Hi everyone! There was no coding challenge last week, so I decided to make one this week. If someone wants to make his own challenge, wait few days and post it. I'm running out of ideas and I'd like to keep these challenges running on Tildes.

Everyone here knows data formats - I'm talking about XML or JSON. The task is to make your own format. The format can be as compact as possible, as human-readable as possible, or something that's really unique. Bonus points for writing encoder/decoder for your data format!

How do you handle long texts? Various unicode characters? Complex objects? Cyclic references? It's up to you if you make it fast and simple, or really complex.

I'm looking forward to your data formats. I'm sure they will beat at least csv. Good luck!

I am an occasional lynx/elinks user and I only have a single complaint about Tildes that prevents me from reading it using those browsers. Threaded comments don't display properly, since the CSS support of these browsers is non existent (lynx) or poor (elinks), the only way to make threaded comments display nice is by rendering them as ul lists. Is it possible to wrap the current article elements inside ul/li elements to make them display nice in text-only browsers?

For comparison, I can get them to display nice on reddit using the old mobile interface. In Tildes threads look flat (those comments are supposed to be nested, link to original thread) and it is difficult to know who is replying to who.

I like the idea of the site being entirely dependent on text with not a single graphic downloaded. I do like the little logo in the top left, but I think it would be even cooler if it was literally just the plain-text symbol ~.

This would also apply to the small little icons next a link post, as the site to which the post takes you can simply be read below the post itself.

I know the website already loads super fast which I am very grateful for, but I think a purely text-based site would promote the overall discussion focused goal of tildes as there would be no graphics in the way. I may be biased towards this style of website, but I think it's worth seeing if other users would like the site to become text-only. This is one main reasons I disliked the new Reddit design, the old site was nice because the graphics were kept to a minimum and therefore more of the screen could be used to show the content.

I'll keep it short:

1. Comments box on top of the comments section. I realized that it might put more emphasis on reading before commenting, but sometimes reading can be too tedious. Some of the posts here reach 50+ comments, which can be a bit tedious to scroll past. The comments will only increase in number from now on. EDIT: It appear's this is a deliberate design choice for the reason that I guessed. Still hoped we got a choice, though.

2. Hide all child comments (like RES would allow on Reddit)

Thoughts?

Hey everyone,
I've seen a bunch of posts discussing the design of the site, and I was wondering if there are any other designers on here that would be interested in discussing the interface more precisely, and coming up with potential improvements. I wrote up a design audit and gave it to @Deimos last week, and I wanted to share it with everyone and generate some discussion about minutiae such as colors, placement and styles of buttons and links, etc. I feel like these are just as important as larger features that people are asking for (such as a markdown preview), and have the added benefit of being very fast to iterate on.

Programmers write documentation for their software which serves as a resource for why critical chioces were made and why they were chosen over other options. Would it be an idea for Tildes to reference to the best arguments for features implemented like the discussion we had on anonymitity some days ago? That way all the users can read why a choice made it into the site and see the process behind the choice.