me as though 'latest changes' should basically be a forum-type thing. Anyone can post, but can't change posts (if we, like Instiki, don't have logins then you can't edit your own post either). Posts can 'reply' to other posts. There should be several ways to view the posts: threaded, chronological, today, last n days (specific values of n?), and, of course, RSS. The syntax should be that of Instiki, and wiki-links should link to the nlab.

    Anything else?

  5.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    re: boxes on edit pages, I can see your points.

    Your summary of features sounds pretty good to me. Perhaps, though, we should think about how much "replying" we should encourage people to do at 'latest changes' versus actually having discussions at the pages themselves?

  6.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    There's already too much replying at latest changes, in my opinion. Sometimes it works, but mostly it should go on the relevant page. (But then, you might want to log the fact that you made a comment! That depends on whether you expect the person that the comment is for to read the page anyway, really.)

  7.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    We could also think about attaching discussion forums to individual pages, the way that Wikipedia does with its talk: pages. I'm not sure whether I think that's a good idea, just throwing it out there. But if we had a forum running with instiki syntax and nlab links, it might make some of the longer discussions easier to follow (one could subscribe just to the RSS feed for a particular discussion, for instance), and also easier to preserve and continue without cluttering up the pages themselves. We might even think about implementing a syntax for nlab pages to link to forum discussions. Just brainstorming.

  8.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    Syntax to link back and forth would be very useful, I think. (And throw the Café in there too.)

    Can we set up RSS feeds for specific threads in this Forum, so that it would be useful for someone who wants to comment on a page to simply throw up a link to a Forum thread, or (if there is already such a link) add to the existing discussion thread? All in all, I like having the discussion right there where it's relevant, but I can see how having an RSS feed would be useful.

  9.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I don't know how I survived without RSS feeds! In one window I can see if there are any new comments/discussions here, any new pages at the lab, any new comments/posts at the cafe, any updates to the instiki software, any complaints about my LaTeX plugins (any comments at all about those!) ... if I had to check all of those pages individually I'd never get any work done. Or something. In fact, one page has just lost its RSS and that means that I only check it when I remember - not very often! As it's a page I ought to keep an eye on (since it's the discussion thread on some software I wrote) then not having RSS is an issue.

    I think that RSS works fairly well on this forum. I haven't tested all possibilities, and I had to tweak the plugin a little (you may remember that), but there's a link up above saying "Discussion Feed" so I think that that would give you the feed for this particular discussion. It looks like that can also happen by category.

    So one quick option would be to have a dedicated category in this forum for 'latest changes'. New comments become new discussions, whilst replies become continuations of a discussion. Integration from this side wouldn't be a problem - it'd be easy to write a wikilinks plugin that took latest changes and made it point to the right page (actually, that sounds like a darn good idea anyway).

    So we could do almost everything from this forum. The main disadvantage would be the integration with the nlab from the nlab side. Loose integration - a link to this forum - would be easy enough. Tight integration, where the relevant discussion gets inset into a page in the lab, would be harder, but easier in Rails than PHP.

    Discussion pages and RSS would save people having to keep putting "more on discussion at ..." on the 'latest changes'. They'd just have to log that there was an interesting discussion and then leave everyone to bookmark them as they wish. Heck, we can even have a feed reader on the site that everyone can use and personalise ... the possibilities are endless! We could take over the world!

    Or something.

  10.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    While we're dreaming, I'd also like a 'lab elves' blog where I can make announcements like the fact that something might have gone wrong with unicode characters so let me know if you spot one.

    Actually, if we're thinking big ... on one site there should be:

    1. A personalisable entrance site, for the moment just a feed reader
    2. A bibliographic database, where there is a central repository and user accounts, so users can tag references and add comments without those being seen, and which automatically imports from the arxiv and mathscinet (and?) (yeah, I'm thinking RefBase here)
    3. The nlab itself, with embedded discussions
    4. An announcement blog.
    5. A DVCS repository for actually writing the darn papers!

    And if anyone says "google wave" then I will personally block their IP.

  11.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    Do we really want discussions to start from latest changes like you say in #9, Andrew?

    I want discussions to start from the relevant page. I would like to have a 'specific pages' category on the Forum, and then I can start a thread for graph if I want to, putting it in that category and titling it 'graph'. If people use the RSS feed, then I don't have to bother with latest changes at all when I continue a discussion; I don't even have to bother with latest changes when I start a discussion (just link it from the page that I'm discussing), although I might note it on latest changes anyway if I want to solicit some kind of feedback.

    One problem with moving things to a Forum, however, is that there is more than one thing being discussed at graph. It's nice that we can keep each conversation in its own query box; to me, it's not an improvement to move to a single Forum thread, even if that does get me an RSS feed. Of course, we could put each conversation in its own thread, but then I no longer have an RSS feed that tells me about new discussions on graph … unless each page gets its own category … pretty complicated!

    All in all, what I'm saying is that I find discussions in query boxes very easy to follow.

  12.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    What if instiki-syntax included something like !discussion NAME, which we could insert into a page anywhere, and it would display the forum discusssion called NAME inline. This would look very much like current query boxes, but could be even better, e.g. threaded and expandable/collapsible. It would include a link to open the forum discussion alone, from which you could reply to the discussion; the inline widget could also support replying directly. The inline widget could also have a link to an RSS feed for that discussion, making it easy to subscribe to. And, of course, if you entered !discussion NAME where there is no discussion called NAME yet, then the inline widget would give you a link to create it, just like how you upload a file now. This would also have the advantage that a single discussion could be displayed on multiple pages; we've occasionally had query-box discussions that were relevant to more than one page.

    Admittedly, this doesn't automatically give us a single RSS feed that tracks all discussions on a given page, unless we put discussions in categories. However, I'm a bit of an RSS newbie and I'm actually a little scared of the idea of having separate RSS feeds for each page on which there is a discussion. Presumably that means we'll have to subscribe individually to each such feed; that seems like (potentially) a lot of feeds! And can my feed reader handle hundreds of feeds without slowing to a crawl? Right now I read RSS with Thunderbird, and for the n-Forum I just subscribe to the "all comments" feed.

    If we do end up with separate feeds for separate page/discussions, it would be nice to have some way of being notified when new discussions start---either they could be mentioned on the "latest changes" discussion manually, or there could be a separate "new discussions" feed.

  13.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Well, okay maybe there's a little too much dreaming going on there!

    If we had a Rails app, then it would be relatively easy to embed stuff in pages since they're designed to talk to each other. However, that would entail writing (or at least adapting) our own program.

    As a first step, we can simply create a 'latest changes' area on this forum and then link here instead of to the Instiki page. Given that you have to click a link anyway, we can make that point wherever we like. What would be more useful, but shouldn't be difficult, would be to have it on every page, for example instead of the 'export' link, or instead of 'recently revised'. That also shouldn't be too difficult (though I'd need to check with Jacques that this wouldn't break anything with updates).

    Tighter integration will need hacking of Instiki so that would take a little more time. Thus it might be a good idea to try a simple link-up to see if people like the idea, and then when we've decided what we do and don't like, design our own app.

    Incidentally, how do the nforum and nlab rate on performance? I could move the nforum over to the nlab host if that was felt to be a good move - this should only be considered on the basis of performance, not hostnames, since I can always (and probably should) make it seem as though the forum is hosted there without actually moving it at all.

    And what "virtual hostname" should I pick? nforum.ncatlab.org? nforum.mathforge.org? I can pick anything.ncatlab.org or anything.mathforge.org. I'd rather not make it a subdomain of ncatlab.org since that domain is completely controlled by the instiki process so I'd have to add an exception. So much easier just to add a virtual domain.

    Hmm, I just checked and it looks like vanilla (this forum software) can't do threaded discussions. However bbpress has a plugin that might be suitable. If threaded discussions seemed a good idea, that is. An alternative is to make a new category for each day and then each new entry on 'latest changes' is a new discussion in that category. I think that one can make categories a bit tree-like (sub categories and the like) and the RSS should be filterable so that you get one feed for everything "below" a certain level.

  14.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I just tried a mock-up. It doesn't quite work as fully as it ought to: one ought to be able to get a 'tree like' effect in the "categories" tab and that doesn't happen. Also, the parent 'latest changes' category should inherit all the discussions of the sub-categories. I'll investigate tomorrow whether it's easy to fix this.

    For the moment, I created a parent category 'latest changes' and subcategories corresponding to the next four days. Actually, I forgot that for most of you it's still thursday (only 45 minutes left for me so I'm off to bed before I turn into a pumpkin). I think that if the inheritance can be made to work then this would be a reasonable system.

    Thoughts?

    (of course, ideally one could use itex here ...)

  15.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Okay, some hackery this morning has cleared things up a little. Multiple subcategories are possible, so one could create a tree a bit like:

    Latest Changes
  - September
     - 1st
     - 2nd

    and so forth. The main hassle was getting the 'search' plugin to search multiple categories. This is needed because the RSS feeds work out of the search plugin so if one wants to bookmark all the 'latest changes' then one has to search in all the sub categories.

    At the moment, the search doesn't have an automatic "search in subcategories" facility which would be necessary (it'd be a pain to have to redefine the 'latest changes' RSS each time we added a new day!). However, it took long enough to figure it out so far and I'd like to know if this is a reasonable idea before investing too much more time in it.

  16.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    It sounds very complicated, but it could work. I'm sorry, but I don't think that I can judge it now. (But presumably Mike will have an opinion, and his probably matters more than mine.)

  17.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    Another point: I don't think that having each day in its own category removes the desire for threaded discussions, with indentations as in the Café. As far as latest changes goes, OK, that's probably good enough. But if you want to move individual pages' discussions and query boxes to the Forum, then I would want that before I considered it worth the change.

  18.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    It seems reasonable to me, as long as we have wikilinks working here. If we don't want people to do much replying at latest changes, then lack of threading is probably not a big deal. But we might also want to try to get some input from other than the three (?) of us who seem to be participating in this discussion.

    BTW, thanks so much (again) for all your work on this project (the nstuff in general)!! I am continually amazed at how much time you put into it.

  19.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    Mike wrote:

    BTW, thanks so much (again) for all your work on this project (the nstuff in general)!! I am continually amazed at how much time you put into it.

    If you mean Andrew, then I agree; thank you Andrew!

    If you mean me, then that's because I don't have a job. Hopefully my participation will drop off at the end of this month. (^_^)

  20.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I was thinking of Andrew, and I was thinking mostly about the technical stuff (for some reason I didn't see your last two comments when writing mine, forgot to refresh maybe) -- but I'm also always amazed at how much time you put into the nlab as well. (-: And I'm not sure why my opinion should matter more than yours.

    Anyway, I agree that this isn't ready yet to replace query boxes, but it might be worth trying for latest changes, if the RSS/search and wikilinks can be gotten to work -- it seems like most of the complication may be hidden for the user. OTOH it'd be nice not to have to worry about finding the subcategory for the correct day to post in. Why is it important to separate out "latest changes" posts according to day? In a real forum like this one, all posts will automatically be dated with when they were made... so could we just have one discussion per month, say?

  21.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    I'm not sure why my opinion should matter more than yours.

    That's because you were the one asking for an RSS feed for latest changes. I'm happy enough without one.

    I also agree with you about separate dates' being unnecessary; I'm not even sure that we need to break it up into months. I originally put dates in just like a date stamp; we organised them later. And I originally broke them up into months to keep the page from taking such a long time to load, which is not a problem here. On the other hand, we may find that some organisation is helpful, so it would be good if we could rearrange things if we find that we need to.

    But the point is, arrange things how we think will be useful on a forum, not just to match what's on latest changes now.

  22.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Well, okay maybe a different subcategory per day is a bit overkill. The point was that in this particular forum software, one can organise stuff by category to arbitrary depth, but the actual discussions are linear. So the idea is that each significant 'latest change' starts a new discussion and any replies - and only replies - continue that discussion. How the discussions are organised is up to you. I picked days because that's what's on the current version. Maybe weeks? One can always shift discussions from one category to another so reorganising later is always possible (though it'd be a hassle to shift loads - may be easier with direct access to the database).

    So what would be useful? Wikilinks shouldn't be too hard to implement. Presumably they should always be on (a bit like the 'vlatex' plugin that does the maths here) and shouldn't be "text formatter" dependent. A simple link should go to the nlab page of that name, whilst link (otherlab) should go to the other lab page (is that the right syntax? It should be like that on the Instiki software). I need to add 'search in subcategories' to the search page so that the RSS behaves correctly. Anything else? (Try to keep it in the realm of possibilities!)

  23.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    I agree about the link syntax. That (and whatever you need to get the RSS working right) is enough to make it work for me.

  24.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Are there really enough replies that we need to have a separate discussion for every latest-change? There are really hardly any replies at all -- I expect that if we do it the way you're describing, we'll end up with lots and lots of discussions containing only one post.

    Although we might also change the way we use it, for instance we might start posting additional changes to a single topic or group of topics in the same discussion as the original one. Actually, now that I think about it, that might be really useful, to have latest changes grouped by subject rather than by date. I often find myself skimming through the latest changes looking for ones I'm interested in, when there is a lot going on that is not so much up my alley.

  25.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    We could have it so that there was one discussion per page, although that would add a layer of difficulty when figuring out where to post your update - you have to find the correct discussion to add it to.

    I don't see that having lots of single-post discussions is a problem. There's the same number of actual posts, they're just organised slightly differently. What this would allow you to do is to hide follow-ups, but ensure that follow-ups don't get too complicated with threads branching off in all directions (if threads can do that!). So although we don't get many replies, this would make it obvious what were replies and what the replies were replying to (without going down the whole messy "threading" route).

    By using, and bookmarking, searches one could narrow down one's field of interest in 'latest changes' so that you could easily see the changes to a particular topic. Maybe the subject of the post should always include the page title.

    However, I wouldn't want to make it too easy to narrow down what is seen in the 'latest changes' section. We ought to be interested in finding ways to contribute to others' work and so keeping an eye on what's going on in other parts of the lab is important - even if we don't follow all of it, we may be able to suggest a reference, or correct a misconception that could save someone a lot of time and effort. That's something that we should be actively encouraging.

    One other technical feature: I suppose that we ought to allow anonymous posting for 'latest changes'. Although it'd be nice if contributors registered, we shouldn't impose extra burdens on them.

  26.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I see that Toby's started trying it out! I'd better get on with the required changes!

    I've enable anonymous posting (requires solving a 'reCaptcha' which I hope no-one minds). I've started hacking a wikilinks plugin (surprisingly, this wasn't already available). And I just have to add a 'search subcategories' to the search capability. Though if we decide not to categorise so finely then this isn't so urgent (that is, if everything just gets lumped in 'latest changes' category rather than subdividing by date). What's the prevailing opinion on this, by the way?

  27.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    My opinion is to lump.

  28.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I also still prefer lumping it all together, perhaps grouped in some larger way like by month.

    By the way, it is kind of confusing right now that we have three discussions called "latest changes." Does the forum software allow arbitrary numbers of discussions with the same name? That seems like a recipe for confusion to me...

    • CommentAuthorAndrew Stacey
    • CommentTimeSep 15th 2009 (edited Sep 15th 2009)
     
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Right, wikilinks should now work. The syntax is \[\[(type:)?link(|text)\]\] where either 'type' or 'text' can be empty. If 'type' is empty then it defaults to 'nlab', if 'text' is empty then it defaults to 'link'. This gets replaced by a hyperlink with 'text' as the visible text. The hyperlink is determined by a template, which depends on 'type', in which a certain string (%s) is swapped for 'link'. The default template is thus:

    http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/%s

    If the 'type' is not known, then the following template is used:

    http://ncatlab.org/%t/show/%s

    where %t gets replaced by the 'type'. Note that \[\[:link\]\] is different to \[\[link\]\] as the first has empty type whereas the second has default type.

    The type can only be letters and is case insensitive, if other characters are used then they get subsumed into the 'link'. The 'link' gets urlencoded as an attempt to avoid nasty links.

    At the moment, the available types are the default and catch-all described above, plus google and wikipedia. The matching occurs everywhere, even in code blocks, so to escape it use backslashes. Examples:

    \[\[direct limit\]\] -> direct limit

    \[\[colimit|direct limit\]\] -> direct limit

    \[\[doriath:page one|An amazing page\]\] -> An amazing page

    \[\[google:nlab|Google search on nlab\]\] -> Google search on nlab

    \[\[wikipedia:calculus|Wikipedia's page on calculus\]\] -> Wikipedia's page on calculus

    I can add other templates, and the Wikipedia one is currently to the search which may not be what is wanted. To request a template, tell me the 'type' and the 'template' (where %s should be replaced by the link text).

  30.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Hmm, escaping with backslashes doesn't work outside of code blocks when using the markdown filter. I suspect that the order of filters matters here: markdown converts \[ to [ which then gets matched by this filter. Probably not a lot I can do about that without hacking Markdown. But then, the '[' and ']' are so overloaded that they should almost never be used to produce actual brackets. Use entities instead (&#91; [ and &#93; ], if I remember right).

  31.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    So if we agree to lump things together in the 'latest changes' category then we now have all the functionality that we want, at least to start with.

    I would suggest that we put the page name(s) in the titles (these won't link since the formatting only applies to the comment body, so also put the page name(s) in the comment bodies). I would suggest that only the page name(s) be in the titles, though I suppose it could be useful to have a single word indicating the level of severity of edit.

    To answer Mike's question elsewhere, discussion titles are non-unique. It is the discussion ID that is unique. We can use this to our advantage if you like the above scheme since then a search for discussions matching 'limit' will fetch all the comments on changes to 'limit' (and probably 'colimit' and 'directed limit' ...).

  32.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Excellent!! You are awesome. Shall we suggest that everyone give it a try?

  33.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    I'm a bit hesitant about just going for it without some indication that anyone other than us three is aware of the discussion! To make it really work (read: to give it a fair trial) we'll need to redirect 'latest changes' here. That's easy enough to do, but it might provoke complaints!

    I should delete the spurious subcategories first as well since we're, in the first instance, not going for any deeper divisions. I'll do that later when I've worked up the energy to delete enough cookies to log out (need to eat some cookies first ...)

    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeSep 15th 2009
     
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Hi,

    sorry, I was busy with other things.

    I am in favor of this idea. At least in as far as I can see what "this idea" is.

    So once "this" is activated, the idea is that the link latest changes will take people to a forum thread into which they type their remarks essentially exactly verbatim as they are doing so far. Right?

    What is that about categories? we are not going to have to assign date categories by hand to every entry for this to work, have we?

  35.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    What is that about categories? we are not going to have to assign date categories by hand to every entry for this to work, have we?

    No. It was part of the original plan simply because we started as close to the current system as possible. But it got thumped down fairly early on.

    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeSep 15th 2009
     
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Great, so let us not stop Andrew from implementing this revolution then!

  37.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Right, I've removed the spurious date sub-categories so there's only the 'latest changes' category. It's clean, so we can switch over.

    If someone else wants to make the switch, then feel free. Otherwise, I'll do it tomorrow. As I see it, the scheme should be:

    1. Change the link on the main page to a hyperlink to the 'latest changes' category here.
    2. Put in an introductory post explaining that new information should go in new discussions (someone should check that a guest user can start a discussion - I can't think why not, but it should be checked).
    3. Add a link to the top of the current latest changes page (which will still exist) redirecting traffic over here.

    Have I missed something?

    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeSep 15th 2009 (edited Sep 15th 2009)
     
    If you are making a change to the main nLab, then if you haven't (if you have, I missed it), you may try to get more feedback from regulars there. Very few people there pay attention to what is going on here.

    PS: A brief summary of exactly what you are doing would be nice too. I have no idea.
  39.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    <grumble>Since people still insist on adding new entries to latest changes to the middle the top where they will actually be seen, I would like this to be implemented as soon as possible!</grumble>

    To help that, I will now test whether a Guest can start a new discussion.

  40.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    Danger, Will Robinson! No, a Guest cannot start a new discussion.

    To begin with, there's no link to http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/Vanilla/nForum/post.php on the Guest's main page, just some stuff about how you need an account if you want to post anything. (There's some stuff about that at the top other pages too, such as this one.) What's more, when I go to that URI anyway, I am not allowed to start the discussion:

    Some problems were encountered

    You cannot take part in the discussions because you are not signed in.

    You cannot take part in the discussions because you are not signed in.

    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2009
     
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab
    Very few people there pay attention to what is going on here.

    Making "latest changes" live here will drastically raise awareness of the forum here.

    It will also inevitably change the nature of the nForum from a place purely for meta-discussion into a place for genuine discussion of nLab content, I suppose.

    Which is probably a good thing in the long run. I kept hoping that the nCafe would be able to play that role, as it has an established supply of regular lurkers who might take interest, but likely the forum here has plenty of advantages for such as discussion compared to the blog. Not the least one being that everyone can start a top-level discussion.

    With the highly appreciated new functionality of having wiki-links here on the forum, what are the prospects of having typeset math here on the forum?

  42.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Right, I want double pay for this one.

    I think that I've solved the problem with starting new discussions. It seems to work when I try it. Basically, if you are somewhere within the 'latest changes' category then you get a 'start new discussion' link which takes you to the right page. There's a recaptcha to solve before you can start your new discussion, and if you have an account here you can log in instead.

    This is hard-coded to work only for the 'latest changes' category. If we do want subcategories then it'll take a little more coding to enable that so give me advance warning that that's what you want! (You have to do that anyway since I'll need to fix the search setup).

    Please can people test this. I know it's annoying to have to delete cookies to log out, but it will be useful since it's only by testing before we "go live" that we'll know what the issues are.

    Urs, by 'typeset math' I presume that you mean MathML (via the iTeX filter). Am I right? You can do latex->pictures here. I keep forgetting what I have the delimiters set to, I think it's double dollars: x^2 + y^2 = z^2.

  43.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    In reply to Eric's comment: take a look at the top entry for 'latest changes' on September 11th. What else would you like me to do?

    I suppose that a summary would be useful, though.

    1. Latest changes as is is a mess. There are replies to comments all over the place, it is difficult to search, and there is no automatic notification.
    2. This could all be solved by shifting the posts to a forum, since each 'latest change' could be a new discussion in a category 'latest changes', and replies could attach to their discussion. RSS feeds solve the 'automatic notification' issue.
    3. We happen to have a forum lying around so why not use it?
    4. In the course of discussing the issues, a few features that were not in the forum at the time were seen to be needed. These have (hopefully) been implemented, but a little extra testing might be in order before going live.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2009
     
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Thanks, Andrew.

    Let me just seconmd Eric in that as someone late to your long discussion about this here, it is very hard to figure out what exactly you have settled on and what exactly is going to be implmented. I am sure it is all to be found somewere atound here and plain obvious to those involved in it, but it is not easily recognized when coming from further outside.

    So if you have the time it would be great, when moving "latest changes" here, if we could provide a link to a place where all this is summarized briefly.

  45.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    The scheme is:

    1. The link to 'latest changes' on the n-Lab will now point here to the category 'latest changes'.
    2. When people wish to record a change, they 'start a new discussion' in that category with the title containing the page name(s) (possibly shortened) - or at least something that identifies where the changes have been made - and body text whatever they want to say about what they did.
    3. Replies can now be made and will be attached to the original post, thus they don't clutter up the listing for anyone not interested in the particular issue.
    4. Wikilinks automatically link back to the nlab, thus \[\[Lab Elf\]\] produces: Lab Elf.
    5. Using the magic of RSS and feed readers, we can now follow 'latest changes' without having to continually check the page in the lab, also replies to old comments have a better chance of being noticed.

    Does that make sense? If not, please ask since if it doesn't make sense to you then it probably won't make sense to anyone else coming to this fresh and it'd be good to get it right.

    When we shift someone (me if no-one else) will put all this both in the current 'latest changes' page on the n-Lab and in the first discussion in the 'latest changes' category here.

    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2009
     
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Yes, makes very good sense. Thanks for all your efforts, Andrew, this is really great.

    • CommentAuthorEric
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2009
     
    Thanks Andrew. It truly is commendable the work you're doing!

    I know your preferred forum for discussing these issues is, well, this forum, but this is an issue that is going to effect everyone and as far as I can tell, there are 4 people (maybe 5) on the forum.

    I would suggest either compiling the relevant discussion (via copy & paste) into an n-Cafe post or composing a new article and posting it to the n-Cafe where it is sure to be seen by everyone.

    I don't foresee pitchforks and torches coming out, but before making a fairly significant change, it would be good to give everyone affected a good heads up. A post on the n-Cafe (and n-Lab) would do that.

    I think the suggestions make sense, but if I suddenly came in one day and clicked "Latest Changes" expecting the usual wikipage and was redirected to a forum (where I might need to register?) without any prior warning, I might be a little miffed. It might even take me a whole 35 seconds to get over it.
  48.  
    Member of the Steering Committee for the n-Lab

    Eric, your post justifies the move!

    The problem is that there isn't somewhere that I can put an announcement about something like this. And this is, after all, really just about technical jiggery-pokery - it's a change to the infrastructure aimed at making the experience better for the users.

    But you are right that now that it seems that those who participated in the discussion are happy with the new scheme (am I right, Mike and Toby?), that we ought to give a little notice before actually changing. I can't do anything about the Cafe but I can put a message somewhere on the n-lab. Howabout in 'latest changes'?!

    Just to reasure you on one point, people won't have to register to post in the 'latest changes' category (though they will if they want to post in any other category) so it shouldn't be any harder to use than the current system. In fact, it should be easier.

  49.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    The link to 'latest changes' on the n-Lab will now point here to the category 'latest changes'.

    I don't understand what you mean by this.

    It would be a Bad Thing if http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/latest+changes simply HTTP 301 redirects to the forum, because then nobody can go back and see what used to be there; it breaks the wiki. (However, the page can be archived to 2009 September changes and then replaced with a link here for the transition.)

    It would be a Bad Thing if http://ncatlab.org/nlab/recently_revised similarly redirects or otherwise goes away; I find it useful, now that it doesn't hang the rest of the Lab, and perhaps others do too.

    But it would be a Good Thing if the link on the HomePage telling people to look at latest changes now tells them to look at the forum category.

  50.  
    Moderator of the n-Forum

    Wikilinks automatically link back to the nlab, thus \[\[Lab Elf\]\] produces: Lab Elf.

    Remember to make that with SGML numerical character entities when you post the instructions for newcomers!

    Wikilinks automatically link back to the nlab, thus [[Lab Elf]] produces: Lab Elf.

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