Similar to the last topic, I've got some more minor updates to let everyone know about.

It's also been quite a while since we had a general feedback topic, so let's do that today as well—feel free to ask any questions or give feedback about Tildes overall.

Here's what's been happening:

1. @Algernon_Asimov's major reorganizing and rework of the Docs is now live on https://docs.tildes.net. A decent number of changes needed to be made to be able to support having the pages in categories/folders, dealing with some formatting changes, redirecting old urls, etc. Some of these changes have started being integrated back into the wiki on Tildes itself as well (and I'm still gradually working on it). For example, the pages in the ~tildes.official wiki are somewhat organized into the same folders, even though the UI doesn't handle it very well in a lot of places yet.

   If you want to help edit the Docs at all, all of the pages (except site policies) are available in the ~tildes.official wiki, and I'll review and transfer any edits to the Docs site. If you don't have access to edit the wiki, send me a message and ask and I can give you access to edit (and you can edit the other groups' wikis too).

2. Some new HTML-exclusive formatting capabilities are available when writing posts:

   • <small>: lets you write a section of text in a smaller font. Good for "side notes" and such, and much better than using superscript, which some people were doing previously to get that effect.
   • <details> and <summary>: lets you make "expandable" blocks in your comments. This is useful if you want to do things like hide a large block of text or code and let people expand it if they want to read it. @hungariantoast used it immediately in his comment here, if you want to see an example. The current state of it isn't great for use for spoilers (but probably better than just writing them in plain sight), but I may make an adaptation of it specifically for use for spoilers.

3. There's a new site theme available, "Zenburn". It's a fairly low-contrast, and used to be one of my favorite color schemes. I had to do some work on one of my old sites that was using it last weekend, and it reminded me how much I liked it, so I added it. Here's the official screenshot of the vim color scheme for it, if you want an idea of what colors it uses. You can change the theme on the settings page if you're logged in, or there's a dropdown at the bottom of every page if you're logged out.

4. @deing has added a small warning to try to let people know when they're about to reply to an old comment or topic, since it seems fairly common for people to accidentally "necrobump" old threads without realizing. For now, the warning shows up when the topic/comment is over a week old. I set that threshold based on pulling out some stats and seeing that only 1% of comment replies and 2% of top-level comments were replying to anything that old, so it should be quite rare for anyone to see anyway.

Other than that, I haven't forgotten about the new group proposals and should be adding some new ones this week. I wanted to finish some backend changes to the group system first to help with that, and it's... gotten more ugly than I was expecting. Sorry for the delay, hopefully soon though.

Let me know if you have any thoughts about any of those changes, and as mentioned, feel free to use this topic for general feedback/questions as well, since I'm sure there are some things that people want to give feedback or ask about that might not feel like they're worth starting a thread in ~tildes for. As usual, I've also topped everyone back up to 10 invite codes, which you can get here.

Things have been pretty quiet and steady for the last few weeks. This is mostly deliberate on my end—I'm going to be away for about a week around the end of the month, so I didn't want to make any major changes or push for a big burst of new users when I might not be very available to deal with any issues. Most of my time lately has been working on stuff in the background, including doing some cleanup, finally getting around to various things I've been putting off for a while, and so on.

However, in early December I'm planning to move forward into the next "phase" for Tildes, which will be making it publicly-visible so that people are able to visit and read the content here even if they don't have an account. Registration will remain invite-only, but I'll probably try to make the process a little easier or automated in some way so that it doesn't require so much effort from people like me and @cfabbro (who's been diligently running invite-request threads on reddit for months).

Overall, I think that being publicly visible should help a lot, both to increase interest for the site as well as addressing a few common misconceptions about it (which are mostly because people can't see anything for themselves). Right now we're effectively "wasting" a lot of invites by forcing people to get an invite and register before they can even see if Tildes has anything they're interested in, so opening it up for everyone to be able to view should make invites a lot more efficient when they're only requested by people that want to participate.

One thing I should mention is that I'm not intending to have a "default front page" for logged-out users. They'll need to choose specific groups to view, and I've been playing around with a few ways to try to make this convenient (that will probably end up being available to logged-in users as well).

It's also been a while since I gave everyone more invite codes, so I've given everyone 10 now. If there's anyone else you want to invite before we get into the publicly-visible stage of things, you can get your codes through the Invite page (linked in your user page's sidebar).

Please let me know if any of you have any thoughts, questions or concerns about becoming publicly-visible, so I can see if there's anything else I'll need to make sure to address before being able to open it up. For example, are there any features that might have a privacy concern when public? Should we consider making any changes to the current set of groups? General feedback and questions unrelated to the public visibility are fine too (and always are—you can always feel free to message me or post in ~tildes).

Things have been a little on the quiet and steady side for the last while now (which has been nice), and it's been some time since we had a thread for general questions and feedback. Feel free to use this thread to post things about the site that you're curious about, questions or suggestions you have, and so on.

@super_james was also nice enough to start this other thread today about ways to help, so this one will probably be a little more on the "specific things to help with" side.

As a couple other things from my end, I've topped everyone back up to 5 invite codes again, so you should have some available on https://tildes.net/invite if there's anyone you'd like to invite to the site (and as always, just message me if you ever need more codes).

I also posted some information the other day about donations so far and the general financial status of the site, so that might be something that you'd be interested in reading if you didn't see it already. That thread also seems to have motivated a decent number of other people to pledge to the site's Patreon or donate, so thanks to everyone that donated, I really appreciate it.

As a final thing, a couple people have asked me about the site's general activity levels lately, so I'll post some stats about that in a comment here in a little bit (so it's more easily collapsible than being in the post itself).

As always, thanks for being here!

It's been quite a while now since we had a general feedback thread. So if there's anything you want to discuss, ask about, suggest, etc. but didn't feel like starting a dedicated thread for it, feel free to do that here.

Also, speaking of things that I haven't done in a while, I've topped everyone back up to 5 invite codes. Please don't feel obligated to find ways to use them, but if there are people you want to invite, that would be great. You can get the codes here: https://tildes.net/invite