Tuesday, July 9th edit
Hey folks. Long time, no update. I'm sorry for that. I've had a lot of IRL stuff and WMF work come up recently. I'm just finishing up the analysis for experiments with Echo and VisualEditor.
Also, I have sad news. My advisor, John Riedl, is in his final days battling melanoma. It's been a long process, but certainly, it's a qualitatively different experience towards the end. John's been my most trusted research buddy for the last 6 years. He deserves a substantial amount of credit for Snuggle. Without the space and encouragement John gave me to work on the problems I thought were important, I wouldn't have had the time to get this project off the ground.
Despite these setbacks, I've been getting some Snuggle work done. Technical 13, TheOriginalSoni and I have been working to plan an IRC office hours session (Wed. July 17th @ 1600 UTC) with mentors across the wiki to discuss Snuggle and figure out where it is and isn't useful for supporting mentor work in Wikipedia. Ocaasi is pitching in some time and energy to help me make sure we gather mentors from across the wiki. If you can't make it to the office hours, I'd still really like to hear from you. If you let me know when, we can always meet up in #wikipedia-snuggle connect.
I'm aiming to get a new build of Snuggle online by Saturday. The updates will be largely hidden to the user interface, but they represent half-steps towards getting a few important features ready. --EpochFail(talk • work) 16:40, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
Wednesday, July 10th edit
Hey folks. I've been getting a lot of feedback recently that the user menu is hidden. I suspected that something was going on since the majority of Snuggle activities are categorizations. No one is using the user menu to send messages, invite to the Teahouse or report abuse! This makes sense since the categorization menu is prominently displayed (and colored) while the action menu is just a sad upside-down triangle.
I felt the muse today, so I've been sketching up some new menu concepts intended to balance the attention paid to categorizing newcomers and performing actions that affect the wiki. See the mockup below for how I'm imagining the new categorization menu. Note that I've also added a comment field so that you'll be able to provide a justification for your categorizations (if you want to).
I'm going to spend a little bit more time tonight trying to figure out how I'm going to get this new menu implemented, but I wanted to get the menu in front of you (someone reads these updates, right?) in case you had some feedback for me. --EpochFail(talk • work) 20:35, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Tuesday, July 30th edit
It's been a little while since the last update. I haven't been posting updates recently because I've been traveling and working on other projects (e.g. my thesis). However, I've been sneaking in some development time. In the last week, I got a relatively large set of UI fixes deployed and I've nearly got the last set of mockups ready for testing. This update is primarily to let you know that I'm still alive and hacking on Snuggle.
Also, I've been spending most weekdays hanging out in #wikipedia-snuggle connect. I encourage you to hop into that channel during your next Snuggle session. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 18:03, 30 July 2013 (UTC)