Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-3417079-20150626034226/@comment-3417079-20150707051845

DEmersonJMFM wrote: Bruce A wrote:

I still think it's terrible that they show dollar signs (code, basically) rather than something more user-friendly. The dollar signs are used because the information they represent changes with every message (you can think of them as parameters for an infobox but in this case they are automatic so you don't have to fill them out and, instead of a template page, you have a MediaWiki page.) I don't see anything that would be more user-friendly to take its place. You also should remember that the MediaWiki page is not one the average user will see. So, current method looks like:

> Hi, thanks for editing $1

More user friendly would look like:

> Hi, thanks for editing .

Etc.

Or something like that. (Similar to how we can just go "Insert --> table" rather than write all the code to add a table.)

Ideally you want to actually go beyond that and have a nice preview sample like:

> Hi, thanks for editing Tournaments.

It would make it clear that's just an example, and would instead show the page name for whatever they edited. But that preview would be nice.

The idea is that the design of things should comform more to humans as much as possible rather than us conforming to software and computers.

An example of this would be website 404 pages showing an actual error message that's understandable by almost anyone, rather than "error 404" (that error can still be showed at the bottom somewhere if it makes sense to have it)."

Advanced functionality is fine; just make it as accessible as possible.