GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2013 Wikimedia

MediaWiki: Block confirmation screen can be confusing

completed by: Mateusz Maćkowski

mentors: Quim Gil

MediaWiki core has this little problem that you could fix:

Steps to reproduce:
*Be an admin
*Go to Special:Block
*Block yourself
*You should then have a confirmation screen. At the top in red it tells you are
you sure, in order to continue you have to click the checkbox at the bottom

This could be unclear. User's may think they just have to click OK again to get
through the screen, and not see the extra checkbox.

The most straightforward way to fix this would be to do 2 things:
*Change the red are you sure message to mention: "If you are sure you want to
do this, check the confirm block checkbox below"
*Make the label for the confirm block checkbox be bold in order to draw
attention to it.

The bolding should probably be accomplished via CSS in a separate file. It
should probably be in a CSS file that is loaded just on Special:Block, not in
the site wide css (i.e. Add a css file to the mediawiki.special.block resource
loader module).

There are probably other ways to improve the usability of this forum. If you
have a different idea for how to make it better, don't hesitate to do that
instead of what I suggested above.
See 
Bug 58783 - Block confirmation screen can be confusing

Please ask any questions in the bug report. You will have better chances for quicker and better answers from the project maintainers and other community contributors.

Students are required to read Wikimedia's general instructions first. Patches should be submitted to Gerrit and reference the bug report in the commit message. Improvements to an initial patch must be submitted as an amendment  to the initial patch, not as new patches.