Today's daily topic comes out of a discussion in this thread yesterday - people are currently feeling a bit weird/rude about using the comment tags (described here, if you haven't read this already).

So the questions are:

• Does it just feel rude because we're currently very small-scale, where any negative action feels more personal?
• Are there any ways that we could try to reduce that feeling a bit?
• Should we just remove comment tags until the site is larger, since they're not very useful at this point anyway?

Feel free to add any other thoughts/discussions about comment tags as well.

Hey everyone, really happy to see people still coming back, and especially having extremely good discussions like this one about moderation. Here's my vague plans for the next few days:

Finish comment reply notifications and a couple other high-priority items

I've got comment reply notifications mostly done now, and hope to have that out today or tomorrow. Username mention notifications should be pretty simple to add on top of that as well. Other than that, I need to look into fixing a few strange bugs that have been noticed, and would also like to get through a few other things in the backlog (including doing a better job of getting the backlog listed on the issue tracker).

A significant feature I'd like to have soon is making it possible for other people to edit the tags on topics, as well as potentially allowing editing the title or even the link. For this to be possible though, we need to have a sort of log of the changes, so that there's accountability in who's making the changes and what they're doing.

Some more updates/additions to the Docs pages

The most important piece is to finish writing up some info about the "trust system", which is a lot of what we've been discussing in the "Community moderators?" post. This is going to be a really essential part of having the site be able to handle growth, so not having anything about it on the Docs site currently is a really big gap.

I'd also like to do a bit of writing/rearranging of some of the other pages before I get too much public attention, since they're pretty scattered right now and are missing some information that people seem to look for.

Invite more people and/or get some "larger" attention

Once those other updates are done, I'm planning to start actively looking for a bit more public attention, including possibly posting to places like Hacker News or reddit. We're going to need a pretty steady inflow of people to keep the activity level up, so I think really getting the site out there soon is going to be the easiest way to do that. I do want to have the updates/info mentioned above done first though, so that will probably still be a couple days.

In the meantime, I've topped up all existing users to 5 invite codes again, so if there's anyone you'd like to invite please feel free. You can get to your invite codes on this page, which is linked in the sidebar when you're on your user page.

Thanks again, definitely let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.

Not a very "deep" discussion topic, but I think I'll try to leave more formal ones for weekdays since that tends to be when people are around more.

So just a general question: in the short time you've been using the site so far, is there some pesky thing that's already annoying you? Something that takes too many clicks, information where you don't expect it, etc.?

I'm going to start posting one "official" daily discussion topic a day in ~tildes to talk about general site things, plans for mechanics, feedback on specific ideas, etc. You're definitely all welcome to post other similar topics as well if you want to, I just want to have one sort of "focused" post going every day.

For today:

What do you think of the current set of groups? It's a decent mix, but there are also some obvious gaps (though ~misc is supposed to act as a catch-all for posts that don't really fit anywhere else).

Overall, it's a tricky balance—I think if there isn't a group where a particular topic seems to fit, it feels a little discouraging, like maybe you shouldn't post it. But I also don't want to create too many groups, where we end up with a lot of them just being inactive because it's uncommon for anyone to submit items that fit in there.

And on a related topic, do you think there's a particular way we should try to handle "group requests", or just treat them mostly informally in ~tildes?

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

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.

Here's a quick list of things that I'm working on getting ready in the very near future. Please let me know if you have particular thoughts on any of these.

1. Fixing the site icons for link topics (currently just shows the blue dashed square).
2. Putting some information in topic sidebars - any thoughts on what would be good to have here? I think I'd like to have some of the more-detailed metadata about the topic once there's more of that being generated (for example for videos, this could show which channel it's from, how long it is, etc.), but that still won't be very much and there's a lot of space. Commenting rules? Something else?
3. Inbox/notifications for replies to your comments and topics, as well as username mentions. Any opinions about how it would be good to do this in a way that's convenient and not too annoying?
4. Collapse buttons for comment threads (possibly by being able to click the line as well, similar to the reddit redesign)