Show It

You use the View > Explorer Bar > Discuss menu item to show it.

(Did you know this existed? I didn’t until I started deliberately poking around.)

1^st Warning

Information Bar tells you:

To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this webpage from running scripts or ActiveX controls that could access your computer. Click here for options...

Should you trust this feature or not?

2^nd Warning

You take the plunge by clicking Allow Blocked Content. You immediately get a message box saying:

Allowing active content such as scripts and ActiveX controls can be useful, but active content might also harm your computer.

Are you sure you want to let this file run active content?

The only buttons are Yes and No. The Close button is disabled. Do you feel lucky, punk?

Insert a Comment

After that, you finally get the discussions bar. You click the Discussions button. You get a popup menu with several items. You click Insert in the Document.

This item doesn’t have 3 dots after it (...). So it should just do it.

Please Specify

What actually happens is you get a message box. Yes, another one. It says:

You must specify a discussion server in order to use the discussions feature. Would you like to specify one now?

O RLY? Why was Insert in the Document enabled if it wouldn’t work? Also, the No button has focus initially.

Options

You click Yes to specify a discussion server. You get the Show discussion fields window. This is available as the Discussion Options window in the popup menu. But you clicked Insert in the Document because it was already enabled.

The first input is a dropdown list labelled Select a disussion server. The initial value is Active document's server. The OK button is enabled.

All the buttons in this window have been squashed vertically. The fieldsets use the label starting a line style rather than label in a rounded-corner box style. One of these has no label. They are 3D. The highlight colour seems darker than the one between the menu bar and address bar in the main window.

Did anyone review this interface before it got checked in?

HAI. I CAN HAS DISCUZ?

So you click the OK button. You are back at the main window with focus on the Discussions button. On the right of the discussions bar, there’s a status message. In this test, it said:

Discussions not available on http://projectcerbera.local/.

Well, that makes sense. But why was the OK button enabled if the toolbar can tell it wouldn’t work and why was this non-functional item in the list?

After all this, I am still not inserting a discussion into this web page.

Would anyone else bother finding how to use this feature?