User talk:LBSpillers

Welcome!

Hello, LBSpillers, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• Help pages
• Field-by-field guide to entering new publications into the database
• Help:Getting Started
• What the ISFDB Wiki is for
• FAQ
• Wiki editing help - Tips on how to use the wiki-specific features when editing wiki pages.
• Wiki Conventions - How things are usually done on this wiki.
• Help:How to upload images to the ISFDB wiki

Note: Image uploading isn't entirely automated. You're uploading the files to the wiki which will then have to be linked to the database by editing the publication record.

Please be careful in editing publications that have been primary verified by other editors. See Help:How to verify data#Making changes to verified pubs. But if you have a copy of an unverified publication, verifying it can be quite helpful. See Help:How to verify data for detailed information.

I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will insert your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, 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).