Your own "main" user page (both topics and comments) is now paginated - this will be extended to everyone soon, so last warning to do any history cleanup

Deimos
Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:05:19 +0000

Things have been really quiet for the past few weeks. I've been pretty deep into server-admin-type work trying to get the site ready to be publicly visible, and while I have a decent understanding of that side of things I'm definitely not an expert, so I've been doing a lot of reading and experimenting that hasn't really looked like much happening from the outside.

I'm pretty happy with the state of everything now though, and I'm intending to make the site publicly visible (but still requiring an invite to register/participate) sometime next week. Part of that will be making some changes that have been overdue for a while, and catching up on merge requests and other things that have been getting backlogged while I've been in server-admin mode (and I apologize to all the people that have submitted those that I've been neglecting).

So this change is one that I've said is coming for a long time: your "main" user page is now paginated, and you no longer need to select "Topics" or "Comments" to be able to look back through older posts. For the moment, this is still restricted to only your own page, but on Monday, I will be enabling pagination on all user pages. So this is the final warning that if there's anything in your history you'd like to edit or delete before people can easily look back through your history, you should do it in the next few days.

I'm still considering whether to add any options for restricting the visibility of your user history, but I think it's really important to stress that anything like that will always be a false sense of privacy. I know for a fact that at least one person has already fully scraped all the comment threads on the site, and probably already has the ability to look through everyone's posting history if they want to (and they could easily make that data available to others). Once the site is publicly visible, scraping everything will be even more common, and it simply can't be prevented. If you post things, it will always be possible for someone to find them.

That being said, one thing that I am considering is making it so that logged-out users won't have access to pagination on user pages (similar to how it is for everyone else's user pages right now). It's still a false sense of privacy, but it at least lowers the convenience a little and means that someone will have to get an invite to be able to dig through anyone's history easily (though there's still the possibility that someone scrapes all the data and makes it browseable/searchable on an external site). Anyone have any opinions on whether it's worth doing that, or should I just let everyone look through user pages, whether they're logged in or out?

And since I haven't done it in a while, I've topped everyone up to 10 invites again, so please feel free to invite anyone else you want before we get into the public-visibility phase.

Thanks - please let me know if you have any thoughts about user histories or if you notice any issues with paginating through your "mixed" history (since it was a bit weird to implement and I'm not 100% sure it's correct).

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/9wf/your_own_main_user_page_both_topics_and_comments_is_now_paginated_this_will_be_extended_to_everyone

Votes: 80

Comments: 32