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Daily Tildes discussion - General questions/feedback
It's been a couple of weeks again since the last general feedback thread, so let's do another one today. Especially since the site has finally been open-sourced now, and we've already had people starting to submit code contributions, it would probably be great to hear about some more general issues/suggestions/etc. that can be added to the issue tracker and potentially worked on by other people.
So if there's anything you want to discuss, ask about, suggest, etc. but didn't feel like starting a dedicated thread for it, fire away!
I was browsing on mobile today and saw that the link to open the sidebar displayed my number of unread notifications. I think that is a really neat trick and simplifies mobile browsing at a glance.
I saw it too! It's nice, but it think the way the number is styled is inconsistent with the rest of the site. Maybe something simple like putting the notification number inline with the sidebar text like 'sidebar (1)' would be better?
I second this. I like the addition, but find it a bit too bold. I'm using dark theme, and the red is a bit too eye catching, especially because I'm one of those people that always has at least a couple unread messages.
I'm okay with the red (or is it orange?), but it is a bit... rounded compared to the rest of the site. Squaring off the corners of the little shape that the number is in would be sufficient for me.
Ditto. I like this addition.
Yes! Noticed this as well. Was super pleased to see the change
I'm curious if there was an uptick in comment and post frequency since the thread about it last week. Seems like there's been more to me, but that could easily just be... Like... My opinion, man.
Personally, I've had some great discussions on here more recently, and it feels like people are catching a good rhythm. All the different talks about content, quality, and approach seem to have helped a lot to establish a baseline. At least from my perspective. Curious to hear what others have noticed in this regard.
I think it's back up a little bit, let me pull some numbers out again:
So it's a little bit up, yeah. The previous list towards the end was getting more down into the 300-400s for comments and 30s for topics most of the time.
Is there a place where we can see more extensive data?
Just the previous post they mentioned, which had a month's worth of data (in a table that looks pretty bad now, probably need to fix that styling).
Could you create a page where we can see a list of number of comments and topics per day? An api endpoint would also work fine, whatever works for you.
Now that the site is open-sourced, someone could even create a system for that and make a merge request
A full blown API is planned, so maybe we'll soon have our very own snoopsnoo.
Or maybe we could make so that it's integrated to the site but private? Like every user could see the personal stats for themselves, but not for other users. I'd be very interested in that.
I'd definitely like to start having more statistics available. Using topics/comments per day as a measure of activity for the different groups would probably be a lot better than just a number of subscribers (which is pretty meaningless).
I'm new to the site, but I already love it here and am hooked
I noticed the solid purple with white text for voting and I liked it. I noticed the notifications with the red circle and white text which I also liked.
Yeah, I'm not sure about the solid purple vote buttons after voting, I think it might be a bit too "strong"/bright, especially in the dark themes. Things you've already voted on are probably ones that you want to pay less attention to in the future, so making them stand out that much feels a little wrong to me.
It was too hard to tell them apart before though, so I don't know.
I definitely had trouble telling them apart before, and accidentally unvoted things several times. I don't know if the current scheme is exactly the best way to do it, but I prefer it to the old one.
I think the solid purple button for already voted (on the "Black" theme) feels a bit too bright.
I kind of miss the dotted vote buttons. Maybe they could be dotted before you vote and solid after voting?
That's how they were before the change. It wasn't distinctive enough. A few people (myself included) would vote for something and observe its votes decrease because we didn't realise that we'd already voted on it (and were therefore removing our vote when we clicked on the vote button again).
I just more like the fact that you're thinking about it
I like the new solid purple buttons on posts I've voted for (I'm using the "Solarized Light" theme). I asked for you to make the "voted" and "not voted" states more visually distinctive, and this change achieves that quite nicely.
Both are true. Old one was hard to pick apart, new one is too bright. Maybe don't make the number solid white? That seems to trigger me the most.
I kinda like the new one in both light and dark. It makes it easier for me to use as a visibility marker for threads that I'm interested in.
How about swapping the styling of items you've already voted on[A] with items that you posted[B].
[B] items have no box and are really not eye catching. That seems like it's ideal for
[A] items have the solid purple box, and might be ideal for things that the user posted themselves. They will be less common and a user might want to easily find their posts.
Just a thought, and I forgot to say earlier: thanks for all of your work!
Edit: I now realize that the box is sort of a button pattern and my idea would break that.
I totally love the vote color change (and I use dark theme too :D)
I find it kind of ironic that after talking about icons being something that you must "learn" we're not talking about whether purple is the right color to indicate something has been voted on. Seems pretty learned and non-universal to me. ;)
Perhaps a small check mark below the number of votes to indicate you have voted? I'm not sure color is the best route here. Any color will give some ambiguity (albeit perhaps opacity, rather than color, will be most useful here)
Another subtle touch might be to have no border (or opacity <50% border) around the vote button until you vote. That way once you have voted the border appears, giving another visual indication.
Well, personally I'd love to see some sort of external notifications feature. For example, Reddit allows you to get an email whenever you get a notification; although this is kinda complex, it'd be very useful, or perhaps even something like an instant messaging bot or something. I really enjoy sometimes not worrying about checking my notifications right away, but other times it'd be nice to have some sort of external notification as soon as something happens.
I don't expect this to be added soon, but in the long term, I'd like to see the addition of an external API, so we can start developing third party apps, for example something like rtv so we can use Tildes from the CLI.
Lastly, I'd like to see an issue added for saving posts. I have a long history of cool posts stockpiled on Reddit, and sometimes I like to look through them again or look back if I remember one particularly useful one. Especially given how hard it is to find posts on Tildes without search and without pageination, I think it'd be very nice.
You're doing a great job so far, I'm really impressed with Tildes progress! And I am so happy to see it open sourced, I've been combing through it, and I've already learned some new things from the code I didn't know before, like edits to a comment within 2 minutes don't add an edited timestamp. I hope to be able to contribute sometime, even if casually since web development is not really my thing :P
Keep up the good work! :)
Thanks!
For notifications, I've been thinking about it a bit and there are a few options I need to look into a bit more. Some mobile browsers are starting to support push notifications now, but I don't know how well they work overall. It might also be interesting to add support for something like Pushover. I'd rather not collect people's email addresses (and I've tried to avoid it so far).
Agreed on the API, I hope we can start discussing that soon. I should probably start an overview/discussion type issue for it as a central place.
And there's one for a save feature here, though it could probably use some updating/clarification: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/94
Please, no notifications of any kind without an active, easily locatable choice to enable them and the option to disable them again!
One of the most annoying things about G+ was that the settings for notifications were buried, and e-mail/mobile notifications regularly turned themselves back on without permission, because Big G wants you engaged.
Facebook for mobile browser ask permission to push notification.
I'm sure it works on chrome so I suppose it would be possible for Tildes too.
Oh sorry about that! I tried to search them before, maybe the quotes might threw off the search functionality on GitLab...
For notifications, I understand, then hopefully with the API open, we can program our own little applications that access Tilde's notifications that way. That'd be cool too :D I'd prefer to stay away from Pushover though, since it looks like a proprietary service, and I think it'd be best for Tildes to try to stick to free / open source software as much as possible.
We talked about some sort of on-boarding for new users recently, to get them to understand Tildes guidelines for posts and comments. Did you implement anything to that end?
Nothing too major yet - there's the welcome message everyone gets, and there's some info on the "post a new topic" page that tries to explain very briefly. @cfabbro is working on some updates and rearrangement of the Docs site, so I think there might be some added in there before long.
Is there anything in particular that you think would be a good method of doing it?
In a previous thread I brought up a “pinned post” type thing that a new user might see for n amount of days since first sign in on top of all feeds. It got a bunch o’ upvotes.
It might be titled: Welcome - guidelines for posts and comments.
Edit: I imagined it might be an inviting color like blue.
Edit2: derp, all items are already blue.. maybe make the text bold? Is it bold already? Or maybe put something in the vote count area that distinguishes the post, like the Tildes logo?
People ignore "pinned posts". There's a "pinned post" at the top of /r/Help on Reddit, saying "This is not an IT Help Desk". They've had something like that there for years (I wrote the first one myself). They still regularly get questions asking for help with games and phones and software. People don't read pinned posts.
I had an idea for that which might help a long time ago.
I'm not sure if we should do it that way (rotating top spot) or come up with a different system for those tasks. When I wrote that it was in-context of reddit, back when I thought they cared. There's probably a more elegant solution possible here, based on using special tags.
I just signed up and I got a private message with guidelines etc. I think that's a better way as people are less likely to miss it.
I will comment here to say that the way it is currently set up also worked for me when I signed up last week, I read it all. If it is clear to someone that it is not just reddit 2.0 and has some different motivations (as is pretty clear I think) then it seems to be motivating enough to read it.
I also suggested this in quite a few people seem to not like the idea I still think it's a good idea.
Yeah, it’s a bit drastic I guess. I’d really have to try it out in action to see.
Maybe we could have a beta.tildes.net to try out new things on willing users.
Sign me up
Is there any way to contribute to documentation without becoming a computer programmer?
I've written user documentation and training manuals for a job, but I simply can't help out here because it's all hosted in a programming environment rather than something like a wiki.
Yeah, the GitLab side of things can be a bit confusing, but the docs are all just files containing markdown in the end. For example, here's the file that gets rendered into the Mechanics page on the Docs site: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes-static-sites/raw/master/content/pages/mechanics.md
Bauke has already offered, but I'm also willing to handle the programming-ish side of things for you if you'd like, you'd just have to edit/create markdown files and send them to me through whatever method's simplest for you.
How can I help without any programming experience at all (aside from basic ass CSS knowledge)? Alternatively, is there a way I can teach myself to program for nothing or next to nothing?
I know it's not really what you're asking, but you can help by adding value to discussions on the site and making the site worth visiting.
I mean, that's definitely a helpful comment tho. And it's something that I've been trying to do for sure. The place needs content, comments, and contributors.
Learning (at least some) programming online for little to nothing is doable! From what I can tell on GitLab, ~'s code is mostly written in Python. A favorite resource of mine is Automate the Boring Stuff with Python because it focuses on practical application. There's lots more online with just a quick search, and if you're looking for a proving grounds, check out the weekly programming challenge hosted by @Emerald_Knight over on ~comp!
Thank you!!! @Deimos do we have a safe function yet? Because I want to save the fuck out of this comment
There is neither a save function nor a user-tagging function here yet. If you want to save a comment, you'll need to click on 'Link' just above it, and then save it as a bookmark in your browser.
Test tagging @delicious_grownups
Ahhhhh fuck you're totally right. It will take you to the user's page, but I got no notification of the tag
Gotcha! Altho the tag seemed to work I think
There's currently an open issue for username tagging and it is being worked on yay
I user-tagged you in this comment but I bet you didn't get notified of it.
You right dawg
A few random thoughts in addition to my suggestion for comment tags I posted elsewhere after a few days exploring the site:
I guess that's it. Looking forward to seeing how this platform progresses. Thanks to Deimos for getting it going and to everyone else for their contributions.
Yeah, this seems to be from the markdown parser. It splits them apart unless you also put a
>on the blank line between the two quoted paragraphs. For example:Looks like:
But if you also add a
>between the two:It stays as one block:
It's probably possible for me to do some small tweaking to have it keep them together automatically though.
Ah, I guess this sort of means that it's an issue of user error. In that case, I'm not so sure what my opinion is--I'd bet that most users intend to have their excerpt as one solid block, but it's possible that some prefer the gap between paragraphs. I'm leaning toward retracting my "nitpick," then--might as well let users choose how they want to format their post. Then again, I'm just some dude, so take my suggestions with grains of salt!
I would personally prefer it kept as is, since that's the way it works on Slack (and a few others sites/services), and it's very handy when quoting multiple sources, E.g.
Learning that in order to keep them grouped you need to include a > in the blank lines between them is easy enough and I can always add that rule to the text-formatting documentation to make it easier for people as well.
I'll chime in to say that I do miss having the option to downvote comments that spread false info. I frequent some technical subreddits and it's a useful part of driving threads in constructive and umm... scientifically legitimate directions. These aren't even trolls, mostly just people with a skewed understanding of reality. Refuting the false info with comments and sources is part of it. But that often increases the visibility, whereas downvotes draw attention away from those ideas. Until you sort by controversial anyway.
I personally think that the comment tag mechanic will do a better job than downvotes when it is implemented, as people will see not only that the comment is "bad," but also the reason(s) why. But I was surprised to learn that there are only five options for comment tags. I'd like to add to the list tags like "False Claim(s)" and "Unsupported Claim(s)." I'd also like to see some positive comment tags, like "Verified Claim(s)" (for if other users have checked the sources/have similar experiences/etc.).
There's no archiving currently, and I don't have any particular plans yet. I would eventually like to prevent voting after some amount of time, mostly so that I can delete the data about which users voted on the post (I don't want to store that data forever).
Especially with
activitybeing the default sort, I think some sort of archiving tool would be necessary. Maybe only impose it manually on threads that have been bumped far too many times because of 'me too thanks!' comments. Just food for thought.The left border highlight on comment links is a really nice touch! I hope I can maybe take a look at the source soon, would love to contribute!
Maybe I’m being dumb, but is there a way to save specific threads or posts to read later?
I believe the only way to do it for now is to bookmark it in your browser.
Not yet, it's in the high priority column on the roadmap though, so hopefully in the near future: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/boards
I’m currently working on this, so it should hopefully be available soon :)
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/merge_requests/10
I themed my tilde lol. https://i.imgur.com/RK2zhfN.png
Edit: Bonus pic: https://i.imgur.com/9ILKBMa.png
White theme?
You must be crazy. Or blind. Definitely blind.
Aha, I think I'll make a nightmode version.
My Discord looks like this at the moment.
Alright.
https://i.imgur.com/dbUjn51.png
https://i.imgur.com/PjPYXjL.png
Codeblock https://i.imgur.com/FGT9MMx.png
Blockquote https://i.imgur.com/FGT9MMx.png
Docs https://i.imgur.com/zbS5Wup.png
Hmm, probably not really. There might be some small/similar aspects that get implemented, but overall that's a system that won't be needed until the site's much larger than it is now. There are a lot of much more basic functions that need to be worked on first.
I noticed that there wasn't an indicator for my edited comments. I'm mostly on mobile and havent checked the desktop page.
If this isn't already a feature I'd like for it to be considered. I'd hate to be trolled with comment editing meant to make someone look foolish.
Edit, weird I saw my edit on one comment I edited and not on the other.
There is an indicator for edited comments. Above the comment, next to your username, there's a timestamp saying "X hours, Y minutes ago". If a comment is edited, it will show "(edited X hours, Y minutes ago)" next to the timestamp. This shows on both the desktop and mobile sites.
However, we have a two-minute grace period during which we can edit our comments without the "edited" indicator showing up.
This is good to know, thank you!
Tiny nitpick, but I think the vote count on posts you've made should have a box around it, just for consistancy with other posts.
I would like to see the comment box at the top of the comments area, rather than bottom.
I prefer it at the bottom. Means I have to read the thread, and if somebody has already said what's on my mind all I have to do is vote on it. It's saved me from typing out and posting what would otherwise be unnecessary noise several times.
I agree with this
As mentioned, it's at the bottom for a reason (encouraging people to read/reply to existing comments more than just posting their own), but I might move it to the top for threads with the "ask" tag, since those lean towards wanting input from more people separately.
I know I asked this a while back, but could we add a ~humor group at this point? If it's opt-in then I don't see how it would upset the people here who take offense to non-serious posts since they wouldn't see them in their feed.
Did you see this thread? Daily Tildes discussion - proposals for "trial groups", round 1
You might also be interested in this recent comment by Deimos about "fluff" content.
Thanks, I haven't been very active of late and missed those discussions. I just did a search in the "trial groups" post you linked and found 0 results for either "humor" or "funny", so it seems like people have given up even asking for that at this point even though I know there's interest because my initial post asking for a humor group got a lot of upvotes.
What I don't quite understand is why this site is being treated like it's some sort of hothouse flower that will wither and die at the slightest hint of a cat gif or web comic. Why not give it a try, and if people don't like the net effect of a humor group on the site then delete the goup and move on.
One reason I linked you to that post about trial groups is so that you could make your suggestion there. Maybe some other people might see it and support it.
Think of it like a dress code. A nightclub won't go broke if it starts admitting people wearing thongs and T-shirts instead of proper shoes and collared shirts. However, it will certainly give that nightclub a different atmosphere, and it is the proprietor's absolute right to decide what atmosphere he wants in his club. If a patron wants a different atmosphere, maybe they should try the pub down the road instead.
Using your nightclub analogy, what I'm suggesting is like a nightclub that opens an adjoining space that allows casual dress that the people going into and out of the formal section of the club would never see unless they chose to walk into the casual space. Meanwhile, the casually dressed people would only be allowed in the casual section, like casinos have with smoking and non-smoking areas.
But, you see... they won't stay there. They'll come into the formal main area as well: that's where most of the action is! There's no wall between the two sections; people are free to come and go from one to the other. And the people in casual attire will still wear their casual attire in the main area, because they think it's acceptable. That's why they came into the club, after all - to hang out in the casual section.
And they'll get cranky when they find out that they're not allowed to wear their thongs & T-shirt in the main area. There'll be friction. The bouncers will ask them to move back into the casual section, and some of them won't move without being forced. Eventually, there'll be a fight, and the bouncers will ask some of them to leave.
And I still don't understand why those people can't go to the pub down the road. There are a few pubs in the area to choose from. Why do they have to hang out in the one place where they won't fit in?
Because the smoke from the smoking sections always wafts into the non-smoking areas. Smokers don't care but non-smokers do. Go smoke outside or at the pub down the street that caters to smokers.
That's all metaphor expansion... not starting a commentary on smoker's rights. :)
Not yet, I'm hoping to get user pages paginated this week though.