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    4. How can a broke dude who can barely code help Tildes?

      ~tildes Ask (survey)
      Right now I'm not only utterly broke, but also don't have access to international payment methods (you may ask the reasons for this, but I probably won't answer :P). But I wanna give back to...

      Right now I'm not only utterly broke, but also don't have access to international payment methods (you may ask the reasons for this, but I probably won't answer :P). But I wanna give back to Tildes somehow.

      I know enough English to communicate and have a general understanding of programming (with a focus on basic Python and very basic C) but never did anything beyond book and class exercises. I'm also familiar with Regex, Vim (including patterns) and Emacs.

      I also have some Inkscape skills (not a designer), and wouldn't mind working with documentation and other things actual developers usually find trivial or dull.

      20 votes

    14. What have you been listening to this week?

      ~music Ask (survey)
      What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as...

      What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

      Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

      You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

      http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

      Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

      21 votes

    28. Your chosen theme on Tildes now carries over to the Blog and Docs sites

      ~tildes.official Text 156 words
      No functional changes, but the themes available on Tildes itself now transfer over to the Blog/Docs sites (previously those sites were always using the "Solarized Light" color scheme). It was a...

      No functional changes, but the themes available on Tildes itself now transfer over to the Blog/Docs sites (previously those sites were always using the "Solarized Light" color scheme). It was a little painful before if you were using a dark theme and clicking something like the "Formatting help" link took you to a bright page, so this should be a lot better.

      There's currently no way to select a theme from the other sites, just on Tildes itself, but it should carry over when you've selected one here (using the dropdown in the footer if you're logged out, or through the settings page if you're logged in).

      Please let me know if you come across any issues with it. It was pretty straightforward overall, but it did involve redoing a lot of the CSS and HTML for the Blog/Docs sites, so it's very possible that I messed some pages up and haven't noticed yet.

      49 votes

    45. Some small updates over the past week

      ~tildes.official Text 628 words
      A decent number of smaller changes have been implemented over the past week, and while I don't think any of them individually were worth devoting a post to, I figured it would probably still be...

      A decent number of smaller changes have been implemented over the past week, and while I don't think any of them individually were worth devoting a post to, I figured it would probably still be good to let people know. If you're interested in following Tildes's development more directly, you can always keep an eye on the commits on GitLab (an RSS feed is available as well). I try to write good commit titles/descriptions, so anyone should be able to follow what's being changed without needing to be able to understand the actual code.

      Anyway, here are some recent updates:

      • Last week, I tried to add a "back to top" button on mobile and broke the site for a lot of people. I reverted it and haven't tried to re-implement it again, since it seemed like a lot of people didn't like it anyway. I'd be interested in hearing feedback about whether that's still something that many people want.
      • @what added a new dark theme called "Atom One Dark". It's pretty nice, give it a try if you like dark themes.
      • @wirelyre fixed the very first issue ever created on the Tildes repo. Markdown includes support for embedding images with a syntax almost exactly like a link, except with an exclamation point in front: ![image mouseover text](https://example.com/link-to-image.jpg). However, since Tildes doesn't allow people to embed images, anyone attempting this would end up with an escaped <img> tag inside their post. It's fixed now so that it just treats an attempt to embed an image as a link to the image instead.
      • As requested, I added the ability to "quick quote" when you're going to post a comment reply. If you select some text from a comment before clicking the "Reply" button, the reply form will start out with the selected text already quoted for you.
      • Subsequent quotes in comments are now merged by default. Previously, if you were quoting two or more paragraphs by putting > in front of them and you had a blank line in between them, you would end up with a separate quote block for each paragraph unless you also put a > on the blank line. This behavior was clearly unexpected most of the time and people ended up with longer quotes broken up into many quote blocks for no reason. I've now changed it so that it will automatically merge subsequent quote blocks into a larger one, but you can still force them to be separated by putting at least two blank lines between them (or other methods like using a horizontal rule between quotes). Info about this was added to the Text Formatting docs page.
      • For about the last month, we've been showing domain names for link topics and usernames for text topics in the listings, but some people (rightfully) pointed out that this isn't very good for groups like ~creative where it's important to be able to see who's posting a link. I've updated it now so that I can change this behavior on a per-group basis, and for now, both ~creative and ~music will always show the submitter's name, even on link topics.

      I've topped everyone back up to 10 invite codes again as well. With the site being publicly visible now, I know that some people are getting requests for invites and have been using them fairly often, so always just let me know if you need some more. You can get your invite links from here: https://tildes.net/invite

      Let me know if you have any feedback or notice any issues with any of the things I listed above (or anything else). Thanks as always, it's been nice to see the site's activity level moving up again lately.

      96 votes

    49. What author has the best worldbuilding?

      ~books Ask (survey)
      It's a simple question, or is it? How would you measure best? Complexity? Realism? Creativity? Detail? I think it's fairly obvious that Tolkien has set the gold standard of all worldbuilding, but...

      It's a simple question, or is it? How would you measure best? Complexity? Realism? Creativity? Detail?

      I think it's fairly obvious that Tolkien has set the gold standard of all worldbuilding, but more recent authors like GRRM, Brandon Sanderson and JKR or the late Terry Pratchett have also created beloved worlds.

      Some, like GRRM, are apparently more interested in complex worldbuilding itself rather than finishing their novels while others like JKR use the worlds more as a window dressing without keeping it fairly consistent. Is it alright if the Wizarding World is inconsistent if it serves the plot? How complex can Westeros become before it gets in the way of the story?

      I think that GRRM and JKR are both extremes on the spectrum. When reading The Song of Ice and Fire, I felt like GRRM needed a proper editor to reign him in while JKR managed to build a fantastical world in 7 books which, upon closer inspection, makes no sense. On the other hand you have Terry Pratchett, who with the Discworld was clearly more interested in creating a parody of the real world, but still managed to make it very interesting and unique.

      Thoughts?

      21 votes