Re: "flat" links in mail archives are badly named

On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
> > On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 7:05 PM, Oleg Bartunov <obartunov(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
> >> May be move the link to some more visible place than end of header
> line,
> >> which people usually ignore. I suggest to replace "Thread:" by "Whole
> >> Thread:" and make it linkable. Also, add explanation text into ALT tag.
>
> > I'm not sure that's a good idea. That seems to overload a lot of meaning
> > into that field which if anything would be more confusing. Many people
> will
> > probably just think it's another header.
>
> > That said, I'm not saying it shouldn't be made more visible, I just don't
> > think that is a good way of doing it.
>
> We already made one change to make this functionality more visible.
> Let's wait and see if that seems to solve the problem before making
> more-invasive changes.
>
> (Do we have any way of tracking how many visits to the "flat" URLs
> there are? If there's a spike since we changed that, it would suggest
> that more people are picking up on what the link is for.)
>

Nothing easy, I think.

We have Google Analytics on the site, and it's possible to search for flat.
As some examples, I can see that during September, we had about 715,000
views of messages, of which about 2,800 hit the flatpages, so about 0.39%.
If I set it to just the last week, the value is 0.41%. Pretty sure that so
far it's within the margin of error, but we need some more time to
determine it.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/