Another open-source contribution, this time from Jeff Kayser.

There are now two buttons at the top of the comments section, next to the header that says "X comments". The minus button will collapse all the reply comments, leaving only the top-level comments expanded, and the plus button will uncollapse any comments that have been collapsed.

This lets you browse the comments in kind of the "opposite" way of normal—instead of collapsing the conversations you don't want to read, you start out with only the top-level comments visible, and can un-collapse responses if you want to read more.

There will probably be some more work done along these lines in the future. A user setting would probably be nice so that reply comments are always collapsed by default, if that's what you prefer. And I'd also like to see the collapsed comments say how many comments there are in that chain, since right now there's not really any way to tell how large of a discussion you might be un-collapsing.

Okay, okay. We really needed some sort of search, so I decided to just get an extremely basic version out today. It's very limited, but it should work for now and can be improved as we go forward.

Details/limitations:

• Currently, the search only includes the title and the text of the post (if it's a text topic). It doesn't include the tags, the group, the link, the author name, comments, anything. Only the title and text right now.
• There's no way to restrict the search to specific group(s) yet. Just full-site search.
• All searches are "all of these words". There's no phrase-searching yet, or "X or Y", or anything else.
• The search results page is just a quick hack on the normal topic listing page and will probably display some things weirdly in some cases (like the message when there's no results).

It's a start though, and certainly better than not having any search at all. There will probably be a lot of minor issues, but let me know if you notice anything especially broken with it.

It's a bit late tonight (for those of us in North America, anyway) so I'm not sure how much attention this will get today or how many people I'll start granting permissions to yet, but it's now possible for people-who-are-not-me to start helping with some moderation-like tasks.

As of right now, these abilities are restricted to (and I can grant each individually):

• Changing the tags on topics
• Moving topics between groups
• Editing topic titles (I may not actually give anyone this permission yet)

All these actions will be logged publicly, and if any of them are taken, they'll display in the topic's sidebar, in the "Topic log" (which you have to click to expand, and will only show up at all if anything's been done). I've changed the tags on this post so that you can see an example here.

For the immediate future, these permissions will be getting granted manually, will apply site-wide (not to specific groups), and will probably only be given to people that specifically express interest in helping with these tasks. I've written about grand, vague plans for a "trust"-based system that will hopefully help with doing this automatically in the future, but for now we'll have a more rudimentary trust system. Here's how it works:

1. I trust you, and give you access to more powerful tools.
2. If you abuse it, I take the tools away, and don't trust you any more.

It's not very sophisticated, but I think it should do the trick for a while.

So if you're interested in helping keep things organized, please let me know (post here or send me a message if you prefer). I'd probably prefer if you had at least some history of submitting well-tagged/titled topics to appropriate groups, but it's not necessarily required.

Edit: I would prefer that you have at least been around on the site for at least a week or two though. This is mostly important because the tasks are mainly organizational, so I think it's best if you've had some time to get accustomed to what's "typical" on Tildes for tags, which types of posts go in which groups, and so on.

Another excellent open-source contribution has been deployed today - @oden has added two-factor authentication support (via TOTP apps like Google Authenticator). Here's the code, if anyone wants to take a look.

If you want to set it up for your account, the link is available on the settings page. If you do, please please please write down or store the backup codes that it gives you after you enable it. If your phone dies or you otherwise lose access to your 2FA device, you won't be able to recover access to your Tildes account.

On that note, I wanted to ask for input about whether I should be willing to bypass 2FA for people if they've set up the email-based account recovery. People will lose access to their 2FA device and not have the backup codes, and I don't know if just telling them that I can't help them is truly the best thing to do. Allowing it to be bypassed does lower the security, but sometimes it's a reasonable trade-off. One possibility is adding a security option that people could enable for maximum security, like "Do not bypass 2FA for me under any circumstance, I promise that I've kept my backup codes".

Let me know what you think about that, as well as if you have any concerns or notice any issues with the feature. Thanks again, @oden!

Previously, the only way to do strikethrough or tables on Tildes was by using HTML. I've updated the markdown parser now so that it supports the methods of doing them through markdown. The Formatting help page on the docs has been updated as well with info about how they work.

I don't think there should be any conflicts between strikethrough and linking to groups, but it's possible that there are some weird edge cases, so please let me know if you notice anything. Generally, strikethrough requires you to have two tildes both before and after the text you want to strike out, whereas group links will only have one before. So something like This ~~should work~~ doesn't work will result in should work instead of a link to a group named ~should.

There are a few updates coming in today, and I'm going to make separate posts for each of them. This is the first one, added by James Southern (I don't know if he wants his Tildes account named) as an open-source contribution:

Your unread notifications page now has a "Mark all read" button at the top, just to the right of the title. Clicking it will mark all notifications on the page as read so that you don't need to do them each individually.

It works in a way that makes sure that it only marks ones that are on the page, and won't affect any new ones that came in after the page was loaded. If you have the "Automatically mark all notifications read when you view the Unread Notifications page" setting enabled, it won't show up (because you don't need it).

Please post with any feedback or issues you notice with it. Thanks, James!

Another feature update courtesy of open-source contributors - @Celeo was brave and took this complex update on as a first contribution to the Tildes code.

Mentioning a username in a comment will now send them a notification. Any of the following formats work:

• @Deimos
• /u/Deimos
• u/Deimos

It won't send a notification if you mention yourself, or if you mention someone that already would have gotten a notification for the comment anyway (the author of the parent topic/comment).

Edits should be handled as well, so if you edit in a mention that wasn't there previously it will generate the notification at that point, and if you edit one out it will delete that notification (whether the user has seen it yet or not).

Please let me know if you notice any issues or strange behavior (and please don't use this maliciously to annoy people).

This is an extremely minor change and I don't know if it's even really worth posting about, but I think it's probably good to make people aware: I've just increased the "grace period" for editing both comments and topics to 5 minutes (previously it was only 2 minutes). That is, any edits inside the first 5 minutes after it was posted won't mark the post with the (edited ... ago) text.

Currently, all older posts that were edited between 2-5 minutes after posting will still be marked as edited, but I'll probably go back and un-mark those as well.
Updated all old posts now as well.

Following up on his original addition of "open links in new tabs", @what has added another sub-option to it, which will make it so that external links in the text of comments, topic, and messages will be opened in new tabs by default.

This can be enabled on the Settings page, and I enabled it by default for everyone that has the setting enabled for topic links.

Tildes has been open-source for about 4 days now, and there have already been a number of people diving in and making some great contributions. Thanks to Ivan Fonseca, we now have our first feature update from an open-source contribution, and it's a heavily-requested one: you can now choose to have links open in a new tab.

This is split into two separate options, so there are two new checkboxes on your settings page under "Open links in new tabs":

• "Topic links to other websites" - this will make the external links (from link topics) open in new tabs
• "Links to text topics and comments" - this will make links to comment pages open in new tabs, both from clicking the title on text topics and the actual comments link

Please let me know if you notice any issues or unexpected behavior with it. There are multiple other open-source contributions in progress as well, so expect some more updates soon.

This has been requested a number of times, sorry for all the lost comments in the meantime.

The site should now ask you to confirm if you try to leave a page with an "unfinished" topic, comment, or message. This includes starting to write new ones, but also covers the forms for editing a post. It should only trigger if you actually make any changes, so if you click "Edit" on a comment/topic, but don't edit it at all (or do, and then change the text back to what it was originally), you shouldn't get a confirmation when you leave the page.

Please let me know if you notice any issues or strange behaviors with this.

I've just updated the site's markdown processor a bit to allow a few more HTML tags through, and added a section to the Text Formatting docs page to explain these options. The short form is that the following formatting is available only by using HTML (some of these may be added with markdown syntax eventually):

• strikethrough - <del> tag
• strike replace - <del> and <ins> tags
• ^superscript - <sup> tag
• _subscript - <sub> tag
• Tables - using <table>, <tr>, <th>, and <td>

I think at this point we should probably have almost all of the wanted formatting available, but there may still be a few missing.

I'm going to cheat a bit today and combine the daily discussion with a changelog post, since I'd like to get input on the changes and talk about what else should be done. I've just updated the "new topic" page in a few ways that we've discussed over the last while:

• There's a note at the top asking people to post informative or interesting content with discussion value, and not to make posts mainly for entertainment.
• You can now fill in both the Link and Text fields, and if you do so, the text will be posted as the first comment on your post. This allows people to make a sort of "submission statement" if they'd like, or give their opinion about the content. I've seen some conflicting opinions about this lately, so I tried to make it clear that adding text is optional. Personally, I don't think mandatory submission statements add much value, since in my experience most of them just end up being "I thought this was an interesting article", or a quote or two taken directly out of the article.
• I added a "Formatting help" link above the Text field that links to the page on the docs site that @flaque was nice enough to write up. This link has also been added above the markdown fields for comments as well.

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm also working on a "tagging guidelines" document which I'm hoping to get into decent shape today, and I'll add a link to that above the Tags field once it's available.

Let me know what you think of the changes, and if you have any other suggestions for things we should do with the submit process. We'll definitely need some group-specific submission info before too long as well, so I may end up adding a sidebar to the submit page that can contain more info (though that doesn't work very well on mobile since it's hidden by default).

As I mentioned in a couple recent posts (about standardizing tags as well as starting some more moderation), I'm going to start re-tagging and making some other changes to posts now.

So that you can see when changes are made (either by me, the post's author, or someone else), topics now have a "Topic Log" that's only shown in the sidebar when changes have been made. It's collapsed by default, and you'll see a title like "Topic Log (3)" that you can click on to see the log of changes. I've added and removed a tag in this post so you can see what it looks like.

For now, this only shows tag changes and lock/unlock, but I'll add title changes and moving between groups shortly. Edit: This does not include edits to the post, you can already see when a post was last edited (if it was), but I don't intend to add more detail or a log for that.

This is the first of several updates coming soon to make the topic-tagging system more functional, since it's been only informational up until this point.

You can now filter a topic listing down to showing only posts with a particular tag by clicking on that tag in the listing. It will affect the current listing you're on, whether that's your home page or inside a group. So for example, clicking a "facebook" tag on your home page will take you to this page - a list of all topics with the tag "facebook" in your subscriptions. Doing it from inside ~tech would go to this page instead, which is "facebook"-tagged topics inside only ~tech.

One thing to note is that (as mentioned in the mechanics page), tags can be hierarchical and this filtering supports that. For example, filtering to "rock" in ~music will also show a post I made yesterday tagged "rock.progressive".

Let me know if you notice any oddities with it or have any feedback about how it works.

After adding the ability to filter to a single tag yesterday, the next piece is active now: you can set up filters that will make it so that topics with specific tags aren't shown in your lists by default (but it's easy to toggle the filters off and see them). The filters are in the sidebar, hidden by default, but you can click the "Filtered topic tags" label to show the list and access the button that will take you to the settings page to change your filtered list.

A few notes:

• Filters are global. They will apply to posts in all groups, whether you're viewing from your home page or not. I'd like to add group-specific ones in the future, but for now they apply everywhere.
• Make sure you comma-separate the tags when you're setting up your filters, if you just use spaces it won't work.
• You can temporarily toggle off the filters from a link at the top of the topic list.
• Filters won't apply if you're viewing a single tag (in case it's one you had filtered)

I think that should mostly cover it, let me know what you think. I know this isn't super useful yet because tags aren't very consistent overall, but the next step (today or tomorrow) will be to make it so that other users can edit tags to fix incorrect/improper tagging. I'll start a daily discussion in a bit related to that topic as well.

After we discussed this the other day, I've now changed it so that you can no longer see who a user was invited by. While some people did like it being public, I think the benefits of keeping it public were pretty minor, and there were legitimate concerns about privacy on the opposite side.

So now it's still stored internally and I'll be able to use it to see if someone is repeatedly inviting users that cause problems, but it won't be shown on the site any more. This means that invites are now effectively anonymous—neither the inviter or the invitee will know the other's username if they don't want to reveal it themselves, and other users won't be able to see any relationship between them either.

Hopefully this will help make some people feel less hesitant about inviting others, and as I mentioned earlier in the daily discussion post, you've all been topped back up to 5 invite codes again.

There's now a new checkbox available on your settings page for "Automatically mark all notifications read when you view the Unread Notifications page". It's off by default so that I wasn't surprising anyone by changing the current behavior.

I figured this would be a quick one to add, and it's a little simpler than a "mark all as read" button (since it doesn't have to worry about new notifications that came in after loading the page but before clicking the button).

As we talked about in the daily discussion yesterday (which was great, thanks for all the feedback), I've got a few changes coming soon that will help people customize what they're seeing.

The first piece of these is out now—changes to the way topic listings are sorted:

1. I've changed the default sort for the site from "activity, all time" to "activity, last 24 hours". This will mean that the same older threads aren't constantly getting bumped back up to the top of the site, but you can still easily change the time period drop down back to "all time" if you want to see if any older ones are active too.
2. You can now set your own default sort and period, which (currently) applies to both your home page and individual groups. To do this, change the options on the home page (not inside a group) to whatever you want to use as your default, and a "Set as default" button will appear after the time period dropdown.

I'll be adding the ability to set separate defaults for each group before too much longer as well, and I'll also make a daily discussion post a little later.

As promised yesterday, it's now possible to set different default "views" (order of topics, and time period) for each individual group. Similar to how setting it for the home page works, just go into the group, change the view order/period to the ones you want, and then click the "Set as default" button next to the time period dropdown.

So now when you go into a group, it will choose your default sort by the first one of these that exists:

1. Your default for that group
2. Your default for the home page
3. The site's overall default (currently "activity, last 24 hours")

On that note, any opinions yet about the default switch yesterday to "activity, last 24 hours" instead of "activity, all time"? Or does this question not even matter much since people are setting their own preferred sorts now anyway?

Moving the vote count to the bottom of comments has been suggested a number of times, and since the comment tags are disabled for now anyway, this seems like a good time to try it out since we won't have those being shown at the top right now either.

I'm definitely not certain I'll keep it this way, but at least for now, a comment's vote count is now shown on the Vote button itself at the bottom of the comment (unless it's your own comment, in which case it's still shown at the top).

Let me know how it feels to you, I figured it would be an interesting thing to try out at least.

This isn't a huge update, but it should make navigating around the larger comment threads a little easier. There's now a "Parent" link in each comment's header (unless it's a top-level comment), right after the "Link". This is also present on user pages and in your notifications as well, for if you'd rather jump to the parent instead of the comment itself.

When you're using it from inside a comment thread, I also added some extra behavior to it: when it jumps you up to the parent comment, it will add a "[Back]" link at the end of that comment's header, which you can click to jump back to the comment you clicked "Parent" from. This can be used in a "chain" as well - you can click "Parent" multiple times to go back up a few levels in a thread, and then use the "[Back]" links on each one to get back down to where you started.

Hope that helps, let me know if you notice any weird behavior or have any feedback about it.

Edit: completely unrelated extra note - hey, we've made it to 3-char topic IDs already (this one is 103)

One of the main complaints so far has been that some people have been having trouble staying logged in (until randomly it just seems to work for no apparent reason). Examples: Here and here and here and here and probably even more.

I think I've figured out (and fixed) the issue now, so if you get unexpectedly logged out again after your next login, please let me know. I think the existing sessions may still have the issue, so I'm not totally sure if it will be fixed until after a new login (and even then, I'm still not totally sure).

This is definitely just a stop-gap until I get some time to work on properly paginating it, but quite a few people have asked about a page to view old notifications again after marking them read, so I put a quick one together that's linked in the sidebar of your user page as "Previously read", at https://tildes.net/notifications

For now it doesn't paginate at all and will just show your most recent notifications (up to 100) that were marked read, and doesn't include the unread ones. It's not great in a lot of ways, but hopefully better than not having any way to view the read notifications at all.

As I mentioned in the post on Monday, I've spent some time this week trying to make sure that I should be in good shape for the GDPR (which takes effect tomorrow).

In the end, the change in minimum age for some EU member states seemed to be the only issue, so I've just updated the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to account for that. You can see the exact changes that I made here, on GitLab.

And on that note, now that the Docs pages are open-source, I added a "view history" link that shows at the top of pages on the Docs/Blog if they've been edited, so that people can click to see the full edit history of the relevant page on GitLab.

Because of these changes, if you're older than 13 but below the minimum age in your country (for example, in Germany and France it's 16), you'll have to stop using Tildes now. At this point, it's unlikely that anyone is affected by this. As a side note, if anyone knows of a comprehensive, updated list of what the minimum age is for different countries, please let me know. I'd love to link to a list so that people can easily check if they don't know what their country's minimum age is, but I wasn't able to find one.

As discussed yesterday, since everyone seemed supportive, I've updated the default sorting for topic lists to "activity". I think we'll probably need to reconsider this as the site's traffic and posting volume continues increasing, but I think it's working really well as a default for now.

Hopefully the default will also be customizable on a per-group basis in the future (and/or allow people to set up their own "shortcuts" to certain groups with specific sortings).

This is more of a stop-gap than a real solution, but it's now at least possible to link to a specific comment. On each comment, on the right side of the header "stripe", there's a # that links to that comment. It just uses an HTML anchor, so you're still linking to the full comments page, but it should scroll to the correct comment at least. You can also click the # on a comment from your notifications page or a user's page to go directly to that comment.

In the future we'll probably want to have a better view that highlights the linked comment more, and allows displaying context (the parent comments), but for now this should help a bit.

A few people have expressed surprise to me that there weren't any notifications when someone replied to their topics (only comments), so I've added a basic version of topic reply notifications now as well. You'll get one when someone makes a new top-level comment on a topic that you posted, and they're combined in with the comment replies and shown in the same "unread notifications" page for now.

Most of the other weirdness mentioned when I added comment replies is still around, and I'll definitely want to add some sort of "stop sending me replies for this topic" toggle eventually, but I don't think it's a big concern for now since the comment volume is still very low.

A couple of fairly minor updates to topic-tagging (that mostly came out of discussion in this thread the other day):

1. When you're entering tags, you now need to separate them with commas. Spaces will be kept as part of the tag, instead of working as a separator. So you can tag something like music, soundtrack, full album and get 3 tags out of that.

   (Side note that I doubt anyone cares about: spaces are converted to underscores internally, so using a space or an underscore in a tag is now the same)

2. I added a tags field to the "new topic" page, so you can tag while you're posting the topic now, instead of needing to do it separately afterwards.

Most of you have probably already read it (especially since I spammed you all with a message that has a link to it), but there's a bit more info about topic-tagging here as well: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics#topic-tags

Tildes has a feature that marks which comments are new in threads since you last visited (kind of like a combination of the similar gold comment-highlighting and RES features on reddit), but I've noticed that not many people are enabling it so far.

I think the reason is that I made the label/description of it a bit too scary, and it sounded like it was some sort of tracking for the sake of tracking, without explaining the actual benefit enough. So I've updated the info now, and added a small image that shows what it does to its settings page. If you didn't already have the feature enabled because I scared you off about it, please take a look at the Settings page again and see if it makes more sense now.

It's still very rough in quite a few ways, but lack of comment reply notifications has definitely been one of the biggest missing features, so I wanted to get this basic form of it out before I worry about fixing some of the weirdness with it.

A few quick notes on it:

• Currently, notifications are only for replies to comments. You won't get any notifications for replies to topics, username mentions, etc.
• Currently, you can only view the unread notifications. Once you mark one as read, it'll be gone with no way to see it again. It's still stored and viewing read notifications will definitely be possible in the future, just not yet.
• There are some strange interactions between the comment visit-tracking and the notifications still, I'm not totally sure how I'm going to handle those yet.

Let me know if you notice anything else, I'll probably apply some more updates to it before long to fix some of the strange aspects.

Edit: I decided to change it from "Recent activity" to just "Activity".

As mentioned in the post over the weekend, I've added a new sorting option now: "recent activity". This behaves kind of like a forum, where active topics (ones getting new comments) will keep coming back up to the top of the list. I haven't added any specific protections like @cfabbro suggested in that thread, but I will if it seems necessary to prevent excessive "bumping".

I'm considering making this the default sort while the site's overall activity is still pretty low, but haven't done it just yet. Let me know what you think of it, and if you notice any weirdness.

Previously, the invite process was pretty annoying if you were planning to invite multiple people - you could only have one "active" invite code at a time, so you'd have to send someone a code and then wait until they registered before you could generate another code for the next person.

I've fixed this now and it's possible to have multiple active codes, so you can generate as many as you need (up to the limit of how many codes you've been granted). You can do this on the invite page: https://tildes.net/invite

Hopefully this makes it easier to invite people, and as always if you want more codes for a particular purpose just send me a message and let me know.

Okay, okay. The default site theme is now less beige/tan/yellow. This was a bit of a quick-and-dirty way of doing it, so the other colors are all still the Solarized ones for now, but I may change them around some later.

The other themes are still available, and can now be selected on the Settings page—if you want the beige back, that's "Solarized Light". I also added a theme with a full-black background (I don't think it looks very good, but it's there).

It's not quite notifications for replies/mentions yet, but in a similar vein, I've now added a feature that will mark which comments in a thread are new since your last visit, and also mark which topics have any new comments when you're on the listing page (like "9 comments (3 new)").

To fit with Tildes's approach to privacy, this feature is disabled by default and requires you to opt in.

There's a link to the page to do this from your settings page, which is linked from the sidebar on your userpage. The page explains the privacy implications and allows you to enable it if you want to use it.

Let me know what you think of it, more new stuff coming soon.

Just a couple quick notes for today:

Updates

I've made a few minor updates to layout and such here and there. I also changed the site's default sorting to "newest" while it's still pretty inactive, since that should make it easier to see the new posts. I'm planning to get an update in pretty soon that will remember which sorting settings you change to (on an individual group basis), so you should be able to adjust that soon if you want to.

Still working on the things I mentioned in this post, hopefully should have a couple of those done in the next day or two. I know the lack of reply notifications is especially painful and hard to keep conversations going at all, so I'm trying to get that in very soon.

Invites + "going public"

I'm inviting some more people directly today, so there will probably be various new faces showing up. If any of you have others that you want to invite, definitely let me know and I can contact them myself or give you some invite codes.

Currently, my plan is to start going more public tomorrow or Wednesday, trying to spread the announcement post out a bit more and get more people invited. I'll probably give all of you some invite codes at that point too, whether you want them or not. If you have particular suggestions for where you think I should (or shouldn't) try to get attention on the post, let me know.

Thanks, it's really great to see some people getting started using the site.

Very basic for now, but there's now a button in the top left corner of each comment (before the author's username) to collapse the comment along with its replies.

In the future I'll make this persist across page loads (so if you come back to the same thread, things will stay collapsed), and have the info at the top change - maybe showing how many comments are in the thread or something similar.

First issue closed!