If I make an edit to a Trac ticket, but someone beat me to it, this message is displayed:
Ideally, I would read this message and figure out what I can overwrite and what I should not. But, depending on this message to keep users from overwriting what was submitted is not something that we should depend on:
This may sound a little harsh, but you'll see, when you do usability tests, that there are quite a few users who simply do not read words that you put on the screen. If you pop up an error box of any sort, they simply will not read it.
Is there a better way to prevent these overwrites in Trac - e.g., if a ticket has been modified while you were modifying it, you must refresh the page, etc?
Yes, if the server would send the page modified outside and if the javascript running in your browser could merge that into your local changes. But noone has implemented it in the current trac.
Related
I would like to ask this question to developers who have a good sense of design. I see that whenever a website uses a popup box for their login page, they will always post and then redirect to the next page whether it be content or a dedicated login page for an invalid login error.
I have a client who has been asking to cut out as much page refreshing as possible, including the login function. They would like to see the login error appear on the login popup box without a page refresh.
I have not noticed a web based businesses do this, so I'm wondering if there's a valid reason to avoid this. I personally think that a page refreshing allows users to recognize their input has been registered and the next page appearing will be a solid response to their action either good or bad.
Having no refresh and expecting the user to notice that some error text has appeared seems like a bad idea?
Notes
The question is most likely more appropriate for https://ux.stackexchange.com .
You can find a lot of stuff by searching "ajax logins" in a search engine
There already is this question that might indeed be a duplicate of this one. Since I was not sure and I had already wrote most of this answer before finding that I post it nonetheless.
The title ought to be changed to a question (maybe something like "Is it a bad idea to use ajax to return login errors?").
Actual Answer
In my opinion ajax logins could indeed make less clear whether there really has been a successful interaction with the server or not.
Some ideas to improve it might be:
to include the time of the login request in the error message
to explicitly assure in the error message that the credentials have been received and checked
to be sure that this error does indeed only occur after the credentials have been determined to be not valid (and not because of problems with scripts or the network, for example).
A good way to ensure this might be to have the server always send the full text of the error, rather than a code that selects a message stored in the page source (and to be careful its caching).
This becomes relevant only after the user has been using the site for some time, of course (and has incurred in the error and verified that it was indeed due to a mistake on his part).
to use some animated feedback to highlight the dispatch and the reception of the reply to the user. As with the text you should ensure that the animations do not give (too) incorrect indications.
Basically these suggestions would be applicable to any ajax form entry, but they are more important for logins because:
in this context it's a lot easier to make typing mistakes (in the typing of the password)
and mistakes have a drastic, immediate annoying outcome: the inability to authenticate and the necessity to input again the entire password
And so uncertainties on whether the input has really been received and processed are a lot more bothering.
All in all anyhow it's pretty complex to do this well, with both an appealing appearance and a reassuring feedback.
The ones ajax logins that I've incurred into did not do a good job (I think I have indeed experienced false login errors with them).
You can find several ajax login frameworks/plugins by searching for "ajax logins". I have not looked into any of them.
I haven't seen this scenario covered here:
Yii Framework: How to work with Flash Messages.
So, after user registration, I wish to redirect the user to a thank you page where he/she could read more about what he/she should do, and what would happen next. It's a nice amount of information, so adding that message to an already existing page is not an option, because it would get to noisy. Making temporary displaying msg isn't an option neither, because it's a fair amount of text to be read.
On cases like this:
Should we still use flash messages and use a conditional so that what normally exists on the page stays hidden while display a success flash message ?
OR
Should we simply redirect to a given thank you view (by creating the respective thankyou action?)
Is there a better option?
You could use a flash message. But these are really for things like "Your account is now created".
If you want to include a good amount of information, I think it best to have a separate thankyou action/view that people are redirected to after the sign up process is complete.
I would like having a way to trigger Thunderbird, from an external script, into displaying a particular message in a particular folder.
If it were Firefox, say, I would use firefox -new-tab http://some-URL, and an already running Firefox (or a new one if none) would nicely fetch and display URL. But I found no way to do something equivalent with Thunderbird, neither on the Thunderbird site or through existing extensions, and even after some furious Googling around, which I attempted more than once!
One problem, compared to a plain URL, is the need some notation for selecting a message. Short of a better solution, I wrote a script which knows folder:SOME-FOLDER:ORDINAL, and behaves like an extension of xdg-open. My tool inserts a proper prefix and a few .sbd as needed within the SOME-FOLDER part to turn it into an absolute Thunderbird file reference, and ORDINAL picks a message in that folder. My tool then grabs the message, heuristically converts it into HTML file, and then, directs a Web browser to the resulting file (and if :ORDINAL is not given, it processes the whole folder instead, yielding an HTML index and many linked messages).
My current tool helps a bit at saving message references in other documents and efficiently retrieving them later, but I handle a copy of the Thunderbird message, and not the original. So if I want to delete it, refile it in another Thunderbird folder, and do other similar operation, I still have to go to Thunderbird, interactively find my way again to the wanted message before I can handle it, and this, is not efficient. What I'm dreaming of is a way to get rid of all my HTML conversion and browser trickery, but still keep the pseudo-URL paradigm and pseudo xdg-open interface, to directly force Thunderbird into the correct folder, with the wanted message correctly displayed.
In previous email readers I used (Emacs RMAIL and then Gnus, and Mutt as well later), such things could be managed, and I heavily used such capabilities in scripts. I am astonished, surprised, even a bit dismayed, by the apparent weakness of Thunderbird as a scriptable mail reader. Am I missing something evident? Any avenue or suggestion?
François
P.S. Of course, I agree that using ORDINAL is not very clever. It might mean a different message if the folder get some messages added or deleted. This is a lesser bad. A better but potentially heavier notation might use Message-ID values, but then, an index would also be needed to find the Thunderbird folder containing each message.
There seems to be some way to do it since Google Desktop supported it according to this thread - http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=584542. Perhaps try installing Google Desktop and see what kind of hyperlink its using?
I'll add Outlook supports using external hyperlinks using the outlook: naming scheme, for example outlook:Inbox or outlook:0000000007A2379547B0624691F4FB2E5468A0D7642E2000. See http://www.davidtan.org/create-hyperlinks-to-outlook-messages-folders-contacts-events/ for more info.
Can we stop user not to print our webpage or save it with the use of some scripts of some kind of that?
No, there is no way. You won't stop users trying to rip the page and will annoy legitimate users. Even if you do find a way, how will you prevent a screenshot ?
There is no way to stop people saving the web page from the browser unless you control what browser they use.
Most browsers will create a temporary file on the user's disk in order to cache your page, therefore it is already saved. There are 0 things you can do to prevent this.
Everything you put into a web page has to reach the user's computer, therefore you cannot stop them from saving it. If they really want your content they can just grab the packets before they hit the browser, thus circumventing anything you might do.
If you do not want people to be able to keep your content, do not give it to them.
I'm working on a Rails application. Two of my models are notes and attachments. The user can create notes and add attachments to them. This is standard stuff and I already have this working fine.
Currently, the user must create a note before they can add attachments to it. I'm looking to implement a more streamlined workflow for the user, similar to the familiar email workflow where you can add attachments to an unsaved email. However, the key is that I don't want the user to even have to save a draft of the note before the attachment can be added, and I want this unsaved note to be abandoned if the user navigates away (I don't want to have the additional complexity of unsaved/unpublished notes).
I know that when the note hasn't initially been saved yet, I can create the attachments without the link to the note, and then establish the link when the note gets saved. The part I'm drawing a blank on is how do I remove the unused attachments if the user breaks off the note creation process? Is there a hook that I'm missing that allows me to see that the user broke off?
Without such a hook, the first solution that comes to mind is a nightly cleanup script that runs via cron that would find all of the unattached attachments and remove them (perhaps filtering by attachments that have been created more than 24 hours ago). Is this the best solution?
There really isn't any kind of trigger to let you know when to clean those up, since a user can just leave the site without "logging out" or some other action. So that leaves you with a background job not attached to user action. In your case I think a nightly cron is nice and simple and would fit this situation well.