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    1. What's your favorite theme on Tildes?

      I adore the available themes and it makes browsing quite pleasing to do. Currently I'm in a fight between Solarized Dark and Dracula. I'm curious though if there's a clearly preferred theme here...

      I adore the available themes and it makes browsing quite pleasing to do. Currently I'm in a fight between Solarized Dark and Dracula. I'm curious though if there's a clearly preferred theme here or if people are using all kinds of stuff.

      Some previous threads on themes (some are about themes in general and aren't Tildes specific):

      28 votes
    2. Is anyone else anxious about using the bookmark feature on Tildes?

      Maybe it's just because I've lost my bookmarks so many times, one way or another. I now avoid using website-specific bookmarks, you never know when the website could shut down or you could lose...

      Maybe it's just because I've lost my bookmarks so many times, one way or another. I now avoid using website-specific bookmarks, you never know when the website could shut down or you could lose the bookmarks some other way. not saying Tildes will shut down; I'm sure it won't be any time soon, but I still can't get myself to use it even though it's so convenient ☹️ does anyone else feel the same way ?

      22 votes
    3. How to search and switch between Tildes groups in Firefox using bookmarks

      I just wanted to share a handy feature in Firefox that can be used to create shorthanded keywords. For instance, you could make it so that typing "t ~books" brings you to...

      I just wanted to share a handy feature in Firefox that can be used to create shorthanded keywords. For instance, you could make it so that typing "t ~books" brings you to "https://tildes.net/~books". Or "ts banana" that brings you to Tildes search engine, searching for "banana".
      I've been using a similar trick on another browser I use for years (Qutebrowser), but lately I've been using Firefox more and a post on the Ferdiverse reminded me that I could do this in Firefox as well.

      Instructions

      • In FIrefox, open the Bookmark Manager. (Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+O , alt: Burger-menu in the upper right > Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks)
      • Select a folder where you want to save your bookmark
      • Go to "Organise > Add Bookmark"
      • Enter whatever name you like.
      • In the URL textbox, enter the static part of the url you want to use. Replace the part that can change (like the page name or the search term with this: "%s"
      • Optionally, add tags seperated by a comma in the tags textbox.
      • At last, choose a keyword. This is the word that replaces the static part of the URL when you use the bookmark. For example, I use "t" for the community-switching and "ts" for searching.
      • Save you bookmark and try it out. When you now type just the letter "t" in your URL-bar and press enter, it should bring you to the home page. When you type "t ~books" , it should bring you to the books community page.

      You can use this feature with any website, so I encourage you to play around with it :)

      14 votes
    4. Question on sorting for new comments on old posts

      Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but is there a way to search which would list comments made on any topic in chronological order regardless of how old the original post...

      Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but is there a way to search which would list comments made on any topic in chronological order regardless of how old the original post was made? Meaning, even if a post was one of the first on Tilde, if someone commented within it in the last few minutes, it would be displayed before a newly created post that hadn't had a comment in several hours.

      I tried all of the sorting options and didn't seem to find one that performed this function. Any assistance would be appreciated.

      7 votes
    5. How to contribute a theme to Tildes

      Want to contribute a theme to Tildes but don't know where to start? Let's fix that. Before we start, get yourself a development environment setup and do a quick read through of the general...

      Want to contribute a theme to Tildes but don't know where to start? Let's fix that.

      Before we start, get yourself a development environment setup and do a quick read through of the general development info to get acquainted with how Tildes works (or at least the HTML and CSS section).

      For this walkthrough I'll be using tildexample as the example name for the theme, but if you decide to contribute a theme for real, make sure it uses the proper name of your theme. :P

      Step 1: Sassy _Sass

      Open the Tildes codebase using your text editor of choice and navigate to the themes directory at tildes/scss/themes. Then create a copy of _default.scss at _tildexample.scss. The default White theme is the canonical source of all colors used, so it's the best place to start from.

      Below is an annotated example of all the things you need to change in your new theme file.

      Annotated example theme
      // Add a small description of the theme here with maybe a link to its website.
      // Check the other themes for examples. https://example.org/tildexample
      
      // Change the theme variable to $theme-tildexample
      // ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ 
      $default-theme: (
        // A whole bunch of color definitions, edit as your theme demands.
        // ...
      );
      
      // Append ".theme-tildexample" to the body selector.
      // ↓ ↙
      body {
        // Don't forget to update the theme variable here too.
        //                  ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
        @include use-theme($default-theme);
      }
      
      @include theme-preview-block(
        // Change the text to tildexample.
        // ↓ ↓
        "white",
        // And again update the theme variable here.
        //       ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
        map-get($default-theme, "foreground-primary"),
        map-get($default-theme, "background-primary")
        //       ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
      );
      

      Once that's done, head to tildes/scss/styles.scss and at the bottom of the file add your theme import:

      @import "themes/tildexample";
      

      Step 2: Hardcoding a TheMe coLor

      Boy that title is a stretch just to say, we need to add 2 lines to the HTML base template.

      Inside the tildes/tildes/templates/base.jinja2 file is a section of if/elif/elif/elif/... statements to set the theme color meta element. Add yourself an elif block and add your theme color.

      For this you probably want to use the background-primary color you used in your theme definition. I've used #ff00dd below because it spells food. I'm such a jokester.

      {% elif request.current_theme == "tildexample" %}
      <meta name="theme-color" content="#ff00dd">
      {% endif %}
      

      Step 3: Snakey Wakey

      Finally the last step is to grab your trusty pungi and give it a blow.

      Head to tildes/tildes/views/settings.py and find the THEME_OPTIONS constant. Here you want to add the theme class you used in body.theme-<this part> and a proper name that will be shown in the theme dropdown.

      THEME_OPTIONS = {
          "white": "White",
          # Many other themes...
          "tildexample": "Tildes Theme Example",
      }
      

      Once that's all been done, check it out in your development site and see if it works.

      Now git!

      Commit. Push. Merge request. Have some water. Deimos reviews, merges and deploys your theme. Job's done.

      26 votes
    6. Where to ask Tildes dev questions?

      If I have a quick Tildes dev question, where should I ask it? For an example that is not actually just an example, but the actual question which drove me to post, where can I found logging output?...

      If I have a quick Tildes dev question, where should I ask it?

      For an example that is not actually just an example, but the actual question which drove me to post, where can I found logging output? Specifically, if I want to print out something every time a request comes in, how should I do so?
      18 votes
    7. Tildes CSS and Android accessibility

      Hi all. On my Pixel phone I have the accessibility option for font size and display size turned up a notch or two but noticed that not all of the text in Tildes adheres to this. Some front page...

      Hi all. On my Pixel phone I have the accessibility option for font size and display size turned up a notch or two but noticed that not all of the text in Tildes adheres to this. Some front page topic text is bigger, some of them remain small.

      Is this something that can be quickly tested and fixed if it's a bug? It might drive poor sighted people away from the site.

      I'm assuming it's not me, as my Pixel 7 is quite new .... but I am on the Android beta program.

      Can anyone else try and see if it's a localised issue or more global?

      I can post screen shots of needed but not sure what image sharing sites you prefer to use in here!

      Edit:

      Fixed with a chrome flag....

      the text-scaling is being replaced by the "Accessibility Page Zoom" feature (currently hidden behind the feature flag in chrome://flags)

      23 votes
    8. Should bylines be more prominent in the topic posts?

      I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to...

      I've noticed we've gotten in the habit of using the author.[name] tagging convention on articles and blogs and I think this is a great idea. But to me it just seems more important than having to see it as just a tag amidst all the other tags. Right now we put the site name and favicon in a prominent spot whenever we post a link, and I get that this is much easier to extract reliably from just scraping the page than the bylines tend to be. But I wonder if any author.[name] tag could get promoted to a special spot in the "Article: X words" element?

      Of course this does leave the question of what to do about multiple authors, but I think the usual convention in academia is to list the first author who appears on the list as the primary author.

      I assume this has been discussed before, but when I tried searching for it the abundance of topics with "author" tags made it so I couldn't find anything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      10 votes
    9. How would you feel about a PC building/tech deals group?

      Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC...

      Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC building\support\tech deals tilde.

      22 votes
    10. How does the "collapse old comments when I return to a topic" feature work?

      I have the "collapse old comments when I return to a topic" setting turned on, but I can't quite figure out how it works. For example, when open a new topic for the first time and scroll through...

      I have the "collapse old comments when I return to a topic" setting turned on, but I can't quite figure out how it works. For example, when open a new topic for the first time and scroll through the comments, the next time I open the topic, they're all still open.

      Does anyone have more details about how this feature works or how I should be using it?

      Thank you!

      19 votes
    11. Under what group would, for example, cars or motorcycles go?

      For many they are considered ~hobbies so ~hobbies.cars and ~hobbies.motorcycles would be a logical place. I don't know if ~transport would be a suitable main category for this since then trucks,...

      For many they are considered ~hobbies so ~hobbies.cars and ~hobbies.motorcycles would be a logical place. I don't know if ~transport would be a suitable main category for this since then trucks, tractors, trains and boats could also go there without bloating hobbies' sub-groups too much.

      I'd like to hear your input on this, cheers.

      23 votes
    12. Do you think there should be more customization of user profiles on Tildes? If so, what should be added?

      When talking about adding new features to tildes, many people talk about adding more ways to customize your profile, since right now we only have the username and the user bio. The most common way...

      When talking about adding new features to tildes, many people talk about adding more ways to customize your profile, since right now we only have the username and the user bio. The most common way other sites do this is by having profile pictures, but considering tildes is text based that wouldn't work out well.
      Another way of doing this would be signatures. Not only would that distinguish tildes from reddit and HN, but it would be text based and look ok on the tildes layout. But what do you guys think? Would it be neccessary?

      Edit: u/TooFewColours said this and i think it seems good. I've also heard about allowing your username to be a certain font:

      I'd be opposed to profile pictures, but maybe simply being able to choose a single colour that decorates your profile page in a simple way would be a cute addition. Given the colours in the logo, I think it would be on-brand.

      32 votes
    13. Prevalence of AI generated text in Tildes

      I've recently noticed that some particular users, who post/comment quite often, frequently contribute with high quality content across an impressive spectrum of themes. These posts/comments...

      I've recently noticed that some particular users, who post/comment quite often, frequently contribute with high quality content across an impressive spectrum of themes. These posts/comments usually go into great detail, an approach suitable of a "semi-expert", that honestly baffles me.

      This lead me to think that Tildes users might be using AI language models to aid in the writing of their posts/comments. This possibility is quite disheartening since I found Tildes to be an extraordinarily engaging community, with a distinct human element that I haven't seen in other bigger forums. The possibility of a significant portion of Tildes content being generated by AI makes this sentiment a mere illusion.

      So here are my questions:

      1. Is there any reasonable way of determining which posts were written with the aid of AI?
      2. Is the Tildes community okay with the content being generated partly, or entirely, by AI?

      Please forgive me if I'm being a cynic, I've spent too much time in forums with significantly lower quality content than Tildes.


      Edit 1: Just wanted to cite this paper to somehow justify my uneasiness when it comes to writing texts with AI in command. As I've commented below, LLMs might get in the way of learning the person's true idea/opinion.


      Edit 2: As I've said in the comments below, I had no intention of accusing any particular user with this post. Clearly, I've failed to convey my intent so I'll try to clarify my original idea a bit more:

      Because I'm new to Tildes and haven't got any other forum experience besides Reddit, I was amazed with how much and how fast some users post extremely high quality content, since this was certainly not the norm in Reddit. As with many other online platforms, spammers armed with AI can be a difficult problem to deal with, so I've made this post with the intent of starting a discussion about this matter and to understand the Tildes community stance. My relatively negative view of the use of AI is due in part to my experience with such spammers in the past. Forgive me if I've assumed the worst...

      From the little time I've spent in Tildes, I'm quite sure the community grew to know each other and I'm hopeful that my post will not cause undue witch hunts. And I've also learned that because people got to know each user's stylistic voice, it's fairly easy to spot a possible AI spammer.

      Thank you for the insightful discussion so far !

      62 votes
    14. How do Tildes users feel about an OP that takes part in their own thread?

      Bit of an odd question but one I'm becoming a little self conscious of. I posted a thread earlier today on ~LGBT asking people to share their experiences of coming out. Because it's a somewhat...

      Bit of an odd question but one I'm becoming a little self conscious of.

      I posted a thread earlier today on ~LGBT asking people to share their experiences of coming out. Because it's a somewhat sensitive topic and sharing your experiences can be a little vulnerable I've been taking part and interacting with everyone who's shared their experience.

      Im being sure to try and actually contribute, bring my perspective and continue the conversation, and importantly thank people for being open about something that can be difficult.

      My problem is that I worry that this is a habit I'm bringing over from Reddit that's perhaps not suitable for Tildes, but I'm not sure?

      I generally see it as a good thing when an OP takes active part in a discussion they started, but maybe it's more of a hindrance here?

      I'm not sure how I feel, and I'd like to get the opinions of other regular users on what would be appropriate?

      Edit: I should specify and make it clear in my case I'm talking about actively replying to most or all top level comments. Not necessarily replies but still a fair number. I worry about crossing a line into just contributing to noise.

      45 votes
    15. Suggestion: Make megathreads more prominent

      So while megathreads are a thing, I think we can really benefit from making them more prominent. Because right now there are two topics about the Titan submersible on my front page (and two more...

      So while megathreads are a thing, I think we can really benefit from making them more prominent. Because right now there are two topics about the Titan submersible on my front page (and two more if I go to the second page), multiple surveys about movies, and at least one new thread per day about the current reddit fiasco. It's getting a bit cluttered.

      So my proposal: make megathreads more prominent.

      • Give designated megathreads a colored border or some other simple decoration to make them grab the eye and stand out.
      • Pin some megathreads so they show at the top of their respective tildes, especially if they relate to ongoing or developing events. I don't think this is necessary for all megathreads like recurring ones, but it will help cut down clutter. (Note: I did check, and this is indeed on Gitlab. Deimos left a comment three years ago that code was made, just hadn't been merged into Tildes yet due to not being needed at the time.)
      • A little more advanced: for ongoing events, maybe have some way that multiple people can edit a post with updates on new developments or links. That way even if the original poster is offline when some big event happens, someone can update it or add new links.
        • Related to above: have a pinned comment on such megathreads to help collect links and such. This would probably be the ideal editable comment rather than the original post.
      • To help cut down on the survey threads that typically just ask for lists without much discourse (e.g. "favorite X movie"): Have recurring survey megathreads asking the most common such questions, possibly each week or every other week
        • You could either cycle through different questions each time (particularly in movies where you can just go through the different genres), or just collate the most common questions
        • Also, have a list somewhere of previous times a question has been asked, and then have a "cool down" period before a question can be asked again. Maybe a wiki-style list that people can edit and add links to previous threads?

      Of these suggestions, I think the first two would be the most effective and also the simplest to implement. Adding some visual indicator for a megathread would be a simple CSS change, and apparently the code already exists for pinning threads. Just a couple thoughts!

      47 votes