Filtering the sandbox for ease of feedback
I see the Sandbox as a vital part of challenge design. When I visit the Sandbox I'd like to be able to show only proposals that are not finalized, so I can focus feedback where it is needed.
In the absence of dedicated functionality, I can search for sandbox posts without the "finalized" tag.
This would probably be enough for me, except there are proposals with "[FINALIZED]" edited into the title instead of having the "finalized" tag, and there are proposals that have been posted as challenges but have not yet been tagged as "finalized" in the Sandbox. There are also some which have "[CANCELLED]" edited into the title.
If we tag all the finalized posts there is still the problem that the search results can only be sorted by posted date, not activity, so posts with recent edits following feedback do not go to the top of the search results, like they do in the Sandbox posts list.
Some of the problem can be fixed simply by adding tags to posts, but I'd like to have a discussion before making any changes. What are your thoughts, particularly on the following points?
- Should the "finalized" tag be the accepted way to indicate that a proposal has been posted to the Challenges section?
- Would it be helpful to edit the existing introduction text at the top of the Sandbox post list, to include the link to the search for sandbox posts without the "finalized" tag?
- Could we add a "cancelled" tag so the search can exclude those too?
- Are we content to use a link to search results indefinitely, or would this just be a short term measure with the hope of having dedicated functionality at some point?
- Do you have a preferred solution / idea for a solution?
"Finalized" (or "cancelled") s …
2y ago
I'm leaving this answer here f …
2y ago
Both tags and [FINALIZED] are …
2y ago
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Both tags and [FINALIZED] are problematic
Problem with tags
Having been shown the related meta post Separate the tags away from the Sandbox or delete the [finalized] tag I can now see that having tags in the Sandbox that are not tags for Challenges is problematic. It's clear from that post that having a partial overlap between the tag sets is not planned to happen, and having two distinct tag sets would mean that every time a new tag is added for Challenges, the Sandbox tags become out of sync. The fix for this is to delete the "finalized" tag so that it doesn't confusingly show up in the Challenge tags.
A separate problem with tags is that a Sandbox post with 5 tags can't have the "finalized" tag added without removing one of its existing tags.
Problem with [FINALIZED]
Editing "[FINALIZED]" or "[CANCELLED]" into the title of Sandbox posts is not ideal as both words have different spellings in different locations (finalized/finalised and canceled/cancelled). In addition to this, there will inevitably be typos. For both these reasons the search will fail to exclude all finalized and cancelled posts.
If editing the title is the best solution we have, we could use a more robust search string that excludes both spellings of each word, and also excludes a list of common misspellings of each word. All of these would be in square brackets to avoid excluding Sandbox posts that just happen to use one of these words in another context.
This is not currently possible for several reasons:
- I've raised on Codidact Meta that I can't search for -finalized. We can exclude a tag from search results but we can't exclude a word unless we also explicitly include a different word, which narrows down the results in a way we don't want.
- Searching for
[finalized]also findsfinalized. In addition to excluding posts that contain the word in square brackets, our search will also exclude any post that happens to include the word "finalized" for any other reason. - I've raised on Codidact Meta that Search does not search the title of posts. Even if the other problems were fixed, we'd need to put the word "finalized" inside the body of the post, not in the title.
Give up filtering and delete finalized and cancelled posts?
Do we want to keep old finalized and cancelled posts around in the hope that one of tags or editing titles will become a practical solution at some point in future? If not, do we introduce a policy of deleting Sandbox posts once they are either posted or cancelled?
Much as I like the idea of a tidy, easy to use Sandbox, I also like having old Sandbox posts kept around for occasional reference.
"Finalized" (or "cancelled") seems like it should be a property of the post. We can close questions -- but not articles. I think that was a change at some point, because the point of closing is to say "no more answers" and articles don't have answers to begin with, so what does it mean to close one? But maybe we need to bring that back in some form?
With the forthcoming filters feature, you'll be able to use question status (open, closed, duplicate) in filter rules. If we wanted articles to have status too, what should the options be?
Another option: in the discussion of this request for cross-category duplicate closure, I proposed that articles could have a single close option, "duplicate".
If we made one of those changes to the code, then there would be a way to change the state of articles in a filterable way. I'm going to ask the team about the feasibility of cross-category duplicates, which would help here, but I can't make any promises since I can't just go write the code myself.
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Followup: I've posted on Meta about closing articles, current limitations, and hopes & dreams.
I'm leaving this answer here for any votes and discussion, but I no longer hold this opinion. I've posted a longer answer to explain why I've changed my mind
After hearing about the filter developments currently being worked on, mentioned in Monica's comment, my personal opinion is that tags for "finalized" and "cancelled" are the best solution to use now, so that we are ready when the ability to filter post lists by tags becomes available.
I'd like to hear whether people agree with this, and whether there is any objection to people starting to gradually add these tags to the backlog of finalized and cancelled posts that has built up.
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