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    18. Why are drink coasters flat?

      ~design Ask
      A drink coaster goes under a glass or cup, and is intended to catch any condensation or spillage from the glass, to protect the tabletop underneath. But most coasters are flat.* Any liquid that...

      A drink coaster goes under a glass or cup, and is intended to catch any condensation or spillage from the glass, to protect the tabletop underneath.

      But most coasters are flat.* Any liquid that gathers on them can roll off the edges onto the table. Some coasters are made of a water-absorbing material, like cardboard or cork, but some are made of materials that repel water, like metal or ceramic or plastic.

      I ask this because I recently discovered a small coaster-like tray with an upraised lip around the edge. Strictly speaking, it's not a coaster, but it's exactly the right size to be used as a coaster - and, with the upraised lip around the edge, it actually prevents liquid from escaping onto the table.

      So why are coasters flat?

      (I bought some of the lipped not-coasters to use as coasters. This design makes sense to me. And they happen to look nice as well.)

      * It was only while researching coasters online prior to making this post that I discovered that some coasters have lips. Every coaster I've seen in real life is flat.

      20 votes

    21. Create a Logline

      ~creative Text 93 words
      Per @mrbig: What is a logline?: a brief summary (25 to 40 words) of a story for film, television or book that states the central conflict and an emotional "hook", with the purpose of stimulating...

      Per @mrbig:

      What is a logline?: a brief summary (25 to 40 words) of a story for film, television or book that states the central conflict and an emotional "hook", with the purpose of stimulating interest (Wikipedia).

      A logline is evaluated not exactly for what a story is (since it does not contain a complete story), but for what it can be. Suggestions usually seek to maximize the dramatic potential of the idea.

      Create a Logline, and you can chose to reply to others with your interpretation of how their stories would go.

      9 votes

    33. Postcard swap

      ~hobbies Ask (survey)

      Hi! Anybody collect postcards? A few years ago I was very active user at postcrossing.com I would like swap postcards again. I'm from Spain.

      14 votes

    38. After visiting a topic's comments, that topic will show when it has new comments since your last visit

      ~tildes.official Text 309 words
      As discussed last week, the site is now marking new comments for all logged-in users. This has two effects: On the listings pages, you will see something like "5 comments (2 new)" when a topic you...

      As discussed last week, the site is now marking new comments for all logged-in users. This has two effects:

      1. On the listings pages, you will see something like "5 comments (2 new)" when a topic you previously viewed the comments on has new comments since your last visit.

      2. When you return to a comments page with new comments, all old comments will start out collapsed, unless one of the new comments is a direct reply to one of them. New comments have a colored stripe down their left side, with the color varying based on the theme you're using (but I think it's generally an orange/red-like color).

        You can expand collapsed comments by clicking the "+" button in their top left corner, or expand them all by using the "Expand all" button at the top of the comments section. If you don't like this initial collapsing behavior, you can disable it on the Settings page by unchecking the "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic" setting.

      I'm working on some other adjustments and changes related to this, so there will probably be some more tweaks coming into place soon as well. I'd like input on one in particular:

      Do we need a separate function along the lines of "stop indicating new comments on this post", or does the ignore function serve that purpose well enough? Are there reasonable cases where you want to stop seeing the "(x new)" on a topic, but do not want to actually ignore it? And if we do want to implement a function like that, any suggestions for a brief name/description for it that will fit in the Actions dropdown?

      As always, any other general feedback about the feature is welcome as well.

      And as usual, I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      38 votes

    39. Where do you draw the line when it comes to what data collection one can do on you?

      ~talk Text 73 words
      (Presuming it's done purely for statistical purposes of course.) I, like most of us am personally fine with age, sex, city level location and relationship status. I really dislike using real names...

      (Presuming it's done purely for statistical purposes of course.)

      I, like most of us am personally fine with age, sex, city level location and relationship status. I really dislike using real names though since I feel like it ties you to who you are in person, which I really dislike and I support people deciding not to fill them in because in some places even what I've outlined can get you in trouble.

      10 votes

    44. 1917 (2019) — Spoiler-free discussion thread

      ~movies Ask
      Trailer topic Wikipedia I watched it last week. Fantastic movie. I don't watch many war movies (in fact this is one of my first ones), but I really, really liked it. I didn't even notice the two...

      I watched it last week. Fantastic movie. I don't watch many war movies (in fact this is one of my first ones), but I really, really liked it. I didn't even notice the two hours go by.

      The one-shot effect is really well done, and I enjoyed trying to spot the transitions.

      It's not an exceptional movie or anything like that, but it's one of the rare times I just went into the theater and came out exceedingly satisfied.

      11 votes

    49. I'm planning to enable the "mark new comments" feature for everyone - any major concerns?

      ~tildes.official Text 475 words
      Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which...

      Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which settings are available, and that's totally fine—they shouldn't need to. The default setup should be as good as possible, with changing settings mostly for specialized cases.

      One particular place on Tildes where this isn't currently being done well is for the "mark new comments" feature, which has always been disabled by default. I think it's one of the best features on the site and makes it much easier to follow ongoing discussions here than on other sites with similar comment systems, but overall, not many users have enabled it.

      For example, Tildes got some attention on Hacker News again yesterday, and about 80 new users have registered so far from that. Only 9 of them enabled "mark new comments", even though the welcome message strongly encourages it. Looking at longer periods of time, this seems typical: only about 10% of users ever enable it.

      As it says on the settings page for the feature, my reason for disabling it by default was out of privacy concerns. However, I've been doing some review of the data that Tildes stores lately and realized that this was kind of misleading and inaccurate. Because I have HTTP request server logs and some other related data (which is all only kept for 30 days), I effectively have topic visit records from the last 30 days for all users anyway, whether they have the feature enabled or not. The data is more convenient to access for users with the feature enabled, but it's available either way.

      Because of that, and because the data will be very useful to combine with some of the upcoming changes I mentioned in the last ~tildes.official post, I'm planning to enable this feature for everyone. Here are the general plans:

      • Data about which topics' comments pages a user visits will be stored (for 30 days), along with when and how many comments were there at the time. This enables displaying which topics have new comments since your last visit, and marking those new comments.
      • There will no longer be a setting to disable this, but you can still choose whether previously-seen comments are collapsed when you return - the same as the existing checkbox on that page for "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic".
      • I will probably implement some sort of "stop informing me of new comments in this topic" feature (separate from the new Ignore one) to stop having the info about new comments in a topic showing up for you.

      Please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns about this. If nothing major comes up, I intend to make this change later this week.

      82 votes

    50. How do you find flights?

      ~tech Ask (recommendations)
      Planes may soon be a thing of the past, for now they're still sometimes hard to replace. I used to rely on Hipmunk for finding flights, but sadly, they recently shut down. So I was wondering, what...

      Planes may soon be a thing of the past, for now they're still sometimes hard to replace.

      I used to rely on Hipmunk for finding flights, but sadly, they recently shut down. So I was wondering, what do people on tildes use to find flights? Any tool/website you're happy with?

      9 votes