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If you would like to add a feature to Tildes, what would you recommend?
What missing feature on Tildes would you like to see being implemented?
What missing feature on Tildes would you like to see being implemented?
It’s been mentioned elsewhere, but the ability to subscribe to a tag would be a game changer, in my opinion.
Allowing users to subscribe to a tag would essentially enable users to create their own subgroups.
The only sport I follow is ice hockey, so for a long time, I was unsubscribed to the sports group because 90% of the content was non-hockey. That meant I missed the 10% of content that was hockey and couldn’t contribute to it.
Enabling users like me to subscribe to the “ice hockey” tag means we would see more content we enjoy and increase the activity in the sports group. Win-win.
This feature request is tracked here:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/359
Just took a look but it looks like the repo is dead, with last meaningful commit being from 2021. Should we consider tildes to be feature-complete, or is the developer just on a break?
See https://tildes.net/~tildes/15q2/is_there_anything_you_dont_like_about_tildes#comment-7yqh
So if I wanted to work on this - how should I get a design review done? I feel like this can be integrated into the UI pretty easily (no idea how much back-end work there is):
#Showing only topics with the tag "foo"(some layout fiddling will be necessary)Backend work will involve adding a new column to the users table for subscribed tags, and setting up the routing and templates. Maybe needing to update the ACLs.
I'm not tech savvy at all but I have been mulling it over as well. I think path of least resistance is modeling it all based on how filtered topic tags are set up. Then users can select a single tag from their shared tag list or have a button to filter all posts by the tags on this list. But that would be the most barebones way and likely not ideal.
Would be curious what @Deimos says
Yeah, I don't think it would be quite that straightforward, or at least if it was implemented like that, there would probably be a lot of edge cases or behavior that made it work a little differently than people would want or expect it to.
I always had a vague plan for allowing users to set up multiple customizable "views" where they could do things like include or exclude groups and tags, set the sorting, and so on. It would have been completely overkill while the site's activity is low, but if the activity stays higher I think it'll probably be worth starting work on a system like that (especially if we end up doing some adjustment and expansion of the groups).
(@teaearlgraycold)
Yeah that’s what I expect but maybe there’s some gotchya. It’s marked as a feature that could take a week or more to implement which doesn’t line up with what we think it would take to do.
I've only been here for two days now and am still learning my way around and getting used to the format. However, I fully agree with being able to subscribe to specific tags to further customize my feed. I know you can ignore certain posts and unsubscribe from different groups, however, being able to see content from certain tags would be so much better. At the very least, I think it would be nice to add a list of tags that you have subscribed to in the sidebar so you can just click on it and see all posts for that specific tag. I know you can filter by tags, but having a list to click on would also be nice.
I'd extend this and say multiple tags in one subscription. For example, I might want a subscription that combined lego.storage and lego.display, while having another one for just the general lego tag. The former being very focused interests the trend to get drowned out in the broader category.
I'd want these subscriptions to show up at the top of the list, since they are ones I would use often.
I like this idea, but would it make the groups system redundant? I guess it's good to have some pre-defined, broad, extra-visible "tags" as well as ultra-customisable ones.
I feel like both could exist, group for more general subscription (say 'tech') and subscribing to tags for more specific content that you might even miss if there's a tossup which group it would be posted to.
I would like there to be an option to hide your own profile to others, as in, your previous posts and comments.
I have personally witnessed, on reddit, people’s argument being completely disregarded because someone points out, after creeping through all of that person’s previous interactions, one bad character trait or bad take that manages to win over the public opinion, leaving everyone to think:
"Wow that guy is a piece of shit. Good thing I didn’t bother critically analyzing what they had to say".
Maybe the vibe is different here and no one would actually do this, but I would like there to be an option to block this possibility.
I'm of two minds on this. One one hand, I think you have pretty strong points: a person's previous actions may not necessarily be relevant in a discussion which is happening in the present, cheap points-scoring is antithetical to good discussion, and trawling through someone's history with the intent of calling something out to demean them publicly is wildly unhealthy. Absolutely, 100% agreed.
On the other, to me this place is a community which we should have shared investment in. And I think part of what allows for community at all is people having contiguous presences: without that, there's no forming of relationships and reputation and thus less opportunity for mutual trust. We can approach discussions more charitably if we know the other person also has some degree of buy in re: the way they are perceived and in the health of the community itself, and I think the natural consequence of developing a certain reputation adds incentive to reign in the little rude impulses of an id sadly trained on years of internet snark.
I think if I post X, I need to be OK with people thinking of me as "the kind of person who posts stuff like X" because that's literally just the truth. If I post X, I am that type of person! If I'm not OK with that perception, that might say something about whether the post aligns with my actual values and goals.
If it becomes a prevalent issue I might change my mind, and even then I'd like to see if making it a "Malice"-tag-able infraction to do the shitty stuff as you described would work before going full lockdown. I'm just not convinced it'd be a neutral decision for site culture to do it pre-emptively.
(Of course, for privacy, a person should be able to completely delete their posts and account at any time for any reason.)
Couldn't have said it better. I don't believe that a few folks succumbing to ad hominem or tu quoque fallacies warrants hiding everyone's history and the advantages that come with it being visible.
Moreover, this isn't reddit. You won't get buried in downvotes. And that is the problem more than bringing up history. People see downvotes and just pile on. I've seen just as many people get mass downvoted for calling out someone's history as I've seen people get mass downvoted because a thing from their history was brought up. Imo the issue stems from the mass downvotes caused by karma not being hidden long enough (or at all) that drives that behavior, not the access to history itself. But again, this isn't reddit. Mass downvotes aren't a thing here. And this is all a moot.
Edit: If anything, my solution to this would be having the ability to post anonymously. I think throwaways are a bad idea and can lead to spam/abuse. But another post anon button next to the post comment button to post anonymously might work. Using it would replace your name above the comment with anonymous and make the comment invisible in your history to anyone except you. And would probably need a limit on the amount of times you could use the feature per day.
Similarly, I wish there was an option to post anonymously per post. I think Tildes is a community where people give each other the benefit of the doubt and don't think the worst of them. That creates an inviting environment where you feel safe to share something personal but the risk of getting doxxed on the web is just too high.
I had a previous account that was way older than this one, where I posted some stuff that could personally identify me. When I realized that information could be used against me, I had to reach out to Deimos and they were kind enough to nuke the account and invite me back again with a new one.
I guess you could say that workaround solved my issue, but I lost all my comment history and I'm a lot wary to post something personal on this account now because I don't want to go through the same thing again.
Just for background (I'm not sure if you were here at the time, and other newer users might want to see this), this idea has been discussed previously:
Allowing users to post anonymously?
Deimos' opinion a few months later.
I was! But good of you to point it out again for newer users.
I disagree heavily. Just because we don't have trolls right now, doesn't mean we won't forever. That feature would do wonders for "shit stirrers" in my opinion. We should rather be open about users actions, not less.
Or the people who are outright lying. Saying they're an unkissed 20 yr old virgin in one thread, a happily married father of 3 in another, a strong independent woman in a different one...
iirc you can't look back more than 30 days for some parts of history, but I don't remember if that includes the posts on someone's profile.
I often look through a person's history to see who I'm dealing with or to give further context to what they're asking.
On Reddit I would occasionally delete an account and start over to avoid doxxing or potential tracking of exactly who I am or use a sort of long term burner for specific things.
I think that having proper psuedo anonymity on a site like this is important. Users can post things and be (relatively) free from real world social consequences BUT their online reputation does and should matter to them.
IMO if you're worried about it then create a long or short term burner. That account can suffer potential reputation loss and if what you're posting on it is totally repugnant then it is still linked to your original.
Totally agree.
While that is not is something I've seen on Tildes myself, that is not a bad idea.
Sometimes it’s useful to identify trolls. You can’t avoid feeding what you can’t recognize.
Seeing that a lot of people are iffy about this one, I feel it's worth noting that the possibilities for this aren't binary. We could, for example, simply allow someone to hide all commenting/posting history of theirs that is over a week/two weeks/a month (pick whatever) old. There's plenty of room to flex with this.
I personally would be concerned about being able to hide every past post and comment, albeit not much since I'd wager administration would always be able to see it regardless, but I'd be totally fine with an "older than
xdays old" history anonymity system.I'd like to see an option to automatically collapse replies past a certain point.
In my experience, the longer a reply chain goes on, the more specific it gets (people debating increasingly finer points on a topic, some people bonding over a very niche experience, etc.). I think this is a good thing to have; it builds community between members, allows topics to get very deep, and gives space for natural back and forth dialogues. But with how the site has exploded recently, I find that I have to be more selective rather than reading everything, and I find it much easier to practice responsible viewing habits when I have to manually opt in for more content than when I have to manually opt out.
What I'd propose is a setting that allows users to select a point to automatically collapse reply chains at, with a toggle to always show exemplary comments, so that each user can customize their experience. I might also consider modifying to new comment notification on a thread from x new comments, to something like x new comments, y new replies, z hidden replies. I find that each one of those groups (comments, replies, deep replies) tends to have its own tenor of discussion, so seeing that breakdown would give me an idea of what type of discussion is happening.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/753
Do you envision the auto collapsing skipping reply chains you have participated in? Or does everything get collapsed after a certain length?
I'd be in favor of the first; at that point, someone has demonstrated clear interest in the topic, so saving them the hassle of expanding the topic each time they visit it seems like a safe move.
The feature I most want is MathJax. If I can't use proper math symbols and formatting it feels like I'm writing with my non-dominant hand.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/620
This is a good idea.
I would like the option of clicking anywhere on the indent line to the left of a post to collapse it rather than having to hunt for the small minimize button in the top left. That can be quote bothersome with very long posts.
If you're willing to do a bit of manual CSS customization to make it fit your liking, I actually just made a user-style to do that! (You can use Stylus or some equivalent to add it as a custom style.)
It's not perfect and doesn't look great, but it works well enough for me.
Userstyle source
Thank you for this! I've never heard of Stylus and honestly am just getting into CSS customization. I started getting into it when switching over to Firefox and customizing it to fit how I wanted it to look. I'm going to start playing around with Stylus and Tildes to see what I can come up with.
Is there a database of CSS script people have already done with Tildes for people to look through?
There's a wiki page on Customizing Tildes that has some example custom themes and other custom CSS (as well as extensions and userscripts), though you can probably find some more by searching.
If you know javascript / basic front end webdev stuff, userscripts are also pretty fun to mess with; I don't like the auto-collapse old comments setting, so instead I have a userscript that adds links between the new comments, and a link at the top to the first new comment.
If you find or make anything interesting, you should share it! With a new influx of users, it would be interesting to create a thread and see what people come up with.
Its also annoying when you come back to a page you've been to before where you minimized your way down a chain, and now have ALL of them showing as minimized. You can collapse the whole thread by maximizing and then re minimizing the parent, but then you're back to hunting for the +
That would likely conflict with "Collapse old comments", but someone may be able to figure out a solution.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/755
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/754
Image and Video embeds/posting.
I understand the stated philosophy of tildes being against that, but I don't think videos or images necessarily mean lower quality content. There is already a barrier of entry to post here in needing an invite, and a rule could be made against excessive re-posting. Could even put it behind a paywall to add some more friction and help pay for server costs.
My favourite era of the internet is before smartphones became widely established and people made MSPaint comics and large informational photos for communities/topics.
Personally I appreciate the text-only nature of Tildes, it is snappy on my somewhat old smartphone.
Oh boy, Tildes can never and will never have a paywall of any sort. Ever :)
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes#no-advertising-user-supported
I definitely agree with the philosophy behind not having image posts (and I think memes wouldn't fit the culture here) but I would appreciate some way to embed images particularly for posts about creative pursuits. If I want to share a cool embroidery I did it obviously would be easiest to do if I could make an image post.
At the same time, though, image posts absolutely eat all the engagement away from text posts a lot of the time. I used to moderate r/conlangs and it was a persistent issue where lower-effort content that could easily be displayed in a snappy image (e.g., "the Coca-Cola logo but in my conlang") would overwhelm the sub (especially when different people kept doing the same thing as part of a trend) and always get more upvotes than even the highest quality text content.
The type of content you described of “one upping” for votes is almost guaranteed to happen with embedded images. I used to work for a gigantic forum host and it inevitably destroyed most discussions of value for shitposting.
I kind of feel the extra step of having to go with a hosted image off site forces higher quality content, or forces you to adequately “sell” your link if it’s a video. Maybe that’s too high brow lol, I don’t know?
I’m doing my smol part by trying to post stuff I genuinely believe people will find interesting or helpful (with occasional puns when required) and I don’t feel embedded media would make me post more or differently
My only concern with that would be old threads with dead image links, especially if the image is more or less the point of the post, like the person you replied to is suggesting. A nice middle ground would be to have a Tildes specific image host where you can upload photos and have them be reasonably safe from deletion.
Though, I know that would require even more costs...
Is it possible to embed images within the text posts themselves (while still just displaying the titles before clicking on the post)? I think it's theoretically doable in markdown but haven't tried it here. That seems like a good compromise since you would still have to sell the post through the title and you could surround it with a text post to help describe the image and start discussion
tbh you can't even really do that effectively on reddit, people on subs where that's useful would get around it by using comments to describe their image posts.
If there were a RES for Tildes that added things like endless scroll and pulling remote images into the post with a pop-down, that might be a happy medium methinks? "Pure Tildes" stays pure and people can extend it as needed.
I had asked about such a feature but in an app and if it would be against the ethos of Tildes, and the response was yes it would be
ooh yes that's perfect, I honestly forgot that was an RES function lol
I would really only want this if it comes with a required text attached rule or something. I know there's plenty of cases where "hey look at this neat thing" is the content, but as every other content aggregator shows, you either let your quality decline or you have to actively enforce/police the low effort nonsense that can quickly spring up.
Yeah I just noticed that there is no ~videos community yet.
A video about history would go in ~humanities, tagged as "history". A video about computer games would go in ~games. A video about a sports team's endeavours to win the flag/pennant/trophy/shield/bowl/whatever-trinket-sporting-people-play-for would go in ~sports.
Rather than group content by its format (i.e. text, image, video), we group it by subject matter.
Also tagged as videos please. For me tags act as ad-hoc groups. In fact, I almost never visit individual groups (though that might change with increased activity), but I do visit https://tildes.net/?tag=videos a lot when I'm looking for stuff to watch on youtube.
I didn't mean to suggest that any topic on Tildes should get one, and only one, tag. I know that's not how Tildes works! (I did literally write the instructions for the site... 😉)
Of course video posts would also be tagged as "videos". In fact, they'll probably get half a dozen tags, or more - for their subject matter, their location, their style, their format, their paywall status, how long they run, and so on.
I'm just explaining how and where "video"-type topics would get posted on Tildes.
Oh, of course. I'm just saying on youtube, vimeo, etc posts I'd stress using the video tag since users seem to have really divisive opinions on them here. Some people want to filter all posts about youtube videos, and others would like to select only those.
We used to have ~videos. It was removed in favor of grouping video content by subject.
It seems inevitable that embeds will be added someday - along with an on/off switch for those features. That's also a fine place for mobile app developers to contribute right now.
Ill give you an idea, If you want to pst photos and videos. Maybe you can use an external hosting for those and rhen post the link here. That way it is a middle ground between Tildes philosophy and your preference.
Until the external host decides to nuke all their links.
Well, nothing gold can stay.
I’m on the side that embedding images/video inline would degrade the experience. However, I also believe that having to navigate externally just to see a piece of media relevant to a post or comment adds unnecessary friction.
Perhaps one idea would be to optionally launch known media types in a modal overlay. That way, users are allowed quick, minimally intrusive access to the media that is easily dismissed to return them to the context within the post.
To avoid reposts, something like /r9k would be kind of cool in my opinion.
https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/
Inline spoiler tags, please.
We have something very like that already: https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/text-formatting#expandable-sections
Do you dare click on this?
Boo!
Those are block level collapsable elements, they're not inline spoiler tags. They break the flow of the text, which depending on what you're trying to format can significantly degrade the reading experience.
I did say it was something similar. These collapsible elements can be used in place of in-line spoiler tags, which don't exist yet on Tildes, and for which there isn't even a plan for when they might exist here.
In my personal opinion, so do spoiler tags in general.
I hate opening a thread and seeing half the comments partly blacked out with spoiler tags. If I'm in the ~tv group and opening a thread about Star Trek, then I want to see the discussion. I don't want chunks of various comments censored in some lame attempt to stop me seeing details about a show I've watched and want to discuss. I'm then forced to open/click/reveal lots of sections of lots of comments just to read the discussion. Talk about degrading the reading experience!
On the other hand, if someone doesn't want to be exposed to details about a show they haven't watched yet, why are they even opening a thread about that show? Surely they should be taking some personal responsibility to avoid seeing information they don't want to see, rather than putting the onus on everyone else to shield them, even while they're choosing to read a group/topic/thread about the show they don't want to see information about?
(Disclaimer: this is only my personal opinion, and not necessarily representative of the wider Tildes community.)
This is a thread in which OP asked for features we'd like to see on Tildes. You reply with a feature that has before been presented as a sufficient replacement, so I pointed out that it isn't and that the feature I want does not exist yet. I'm not new to Tildes.
I'm not sure the scenario you provide is representative of all use cases for such a feature. The fact of that matter is that if such a feature doesn't exist, it can't be used at all. Period.
But if it did, it would be trivial to add a single button for revealing all the spoilers at the same time. Or a user setting to do it automatically. Or even a client-side userscript. I'll even make one for you if you want!
I'm curious. What would people use in-line spoiler tags for, other than to hide spoilers about newly released shows / movies / games / books /etc, and where this need would not be met by the existing collapsible elements? I readily admit I don't use spoiler tags, so I'd like to understand what they're used for, other than to hide spoilers.
Well, I just meant that when you say something like:
You're making an argument against all forms of spoiler tags, using a highly specific example in which you know exactly what the thread might spoil you about. I can easily come up with the opposite: Imagine the thread is about show recommendations in general. Certain people want to recommend certain shows, but for different readers it might be ideal to provide a different amount of spoilers: Some people always prefer to know a little more about the show in order to know if they might be interested in it, and don't care about being spoiled at all - it's the viewing experience they care about. For others, being spoiled is intensely frustrating and will turn them off. I think usually the consensus is that spoiler tags are useful, properly labeled in such a way that there is at least some hint about what the content of the spoiler might be.
You could write your response as a series of blocks of text organized by spoiler degree:
I like Star Trek TNG! You should watch it!
[Spoilers about why I think Picard is cool][...]
[Spoilers about why I think Q is uncool][...]
[Spoilers about why Wesley shouldn't shut up][...]
But this might force you to write a response that's disorganized by any other criteria. Suddenly you don't have just one text, you have to write this bunch of little self-contained snippets.
You can also write a response that flows as a whole, and break for a smaller spoiler block wherever you would want to introduce a spoiler, but if each spoiler must be a paragraph you're still making the text position unnaturally down the page, possibly adding a some boilerplate filler to your prose in order to make it read well. For example:
Start Trek TNG has a bunch of cool characters, such as Picard:
[Why I like Picard][He drinks tea. Earl grey. Hot, and I think that's just the greatest thing.]
And LaForge:
[Why I like LaForge][LaForge is an engineer and I think that's cool because I'm an engineer and I like engineers.]
If you have inline spoiler tags, you can write a response that flows well as a whole, with no boilerplate. The information is presented in a compact manner. You can organize the text in any way you want. If the spoiler is well tagged, the context of the position of the spoiler in the text hints at what kind of information the spoiler pertains to, so you can decide whether to show it or not. The spoiler tag can be completely removed (for example, automatically) and you'll still have a well formatted text with no unnecessary paragraphs.
You should watch Start Trek TNG! I like that it has a bunch of cool characters, such as Picard, who drinks [tea. Earl Grey. Hot.] and LaForge, who is [an engineer].
Good point.
I still get frustrated by spoiler tags, but you've explained your point well.
However, just to throw a bomb before I head off... Spoiler alert: spoilers make you enjoy stories more
I'd really love this, inline spoiler tags are perfect for spoilers that are only a few words. As someone who likes to use spoiler tags liberally so that people can choose how much information they want, inline spoiler tags are a key way for me to communicate while still respecting people right to not be spoiled even a little bit.
Let's steal Stackoverflow's methodology. I always thought they had the simplest and most sensible method for spoilers. I think the holdup here is that the markdown parser we're using hasn't got that feature, and spoiler tags aren't part of markdown itself yet - so we'd have to extend the parser with non-standard conventions, or add some other method that makes it work after markdown is processed.
Let's also get footnotes in there while we're at it. Not many websites would ever use them but I have a hunch this one will use them heavily.
I would even go so far as suggest that the existence of the possibility of footnotes would encourage the sort of content that would make use of them!
The method described in the linked comment can be easier to visualize while you're writing a quote, but it's still a block level only feature, right? It doesn't seem to provide support for inline spoilers.
Oh, we could tweak it so that it works inline too. I was just thinking that their
!method is very simple, easy to remember, and it looks like it doesn't run afoul of other syntax.I suspect that was the line of reasoning that led to reddit's spoiler syntax, which is >!text!< (note how the opening of the spoiler section is the same as SO).
Already on Gitlab, but I added a comment there about the renewed interest:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/57
I'd like to see a list of tags in a group. Maybe in the sidebar, showing a list of the most common recent tags.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/746
To add to this request, it'd be great to see a list of most popular tags site-wide.
I think this would help with figuring out which tag is best to apply, eg:
marijuanavscannabis. (I've recently noticed one is far preferred over the other.)This would also allow users to browse tags more like groups, eg: clicking some
browse tagsbutton that brings you to a list would allow you to view 'cannabis' topics in both ~health and ~hobbies instead of searching from or subscribing to both groups.I copied your comment to the Gitlab issue so it can actually get seen by anyone that works on the feature.
It's not much, but two anchor links, one to jump at the bottom of the page and another one to jump back to the top.
I don't think a 'jump to bottom' button in the comment's section is a great idea, since it would basically render the comment box being down there pointless. It's meant to encourage people to read existing comments before making their own new top-level comment.
However a 'jump to top' navigation button wouldn't, so I have added to that suggestion to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/756
Yes... 100%. Need a button that takes me either to the top, or just freeze a bit of the header to the top so I can always just click back to home.
Maybe that should only be visible on mobile, since desktop users can just hit the home or end keys on their keyboard. I'm not against it, but it's certainly something I'd never use.
I've been using computers since I was like 7 - I've never thought to do that, or even bothered to figure out what those buttons do.
Oh, they're super handy if you edit a lot of text. In a text box or a word processor, Home brings you back to the beginning of the line. Ctrl+Home brings you back to the top of the page. Shift+Home selects from your cursor to the beginning of the line. Ctrl+Shift+Home selects everything up to the top of the page.
Once you get muscle memory for using those keys you'll resent every laptop that doesn't have them or requires you to hit Fn to use them.
I wouldn't be able to use a computer without the keyboard navigation keys and keyboard shortcuts! I don't even think about them any more: they're just muscle memory. If I need to move someplace in real life, my subconscious brain takes care of moving my feet and legs. Similarly, if I need to move someplace on a computer screen, my subconscious brain takes care of moving my fingers and hands. In fact, if I try to think about how to move to the top of a screen or skip to a different tab, I get all confuzzled, like the millipede who gets asked how it can walk with all those legs.
When Microsoft revamped Office a decade ago, and changed all the command menus, and therefore also changed the keyboard shortcuts for just about every function... it was like I had to learn to walk again after a stroke. I was so unproductive for months after that.
I'd love to be able to have a font size option alongside the themes if possible! While I can read it fairly easily, having the option for larger fonts would be amazing <3
Being able to customize font spacing, line height, etc would be lovely as well. If we wanted to go full ham the ability to set your own custom css theme would be amazing, but that's likely overkill.
Tildes is relatively easy to customize using User Styles (using a browser extension like Stylus). Tildes has quite clean markup and CSS classes, so customizing the styles isn't that bad. Since Tildes is designed to be simple, it's unlikely to get that level of customization within the site itself, (besides font-size and line-height for mobile, potentially) so if you want something complex or your own custom theme, user styles are the way to go.
For example, here's a simple user style that I made to add clickable bars on the side to collapse comments:
User style source
Edit: I saw from your other comment that it's for mobile -- then yeah, user styles probably won't work. (In theory support for mobile user scripts / user styles is growing... slowly... but it'll be a while until it's generally usable.) I still think it's unlikely that anything beyond font-size or line-height defaults would get added to the settings, but I'm also not the one to decide what gets implemented.
That's a really cool example of what I was thinking of when I thought users could provide their own styles. A bit like how in old reddit subreddits can create their own styles, but this would be unique to each user.
As a dev I'd love to be able to theme things myself, but that's not really for the average user so I don't think it should be prioritised. It could get complex with serving those styles though to each user too, but it'd be a fun challenge to work on.
Unfortunately yeah it's not really possible on mobile. Adjusting the font, spacing, font-size etc would probably do as I quite like the Atom One Dark theme already.
I use Arc browser and used their new Boosts 2.0 feature to make my own theme. It's nice to not have to use outside extensions to do this now.
BTW if there are any Mac users out there that would like an Arc invite, let me know.
I hadn't heard of Arc but it looks cool!
I mostly browse on my phone so being able to edit css / styles on my PC and have it saved to my account for use on mobile would be ideal.
On PC I run pop_os and Firefox as I prefer their developer tools and don't want every browser to be chromium based. The really nice chromium based browsers though like Arc and Brave which prioritise the users over ads which are always tempting...
I used to use Brave for a while, but they're getting annoying now with all of their crypto stuff. Once I discovered how to use CSS to customize Firefox, I immediately left Brave and haven't looked back. At this point, I think I have my Firefox browser more secure and better looking than Brave just by using CSS, Sidebery, and UBlock Origin.
I am awaiting the Windows release of the Arc browser as I would like to give it a try as the idea of it sounds interesting. Unfortunately, my Macbook is too old to upgrade to a compatible version of MacOS to run Arc.
I would also advocate for a select section of types of fonts to choose from. I suspect I have a reading disorder myself and thus lurk in other reading disorder subreddits - namely the dyslexic subreddit since it has the most active userbase - and judging from what some have said, the ability to change a font to a more dyslexia-friendly font would be nice. Also, for people with Meares Irlen Syndrome who rely on a colored overlay, the ability to change the background and words to any color you like would help immensely for those.
Though I will say, this usually is a bigger problem for those who use tildes on their phone or in a browser that doesn't support a wide range of extensions. Currently, the site is a website-only site from what I'm gathering, meaning a mobile version won't be available anytime soon. Most of the activity here will be from a PC or a laptop, presumably most being on the bigger browsers like Firefox and Chrome, so I don't think that should be that big of a problem so long as it's accessible. I'm seeing an extension for Chrome, and if you give me some time I can definitely find one that might work on Firefox (though extensions tend to feel a bit janky on Firefox for me. I have no clue why.)
Note: I am sick and sometimes the way I word or comprehend things can be wonky. If anything isn't making any sense, please let me know. I'll be more than happy to work through the things that sound confusing :)
What you wrote makes perfect sense :)
Yeah a selection of fonts, spacing, line height, maybe even custom themes (although the default themes are quite nice) would be lovely. Especially for people like yourself who would really benefit from additional text customisation given how text dominant Tildes is.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/757
cc: @buzziebee, @Monthly_Vent
That's amazing! Thank you.
I'd really like a way to link to tags in comments. I suggest something like
#videosor~games#videosto narrow it down to a group.Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/758
That would be a great syntactic to allow us to subscribe to tags too. Have ~games#minrcraft in my sidebar under~games so I can easily go directly to specific content
I like the idea, since it looks elegant... but I can already forsee an issue with it. tags are not limited to usage inside particular groups, and so are often used in many groups depending on the context and main subject of the post. So how would we reconcile that?
If minecraft was a group (~games.minecraft), then everything Minecraft + games related would likely be submitted there, but that's not the case with topic tags which are merely indicators of one aspect of a topic's subject. E.g. An article about some novel application of Minecraft used in research might actually be more at home in ~science#minecraft than ~games#minecraft.
And what about purely meta topic tags that aren't really meant to act as a psuedo/precursor-group at all? E.g. ?tag=survey, which doesn't really have any one specific or obvious parent. Where would we put those in the sidebar?
The idea would be to subscribe to both the group and tag combination. Though, I like your idea too! If I was interested in minecraft, I'd like to see how it is being used in science.
Would be great to subscribe to a tag regardless of the group. That is something unique to tildes and would make tag subscriptions even more useful.
For example, if I subscribe to #starwars, then I can get info on starwars games, movies, lego sets, etc no matter where they are posted, just by clicking on that link in the side bar.
I believe there's a recent post which is very similar in function to this one: https://tildes.net/~tildes/15q2/is_there_anything_you_dont_like_about_tildes
I'll check it out too thanks.
The title there asks though about what they don't like about tildes, mine is asking for what is missing which can be added.
Are people here interested in location based groups? Maybe not city scale, but country level?
Perhaps a group called locale, with sub groups on the 2 letter moniker that denotes a country.
~locale.de
~locale.uk
~locale.au
~locale.nz
~locale.fr
~locale.nl ....etc.
I would love to see passkey support added for logging into Tildes. Passkeys are the future and would be awesome to see more and more places adding support for them.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/759
Being able to download a copy of my comment history.
When Tildes went down recently, I had thoughts of “what if it doesn’t come back?” While contemplating that, I also had thoughts of “what if everything I wrote here is now gone?”
While a lot of what I’ve written here is more temporary, functional, or conversational stuff that I wouldn’t mind losing, I also have tens (maybe hundreds?) of thousands of words here that I’ve put a lot of time and effort into and that are still quite meaningful for me. I would be genuinely heartbroken if I lost all of that.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/760
I'm currently sick so excuse me if I have any comprehension mistakes or just downright speaking nonsense. Usually I would be able to work through these issues but I have too little energy right now. Feel free to ask if anything sounds odd to you :)
I do have a few requests, the biggest one being that it would be nice to see tildes working with those who are blind - specifically blind users on reddit for how close this site feels to reddit - to see if there's any way to implement changes related to accessibility. I myself am not blind, so I can't speak for what those changes are, but I do know that there's a good number of blind redditors that might have to completely do away with reddit once they kill API usage, so it would be nice to see reddit alternatives like this one be open about accommodating them.
I also agree with cheeky_green's comment and buzziebee's reply about custom font size, line-spacing, and user-customed themes. Mainly because I lurk a lot in the dyslexia subreddit and I know people with reading and sight disorders would benefit from something like this. Though from what I'm hearing this could be done using extensions and external browser features so I don't think it's that big of a concern.
A smaller and more selfish request, I'm currently using the Apollo app for reddit and one feature I really enjoy is the ability to sort your bookmarks in categories. I would really like having a feature like that, since I don't usually like looking through my bookmarks due to the sheer disorganization of it all.
I'll add more in the replies if I think of any, but for now this is all I got
I asked @itsthejoker (mod of /r/blind) for advice on that, but they haven't responded yet. I imagine they are pretty busy dealing with the blackout, and still trying to get through to reddit HQ to get the accessibility issues taken seriously though, so that's totally understandable.
But if anyone else has any suggestions for how Tildes can improve the accessibility of the site for visually impaired people, I will happily add them as feature requests to Tildes Gitlab.
p.s. I have already added cheeky_green, Monthly_Vent, and buzziebee's suggestions for UI customization improvements.
i believe one big complaint was about screen reader usability - the official reddit app is a lot worse for people who rely on screen readers to use the internet, bordering on entirely unusable on iOS
this should also be something of note to anyone who’s developing mobile apps for tildes
I do miss having easy buttons access for markdown, not a huge deal since I'm a programmer, so I'm decently familiar with markdown, but it's nice to be able to click a button and not have to remember which characters need to be used.
Another thing I'd like is better spoiler support. I'm mostly interested in anime, and spoilers are a big deal. Currently there's details, but it's quite unwieldy and also doesn't support inline spoilers. Some spoilers are just a few words long and currently it's quite a pain to have to break up a paragraph just to mark your spoilers. And as with anything, the more friction, the less likely people will do it, and so I think it's important to have it be easy to mark spoilers, so that people will use them more frequently.
Related Gitlab issues:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/651
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/57
Get it ready for primetime. It's time for the first Beta release.
By that I mean clean up what we've got, and sweeten the pot a bit for sites other than this one. This is an open source project, it needs to get out there. When someone can just install it on a VPS and set it up through a nice little web configurator, it's ready. Right now it is not - one would have to go through the code and change references to 'tildes.net' and tinker a bit. I'm sure some things being done are still manual database edits, those need an admin interface or at least a good admin reference sheet.
Also, let's not assume other Tildes nodes are going to grow as slow as this one. Get the invite links in there so that any Tildes can grow just by sharing links in one to many fashion. Maybe drop in that metered open signup feature as well. Seems to me like that's all it really needs - a bit of polish and then let it go into the wild, see what comes back here. All doable by July 1st which is surely the peak demand moment when all reddit apps update or die.
Push the support of logging into/aggregating content from multiple tildes instances and support of embedded content to the mobile app developers. That's an easier thing for them to do than it is for the site itself to do, and it gives them a portion of the value added equation as well - encouraging them to diversify how they support both features. We never did figure out how to make mobile good for something, and now there are two things it can do.
The best way to do this is to get Deimos paid.
Are we sure that federated instances are good? It seems like it leads to unhealthy behavior between groups of instances and confusion for the users.
They won't be federated at all. It'll just be new websites that use the Tildes code to run their own forum, kinda like phpBB or vBulletin. Deimos has repeatedly stated he's got zero interest in federating them and I agree with him. What would be nice, though, is to have a mobile app that can plug into any website that's running the Tildes code. Then the app users can add as many sites that use it as they like and get the content from all of them.
The Tildes code can basically turn a subreddit into a website, if someone wants to set it up. Mod teams on reddit could take it and migrate their communities off of reddit with relative ease.
Oh, like Tapatalk and how it could hook into XDA, Android Central, and a bunch of other similar websites?
Sorry, my misunderstanding of your meaning. Seems like a good use of resources.
If I have a multilevel tag,
one.two.three, there should be an option where pressing on the "one" brings up the tag search forone, pressing on "two" give metwoand so on. Maybe a press and hold or a right click on "two" gives meone.two, or that could be its own option.https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/414
I said this in another post, but I would like the option to soft block, or mute, a particular user if need be. To be specific, to have the actual content of a post or comment by a blocked user to be hidden unless I choose to see it. This need not extend to site searches, just posts and comments.
Put succinctly, the "soft block" of RES is the model for what I would like to see.
To (sort of) quote my earlier post: instead of labels that I do not now have anyway as a new user, I would far rather have the ability to individually mute, either temporarily or permanently, someone who engages in low-level nastiness, because they tend to do so regularly. If I have no beef with the thread, or the subject, or anything else about the conversation, why would I set any of that on ignore when that's exactly the content I came to see?
A RES-style soft block for specific users would solve all of that.
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/462
I often like to look at the post body while I write a response, and the comment box being at the bottom means that if there are a bunch of comments already then I can't get both the comment box and the post body in the same screen. I don't want this to be misinterpreted as asking to move the comment box to above comments, but perhaps either automatically or a button to dock the post body. Or perhaps there could be a setting to duplicate the post body at the bottom of the page as well?
Honest question, why are you making a new top-level comment if you're basing it off what was said in an another comment, instead of just replying to that other comment?Edit: See below.In any case, added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/762
I think you're misunderstanding. I don't want to reference other comments, I want to reference the post body itself. I suppose this is only relevant for self posts though.
Oooooooooooh. Whoops. Sorry about that. Changed the issue to reflect your actual feature request. ;)
I would like the ability to make our own groups, so we can stop relying on tags to do the function groups can do with way less hassle for the average user.
I'd like to see all comments below a certain length automatically marked as noise. I'm not entirely sure what the threshold should be, but I'd place it somewhere between 50 and 100 words. (As a point of reference, 50 words is exactly the length of this paragraph, including this parenthetical).
I don't think shorts comments are inherently bad; sometimes a comment doesn't warrant much more than a "thanks" in response. However, unless you're Cleo, a short comment rarely constitutes "quality content and discussion". On a more practical level, (I think?) only comments marked as "noise" are excluded from bumping the activity feed, meaning that short comments in rapid succession risk crowding-out more in-depth discussions elsewhere.
To reiterate: I'm not saying we should ban short comments; I just think they need to be excluded from bumping threads. Personally I think a ~50 word threshold is a reasonable minimum: that basically just amounts to a single sentence statement plus a couple extra sentences of justification.
Noising a comment results in it being downweighted heavily and autocollapsed, which I'm not sure it automatically warranted. But I think having short comments not bump threads is an interesting idea. I might put the threshold a bit lower; perhaps 20 or 25 words? After all, "thanks" is just one word.
This is a good point. Personally, I'd guess the majority of ≤50 word comments are low effort, so I wouldn't mind the majority of them being collapsed. But I can also imagine cases where a short comment would be warranted and you'd want the discussion to remain prominent (for instance, a clarification question). With 50 words, I can imagine some edge cases; but on the other hand, it really isn't too difficult (or harmful) to expand just a wee bit, even if you're only asking a question.
But if a comment's less than 20 words, meh, I'm guessing that's noise with 90+% certainty. I mean, this paragraph is longer than that!
I think I would be only interested in this for top level comments.
Example: There's a lot of casual conversation here as well, I think arbitrarily limiting that by forcing you to toggle it wouldn't be great.
Actually, I think a combination of yours and @Cycloneblaze's suggestions would be the best implementation here.
Counterpoint: This would auto-noise comments that are trying to further discussion by posting relevant, interesting links that may not warrant their own threads. The weekly U.S. politics thread would be a good example of this.
There are ways around that for the commenter – an example being including a snippet of article text to bump the word count – but they might not be ideal or wanted, and I think it'd be better to just not have the issue to begin with, personally. I'm fine with not bumping for short, nested comments however.
Maybe, maybe not. I just checked the most recent US politics weekly thread, and it looks like all 6 of the top-level comments are above 25 words, with 4/6 being longer than 50 words (granted, 2 of those comments are just quotes from their respective articles).
I don't think it hurts to add a little bit of context while submitting a link, even if it's just quoting a paragraph from the article. A little bit of friction can be a good thing.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/761
PWA.
You want more people with attitude on Tildes? Well, there's me, for starters... ;)
Or are you interested in Pro-Wrestling Australia?
Sorry, but what's "PWA"?
Progressive Web App
Thanks.
Not that I'm any the wiser now, but at least I know why I don't understand it! :)
One benefit is that you can add Tildes directly to the home screen of your smartphone and open it with one tap.
I've got that ability now. I've saved the Tildes website as a shortcut on my phone's and tablet's home screens. I click on that shortcut, and the site opens immediately.
True, but a PWA can also implement custom caching to be more performant and enable offline access to pre downloaded content.
Edit:
A good and more complete explanation can be found here: https://tildes.net/~tildes/15w7/tildes_as_a_progressive_web_app_pwa#comment-82j3
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/356
Related Gitlab issue:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/356
Would it be possible to implement a "scroll to top" button? Sometimes I scroll through a post with a lot of comments and would like to jump back to the original post to check something, but it's a lot of scrolling. It's absolutely a first-world problem, but it would be nice to have.
Someone else requested the same above, so I added it to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/756
An issue that exists with both Tildes, and reddit is that when a lot of comments are nested, it can be difficult to tell which comment is the "parent" of another comment. E.g. there could be six vertical bars to the left of a certain comment, and unless it's immediately below the parent comment, if I want to see what it was posted in response to, I need to scroll up and count the vertical bars next to the comments until I find one with five bars. If the full context, or a preview of the higher-level comments at the very least, remained on-screen when scrolling, that would be really nice. It could also help refresh one's memory of a discussion if they switch tabs/windows or get off their computer/phone for a while then return to the page later on.
You can actually just click "Parent" to do that... and then [Back] to get back to the original comment.
A small colored bar to signify a top-level comment on posts would help with that, giving nested comments different colors could help with your concern of discerning what someone is responding to.
Tildes has a nesting limit after which the comment will be prepended with "that's a reply for the one above" and everything will be at the same level.
Just a minor thing but unless I've completely missed it there isn't any way to automatically switch between a light mode theme and a dark mode theme, you have to do it manually. Would love to be able to either set it to copy system theme so it switches based on that or just put it on a time schedule.
It looks like this is issue #307 on the GitLab repo
I think this is a bit premature, but some better support for things like community watch alongs would be great. We at ~anime are just starting our first watch along and there are certainly some things I think which would make the experience a bit better.
Currently we are having it entirely in a single thread and having top level comments for each episode to discuss. In a format like this, some things I would like would be disabling top level comments (not exactly sure how the episode discussion comments would get posted, but if i'm wishing for stuff, I think automatically, ideally something like you configure ahead of time what days / times comments should be posted and then they're auto posted), auto posting top level comments, fixing the ranking of top level comments, auto collapsing top level comments by default (to avoid spoilers for people not fully caught up).
Alternatively something similar to a reoccurring topic could work too (I'm new here, so I don't really know exactly how reoccurring topic work yet). Where each episode gets it's own post, and they're posted on a schedule. Things that would be useful for this would be autogrouping threads together (I believe theres already something like this for reoccurring threads), easy navigation to the next / prev thread, finite reoccurrence. Just some thoughts on how it could work.
I'm new here so forgive me if what I'm suggesting isn't really compatible / ideal for tildes. I'm still pretty heavily in a reddit style mindset.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/763
This follows the already suggested feature of tag suggestions when posting topics, but perhaps
OLED screen friendly black theme (not sure what this is properly called)
"Black" theme has a fully black background for OLEDs.
I'll have to check on mobile then, it seems to be only partially OLED black on desktop.
Hmm. I'm trying to think how this could possibly work, so I can add a feature request for it to Tildes Gitlab. Autocomplete only "suggests" things if you start typing the same letters as an already existing tag. And AFAIK there is no real connection between "related" tags in the tag database, other than in hierarchical tags (which are by far in the minority). So any suggestions for related tags would likely have to be manually curated by someone, which seems like a lot of overhead.
But if you have any ideas on how it could realistically work, please let me know so I can create the appropriate feature requests.
Already on Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/746
I can't remember my specific train of thought when I typed it out, but it would most likely have suggest items similar to autocomplete as you type, but based on existing tags. Alternatively perhaps similar to the second bullet point - shows top/recent tags as the user types? I believe I was thinking of the use case where the user is in the home page and has not navigated to a specific topic where the top tags/recent popular tags aren't visible per the second bullet.
A smart contextual suggestion seems like alot of overhead for a small feature, but I'm not familiar with the topic.
There already is an autocomplete when you're applying tags to a topic. But I'm unsure how best to write a feature request for something like this, as far as helping with tag discovery when browsing goes, since there is no way to search for specific tags at the moment, or browse through all the various tags. And I'm also unsure if something like this could even be done in the address bar when manually typing out a tag (e.g.
https://tildes.net/?tag=...). So we might have to put a pin in this idea until some sort of tag browsing page is actually implemented, and revisit it then. I will try to keep it in mind if/when tag browsing/discovery starts getting worked on though. So thanks for the suggestion (and discussion). :)Just throwing out thoughts of small things I think of while browsing! Honestly the site works very well and additions to the UI would just be QoL improvements the site as is.
The influx of new people and number of questions with a straightforward answer makes me think adding some automated guidance would save a lot of trouble. Many potential bits, some simple and some complex, that could make onboarding, culture integration, and feature discovery smooth.
There could be some of those simple tooltips that show up the first time a user sees various things and features (maybe not all at once to avoid overwhelming or mindless skipping). There could be links to relevant parts of the docs/philosophy integrated prominently near corresponding features for some time after joining. There could be some fancier help, like detecting certain behavior patterns and offering advice (Clippy, but less annoying). There could be an ai driven help chatbot trained on the docs and additional manual Q/A. Eventually, it would be interesting if we could use ai and language processing to offer suggestions on comments that gently guide users toward the desired culture and tone (though never require compliance)
Since onboarding is definitely an issue, I think this might be worthy of a topic of its own at some point, so people can make various suggestions and discuss how to improve it... and I so can create Tildes Gitlab feature request issues for all of the suggestions.
Despite me personally not wanting something like that, since as others have said, it would greatly exacerbate the link rot issue... I also still think giving people the option is a good idea anyways, for privacy's sake. So I have added the feature request to Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/765
No prob. And I also changed the Issue titles to: "Add user to setting to automatically delete their comments (or selected comments) after a certain legth of time" to include your new suggestion.
Out of curiosity, how would you feel about the feature instead stripping your username past a certain point? The post becomes anonymous, it'd ease privacy, but it crucially would scarcely worsen link rot at all.
This seems like a much better solution. It helps the users privacy by no longer linking that “content” to them, while still being able to revisit what was said there in the future. The biggest downside (in terms of data being lost) that I can imagine would be that if multiple users (like 3+) go back and forth in a conversational way, it may be tough to figure out who said what.
For example: if three users are discussing a movie, one likes it, one dislikes it, and one is on the fence, it might be tough to tell if it is the person on fence talking about the movie or one of the other users.
A possible solution to this could be to give a fake pseudonym (like “Unknown[Animal Name]” or “Anonymous[Color]”) on a per thread basis to all of a user’s replies if they decide to use that privacy feature?
This would solve my previous example with the three users. Instead of all of my replies saying “ADwS” it would become “unknownHorse” (or something similar) for that specific discussion. If I went to a different thread than my username after getting “wiped” would become something else.
One of the discussed features is the ability to post anonymously from your existing account, which could let you have the discussions you want to have. It's tangential to your initial proposal, but it sounds like it might solve your core concern of having things you'd rather keep separate from your user name in the long term?
I'd kind of like to be able to subscribe to users. Some people post interesting things and I'd like to see more.
Tildes, like Reddit and HackerNews and a few other sites, is a content aggregator. The content is the central driver for the site, not the users who post that content. The site is organised around topics, rather than around people. You subscribe to the types of content you want to see, not the people you want to follow. It's a deliberate alternative structure for social media, in contrast to personality-based sites like Facebook or Instagram.
In fact, one early tweak to Tildes was to hide the username from link-posts, because it was felt that the source of the link and the linked material itself was more important than the person who posted it. Go look at the front page, and you'll notice that there are no visible usernames on any link posts (only on text posts).
In that context, it would be unusual to create a "follow user" feature. Not impossible. But unusual.
The "follower" social media trend is definitely one of those things that seems to have been shoehorned into a lot of sites unnecessarily...what ever happened to having a good old-fashioned friends list? I don't know if Tildes needs even that, but it might become marginally useful as the site expands.
IIRC, Deimos actually has talked in the past about potentially wanting to support user created "blogs" of sorts on Tildes, so the suggestion to subscribe to other users isn't actually that unrealistic or off-base.
I hadn't heard this before. Interesting.
Added it to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/764
I appreciate it! I still don't know how to use gitlab/github whichever it is that's connected to Modrinth and other sites for aharing bugs and issues for coding, but I'm trying to get used to it. I feel like some old boomer trying to figure out how to use zoom. Lol (I'm only 29)
Being able to add tags to users (like in RES).
Already on Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/187
But worth noting is Deimos' comment in that issue:
And I honestly feel the same way about it now too, after finding myself unintentionally encountering that issue using the feature in @Bauke's Tildes ReExtended. From another comment of mine:
A simple feature request: allowing for the full length (right side) of the user post bar to function as an expand/collapse toggle, which is especially helpful for use on mobile. Or honestly, anything to make toggling easier on mobile I would welcome.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Are you asking to have "Collapse replies" and "Expand all" included in the mobile sidebar? Asking for clarification so I can add a feature request for this on Gitlab.
Nothing to do with the sidebar. I was referring to the whitespace to the right of the username, "link," "parent," etc. This would make expanding and collapsing generally easier on mobile so you don't have to tap the far left +/- icon, allowing tapping from the right side as well. I think at least making this an option would be good for accessibility reasons.
Ah, gotcha. Something similar was suggested about using the comment indent line, and I added it to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/754
But I have now added your suggestion to include the whitespace of the comment bar too.
Reddit has a feature where when you receive replies in your inbox you can click on 'show parent' and read what they were responding to without navigating back to the discussion. That would be a nice to have feature.
I'd really really like there to be ~spirituality and ~occult personally.
Those are tags in ~humanities, which is the umbrella group for religion, philosophy, ethics, history, and the other humanities.
https://tildes.net/~humanities?tag=spirituality
https://tildes.net/~humanities?tag=occult
I'm new here, so sorry if I may have missed it, but is there a way to see a list of all of the tags that are in each group? How were you able to see that ~humanities has those two tags you mentioned?
Tags are sitewide from the homepage, but also group specific when clicked on within a group.
Yeah that makes sense, but how can I view a list of all of the tags that are used in a group? Like how did they know that those two tags were available to use in that group? Is the only place that Tags show up is underneath the titles?
Any tag is available to use in any group. Anyone can invent any tag they want for any post they make in any group. You could invent a "stovepost faves" tag, and apply that to any post you make - and, if you ever get the ability to edit tags on other people's posts, you could apply the "stovepost faves" tag to those posts as well.
However, Tildes is communally moderated, which means that anyone can make a tag, and everyone can edit a tag. So, other people might come along and decide that "stovepost faves" isn't a useful or suitable tag, and delete it from any post it appears on. Or they might like it and think it's useful and start applying it to other posts where it's relevant.
Or, more realistically, if someone wants to post in ~humanities about the Wiccan religion, they could make a post and apply a "wicca" or "wiccan" tag to that post. Other people might like the idea of having a "wicca" tag, and might apply it to other posts about the Wiccan religion. And, thus, a new tag is born.
Furthermore, if someone wants to post a book review of a book about Wicca, they could make a post in ~books and apply the tag "wicca" - because tags aren't specific to a group. As @mycketforvirrad (our resident tag expert) said, tags are site-wide.
Thank you for this response, that's definitely helping me understand how tags are used and created. I figured there would be some way to see a list of all of the tags used throughout the site to make browsing it a bit easier to search some of my favourite interests, but it seems like that's not a thing that exists just yet.
Here's a little trick I use when I'm posting to an unfamiliar group, and I don't know what tags are common in that group...
When I'm tagging a topic, I take advantage of the fact that tags can be auto-completed. So, if I type "a" into a tag field, it will automatically show me all the common tags that start with "a". Similarly, if I type "b" into a tag field, I'll see all the common tags that start with "b". And so on.
That's a sneaky little way to see the common tags on Tildes.
Alternatively, think about the categories your favourite interests might fall into. Games? Sports? Hobbies? Technology? Design? Find the right group and start scrolling through the various posts. You might find a post about what you're interested in, and that post will have relevant tags for you to look for.
However... searching by tag, or subscribing to a tag... are not features that exist yet on Tildes. The website is still very much a work in progress. So, tags don't have as much utility yet as they should.
You can't view a list of tags. They knew simply by knowing the tags that often occur in that group from time spent on Tildes. Tags show up on the homepage and underneath titles, yes.
Gestures, such as swiping right/left on comments or posts to Vote, Reply, Comment, etc.
Thats an app feature tho? I'm pretty sure question was intended for the website.
It's possible. Difficult to execute on web. Very difficult to execute well with custom gesture event handling and processing, fighting browser built-in gestures, and not having a native app gesture library provided. But possible.
I forget which website had swipe built into it that I encountered, but I absolutely abhorred it. was constantly fighting between my phone's OS and the browser registering gestures.
Ah yeah that makes sense.. I forget sometimes how fractured web architecture is sometimes
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/766
Move comment submission area to the top, so I don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom before submitting a comment
This has come up a number of times in these threads, but having the comment box at the bottom is intentional, and is part of the site's design.
As annoying as it is, I do kind of enjoy it. A problem that I have with most social media sites is that people tend to comment without looking at the other comments to see if the exact topic has been said before. It takes away from discussion and puts focus on the quantity of comments instead of the quality. Theoretically, putting the comment submission area at the bottom would encourage people to read before they comment, so that people can breed discussions with others instead of a quick comment and a sudden leave
Note: I am sick and sometimes the way I word or comprehend things can be wonky. If anything isn't making any sense, please let me know. I'll be more than happy to work through the things that sound confusing :)
I would like more control over the size of text as it is displayed. On my Macbook I can just zoom in Chrome to 150% and deal with it. However, on my iPhone and iPad I have Chrome zoomed in all the way and text still appears very small.
I've seen some users mention one or two ways to modify themes using extensions, but that isn't an option on iOS or iPadOS as far as I know.
Some other people in this topic suggested similar, so I already made a Gitlab issue for it:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/757
Thanks to the gitlab comment from Jason about the existence of a workaround, I was able to find the setting(s) for my iPad.
chrome://flags/#webpage-text-zoom-ipad
chrome://flags/#webpage-default-zoom-from-dynamic-type
"Show context" in line when viewing replies
This is something that would very likely already be built in to with the "permalink" system feature:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/256
Yeah, ?context= would solve that, and very likely be included in the permalink system here too. I'm a big fan of it on reddit as well.
Make it so that the topic Vote button changes colors or something when I've voted for it.
Apparently, this is an old, open ask:
I'm not sure if this is specific to the Zenburn theme or not, but when I vote on a topic it both changes color and removes the box around the "Vote" button. Does nothing change for you at all?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was actually fixed with the theme system changes. The border around the vote button now disappears, a solid color replaces the background color inside the vote border, and the colors are more distinguishable. On comments there is now an underline when you vote, too. So I should probably close that issue.
What are you finding hard to distinguish between the unvoted/voted states, @manosinistra? Asking so I can add another Gitlab issue to fix it, if required.
Interesting; I was just playing with this because on my desktop browser (Edge, no special extensions), there's either a thin line border or there's nothing. I don't see the solid color you are referring to. It's just text on white, border or no border.
On mobile it works the way you say (which is fine).
Oops, I meant it changes color when you mouse over and click vote, not stays that way afterwards. Does it not do that on Edge? I can make a bug report for that if it doesn't. And even if it does, I suppose it might still need more distinguishing, esp on higher resolution screens. Would increasing the border width help with that?
On Edge, a mouse-over does color change but it doesn't stay afterwards.
I'm chalking this all up to unfamiliarity with the system. I think the original thought was that it would be nice if it was easy to distinguish whether I had voted on something or not. Personally ,I would prefer actual wording changes to denote a state change otherwise it's just a box with a number and my old brain handles the semantics a lot slower.
Also, it's probably an edge case but I wonder how assistive technology would make sense of the borders in this context.
Ah, that's actually a really good point. Perhaps it shouldn't say "votes" in both cases, but perhaps switch from "vote" to "voted" or something similar. I reopened the above issue, and edited the body to include your concerns about assistive technology as well.
No, it seems I'm just getting confused. I still do the newbie thing... visit a topic (again), press the vote count, see it decrement, then press it again, forgetting that I already voted on it.
I'm used to state changes being explicitly articulated or being heavily visually indicated. A box around number is probably meant to convey a button / "Press Me" but I'm still having to wrap my head around it.
Make it easier to hide posts on mobile. The "ignore" button shouldn't be hidden behind a drop-down menu, it should be a single tap.
Yes please! Apollos auto read and hide feature was amazing. I hide everything manually on here and I’m glad it’s a feature …but it’s also a pain.
There’s “Collapse old comments when I return to a topic” in your settings that sounds like what you might want. If you return to a topic with new comments since your last visit, all of the old ones will be collapsed except direct parents to any new sub comments. Returning when there’s nothing new will show all comments expanded again.
Nice, I have that turned on it seems. Will still manually collapse because i'm an animal like that....
Already added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/777
Maybe if it's a read only like an RSS, but if federation allows anyone from the Fediverse to immigrate in and post on a Tildes thread without a Tildes account, that defeats the point of the invite limiting we already have going.
Now I'm curious, if Tildes was an ActivityPub instance that allowed users read only access unless they had an approved handle from Tildes.net itself, a trusted instance, or an individual user who was invited in, does that "diminish the brand" of the Fediverse or of Tildes? Or does the idea of Tildes content in with everything else yuck the yum?
I don't know if possible or aligned with this site principles, but I would like a way to stop reposting the same content over and over. For that, a suggestion would be for submissions to act like a tag (the "tag" would be the account that made the post), and for the content of the submission to be hashed or to be unique in some way.
What I mean it's this. I (rickartz) make a post here that no one else has shared before, a link to my YouTube video. This submission has tags, and a (maybe hidden) tag about who post it (me). Then, no one else can make the same post again, or maybe they can, but it only adds their username tag to the already existing post. After some time (like 6 months, one year), adding again the same post may be allowed, with an automatic link on previous discussions.
Making post unique and the info about who post them as a tag could help to make the job of librarians (tag, archive, moderate) more easy, and it favours quality content instead of repost machines, I think, but it's just a very green idea.
Also, before I forget: a the bookmark page organize by groups, and with tags as filters.
A repost prevention system does already exist. If someone tries to repost a link, they get a warning that it has already been posted (and a link to that original submission). If they still want to repost the link they have to click a checkbox acknowledging it, and then "Post Topic" again.
What would be the benefit of allowing users to essentially claim a submission as their own, and disallowing anyone else to repost it? It kinda seems ripe for abuse.
A related issues is already on Gitlab by I have added your suggestions as a comment there:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/342
Sounds like a thoughtful implementation, and while that means repost could still exist, the fact that it has to be acknowledged by the user could mean moderation starts within ourselves. We have to first moderate what we share here.
On the other hand, it seems the backlog of interesting features is big. Maybe I should study programming as a hobby then.
It is, but thankfully it looks like a bunch of people are working on open-source contributions again. There are even a bunch of new merge requests already.
Nice! I would like to contribute, but I'm in the first step to becoming a programmer: being interested in being one. It's a long road ahead!
I've been trying to become a programmer for about 3 decades now... but other things keep getting in the way so I'm still completely shit at it. ;)
Being able to set the number of links on the home page or in a community would be nice. I noticed that the default number of posts displayed per page is a bit low for my liking. I'm one who always had my Google settings show 100 results, and like a large number that I can scroll through quickly and easily, but I realize not everyone is the same way.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/767
Simple mutable areas of posts.
In effect you can have >text< which changes based on a third party webservice. Tildes provides the interface for markup and moderation. Users can find or create the webservices.
Examples: (Severe) weather reports, election results, stock tickers, exchange rates, other live data (like current donations to a charity stream). Someone could make 'Zork' (where the current room is the text of the post).
You can also allow some of these APIs to be used on user specified locations (like a dashboard). The key would be text and perhaps iconography. Example: >cloudicon< 63F
Jump to top button on mobile please!
Already suggested above and added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/756
This is why on an earlier topic I was asking if there's a way to easily search... especially with an influx of new people, there seem to be on certain threads repeated questions/answers. Also, the way that topics seem to work, you could conceivably have a topic last years.
It does take a second of thought and engagement to proactively search for an open thread on something one might want to bring up, but some intuitive way to search before answering might help keep things organized. Just an inkling of a thought.
Yeah, I suppose a search feature specifically for inside topic comments sections (beyond CTRL-F, etc) does make sense to help prevent that. Added to Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/774
Thank you! Also, because on mobile it's not always an intuitive experience.
Thanks for that info! It would be cool if it was floating too, not just at the very bottom, just my $.02
Edited the Gitlab issue text to include that suggestion. :)
Cool, thank you!
After setting up the ~anime community watchthrough, I have a couple ideas.
We currently have a "collapse replies" button, but it would be handy to have a "collapse all" button, like when things have been read and you reopen a post. This would allow people visiting the thread to only see the previews of top level comments, which in this specific case would be episode numbers for discussion. That way they can completely avoid spoilers by only opening comment chains for the episode they want to discuss.
Going off of that, it would be nice if I, as the creator of the post, could toggle a setting for all comments to be collapsed by default. Again, this is all just for the specific use-case of these watchthrough posts, I'm not sure how much they would apply to the rest of the site.
Very, well, unnecessary probably but I'd like to create my own themes.
Tildes is open source, so if you have a Gitlab account, you could create one and submit it as a merge request. And for reference, the relevant scss files are located here:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/tree/master/tildes/scss/themes
Nice, thanks! I may contribute my theme there, if the maintainers want it: https://codeberg.org/akselmo/Revontuli/src/branch/main/Tildes
I had the same thought. The Stylus extension might be what you need?
Heh, funny you should say that, I just created this: https://codeberg.org/akselmo/Revontuli/src/branch/main/Tildes
Not a theme for everyone but it helps me a lot, which is why I created the whole set of themes in first place.
This is probably a bit out there but I've always thought it would be great to be able to "subscribe" to another user's blocklist. I would love to automatically import someone's "anti-spam" list that they personally maintain. One thing I didn't like about Reddit was that the topics and moderation teams were combined, meaning that the moderation team had control over the content within the topic. And all I wanted to do was "unsubscribe" from those moderators' opinionated actions, and see the deleted content. Would be great to be able to choose which moderators you prefer, and be able to opt-out of the filtering that some of them do.
I'd like links to open in a new tab automatically instead of the same tab the site is in.
You can do that already. Check the "Open links in new tabs" section of your user settings.
THANK YOU! You're awesome. I thought I looked through already.
Would be good to have a “close comment thread” link from within a child comment. Similar to go to parent but it takes you there and collapse the whole thread of comments.
Do you mean a button on every individual comment to collapse the entire root parent thread? Asking so I can write a feature request on Gitlab.
You can already kind do that reasonably quickly by clicking "Parent" on the child comments until you reach the root, and then the collapse button on the Parent you want to collapse. A "top-level parent" button might be a good idea though, in order to save multiple "Parent" clicks in deep threads, so I have added that to Gitlab as well:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/772
I don’t think that captures the use case I was “trying” to share:
I mean having the functionality of the [-] on any children comment to collapse the “top parent level” comment.
If the [-] button on every child comment did that, then how would anyone collapse a specific sub-thread if that's all they wanted to do?
I’m not saying change the
[-]functionality, I’m saying would be good to have another link, let’s say[^-], that collapses the top level parent comment from any children comment in a thread.Hope this makes sense.
Oh, okay. Yeah I understand you now. Sorry about the confusion. Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/773
Before I begin, I must confess, I haven't played with HTML/CSS for a while, and so my terminology is probably going to be off.
I am also aware that Deimos has a very specific design philosophy in mind, so I hope my suggestion doesn't step on any toes.
With that out of the way, restricting access to comment tools to the bottom of the page is a pain, especially for someone like myself, who likes to look back at the original post/statement multiple times for reference's sake. That being said, I do like the underlying psychology of it all: try to read everything before posting. Still requires an absurd amount of scrolling, on mobile, even when writing this comment.
So, this could be a possible suggestion that may give us the best of both worlds: have the comments scrollable, but keep the original post on the top of the screen, maybe have it collapsible.
Relevant feature request:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/651
Voice chat could work for a community as tight nit as this one and likely would be easy to add.
I thought on this for a bit and TBH the only thing I'd consider adding would be the ability to underline/italicize/strikethrough text. Barely makes my would-be-nice lost, though.
You can already italicize and
strikethrough. You just can't underline since that's reserved for hyperlinks.Edit: Oh, I guess you can actually underline text, but it's technically meant to distinguish inserted text.
Click More... then View Markdown to see how. And if you want to learn about all the other formatting you can do, like this:
click to reveal
Check out https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/text-formatting
If you click the vote button. It hides the post.
I think being able to post to your own user profile would be pretty cool, it would open up a new way to use the platform for creator-related content without flooding the platform with new communities. The friend flair like reddit used to have would be a way to follow user profiles. You could have it as a check box if users want to allow others to friend them.
Not to veer too off-topic here, but has anyone been able to get a development environment up and running for Tildes? I have been trying on and off for the past few days and have hit a few roadblocks. One of them is when running the vagrant provision command, it is unable to complete all the functions starting at
It tries to get the repo at:
https://repo.saltproject.io/py3/ubuntu/16.04/amd64/latest/
but this URL doesn't work. I attempted to try to run it on 18.04 but received an nginx Error 502, which is where I stopped.
I switched away from Salt and Ubuntu (to Ansible and Debian) about 2 years ago, do you still have a very old dev environment you were trying to use?
(Also, I agree with @Aeledfyr that a new post in ~tildes would be best for this)
Yeah, that is actually the issue! I forked it in Gitlab, but had done this 4 years ago so the newest updates didn't make it over. That's a silly mistake on my part! Thank you for the quick response!
I'll make a post :)
Edit: https://tildes.net/~tildes/15ub/resources_and_help_for_setting_up_a_tildes_dev_environment
So this doesn't get buried and other people can find it later, it might be good to make a new post for this in ~tildes. I also haven't managed to get the dev environment set up yet, so I'd also be interested in seeing how (and updating the docs).