"Unsupported questions" isn't understandable

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

A project's Answers page contains an "Unsupported" link to an "Unsupported questions for ____" page. Neither the link nor the heading are likely to be understandable, and there is no other clue to what the page is for.

The actual purpose of the page is apparently "Questions specified as being asked in languages that nobody is subscribed to for this project". A shorter way of putting this is "Questions in languages that lack subscribers" (though that's slightly less accurate, because sometimes the question is here only because the specified language is mistaken). Maybe I can give a better suggestion once I know why this page exists.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

The main use-case for the page is for a project admin or an answer contact to get a listing of all questions in a language that isn't covered by any answer contact.

It should be mentioned though that all answer contacts will have received an email about the question (the email only contains the question title though, see bug 107390)

So maybe 'Orphaned questions'...

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

So is the idea that someone will see "oh, we've had half a dozen questions asked in Ossetian, I'll go find someone who's fluent in Ossetian to translate the questions and translate my answers"?

If so, at the moment, this page expects people to be able to recognize by sight even languages they don't read, which will be unrealistic in many cases. ("Hmm, is that Japanese kanji, or Chinese kanji?") This listing (but not listings for questions in a single language) would need a "Language" column as well.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

The lack of 'Language' column on that report is now bug 118957.

Otherwise, yes, the purpose of the report is to determine that someone willing to help users speaking Ossetian should join as answer contact for that language.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I think we must review all uses of the term Supported/Unsupported. It is vestigial from Support tracker. Since Matthew is keen on 'Subscribe', I'm going to try 'Unsubscribed languages'.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I like 'Without subscribers'. It plays well with 'Needs attention'.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Attached is a screen cap of what the wording look like in place. Making a change like this means we should rename answer contacts to answer subscribers.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

Technically, 'without subscribers' isn't correct. All these questions will
usually have at least one subscriber (the owner).

It is really more 'Without answer contacts' or 'Without implicit subscribers'.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Even "without implicit subscribers" could become false as soon as we introduced more advanced subscriptions (e.g. subscribing to all questions that contain the words "suspend" or "hibernate").

I now doubt this problem can be solved by tweaking the heading, and also doubt that this page is the best way of solving the original problem. To help with the problem, people need to know the *languages* that aren't being attended to, much more than they need to know the individual questions.

So how about having a compact list of languages for which there are no subscribers in this project? Something like this at the beginning of a project's Questions page, under the heading:
------------
FooProject has questions in _Ossetian_, _Simplified Chinese_, and _Adangme_, languages with no subscribers. Can you help?
------------

Later on, with the power of statistics, this could escape the crudeness of zero/non-zero language subscriber counts:
------------
FooProject questions in _Ossetian_, _Simplified Chinese_, and _Adangme_ are often going unanswered. Can you help?
------------

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I like the suggestion of a list to call attention to projects that need assistance. We need something to call new launchpad users attention to project that they can contribute to. I think that should be a separate task.

I think we still need to do something about the term 'Unsupported' view of questions. I'm not keen on the use of 'support' since we renamed the Answer tracker and we now have answer contacts. I think we need the word 'language' in the title to callout the view to new launchpad users who can help.

To Francis' last two suggestions, I think using the word 'implicit' will turn new launchpad users away. I understand that 'Without subscribers' is imprecise, but I think it is an effective call to action. I like 'Without answer contacts' since it aligns with the Answer Tracker terminology, but new users might not understand that the view offers them a change to help. We still need to convey the problem is language.

Reviewing the text of the ask a question page ("The languages marked with a star (*) are the languages spoken by at least one answer contact in the community."), I propose:
In unspoken languages.
I think the opening word of 'In' is needed, because new launchpad users will not be certain of the context of 'unspoken languages'.

Back to you Matthew and Francis.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Unfortunately I don't think there's a good solution to the problem of making this page understandable, that involves the page still existing afterward. That's why I suggested the in-page promotion of neglected languages here, rather than in a separate bug. I think such promotion should *replace* the "Unsupported questions" listing, rather than being an addition to it.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I don't think an in page promotion would be a good replacement. The promotion could only show a subset of questions, and as I understand it, span projects. That is an excellent call to action. We may want to restrict the promotion to questions in the the user's languages. I think that would be an excellent feature for new contributors that are looking for the project they can help the most.

The unsupported questions page is about a specific project, and is a utility for the contributors to the project. It is needed to identify the questions that locate misclassified languages. It allows the project owner to see the breadth of questions that the project needs help with. I think the report must stay.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

No, the inline list would not span projects. That's why I proposed that it appear "at the beginning of a project's Questions page", and that it begin with the text "FooProject has questions in...". And I think it shouldn't be restricted to questions in the user's languages, because that would prevent the use case of "Hmm, I don't know Ossetian, but I know someone who does".

The unsupported questions page will not make it easy "to see the breadth of questions that the project needs help with" whenever the number of such questions is greater than the batch size. When that happens, regardless of how the results are ordered, it will be possible that a neglected language is not represented on the first page of results. An inline list of neglected languages (rather than questions) would never have this problem. For an even better view of that breadth of questions, if necessary, each language with more than one question could be followed by the question count:
------------
Ubuntu has unsolved questions in _Georgian (5), _Hebrew_, _Hungarian_ (2), _Romanian_, _Swedish_ (3), and _Turkish_, languages with no subscribers. Can you help?
------------
The individual-language links would also cater better for people who did want to help. For example, if you knew Swedish, and on clicking the "Swedish" link above you saw that the Swedish questions were usually genuine, you could subscribe to Swedish questions directly from that Swedish-only listing.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 08:59 +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> No, the inline list would not span projects. That's why I proposed that
> it appear "at the beginning of a project's Questions page", and that it
> begin with the text "FooProject has questions in...". And I think it
> shouldn't be restricted to questions in the user's languages, because
> that would prevent the use case of "Hmm, I don't know Ossetian, but I
> know someone who does".

Ahh I mis-read your example thinking it was spanning projects, not time.
I think we can do the later suggestion of show languages that answer
contacts do not speak and are open

------------
FooProject questions in _Ossetian_, _Simplified Chinese_, and _Adangme_
are often going unanswered. Can you help?
------------

Those links would link to the revised unsupported questions page you
describe below:

> The unsupported questions page will not make it easy "to see the
> breadth of questions that the project needs help with" whenever the
> number of such questions is greater than the batch size. When that
> happens, regardless of how the results are ordered, it will be
> possible that a neglected language is not represented on the first
> page of results. An inline list of neglected languages (rather than
> questions) would never have this problem. For an even better view of
> that breadth of questions, if necessary, each language with more than
> one question could be followed by the question count:
> ------------
> Ubuntu has unsolved questions in _Georgian (5), _Hebrew_, _Hungarian_ (2), _Romanian_, _Swedish_ (3), and _Turkish_, languages with no subscribers. Can you help?
> ------------

We can have the first page of unsupported questions list the languages
and counts. Each link would go show only those questions.

An alternative approach is to show the unsupported languages in the
search form instead of the user's languages. I think the showing the
number of questions is more compelling, but this is an option.

> The individual-language links would also cater better for people who
> did want to help. For example, if you knew Swedish, and on clicking
> the "Swedish" link above you saw that the Swedish questions were
> usually genuine, you could subscribe to Swedish questions directly
> from that Swedish-only listing.

I like these suggestions. I want to implement them. Is there anything
more we need to know? Are we going to keep 'Unsupported' or switch to
something like 'In unspoken languages'?

--
__Curtis C. Hovey_________
http://launchpad.net/

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

On June 26, 2007, Curtis Hovey wrote:
>
> We can have the first page of unsupported questions list the languages
> and counts. Each link would go show only those questions.
>
> An alternative approach is to show the unsupported languages in the
> search form instead of the user's languages. I think the showing the
> number of questions is more compelling, but this is an option.
>

I think if we keep the 'Unsupported questions' action (or whatever its new
name is), that report should have in the 'Languages filter' place the list of
unsupported languages. The links would simply preset the filter to only one
language.

> > The individual-language links would also cater better for people who
> > did want to help. For example, if you knew Swedish, and on clicking
> > the "Swedish" link above you saw that the Swedish questions were
> > usually genuine, you could subscribe to Swedish questions directly
> > from that Swedish-only listing.
>
> I like these suggestions. I want to implement them. Is there anything
> more we need to know? Are we going to keep 'Unsupported' or switch to
> something like 'In unspoken languages'?
>

I think that Matthew would rather we remove the 'Unsupported languages'
action (because of the direct manipulation principle). The report would only
list one "unsupported" language at a time. The resulting page would be called
something like '$language Questions in $project'. We would lose the ability
to display all the "unsupported" questions in one report, but I don't think
it's a great loss.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

The branch that fixes this is in review.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

FIxed in RF 4513.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Fix released in Launchpad 1.1.7.