Forum:"Report a problem"

Hi All. Wikia have made a new feature that may be useful to you. It's a link/tab on each article to "report a problem". This leads to a small form that can be used to give information on what's wrong. Admins then have a special page that allows them to mark each as fixed, not a problem, or to flag it for Wikia staff. The idea is to catch all the people that don't know enough about wikis yet to fix things themselves, or how to find admins to help them. At the moment, we get email from people with problems that would much better be addressed by local admins, maybe this will help fix that!

So, this will be enabled shortly and is on Inside Wikia now. Please have a look at it, try it out, and let us know whether it's something you want. The reports page is at Special:ProblemReports and the link/tab is on each article page. If this won't be helpful to you, we can disable it for your wiki. All feedback gratefully received! Thanks -- sannse (talk) 22:16, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * It's not currently working on inside. Please test it on scratchpad instead. I changed sannse's link to point there. Angela (talk) 23:25, 20 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Interesting feature. Though I think I have an issue with the e-mail part. Would it not be best to tie that in with the Emailuser special page? It says that the email is only viewable by staff but as a Inside Sysop I can freely read the e-mail addresses that people put there. Also, someone used an IP to do a report, and the reporter field was left blank. That field should show the ip in that case. What happends if someone decides that it's a good idea to use the report a problem feature to spam up the report page through an ip. It would be nice to know what IP we half to block to stop their spam. Otherwise we have another issue like what was run into with the TaggedImages extension. ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) (tricks) (current topic) Sep 15, 2007 @ 05:41 (UTC)
 * Ok, I'm finding more issues, I'll just put this all into a list:
 * IP's don't show up as reporters so we can't block IP's which spam the report page.
 * IP's can freely chose a username, and this username is treated as if it was that user who made the report. So an IP could type in say, Angela's username and spam the report page making it look like Angela is a vandal. O_o
 * Here's my thoughts on what things should be like:
 * The e-mail should say that it is readable only by admins.
 * The e-mail field should not automatically use a user's e-mail because that means that someone can easily reveal their authenticated e-mail which is supposed to be private (even to admins). Instead that should always be blank, and when it is unspecified the @ beside the user name should just link to Emailuser.
 * When a user makes a report it should only be locked to be their username as it currently is.
 * When an IP makes a report, instead of listing who they say they are. It should list that name user inputed name (or list the IP if that was left blank) as a link in italics pointing to the IP's contributions page.
 * The actions such as changing the status of a report should be logged on the page like how Checkuser is logged. It's possible for a bad admin to falsely list a bunch of reports as fixed when they're not, and no one knows who did that.
 * ~ NOTASTAFF Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (talk) (tricks) (current topic) Sep 15, 2007 @ 06:03 (UTC)


 * Nice feature!
 * I'm not a sysop on c:inside and I can view the email address in Special:ProblemReports (clicking the @)
 * The links in the "Wiki name" columns makes me think that in this page one can view reports from all wikis. Is it true? I think it's not useful, except for janitors and staff
 * --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 09:27, 15 September 2007 (UTC)


 * This has been fixed. Now only staff can see IPs and email addresses. Anyone can view Special:ProblemReports but only admins can use the action buttons that allow the report to be closed as fixed or invalid or escalated to staff. Angela (talk) 23:32, 20 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm having some serious problems with this, on every single Wiki. I'm using Internet Explorer (and I'm probably not the only one), and what I get is a horrible mass of text, rammed directly beneath the existing article with no seperation. The shorter the article, the worse it is. I uploaded an example from Muppet Wiki, here. Is there any possibility of looking into this? As is, there's some bugs which show up mainly in IE (like a huge space separation whenever a picture is used larger than the text section accompanying it) that at this point, seem permanent and unlikely to be fixed, but I'm not happy with the possibility that I'll either have to live with this one, or install Firefox. -- Andrew Leal (talk ) 02:24, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * What version of IE are you using ? I'm on Internet Explorer 7 and there's no problem at all. See this screen capture on ImageShack. ;-) TulipVorlax 02:53, 22 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Version 6.0. Anyway, it seems to have gone now, so hopefully someone else caught and fixed it. It was there for several hours. -- Andrew Leal (talk ) 03:15, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

This is definitely interesting, and I think it could be a useful way to communicate with new users who haven't learned about talk pages yet. The interface is easy to use -- I like that it pops up, rather than taking you to a new page, and you don't have to type much in order to file a report.

However, I'm not sure how admins are notified that a report has been filed. I assumed that a new problem report would show up on Recent changes, but I just tested it out, and it doesn't. Is the idea that admins will check the ProblemReports page on a regular basis?

If that's the case, I think it's probable that the admins on many wikis will forget -- or not even know that ProblemReports exists in the first place. I think it would be very frustrating for a user to report a problem and then have it ignored, just because the admins don't know to check the page. -- Danny (talk ) 08:08, 22 September 2007 (UTC)


 * There also doesn't seem to be a way to communicate with users who report a problem when they're not logged in. If the user is logged in, then we can see a user name as the "reporter", and we can leave them a message about the problem. If they're not logged in, then that field is blank, and there's no way to talk to them.


 * I assume that the people who are most likely to use this feature are new users who haven't learned how to edit or revert vandalism yet. For them, the best response for the admin would be to fix the problem they're reporting, and then leave them a message that shows them how to do it themselves next time. The admin also may have a question about the reported problem -- but if they don't know the IP address, then they can't ask any questions.


 * The system also doesn't tell the user where to go, to check on the report's status. It just says "The problem has been reported," with no further instructions. I'm not sure how a user is supposed to know whether a problem has been attended to or not, especially if they're not logged in and there's no way for the admins to leave them a message.


 * It also looks like the description of the problem disappears -- I don't see it on the ProblemReports page. So the person filing the report can type a long description of the problem, which then vanishes. If they file the report under "other", which is the default, then there's no way to know what the problem is. -- Danny (talk ) 08:25, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

form shown when printing
The report a problem is shown when printing a page. Go for example to c:scratchpad:Scratchpad_Wiki_Labs and go to "Print preview" in your browser. Is shown also in printable version. Only in print preview or when printed, not in the screen. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 17:25, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Nice bug find! What browser are you using Ciencia? Thanks -- sannse (talk) 21:08, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Firefox 2.0.0.7 --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 08:19, 22 September 2007 (UTC)


 * The bug is easy to fix. Add "noprint" to the class of the outer div of the form. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 08:25, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Translation ?
Will it be translated someday ? Or can we do it ourselves with some MediaWiki pages ? TulipVorlax 02:17, 22 September 2007 (UTC)