[Systers-dev] message to be displayed

[Robin Jeffries]

 We need a clear error message that will cause people to go back and fill
out the form element they missed.  The way mailman gives error feedback to
users is to show a message in a colored (yellow?) background at the top of
the page, so we have to work within that constraint.
Before commenting, people should go to something like
www.systers.org/mailman/listinfo/systers to see what the essay page looks
like.  My proposal (listed in the bug report) is

To subscribe to this list, you must answer the questions asked directly
above the large text box.

Suggestions for improving this are certainly welcome -- it's a little long,
but I think it's important to communicate what part of the form they failed
to fill out. It's also slightly awkwardly phrased, so I'm sure it can be
improved. Please give justifications for your proposal, not just opinions.
This is html, so we could use bold or italics, if that would improve things.


Vidhu, when you request something like this, you need to
   - explain in detail what you are talking about.  The rest of this list
does not have burned into their brain what the essay page looks like.
   - give a proposal for what you see as a potential solution; it's much
easier for others to critique from a starting point than start from scratch,
and what will happen if you don't give a starting point is that no one will
propose anything (even "Empty essay field" is a better starting point than
nothing).
   - describe what criteria guided your solution -- in this case, the two
things that were most important to my proposal were that a) the message is
not close to the place where the error was made, so we need to point users
to that location, and b) that the message should be as short as possible
while still being clear -- no one reads an error message that is a paragraph
long.

Robin

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Vidhu <vidhu2366 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Ref: bug 296180 CHECK SIGNUP FORM FOR BLANK ESSAY
>
> I need some opinions for the message to be displayed when the essay field
> is
> left blank by the subscriber.
>
> Thanks
>
> --
> Vidhoon V
>
>
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