Toolbar discussion

[viziionary]

The request where we were discussing the toolbar as a whole is for Needy Question Finding; here's one for discussing the toolbar as a whole. I'll paste some stuff over from those comments.

GUI concept (default/closed):

GUI concept (open/core editing feature):

This should give an idea of what the heck I'm talking about.

[viziionary]

Here's what I have in mind:

Spell-checking can get a lot of false positives if the score isn't set to above 0.876 or something above that, but at that level it also misses quite a few fixes. To solve this,one tab in the small interface unit is going to (first, it goes through a 3-part icon animation to show the dictionary's loading process, see relevant icons here: http://imgur.com/KkARbBu,kcjCFVI,bsDqfip,xOStKCi,7SsyOnb,YbdzJgn,4SuHaOs,etPit20) blink to an active (colored) state when an edit is made to say basically "Hey, I'm doing stuff, click me if you want".

When the user clicks that, a list slides upward from the bar allowing the user to check or un-check words that have been / can be changed, or change his spell-check setting to higher or lower than the default 87%. That way users can get maximum efficiency from spell-checking if they want to, can disable it altogether, or can let it run automatically at default settings.

There is also a main tab which works sort of in the same way, showing what changes the core editing function has made and allowing the users to check/un-check those changes.

The last two buttons (this is fixed to the bottom of the screen to be the width of the sidebar, and about 50-70 pixels high unless a list is expanded, so it has room for 2 more buttons) will be:

Needy Question Finding - again, a list of 25 questions that need significant editing based on your favorite tags on the current site. No favorite tags = no needy questions.

And I don't have any ideas for the fourth button, so, if you guys want, it really can be an auto-pilot burninator. That sounds like something that editors for every single site on the network will be interested in at some point.

So, how that works is obvious. Crawl all questions with that tag and the system goes into auto-pilot mode OR 1 by 1 mode, where the user can just click, click, click. Auto-pilot burnination will only occur in sprints of 25 questions. There will be a key that stops the auto-pilot mode of course besides using the button.

If they mis-use it, there's a system in place to handle that. People > 2000 points will likely not go rogue on the site though. And if they do, well, they could've done the same thing in a few hours anyway. Not to mention writing such a program is extremely simple and anyone could do it, at the cost of losing editing rights or being banned on an account with >2000 score.

Thoughts, ideas, etc?

[viziionary]

That design is subject to change a bit (looking at the sort of too-bright icon at the top). The icon is to collapse the bar, but I'm gonna do that in minimalist way instead.

Something I am debating is adding some sort of link to the repo. If I can fit one somewhere without making it looks cheesy / make it look like we're asking: "Please like and share this". We want to have people share the repo easily without appearing to be begging for that. I'll figure it out.

This is all of course, if we decide to pursue this.

[AstroCB]

Looks good to me, but I don't think we need the burnination feature- if people want to use it for that, they can combine it manually, but I think including in the script is going a bit too far.

[viziionary]

@AstroCB You know what. You saying that gives me a better idea. You're right, burnination as a lone feature is over-kill. This doesn't do away with burnination capability, but rather just makes it one of the many things that could be done. It hides the burnination capability within a more widely useful functionality:

Manual (sort of an oxymoron, but not really) / Sprint Auto Pilot ;

The interface for it simply lets the user edit in 1 by 1 mode for all questions of a (multiple) tag(s) of their choice (though I like the idea of putting an option for 25 question sprints). They type in the tag, a list of the most recent 25 questions for that tag is built (everything with the bar is stored in session storage so no need to grab the 25 questions each page load), and they just click a submit button in the control bar, it does the edits, goes to the next question, and they can review before clicking the button again.

While a 25 question sprint option may not be a good idea (I'd place a warning under the option, and possibly an alert) for normal editing, it makes burnination possible to get done really fast while the feature as a whole is for more streamlined, faster editing.

Finally, under the 25 question sprint option (if that's decided on), when clicked, an option should appear allowing a tag to be input for "burnination". Or perhaps it should be included in 1 by 1 auto pilot mode too. I think it would be a bad idea to only let people burninate in sprint mode, because many would want to spend time editing the question itself too (as suggested in the meta discussion).

[viziionary]

I think auto-pilot in 25 question sprint mode might even be safe for standard editing so long as spell checking is turned off during that phase. Your core editing rules (without spell checking) are pretty much fully safe, so that would let those interested in fast edits edit hundreds of questions in a safe but rapid way.

Might not be as thorough as it should be done, but that's the user's choice (any correct edit is better than none, so long as it is a significant one).

Ohh and of course there should be the option to choose a minimum number of required edits for the question to be on the list. (Burninators can choose 0, people interested in rapidly editing all of SO's nasiest questions can choose 10)