Open question

• How tractable is this task? What needs to be true for us to be able to implement this?
• This actually not currently tractable because we haven't thought through the cases where a conversation gets moved, renamed, or two sections on the same page have the same title.

Meta
Today, @EAkinloose, @Esanders, @matmarex, and I met to discuss how we might go about implementing this were we to prioritize work on it. The notes from this conversation are viewable in this publicly accessible Google Doc: T273341/Talk page comment permalinking.

I've also created T296801 to track the work that would be involved to design and implement the infrastructure that would help "unlock" this permalinking use case.

@Esanders, on Tuesday (8 February 2022), when you and I were talking about this ticket, I asked a question that was something like, "Will resolving T296801 'unlock' our ability to implement permalinks for talk page topics (T273341)?"

In response, I remember you saying that before answering the question I posed we would first need to investigate something...do you recall what what that "something" was? Unfortunately, I don't see any mention of it in our notes..."

It will, as long as we don't forget about it. The plan in T296801 includes both headings and comments.

We discussed at some point the idea that going forward some features would depend on the visual enhancements being enabled (e.g. permalinks). Do we need to make a firm decision around this?

In T273341#8097285, @Esanders wrote:

some features would depend on the visual enhancements being enabled (e.g. permalinks)

What do you mean by that? The permalinks feature consists of two parts:

• Creating permalinks – it’s okay if it depends on visual enhancements, people who opted out probably want as decluttered interface as possible (an easy-to-remember naming scheme or a special page would be nice though, for one-off usage).
• Using permalinks – this should be available always, independently of the enabled features or the used platform (i.e. should definitely work in the apps as well), otherwise it’d be very confusing that a link provided by one user doesn’t work for the other one.

Yes - just exposing the UI to create them.

In T275729#9212841, @ppelberg wrote:

I'm merging T273341 into this task as a duplicate.

Reason: to start [i], the user experience for generating a permanent link to a comment and topic will be one and the same...

People will generate permanent links to both by clicking/tapping, what will soon become, the links that appear in peoples' signatures. [ii]

Longer-term, there WILL be distinct affordances to generating links to comments compared to topics. That work will happen by way of T338534 and T340138.

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i. T302011#9212812
ii. Note: there is an exception we still need to figure out about what happens when someone's signature already contains a link. See "Open question #1" in the task description for more.

As noted above, topic permalinks, which begin #h- are already implemented and work, they just aren't exposed in the UI anywhere:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Wikip%C3%A9dia:Accueil_principal#h-Grand_K-2019-05-20T23:35:00.000Z