User talk:LBSpillers

((welcome))Kraang (talk) 23:28, 21 April 2024 (EDT)

Painful Interface

Like a lot of people, I came here originally to fix entries about my work. So I created an account. I submitted a title fix. That went through okay. I submitted a novel. That seems to be working its way through.

So I have a new story in ParSec #10 just published Friday. I logged in to see about helping get that issue in the DB. I had this banner about a new message, click here to view and respond. I clicked. It takes me to a page labelled User talk: LBSpillers, and lists my one message--welcome. There are none of the normal interface elements I'd expect: reply, delete, forward. So I have no idea how to respond to that welcome message. I didn't really want to respond, but that damn banner wouldn't go away. I'd read the message many times--not hard, it's one word. Today, at some point, it eventually disappeared.

At the top of my Talk page there are tabs for editing and adding a topic. There's nothing about sending a message, responding to something, etc. I went to the help pages, and the simple topic of sending a message isn't anywhere I could find.

Since the insipid "respond" banner eventually disappeared, I gave up on trying to send a message.

Next I thought I'd tried to introduce a new issue of ParSec into the DB. I can find "Add Magazine" but nothing about adding an issue. So I tried "Edit Series" and that had apparently nothing to do with adding an issue.

As far as I can tell, there is some unusual interface taxonomy at work here like "user talk". Modern GUI standards have been eschewed in favor of I don't know what you call this. There is no association of verbs (UI actions) with the things they act on. For instance, apparently I can't just go to a message and respond, despite being constantly pestered by a damn banner to do just that.

So I give up. I can't use this site without investing a significant portion of my brain to studying this bizarre, undocumented interface. And now as I look for the button to save this message, I'm informed that whatever I put here will be "edited mercilessly." Why do I have a user "talk" page if I don't even have ownership of it? Seriously, for what's supposed to be a community resource, this is hostile in the extreme.

For what it's worth, ParSec #10 came out Friday (26-April-2024).