More coronavirus-related updates: specialized views, and a daily topic. Anything else we should do?
After adding the ~health.coronavirus group the other day, I've just made a couple more updates to try and keep the site more usable as the flood of news and information keeps coming in.
First, I just added a bar in the header when you're on the home page that has links to two "specialized views" in it. One of these views will show only coronavirus topics, and the other one will filter out all the coronavirus topics. These should be helpful for both logged-in users as well as logged-out ones (who previously didn't have the option of unsubscribing from ~health.coronavirus to hide those topics more easily).
For the purposes of these views, a "coronavirus topic" is one that's either inside ~health.coronavirus or has the "coronaviruses.covid19" tag on it (in any group).
The way I did this was definitely pretty hacky and isn't intended to stay around over the long term, so please let me know if you notice any strange behavior with them.
Second, earlier today I set up a scheduled post in ~health.coronavirus for general chat, questions, minor updates, and so on. The first one is here, and that will continue posting every day for now. If the activity in it starts dropping I'll probably reduce the frequency, but I think it should be good as a general spot for discussion for now.
It's looking like we might be living in this situation for weeks or months, so I'm definitely open to making other changes that will help keep the site usable and enjoyable during it. Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions, thanks!
This is great. I finally unsubscribed from the covid19 group over the weekend because - while I am interested in the topic - it just became too much. It dominated every news feed and I needed a break.
It's great that Tildes software is still malleable enough that quick hacks like this are possible. Hopefully it doesn't go the way of reddit's "contest mode" and became an accidental site feature in perpetuity.
If it becomes a perpetual site feature, we have a much, much bigger problem.
What is contest mode?
It can be enabled by moderators in comment threads. Threads in contest mode will randomize the sort order of top-level comments, and automatically collapse all children.
It's a minor thing, but I'm not sure that the coronavirus tag autocompletes in every topic yet? I find the official tag difficult to spell without autocomplete, so I don't try and just tag it as "coronavirus" assuming someone will fix it.
Thanks, that's a good point. The autocomplete is based on the most common tags in that group specifically, so it would only come up in groups where it's been used quite often (probably mostly just ~news outside of ~health.coronavirus).
I just pushed a quick update that should make sure that "coronaviruses.covid19", "nsfw", and "spoiler" are always available in the autocomplete options now.
Thanks! It's fine for now, but I think uncommon tags might be handled a bit better; it seems odd to start typing a tag that you know should exist somewhere and nothing shows up.
The way I've handled it before is to keep separate lists of autocompletes for each prefix (two or three letters) and lazy-load them.
I really dislike that long, overly-verbose tag. I don't see why we can't simply have
covid19.We could definitely go with a shorter one (maybe "covid19" or "coronavirus") and then once this passes I could just do a mass re-tag to change it to this more-specific one.
It's not a big deal though, and the autocomplete covers most of it regardless.
What's the benefit of the hierarchical tag?
You might be interested in this discussion: How should we be tagging topics related to the coronavirus outbreak?
I participated in it. In fact, you even replied to me there. :)
Right. So you already saw all the reasons expressed for and against this tag.
I was surprised the big ugly tag won out. It doesn't seem very pragmatic.
I don't mind either as long as it shows up in the list when you type "co".
is there a way we can set the option permanently?
Unsubscribe from ~health.coronavirus and put "coronaviruses.covid19" in your filtered topic tags and it'll be exactly the same.
perfecto. You're the best! The news on this is great, but overwhelming when its all day. :)
I did that last week ― maybe it would make sense to hide the bar if the view is already filtered? Or to only show it if there are topics with the group or tag visible?
Edit: Or to give it an ID so I can Stylus it away.
There you go, added an id, so you should be able to hide it with selector
#coronavirus-views.Thanks. :)
I think trying to figure out some logic to hide it automatically would be pretty tricky, but I don't mind adding a unique class or ID to it to make it easier to hide with Stylus/uBlock/etc.
I'll add one in a little bit and reply again with the details.
You should be able to target the class just fine in Stylus. Just remember to clear it in a month or two, in case other features use the same class later.
Yeah, that's my concern. :/ Guess I can put it on my calendar.
Browser bookmarks will also do it. (And that works for people who aren't logged in.)
I find it a little annoying anchored at the top. What about having it anchored on the side bar just below the donation square? Above or below the word Home
It's possible, my concern with that is mostly that mobile users will never realize it exists.
I've moved it into the header now, which is definitely where it should have been all along. That space wasn't being used on larger screens anyway, and it's a little awkward on mobile but probably still better.
Maybe if you wanted to genericize the feature a bit, you could make a feature in the sidebar that allowed the user to toggle "popular tags", and define what is popular by some kind of heuristic about % of tags on main page?
Probably overkill for now, I guess.
Fantastic choice! Thanks!
Having seen the orange site turn into a hotbed of bullshit misinformation I think it's important that you sticky somewhere the WHO pages.
I started a "Resources" page on the ~health.coronavirus wiki (which could definitely use more editing). Maybe it would be good to try to put a prominent link to that somewhere.
You should tag this topic
coronaviruses.covid19, it's the first thing that shows up when viewing the group :DThanks, though. It's good to have a break from it…
...Aaaand there isn't enough room for it in portrait mode. Bugs really are eternal huh?
Slightly Off-Topic but I wanted to say this: