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Merge abilities help page with abilities dashboard
Where to find information about the abilities, is currently a bit confusing. There are too many pages. The help page for abilities, as well as the dashboard, present pretty much the exact same information, although the table on the dashboard is more informative than the list on the help page. I suggest replacing the list on the help page with the table currently sitting on the abilities dashboard, and then remove the dashboard altogether.
| Abilities help page | Abilities dashboard |
|---|---|
 |
 |
There is however one issue with this; the abilities dashboard serves one more purpose other than showing one self's abilities; it's also used for viewing the abilities of other site members. For instance, my abilities are listed here, by specifying my account's ID in the URL (for=8046). This URL is available on each user's profile page, with that argument included in it.
I see 2 workarounds:
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Allow specifiying an account ID on the help page; this will show the entire standard help page, the table for the user with the given ID, as well as a title over that table, which says what user this list is for. The table title is omitted if one's viewing one's own abilities.
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Redirect to the help page (
/help/abilities) when attempting to load the abilities page for oneself (/abilities), and otherwise show the current dashboard when visiting it with the account ID of another user (/abilities?for=8046).
2 answers
I think it's important to discuss this, but I'm mildly against the proposal as it stands. In principle I like removing redundancy, but it does serve some purpose here. It seems awkward to have that much framing text when simply trying to check one's own abilities, and weird to see information specific to oneself when looking up documentation. I don't think that adding a user switch to the interface resolves that weirdness, either.
I'd like to offer a countering proposal:
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Have the abilities dashboard directly link to the corresponding help entry, in the opening summary.
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Replace the explanations of individual abilities on the Help page, with an appropriately framed link back to the user's own ability page. Something like:
A detailed list of abilities is shown [on your Abilities dashboard](//site.codidact.com/abilities), which is linked from [your user page](//site.codidact.com/users/me) in the sidebar. You can similarly access information about other users' abilities from their user pages.
Although it would arguably be better to have abilities appear as a tab of the user page instead, the same way that e.g. Activity and Vote Summary do. (But that's a separate feature request.)
This sort of cross-linking allows the right information to be in the appropriate place, while still avoiding the risks associated with redundancy (i.e., the risk of creating a regression when the abilities list is changed).
Help topics are static content, so adding the status of your own abilities there is not feasible. The links for the individual abilities in the help are to the same pages as the links in the user-specific list:
There's also a button on the help page that takes you to the user-specific list. I don't know if that button was there when you posted this (didn't dig into the history).
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