Great, thanks again.

I find that information interesting, too. Also, sentences would be properly attributed to who owns them. I don't see why this should be irrelevant.

+1

​To clarify, by irrelevant I meant that it doesn't seem to help achieve any particular goal in the context of the comments.

More concretely: the sentence text and language are relevant because they give context to the comment. If the comment says that the sentence sounds strange, or has a mistake, or is set with the wrong language, you'll want to see what the sentence looks like. For a large amount of comments, if you didn't have the sentence, you would click on the info icon to see what's the sentence exactly, in order to understand fully what the comment is about.
​
But what about the owner? It's an extra information and of course it can be useful. Just like having the date of creation of the sentence, or date of last modification, could be useful. Or knowing if the sentence was tagged OK or @change could be useful. Or knowing if the sentence has audio or not.​ Or knowing how many comments in total have been posted on the sentence.​..

What makes the sentence owner more important than any of these other pieces of information? What do you achieve with it? What justifies that you get this information right away, rather than with an extra click, like you would have to do for the creation/modification date, the tags, the audio...?

These are questions I cannot answer by myself.

Considering that several users are requesting to have the username back, there has to be something. But I need deeper explanations than "because I want to know it" or "because I find it useful".

Here's my analysis of the various arguments posted in this thread.

1. Having the owner's name would give proper attribution to the sentence.

=> This is is not completely correct. The only place where we can provide complete attribution is on the sentence's details, because this is where you can see who initially added the sentence, who modified it, who commented on it. A sentence can belong to someone who did not initially added it. The final version of a sentence is often the result of collaborative work, with people suggesting corrections or better wording. Reducing attribution to the owner of the sentence is actually a bit unfair, not all the glory goes to the owner.
The username can be misleading as well because the way the it is displayed kinda makes it look like the user is the original author. But when users are extracting quotes from other sources to add them to Tatoeba, even though they will be marked as the "owner" of the sentence, they are not the original author. The original author may be mentioned in the tags or in a comment.
So for me the owner's name doesn't fulfill very well the role of giving attribution.

2. Some users look at the username to figure out if the author of the comment posted on their own sentence.

=> This use case is not elaborate enough for me to see the needs behind it. The question is what happens then? Once a user knows that a user has commented on their own sentence, or hasn't, does it influence any decision? Does it make the user look at the comment any differently? If yes, which decisions, what difference?

3. Having the username serves as a shortcut to discover (and proofread) more sentences from a contributor.

=> This is a much stronger use case, one that I can actually work with. This use case shows that the username facilitates navigation within Tatoeba for an actual purpose: checking out more sentences from a certain contributor. Instead of reaching the contributor's sentences page in 3 clicks, one could get there in 2 clicks.

-------

Now I have to rant a little bit more because there is something important. If I'm spending so much time writing this post, this is not because displaying the sentence owner is a huge deal, but because it's related to a much deeper problem that I'm struggling with, on regular basis: the struggle of getting users to share their user stories.

More and more often, whenever I'm making changes in Tatoeba, I try to ask myself what is the purpose for each part, each button, etc. I came to ask myself why do we display the owner of the sentence in the comments. I couldn't remember why we added it there, and I couldn't picture a good reason either. But I was able to trace down the reason (explained in one of my previous comment), and when I read the Wall thread explaining the reason, I realized that it was not a good reason.

So displaying the sentence owner is actually something I implemented myself back then. I was the one who made the choice to put it there. But in the past, I had the tendency to accept pretty much every request that users asked for. If it was something "small" and not too complicated to implement, I would be okay to implement it, without really taking the time to analyze if the request addresses real needs or if it's just sugar coat. The username is a typical example of something I've added without analysis.

Nowadays, I am a lot more strict with these things because the danger is that the UI gets more and more cluttered, with too many options and too much information, that it becomes too intimidating, or too distracting, or too uncomfortable for the average user. I don't want to overload the UI for the wrong reasons.

Just because a group of users want to see a certain piece of information doesn't mean it is beneficial for everyone, and many parts of Tatoeba's UI are problematic for that matter. Some people like to have the random sentence on the homepage while other people find it unnecessary. Some people find it useful to see transcriptions for Japanese, Chinese, etc, while some people have no use for it. Some people like to see translations in every languages while others only want to see the language they are interested in. There are, and there will always be, many parts of Tatoeba for which users have conflicting needs.

In such situations, it is impossible to make a good decision, nor to find a good solution, without understanding the user stories behind a certain a feature, or feature request. And by "user story" I mean a description of how you are using a feature, with enough details for anyone to put themselves in your shoes and understand why having this feature makes your experience better (or worse) and why not having it makes your experience worse (or better). What problem does it solve for you? The reply from Aiji is an example of good user story: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/sh...#message_27243

Without user stories, I have to rely on my telepathic powers, which are not very advanced, to read users minds. Or I have to use my imagination, fight with my own instincts, to try and understand what could be the problems for other people, when it is not necessarily a problem for me. Then I have to spend time writing down a hypothetical user story that the concerned users have to validate.
Without user stories, I could be wasting time implementing a solution that doesn't solve the right problem. Maybe by sharing your user story, you will uncover a problem that I, or anyone, never really thought of, and that can influence a lot, not only the final solution for the feature itself, but as well other features of Tatoeba.

So for anyone reading this, when you are confronted to a change that disrupts your activities on Tatoeba, or when you want to suggest a change because the current features don't do the job for you, please, remember *not* to stop at merely stating that "it would be better if...", or "I would prefer if..." or "I would find it useful/interesting/practical/nice if...". Give me the full story, so that I can understand clearly what is your goal and what causes you trouble to reach that goal.
And when you see someone failing to provide a user story to back up a suggestion, please do me a favor and interrogate them until they've provided enough information. Or provide your own story, if the suggestion is something you'd like to see implemented as well. Don't just "+1" it.
This will save me a tremendous amount of time and energy.

+1

Thanks for your feedback, Aiji. You can refer to my post above for my thoughts on this use case: https://tatoeba.org/eng/wall/sh...#message_27256

As for the impossibility to click the username of the author of the comment, this was not an intended behavior, and was fixed yesterday.

+1

Some users seem to habitually browse through the comments, and they know most of the usernames. To them (me), the username isn't irrelevant at all.
For example, did the owner himself put a comment to their sentence or was it someone else?

Egyes felhasználók úgy tűnik, hogy rendszeresen böngészik az észrevételeket, és ismerik a legtöbb felhasználónevet. Nekik (nekem), a felhasználónév nem irreleváns egyáltalán.Például az, hogy maga a tulajdonos írta a megjegyzést a mondathoz vagy valaki más.