At the suggestion of a certain heathen who shall remain unnamed. I'm tossing up a quick and dirty comment (and post text) formatting guide. There is a formatting guide in the docs/wiki with a link just above the comment box, but it can be a bit much to digest.

*italics*
**bold**
~~strikethrough~~
[Text goes here](URL goes here)
<small>small text</small> 
<sub>subscript</sub>
<sup>superscript</sup>
# headline
`code which removes the formatting and makes it look like this block`
* bulleted
* lists
1. and
1. numbered
1. lists

Spoilers is a bit more complicated, the <details> start and end </details> is required, but the <summary> start and end </summary> is not unless you want text in the summary or you want the summary to be blank.

<details>
<summary>Summary text!</summary>

Body text inside spoiler!
</details>

Three underscores (or dashes, but dashes require an extra line) in a row on their own line creates a blank line to divide a topic...
---

You also have a sub-headline text option by putting a single dash under text...
-
...or headline text by putting an equal sign under text.
=

If you like userscripts (who doesn't?) you can install extensions like ViolentMonkey that allow you to install little bits of code like the Tildes Formatting Toolbar that can change/improve the sites you use and make formatting here a breeze.

Do use the formatting responsibly, but here are examples for bold, italics, strikethrough, links, small text, sub_script, super^script,

headline text,

sub-headline text,

code,

• bulleted
• lists,

1. and
2. numbered
3. lists

Most formatting can be combined as well such as superscripts, lines, and small text to make...

...sentences with a...¹

¹...footnote

Apologies if this isn’t the right place to put bug reports.

I’ve noticed an issue where comments which are bookmarked don’t display as such in my notifications.

For example:

A bookmarked comment displaying as Unbookmarked in my notifications.

Is anyone else seeing the same ?

I'm sorry if this was already answered in the docs somewhere but similarly to the question "What happens to my Steam games when Valve goes out of business?" I was wondering what happens to Tildes if Deimos can't sustain it anymore for whatever reason (e.g. death, prison, going off the grid and starting from scratch in Ecuador...)?

Is there some kind of backup plan in place?

What do you long term users want to share about the culture?

What about growth plans? The erudite discussion with (presumably) real people is what I love most, but I miss the really niche subs. That needs more people.

I just want to make sure this isn't "eternal July".

I read some funny stuff on here and there are plenty of witty responses around, but a community for humorous content may lighten things up a bit and it can start discussions too… after all:

“Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.” -Mark Twain

Hi all.

I was wondering if there was a way to see all the tags that have been created on Tildes and their popularity? It would help when working out what tag to use, etc.

Maybe even a popularity break down by group that the tag was posted into would help loads when selecting the correct tag.

I can see that auto-complete for tags uses the 100 most commonly-used tags, not sure if this is by group or site wide, but even that list would be great to see.

Many thanks!
RRR

Enshittification: begone!! Let us celebrate our newly found freedom from crap social media giants and sponsored goons by donating a few dollars to Tildes so they can keep the lights on and the fireworks popping 🎉

Hey gang, I’m a rather novice / hedonist tildes user and have just been posting links to uploaded images by hosting them on ibb and then sharing

https://ibb.co/PF5nFf9
https://ibb.co/10pV1wB
https://ibb.co/1GgyWCT

Is there a better place to host and better way to post images?

Thanks in advance. Sorry for any eye rolls I may have caused!

Hi, I was wondering if the current duration before voting gets locked on a post is still 30 days? I tried to find the answer in the docs but didn’t see it (apologies if I missed it) and all I turned up in a search of the site was a topic from 3 years ago mentioning the 30 days, so I wanted to see if that’s still accurate.

Thanks !

With the increase in activity, it's now more difficult to read every topic and every bit of discussion. As well, there are some topics that I wouldn't click into naturally, but I would very much click into if I knew there was a high-quality comment hidden within.

So, it would nice to have a page that specifically highlights comments that have received an Exemplary label. That way, it would be possible to jump straight to the most insightful/thoughtful/interesting discussions that Tildes has to offer, regardless of the topic.

I'm imagining that the page would be somewhat off to the side, so that it doesn't incentivize misuse of the label. Something like how Hacker News hides the pool/invited/best/bestcomments pages under the lists page in the footer of the site.

What do you think?

I just noticed that when I sent an invite to family member over SMS it never arrived. After experimenting it looks like if text contains "tildes.net" it is filered. This also happens with another family member's phone. It is weird why would those companies want to filter it.

I also checked and the message didn't show up in spam & blocked. Does anyone else observe the same thing?

I lurk here at work and don't watch YouTube in general. Often it's annoying to see something of potential interest and it's a YouTube video. Is there a way to filter youtube.com here or an extension enabling that functionality?

Thank you.

I never noticed this before today, but I don't seem to be able to search for comments. Is that supposed to be doable on Tildes?

It took me way too long to figure out that the links at the top of the search results page are sort options; I had been clicking "Comments" hoping to see comment search results, and I was a bit confused why only full topics were still being listed. I guess comment search doesn't currently exist?

Hi Deimos

Its been a while since a lot of redditors started to move over to tildes, yours truly included, and I wondered how is it going for you?

I know you have a full time job and tildes was relatively quiet until the last few weeks but is it becoming too noisy?

I'm guessing that you have had a lot of positive feedback but I'm also guessing you have had a lot of 'why can't we make this more like Reddit?' comments as well.

I see you responding to comments left, right and center and while good this must mean you are reading everything as well as all comments in order to evaluate things, which takes time out of your day.

I know that you have a clear vision of where you want tildes to go, so I guess my question still stands, how is it going?

Looking at the current top thread in ~talk, it seems many of us were forged in the fires of Mount Digg, and now suffer again through the great Reddit diaspora. Perhaps it is here our journey ends?

I am not from the US of A, but one thing I have always found fascinating about that country is the concept of the constitution. I believe it was so incredibly well conceived, the three legged stool, with all the thought that went into how it might be attacked and edge cases, that the founding fathers would have made excellent software testers. The fact American democracy has stood this long is some feat.

Which brings me to my question. Should Tildes create some form of constitution? A set of principles that binds and guides it? I believe something like that would make questions like this easier to answer. A founding set of ideals from which everything else should derive.

We have something akin to this at my company, where the founding principle is the customer is always our main priority. This has served our business well for decades; is everything we do in service of the customer and their needs. You would honestly be amazed at the loyalty and trust this builds over time.

Anyway just some food for thought. I think I will be calling this my new home for now - it feels very much like the Reddit of old right now, a feeling I haven't felt for a great age.

So like many others, I'm a refugee from the Rexxit, and the collaborative, positive enthusiasm here is infectious.

I've had an odd observation about my brief time here - when I think I can contribute to a thread, I find myself trying to step up my posting game - doing a bit of extra research, making sure I add links, and double checking my grammar (as best as I can!). I want my thoughts to have value or be meaningful here, moreso than anywhere I've contributed to in the past.

Do others feel the same way?

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):

• https://tildes.net/~comp/iyy/what_is_your_favourite_light_theme
• https://tildes.net/~comp/j14/what_are_your_favourite_low_contrast_themes
• https://tildes.net/~tech/cfq/light_themes_or_dark_themes
• https://tildes.net/~tildes/1yd/the_thing_i_want_most_atm_is_a_dark_theme
• https://tildes.net/~tildes/19c/why_so_much_blue_for_the_dark_themes

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 ?

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"
  • Example for switching communities or go to the frontpage: "https://tildes.net/%s"
  • Example for searching: "https://tildes.net/search?q=%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 :)

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.

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.

// 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.

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

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)

Updated: June 29th 2023

Hello folks,

Like many of the other people that have been around lately, I'm new to Tildes, I've been browsing it without an account since last Monday or so while waiting for an email response (thanks @Deimos), and in that time I've been working on a little tool to add some QOL features I thought would make my experiences with the site feel better.

I didn't plan on sharing it initially, because I didn't think I'd be able to get the javascript into a usable state, and I'm not fond of sharing my code in general, as I always get a big wave of impostor syndrome whenever I do, "What if they look at my messy code and see how silly I do some things", that sort of thing. But with Tildes I want to try to correct some of my internet behaviours, for years I've generally stayed as a lurker, never commenting or sharing content of my own, so, hello there, hopefully, I stick to my guns and you see more of me.

Onto the script itself, currently, I've built five main features into it all of them being rather minor on their own, I did do bug testing on everything and couldn't find anything else, but if you notice anything please feel free to report it to me or post an issue on the repo. It's easy to miss bugs when you've only got one set of eyes.

Tildezy Github

The GitHub contains installation instructions if you've never used a userscript before, and contains some images showing off each feature described below.

Hopefully, someone gets some use out of this with me, I look forward to chatting with you all.

EDIT
Refactored the code and added a new comment traveller feature based on some of the comments below.

EDIT 2
Up to 1.3.0, we've got markdown buttons now, see comment explaining the change or check out the github readme

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)_/¯

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.

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!

A lesser known feature of Tildes that is VERY useful:

You can ignore any topic on Tildes! There are two ways to do it:

• From the main page, click Actions ▼ then Ignore this post

• From the topic itself, click Ignore

The topic will leave your feed, never to be seen again (unless you want to or made a mistake, in which case you can see it under Your ignored topics on your user page and remove it from your ignore list).

Use this to cut down on clutter from your feeds by eliminating high-activity topics you are not interested in.

It will also mute notifications from that topic as well, so it’s a good way of disengaging from a conversation if you wish.

I saw a few longtime users in other threads who were unaware of this feature until today, so I figured I’d make the PSA.

Go ahead everyone, try it on this post!

Ignore it, PLEASE!

Just a hack job, but I'd seen some comment about it being inconvenient to ignore posts so I made a quick userscript (tested with Tampermonkey on Firefox) that adds hotkeys for bookmarking/ignoring/voting on a post. It can also navigate to the link or comments or prev/next pages (←/→). Only implemented for posts 1-9 at the moment.

Ex:

i+2 ignores and hides the 2nd post (or restores, if ignored)

? shows a summary of hotkeys

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Tildes
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      0.1
// @description  Quickie convenience hotkeys for tildes.net
// @author       TT
// @match        *://tildes.net/*
// @icon         https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?sz=64&domain=tildes.net
// @grant        none
// @require      https://unpkg.com/hotkeys-js/dist/hotkeys.min.js
// ==/UserScript==
(function () {
    "use strict";
    let Action;
    (function (Action) {
        Action[Action["Invalid"] = 0] = "Invalid";
        Action[Action["Bookmark"] = 1] = "Bookmark";
        Action[Action["Comments"] = 2] = "Comments";
        Action[Action["Ignore"] = 3] = "Ignore";
        Action[Action["Open"] = 4] = "Open";
        Action[Action["Vote"] = 5] = "Vote";
    })(Action || (Action = {}));
    const regex = /tildes\.net(\/~(?<group>\w+))?/gi;
    let match = regex.exec(document.location);
    //In a group if I wanted to support hotkeys there?
    if (match.groups.group) {
        //alert(match.groups.group);
    }
    else {
        addArticleNumbers();
        addMainHotkeys();
    }
    //Route
    function routeAction(action, event, handler) {
        event.preventDefault();
        //Grab index.  Zero-index?
        let indexText = handler.key.substring(2);
        let index = parseInt(indexText) - 1;
        if (isNaN(index))
            return;
        actOnArticle(action, index);
    }
    function actOnArticle(action, index) {
        //Get article for index
        let article = document.querySelector(".topic-listing").children[index].children[0];
        //Do the thing
        switch (action) {
            case Action.Bookmark:
                if (article.style.borderStyle === 'solid')
                    article.style.borderStyle = 'none';
                else
                    article.style.borderStyle = 'solid';
                article.querySelector('button[data-ic-put-to$="bookmark"]').click();
                break;
            case Action.Comments:
                article.querySelector(".topic-info-comments a").click();
                break;
            case Action.Ignore:
                //Hide vs blank?
                if (article.style.visibility === "hidden")
                    article.style.visibility = "visible";
                else
                    article.style.visibility = "hidden";
                // article.style.display = 'none';
                article.querySelector('button[data-ic-put-to$="ignore"]').click();
                break;
            case Action.Open:
                article.querySelector(".topic-title a").click();
                break;
            case Action.Vote:
                article.querySelector(".topic-voting").click();
                break;
        }
    }
    function addArticleNumbers() {
        let titles = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".topic-title a"));
        for (let i = 1; i <= titles.length; i++) {
            let title = titles[i - 1];
            title.text = i + " - " + title.text;
        }
    }
    function addMainHotkeys() {
        //Set up handlers
        const handleBookmark = (event, handler) => routeAction(Action.Bookmark, event, handler);
        const handleComments = (event, handler) => routeAction(Action.Comments, event, handler);
        const handleIgnore = (event, handler) => routeAction(Action.Ignore, event, handler);
        const handleOpen = (event, handler) => routeAction(Action.Open, event, handler);
        const handleVote = (event, handler) => routeAction(Action.Vote, event, handler);
        hotkeys("shift+/", (e, h) => alert(getHelpText()));
        //Page nav
        hotkeys("left", (e, h) => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".pagination a")).find((e) => e.textContent == "Prev").click());
        hotkeys("right", (e, h) => Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".pagination a")).find((e) => e.textContent == "Next").click());
        for (let i = 1; i <= 9; i++) {
            hotkeys("b+" + i, handleBookmark);
            hotkeys("c+" + i, handleComments);
            hotkeys("i+" + i, handleIgnore);
            hotkeys("o+" + i, handleOpen);
            hotkeys("v+" + i, handleVote);
        }
    }
    function getHelpText() {
        return `
    ←/→ = navigation
    b = Bookmark, i = Ignore, v = Vote,
    c = Open comments, o = Open link,

    Action+[1-9] calls that action on the corresponding article`;
    }
})();

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.

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.

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 !

I tried to register here the other day with my preferred username, which was taken, so I replaced an S with a 5 as I've done in the past. Now I realize that might have been a bit deceptive - someone reading my comment might think it's coming from the other user or vice-versa, and I don't want to be that guy. What's the vibe here about that? Should I invite myself under a new name once I'm approved for invitations, or keep this username? I'd just DM the other user if that was an option on tildes.

edit: Thanks, all! I'll keep it until/unless the other user feels strongly about it.

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.

For those who are new to Tildes:
This site has quite a number of wiki pages which are maintained by volunteers (except the ~tildes.official wiki pages, which are the official documentation). Many of these community pages are now out of date, so it's a good time for people to poke around and make some changes.
For more information, including how to gain wiki editing privileges, see the announcement post from 2019.

A bit of advertising:
For those who don't know, I have been maintaining the Customizing Tildes page since 2020. It is the official successor of the Awesome Tildes project and has numerous suggestions for improving the Tildes experience using userscripts, userstyles, and uBlock Origin's filtering capabilities. Feel free to drop a message if there's something that needs to be added to the wiki.

The Actual Problem

Changes to the wiki are no longer syncing with the GitLab repository. The last commit on GitLab is from 2021!

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!

The ? means, it doesn’t really need to be coded. Technically I could just do it. But i wanted to check in first.

I really like the community here, amd sometimes want to share or ask something really small. I can and have started a whole thread for it, but we might be better served by a short comment in a larger thread.

What do yall think?

Edit — thanks to all who replied and educated me on this. I thought I'd do this rather than pollute the thread with single thank you posts while I learn the ropes here.

Hi,

I'm brand new here so this could well be answered and I'm just being stupid. Very probable tbh!

I'm on a macbook and iphone and one thing I noticed was it's a bit of a trek scrolling down to comment. Not that I've done that much.

Now I love, really love, the lightweight and speedy nature of this site (and incidentally looking forward to brushing up on my Markdown) and am hoping that with the influx feature bloat doesn't happen but would a small anchor text link somewhere up top be in order to quickly get to the comment field?

Let me know how idiotic I am and why or.. if I'm lucky.. how much of a genius I am!

Thanks,

Rodney

I didn't see it in feature requests or planned features. Has there been discussion on this before?

For the most part, I want to receive notifications of replies to my topics. But recently I made a topic that took off a bit and many days later there are replies still dropping through. At this point I would prefer to stop getting notifications and or would be great to have a button on the topic to disable replies most for that one.

Hi All,

As yet another reddit transplant (YART) I've been watching the drama on that other platform and reflecting on what the most important aspects of successful online discussions are for me.

One of the things that I value(d) most about reddit was the ability to use the keyword reddit in DuckDuckGo or Google searches to help me find more relevant and helpful content about a variety of niche subjects. So far, it seems to me like Tildes has some potential to fill this role based on its emphasis of thoughtful text content. Also, these types of searches add credibility to a site when random internet browsers stumble across a thread discussing their exact question.

One thought that I had along these lines was that people who care about this type of thing could make a concerted effort to transport content from reddit and other sites to be shared here. I don't think it would be appropriate to just copy and paste text without adding at least a bit of original thoughts or context. However, I often find myself researching niche products or ideas to such an extent that I could write up a nice summary of all my findings. A post like that could be a nice crash course to others or a fun way to introduce people to ideas they didn't know about.

Would people here be interested in consciously doing this type of thing? We could all make nice amalgamations of information we think is important as we independently research topics and post them here to boost discussion and boost Tildes threads in web search results.

Hello everyone! A few days ago I mentioned I was working on a new WebExtension for Tildes.

Since the tidal wave of users has flooded the Spectrian plains of Tildes, I came up with this idea for having interactive guided tours of the interface to explain how Tildes works and why certain things are the way they are. Well, a basic version with two (count 'em, two!) tours is here! An introduction tour as an example of what to expect and some extra info. And a homepage tour going over everything you can find there.

Firefox users, you can install Tildes Shepherd today! Chromium-based browser users, you will have to wait a while or switch to Firefox, sorry. ;)

As you will see in the introduction tour after installing the extension, if you have any questions or feedback, you can message @Community or comment in this topic. It's very likely I made some mistakes in what's already there so even if it's just a typo, let me know!

As far as other tours goes, I have some planned and am open to anyone creating their own. Even if you have no programming knowledge whatsoever, if you can come up with a tour by taking screenshots and drawing over it in your favorite image editor I'd be more than happy to turn that into code for you. The most time-consuming part of creating tours so far has been finding out all the information and then condensing it into something readable, the coding aspect has been pretty easy.

If you're new to Tildes and like what you see, please consider donating! A fundraiser was started by @talklittle and a number of goals have already been reached, with 2 more goals remaining at 500 donors. So if you want that to happen, donate! Thank you! <3