User blog comment:Dopp/Communicate Easily with Message Wall/@comment-1724320-20111012061333

Man, this is a messy product. Some of the issues: Oy vey, I am dreading the day this becomes mandatory. I'm not opposed to the principle of the Message Wall--in fact, I do like the idea of making talk pages more accessible to the non-enlightened. Unfortunately, as you dig deeper into how it is designed, you realize just how bad the architecture is, and how many problems it will cause. Do any of the staffers replying here see that?
 * I could not find a way to view the source of a message. If in fact there is no way to do that, there should be.
 * Deletion is a mess. Not only can you not leave a summary, but I do not believe you can even view messages previously deleted from your wall. I'm not even sure if sysops can do that, because it just redirects seamlessly to the current wall. I know that Message Wall is not completed in RecentChanges yet, but if it's anything like blogs or article comments, deleting one root conversation with 50 replies will fill up RecentChanges. It's not quite a big enough number to cause a problem with the job queue, but if this architecture gets ported to other namespace talks, it certainly will be. Also, am I the only one who thinks it looks a little weird to have non-sysops in the deletion log?
 * Who can actually edit messages? The person whose wall it is on doesn't seem to be able to. That leaves it to the message creator, and sysops. Coupled with AWB not working on the wall, it will be a nightmare for maintenance, whether it's fixing signatures or links or something else.
 * I was unable to leave messages for unregistered users, as were two other people I asked. I guess that's one way to make sure anons don't miss a message, but is that really intentional?
 * Aren't the pagenames (Message Wall Message:Cook Me Plox/@comment-Cook Me Plox-20111012053214/@comment-Cook Me Plox-20111012053228) long enough without having a super long namespace on top of it?
 * I personally find it funny that messages without headers use the  tag. I wonder what "ac" stands for?

My preferred action, if there is to be any at all, is to completely rethink the design of the Message Wall, and I guess by extension article comments. Everything, everything would be so much simpler if it was based on different sections of the same page. It's not that difficult to deal with transclusions and protection; ProtectSection and Labeled Section Transclusion could be modified to fit our needs, and a simpler editing interface would be helpful for such a thing. I implore you to investigate this option.