Is there a thread, here in GZ Talk, which discusses the pros and cons of Talk itself?

by JeanTate

I tried searching for such a thing, but came up blank. 😦

Does anyone - a mod perhaps? - know if there is such a thing?

Related question: how would you go about finding such a thing, other than by starting a new thread (like this)?

Posted March 15, 2013 12:10 AM

by ElisabethB moderator

As far as I can see, there isn't a thread for this.

Posted March 15, 2013 10:08 AM

by vrooje admin, scientist

The search function at the top works reasonably well (it's under the Home menu), so you could search that way. I know there's a technical bug thread but I don't think there's a suggestion thread.

So why not make it this thread? (We could change the title of this thread, if desired.)

Before the suggestions start rolling in, I should say:

I hope everyone will be constructive. Perhaps that doesn't even need to be said, but I'm saying it anyway. 😃
A new version of Talk already exists and has been rolled out on the most recent Zooniverse projects, so if you'd like to get a sense of changes that have already been made I'd encourage you to check out Talk on Planet Four and Snapshot Serengeti, for example.
I do not know when the newer Talk will be rolled out on Galaxy Zoo. I do not expect it imminently, but it is on the to-do list.

Posted March 15, 2013 12:30 PM

by Mjtbarrett

I hope that this helps; if you know what the topic you are looking for is, the search function works surprisingly well. For example, if you go to the search box and enter keywords it will return all cases in which those words appear. I just tried searching for "GZ Talk Discuss." Only one item came up - vrooje's post to this discussion. If you then go to the header in the returned item (in blue) the whole discussion is shown. I think that it is actually very useful for searching by topics like "QSO" and so on; this will show all comments where the phrase has been used.
But it does help to locate Discussions in the same way.
On PH it is good discipline to post the KID number in a comment or discussion. A similar usage of either the AGZ number or the obj ID number could possibly be very helpful to aid a GZ talk search? If you type in one of these you could access every discussion relating to the object. Just a thought.

Posted March 15, 2013 8:27 PM

by JeanTate in response to Mjtbarrett's comment.

Thanks mjtbarrett (and vrooje (science team) too)

mjtbarrett
I hope that this helps; if you know what the topic you are looking for is, the search function works surprisingly well. For example, if you go to the search box and enter keywords it will return all cases in which those words appear. I just tried searching for "GZ Talk Discuss." Only one item came up - vrooje's post to this discussion. If you then go to the header in the returned item (in blue) the whole discussion is shown. I think that it is actually very useful for searching by topics like "QSO" and so on; this will show all comments where the phrase has been used.
I just wrote a 'trouble ticket', to test something which I suspected was happening (also to report a 'trouble').

The Search function seems to completely ignore the title of a thread! At least, of a discussion thread; I didn't try the other kind.

In my 'trouble ticket', I deliberately mis-spelt 'trouble' (the o and u are reversed) in the title; in the body, it was 'browser' (w and s). Search found the latter, but came up blank with the former.

As this seems to be a design feature, rather than a bug, it is not appropriate to report it in the technical bug thread, is it?

In any case, I think it would be make Search much more useful if it could also return hits on words in the titles of discussion threads.

What about URLs? I just checked, and Search seems to look for, and find, occurrences text strings in both the URL itself (e.g. 'galaxyzoo' as part of 'galaxyzoo.org') and in the name of the link (e.g. 'bug' in the link in vrooje's post above). I expect it would not find either of these if they were in a title.

What do others think?

Posted March 16, 2013 4:14 AM

by vrooje admin, scientist

I'm not sure whether it's a feature or a bug in this version, but on talk.planetfour.org the search does seem to include titles, which suggests that the changeover to the new version here (when it does happen) will include titles in the search.

If you'd asked me a few months ago what changes I wanted in Talk, I'd have mentioned:

front-page lists of threads/discussions/comments should have thumbnails and maybe preview snippets
a modified definition of what counts as "trending" would be useful
the ability to see short "comments" specific to an object on the same page as longer "discussions" mentioning the same object
a more obvious means of scrolling through pages in collections (those dots are small & hard to see)
bigger thumbnails returned when searching
And all of those things are currently features on the new version. Some of that will definitely make discussion easier, and I hope it will also make it easier to find posts that people have already made.

I'm curious: do people use the "Recent" view of Talk, or the "Trending"? Or both? Neither? Why or why not?
-Brooke

Posted March 18, 2013 6:37 PM

by Mjtbarrett

FWIW I hardly ever use the trending view. I have been known, on occasion, to drift off task and wander around looking just out of general interest (being nosy). The ability to "watch" a discussion and be notified of a post by email is something that I value far more (and am grateful for).
The other four suggestions above are all very sensible and would be welcome 😃
Stickied threads on the right (where "Boards" lives at the moment) covering FAQs, links to common artifacts and a moderator monitored (fast track) helpline might be useful? On PH some similar threads are very large and a bit unwieldy, so perhaps an archiving system which feeds a FAQ thread could be considered??

Posted March 18, 2013 7:40 PM

by JeanTate

Copied/extracted from the PH Talk Version 2 Feature Requests thread (I don't know how to link to a specific post - other than the last one - this post is near the end, on p15):

[JeanTate]: My first suggestion applies to both this Talk and SS Talk.
Replace "about 3 hours ago" (etc) with a date-and-time.
Or keep "about 3 hours ago", but add a proper date-and-time.
Or add a button (or other feature, mouseover?) so you can get a date-and-time.
Something, so that the timestamp of a post can be made visible (and recorded).
Why? Apart from the sloppiness implied by "about 3 hours ago" (a habit of accurate record-keeping is important in experimental/observational science, is it not? We seek to foster good habits, do we not?), when you need to determine time-order - outside/beyond just one thread - you will often find ambiguities, and have no tie-breaker to hand: was this "about a year ago" post, in this thread, written before or after that one, with the same "about a year ago", in that thread? And how far apart were they written, a day? a week? a month? six months??
The main reason for why full date/time info is A GOOD THING, however, is that not having key metadata - such as date/time - restricts what zooites, or any other researcher, can do, with the data which is the Talk threads and their constituent posts (and their content).

Posted March 20, 2013 12:45 PM

by JeanTate

Another suggestion: allow blank lines, in quoted material, where they appear in the original.

The last post of mine, here in this thread, contains 'quoted' text. That text, in the original, has blank lines between the paras. However, when quoted, the blank lines are stripped out.

Posted March 20, 2013 12:49 PM

by JeanTate

Two more:

permit quoting of your own posts (at the moment you cannot REPLY to your own posts, so quoting them means using copy/paste, and loses the link back to the original post)
provide a straight-forward means of linking to a specific post in a Talk thread (other than by using REPLY)

Posted March 20, 2013 12:54 PM

by JeanTate in response to vrooje's comment.

vrooje
I'm not sure whether it's a feature or a bug in this version, but on talk.planetfour.org the search does seem to include titles, which suggests that the changeover to the new version here (when it does happen) will include titles in the search.
That's good news!
If you'd asked me a few months ago what changes I wanted in Talk, I'd have mentioned:
[...]

the ability to see short "comments" specific to an object on the same page as longer "discussions" mentioning the same object
I'm not sure I fully understand this, but it is a most desirable feature!

Suppose an object - in our case, something with an AGZ ID - has its own thread, and is also mentioned in five (to pick a random, small, number >2) separate discussion threads. Can we see all those? Even if, in one discussion thread (say), only the image appears (i.e. the ID is not explicitly stated)?

a more obvious means of scrolling through pages in collections (those dots are small & hard to see)
Not only small dots: the only (default) order objects appear in a Collection is ID (at least, it is/was in AP Talk). It would be nice if you - the creator of a Collection - could switch to the order in which you added objects to it. Especially if your Collection contains many objects.

Also, a way for you - the creator of a Collection - to provide a (text) description of it, beyond its title.

One more: an object can appear in several Collections ... but only if there several zooites create such Collections. How about the ability to put an object into more than one of your own Collections? An object is both an Eos (edge-on spiral) and contains an AGN; I want to put it into my Eos Collection, AND my AGN Collection (a made-up example).

And all of those things are currently features on the new version. Some of that will definitely make discussion easier, and I hope it will also make it easier to find posts that people have already made.
Good news! I think it will.
I'm curious: do people use the "Recent" view of Talk, or the "Trending"? Or both? Neither? Why or why not?
I have tried both, here and in AP Talk.

In the beginning, when a project has just started - less than a week or two old, say - Trending is quite useful; beyond that, not so much. Why? Because I didn't find anything interesting or useful.

I use the Recent view all the time, for all sorts of purposes

Posted March 20, 2013 1:54 PM

by JeanTate

Take a look at this post, in the GZ forum, by Pat ("Posted in collaboration with Gumbosea.").

That rich (format) structure (of the post, not the object!) is possible in the GZ forum:

text of different colors
images and text arranged horizontally (as well as vertically)
fields with fixed formats (and spaces/spacing which remain as-is)
variable number of columns
and more, much much more.

The best thing about this is that you can write code, to create such pages, using data (text, numbers, links) from elsewhere (e.g. spreadsheet, text document, database). That ability comes - as I understand it - from the fact that the GZ forum is "Powered by SMF 2.0 RC5". (And to gumbosea, a very big THANK YOU! He is, surely, one of the most dedicated and enthusiastic zooites; also one of greatest unsung GZ heroes).

So, another suggestion from me: capability like that illustrated in Pat's post, in Talk.

Posted March 20, 2013 2:48 PM

by JeanTate

I want my asterisk (and period/full stop, minus sign, ...) back!

Or, to quote Freud, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

In other words, any one of these characters, as the first character in a line, creates a bulleted point (in the current Talk). Whether that's what you want, or not. And there's no way to get around it.

Posted March 20, 2013 2:51 PM

by JeanTate

That's the first image in the post by Pat, which I provided a link to in an earlier post here.

I can get rid of the cross-hairs (and scale bar and grid/tick marks); I can change the image scale (pixels per arcsec); and change the size of the image (in pixels) by changing the URL. For example:

But if the image is just an image - a JPEG or PNG, for example - I don't have that option.

(that's from today's OotD).

In the GZ forum, I can change the height and width of the image, by adding text like "width=600" within the img tag. As far as I know, nothing like that is possible in Talk.

Wouldn't it be nice to have such a capability?

Posted March 20, 2013 3:01 PM

by JeanTate

One of the stupidest limitations of Talk - in its current version, here in GZ Talk - is the inability to indicate the simplest of mathematical functions; namely, the power!

Sure, there is no superscript (or subscript) capability. Fine. That's not uncommon.

However, a pretty standard way of working around such a (stupid, IMO) limitation is to use the caret character, which you can get by tying SHIFT-6 (at least on my keyboard): ^

So, 2x2 = 4, 3x3 = 9; or 2{caret character goes here}2=4, 3{caret character goes here}2=9.

Now watch how the super-idiotic Talk interpreter destroys this:
2^2=4; 3^3=9

Is the Zooniverse Development Team trying to dumb us back to the Stone Age? (likely worse; the concept of raising a number to the power of two likely preceded the development of writing!)

Posted March 27, 2013 10:27 PM

by Mjtbarrett

Sorry Jean but I have to step in and take exception with you here! I can tell you from painful (and often expensive) experience that the calculations that I've made confirm Talk's arithmetic. Sums that I've had to conduct for income tax purposes mean that sometimes twenty two does indeed equal four. And thirty three can equal nine (according to my accountant).

Posted March 27, 2013 11:05 PM

by vrooje admin, scientist

I've just tested this out on the new version of Talk and it seems to work fine there, so it must just be a bug. Is it something that can wait until we move to the new version, or should I ask the developers to hunt the bug down here?

Posted March 27, 2013 11:51 PM

by JeanTate in response to vrooje's comment.

vrooje
I've just tested this out on the new version of Talk and it seems to work fine there, so it must just be a bug. Is it something that can wait until we move to the new version, or should I ask the developers to hunt the bug down here?
I'm sure it can wait.

FWIW, I discovered this in PH Talk, so I guess GZ and PH are both using the same, buggy, version.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised any more, but I just find it really depressing that:
a) no one thinks to even try to code this sort of basic mathematical functionality in, from scratch;
b) no one - until now - even noticed (apparently);
c) that it is a science-based project, the very epitome of applied mathematics, where this happens (Kepler, and Newton, would surely be turning in their graves!).

Oh, and both super- (and sub-) scripts and the caret - to indicate 'raise to the power of' - work fine in the GZ forum ...

(Sorry for the rant; this is one of my hot buttons ...)

Posted March 28, 2013 12:56 AM

by JeanTate in response to JeanTate's comment.

In the Upgraded Talk, this has been resolved. Go Development Team!

Posted June 3, 2013 4:32 PM

by JeanTate in response to JeanTate's comment.

As this test discussion/post shows - Test of asterisks (etc) - only the asterisk remains, as a problem. As the first character in a line, it is treated as a bullet.

Posted June 3, 2013 4:39 PM

by JeanTate in response to JeanTate's comment.

enter image description here

Is there a way to do this - change the width and height of an image - in the Upgraded Talk?

Posted June 3, 2013 4:47 PM

by vrooje admin, scientist in response to JeanTate's comment.

* This seems to work. (At least, it works in preview.)

I got that by using the code &ast; in place of the * character.

The same thing, by the way, works for < and > -- you can write < and > and they will interpret as the less-than and greater-than signs instead of as part of an HTML tag.

Posted June 3, 2013 5:21 PM

by vrooje admin, scientist in response to JeanTate's comment.

At the moment, if I type:

I get:

However, the img tag wasn't one of the tags that Arfon mentioned as being supported, so using the HTML tag in this way could cease to work at any time.

Posted June 3, 2013 5:28 PM

by vrooje admin, scientist

Though, now that I've done that it seems to have broken the appearance of the front page, which isn't so great. Hmm.

Posted June 3, 2013 5:38 PM

by JeanTate in response to vrooje's comment.

Yes, that was what I was going to try next, so you beat me to it, and discovered how to do this ...

Cross out another on the 'wish list' ... 😉

Posted June 3, 2013 5:40 PM

by JeanTate

However, as far as I know, there has been no science to emerge from any of the Galaxy Zoo Talks²

I wrote that, in the GZ forum A thread to talk about Talk, nearly two months' ago now.

Just a couple of days ago, newbie GZ blogposter Becky Smethurst wrote:

So far there have been over 100 scientific research papers published which make use of your classifications, some of which have been written by the select few Galaxy Zoo PhD students (most of us are also previous Zooites).

A quick read of the preprint Becky writes about failed to turn up any mention of GZ Talk. Curious, I took a quick peek at a few of the other, recent, papers, ones during which GZ Talk has been live. Again, I came up empty.

So, what science has GZ Talk produced?

² Lots from Planet Hunters Talk, and possibly from other, non-astronomy Talks. By "Galaxy Zoo Talks" I meant Space Warps, Quench, and this GZ Talk

Posted December 2, 2013 4:31 PM