Better reply features
Not too much to say here. It's pretty barebones right now. Dunno if it's a major goal, but given the whole point of tildes was for it to encourage better discussions, it'd probably help if the reply feature was looked at a bit.
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I believe that the formatting help should contain the word "Spoilers" in the header for expandable sections. It's probably the most common reason I find myself going to the help doc of a site, because most other things just follow markdown format these days, and yet that word doesn't exist on that page and I still consistently see people asking how to do it.
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I like that you can resize your replies. I hate that it's possible to accidentally resize the box UNDER the sidebar making it impossible to get to the scroll bar or the resize "'grip" on the lower right corner.
https://imgur.com/a/xDVTigJ -
How much of RES can be emulated?
The normal reply view, with most of the shown buttons pushed:
https://imgur.com/a/GW5eNeY
And the large editor mode for more substantial posts:
https://imgur.com/a/XCdNEfN
It's a pretty clean interface that does 3 important things in my eyes:
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Gives you LIVE previews. Matters more on reddit where it's easier to accidentally screw up your line breaks and get formatting you were not expecting, but for more complex posts it can be annoying clicking back and forth between the preview pane.
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Quick buttons for common features. I know the markdown for most things, but buttons are nice, especially for "oh shit i want this whole section to be a quote/codeblock/spoiler" moments.
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The "i'm going to write the wheel of time in this window" large mode which can help ensure somewhat decent flow for more complex topics.
Some of this matters more due to reddits nature as a community resource (games/hobbies/whatever all have large pinned threads, and hell their own mini wikis), but again just wanted to bring this stuff up as it's either kicked me in the teeth or prevented me from making larger posts/topics more than once.
Edit- and i suppose to make my case I had to edit this because I screwed up my line breaks and forgot how they get handled with numbered lists. If i could just see the preview and make the change i'd use it more, but since it requires just clicking off, scrolling down, checking my work, clicking back, finding my place, and editing, I find it just easier to post and uh...fix it in post.
Just a few points from a web dev to possibly clear up some misconceptions.
Tildes doesn't actually have a spoiler tag. There is an open issue to add one, but unfortunately development is mostly stalled right now.
The tag you're describing is for summarizing long text and allowing expansion for details, sometimes called an accordion. It's been somewhat co-opted by the community to act as a spoiler tag because it does allow you to hide information. That said, it's not well-suited to this purpose. Its text still shows in topic previews, and it's exclusively a block-level element, meaning it can't be used inline
>!like this!<would be.I think it'd be okay to add the word Spoiler to the docs to make it easily searchable until there's a better solution, but it's best not to think of summary/details blocks as dedicated spoiler tags. They're just a kludge.
As for the ability to grab and resize text boxes, that isn't really a website feature so much as a browser feature. They're added automatically, so a lot of websites have issues where dropping the corner underneath another element will lose it. That said, there are still ways developers can influence its behaviour. Setting a min and max width on the textbox itself will hardcode certain limits. The trick would be setting a max width equal to the page's width, before the scrollbar is visible. Alternatively, the
resizeproperty can lock it to vertical resizing only, though that may not be a preferred solution.Regarding the live preview, personally I find those quite distracting while typing and prefer Tildes' solution of having a second tab for Previews. Though I recognize that I've been using Markdown for 15 years and only need a quick check at the end of complex comments, and that others might benefit more from immediate feedback. I feel like that might be a good candidate for an extension, though because the Preview is server-sided it could increase the server costs by updating it on live keystrokes.
Another user pointed out the Formatting Toolbar userscript already, so I'll not go over it. Though there are a number of other extensions and scripts available for Tildes here.
I don't know if there are any plans to make these changes, but have you tried out the Three Cheers app? I think it solves some of your issues.
All of the markdown stuff is in easy to use buttons including spoilers and you can easily toggle between your post and a preview with a tap. The app is basically feature complete at this point and has become the primary way I browse Tildes.
The majority of my browsing is done from a computer, not a phone. Further if i'm planning on writing a very large post, i'm almost certainly not doing that on a phone.
I brought this up mostly because of the smaller issues of 1, which is a simple fix, and 2, which is just an anti feature that's also frustrating (although I wouldn't be shocked if it's annoying to fix). That said, to quote the mission statement:
To be very clear i'm not trying to rules lawyer in some change that probably isn't simple, and I get that paragraph is more about the quality of the content than the ease of submitting it. Still the uh...ROI for lack of a better term, is probably pretty good. I like that this place in theory supports more than memes and news spam, but at this point the 2 major topics I've posted I wrote in VS code.
Frankly it doesn't matter how good Tildes's web editor is, unless it supports saving/editing drafts server-side I don't trust any browser text form editor. Too many times I've refreshed a page, or the tab crashed, or something in CSS/JavaScript screws up, or or or.... for anything more than a paragraph or so I edit offline and paste into the browser.
Maybe Tildes happens to be more reliable, but that fear of losing work is hard to let go of.
I happen to use Obsidian, but vim, notepad, or VS Code are all preferable to a browser editor to me.
Yes, this is my biggest issue with posting and editing on Tildes. I’ve seen it happen mostly on my tablet. When opening a bloated website in another tab, the browser will evict other tabs from memory, so they have to be reloaded when you switch back, and you lose your work.
I haven’t seen it happen on desktop.
I opened a bug in the issue tracker a long time ago with ideas on how to fix it.
Fair enough, just thought I would mention it. I hope you find a solution or one gets made.
Tildes Formatting Toolbar userscript handles the formatting buttons in one quick swoop.
Oh my goodness thank you for this, I've been going crazy typing out the details tag by hand
Neat, although it does seem to be struggling with a few icons on my end, that certainly helps. As I sorta mentioned in the other response though it'd be nice if this was just a base feature given the goal for higher quality content.
https://imgur.com/a/7nHqaGU
Yeah, that happened with mine as well, I just replaced two lines with the following for the bullet and numbered lists:
olButton.innerHTML = "<small>1. ―<br/>2. ―<br/>3. ―<br/></small>";becomes
olButton.innerHTML = "<small>1. uno<br/>2. dos<br/>3. tres<br/></small>";ulButton.innerHTML = "• ―<br/>• ―<br/>• ―<br/>";becomes
ulButton.innerHTML = "<small>• text<br/>• text<br/>• text<br/></small>";and I reversed the comment-out of the link button to use the letters instead of the icon.
becomes
Re: #1: A user with wiki access could add the word "Spoilers". Not sure who currently has access though.
The text formatting wiki page isn't synced with the official docs page . In fact, it looks like Deimos merged a patch that wasn't made on the wiki version.
Any edit should probably be made as a merge request on the static sites repository.
Let everyone post suggestions too!