Mentoring Improvements

This has been automatically extracted from “What’s the one thing about Exercism you’d change?


From the mentoring side, the fact that most data is only updated with a full page refresh.

  • Exercism Notifications - Sometimes I get 2 notifications that a student posted a new iteration and a new comment on the solution, I go check it out and sometimes when I get back to the main page the notifications are still there. A full page refresh is needed to fix it.
  • Mentoring queues numbers - A similar problem happens with mentoring queues. 1) There is a number at the top showing the total solutions in all queues we have active 2) Then there’s a number next to each track on the selector on the right and 3) Then there are the actual solutions we can see.
    I find that most often these 3 pieces of information are not in sync. Sometimes when a solution gets picked up by a mentor I can still see it in the queue, but 2) updates. I believe this happens the other way around too, when a new solution enters the queue, I think I can see it first before the numbers update to reflect that. Another full page refresh is needed to bring the numbers back in sync.
  • Testimonials - A similar thing happens with testimonials. When I get a notification that a student finished a discussion and I know our discussion was good, I might suspect I have a new testimonial that the interface is not showing me. Another full page refresh is needed for me to check if I indeed have a new testimonial.
  • Unread Reputation gains/notifications - Clicking on the notification badge for we can read them by hovering over them, but if we happen to have more that 5 unread, to see the next 5 we need a full page refresh. A similar thing happens with the reputation gains notification log.

Despite no one thing in particular of the above bothering too much, all of them together make the navigation through the mentoring pages/tabs require pressing F5 a lot.

I agree with the suggestions of andrerfcsantos, and I will add one more from myself. There is a great lack of chat between those who are currently solving the task. You can get help only after you solve (and publish) the task (99% of the help is already late).

I really want to talk online with what is currently solving the problem that you are puzzling over yourself. I don’t know how difficult it is to add a chat to the site, but if it appeared with task rooms, it would be very good.

You don’t have to publish it to talk to a mentor, and you also don’t necessarily have to solve it, either, to request a mentor. In order to submit it to the site and request a mentor, although you currently need to submit it using the exercism executable, rather than through the web editor.

Good news, hopefully, there is a chat plugin that might be considered for here.

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