Hey guys,

Deimos gave me a bunch of invites to give out and I have a post on Reddit where I’ve been giving them out.

So far I’m looking at each persons history to make sure they aren’t a troll, and have posted generally positive and insightful content.

What do you guys think we should be vetting?

Since I’m assuming Tildes won’t be Invite-Only forever, is this just delaying the inevitable?

One of the more frustrating things about posts that become popular on reddit, is when you get to them several hours later when they have 1000+ comments. You'd love to give input, but know it'll be lost in all the traffic. No one ever scrolls to the very bottom to see the newer comments.

What if the sidebar displayed a handful of newer comments, with the main comment section remaining as it currently is? Think of it being similar to Amazon reviews, where the newest reviews are displayed on the right. This way you get to see both the most popular and newest comments at the same time.

Hi fellow Tildes Beta users!

I primarily do my browsing on an iPad or my iPhone. Currently I'm using Chrome.

Until an app is made, what do you all find the best way to browse Tildes is? The formatting is a little wonky for me, which is perfectly understandable. It's not exactly a deal breaker, but it would be a lot easier having a more optimized experience.

I doubt I'm alone, so what're y'alls preferences?

I finally signed up on tildes, and just as on the other site, I immediately proceeded to unsubscribe from ~news, ~lgbt and ~food, just because I like to focus on my interests most of the times. However, when I'm hungry for more content, my limited tastes aren't enough. On reddit, /r/all used to provide a wild west, all-you-can-eat-buffet experience, which I don't find here.

I understand the site is in early alpha and community is small (which is the main attraction for me right now), so what do you guys think about something like /r/all for tildes?

I have a question about AMP links in new topics.

I posted this with the AMP link as an experiment. After a few days of life at 2G data speeds I have begun to appreciate the benefits of AMP. Also, fast load times seem to be in line with light and quick philosophy of Tildes.net.

One downside of AMP is that it is a mobile layout which is not ideal layout on desktop with high resolution.

What do you all think of using AMP links in topics?

With so many threads asking about what operating system people use, favorite music, favorite tv-shows, etc, I feel like this is a good subgroup for all of the groups (other than maybe tildes and talk).

Posed this in the weekly thread and it was recommended to pose the question to the broader community.

I am a new user of this wonderful community and certainly plan on being active. It was a bit disappointing to see my preferred name registered and fully inactive (minus an introductory post 60 days ago).

Curious how the community thinks this should be handled, both in Alpha, an on into GA.

I suggest we require decluttering clickbaity titles. The rule can be: if the title leaves you asking "Which X?", include that X in the title; if it asks you "Why X", change it to "X Because Y". It can be a spoiler, but I'd rather have an idea of the content than the suspense, which with this sort of articles is almost never really gratifying. What do you think?

Someone posted comment, I wrote a response (here), but when I wanted to send it, I got this message: Comment not found (or it was deleted). After I refreshed, the comment was gone, not even something like [deleted comment].

Do someone know how the comment removing work?

I have an interest in this type of subjects, and it seems this site doesn't have an appropriate space for these matters. Can we have a dedicated group and if not where should I post about this kind of stuff?

Choose three words to describe the kind of community you want here, and explain why you chose those words.

Diverse

More points of view makes for a more in depth, nuanced conversation that brings viewpoints I may not have considered before. I have plenty of experience as a native woman in Canada, but that isn't the only viewpoint. Much as it pains me to admit, I don't know everything and sometimes I miss layers of conversations that others can point out to me. Those viewpoints are the ones I need to read if I want to continue growing as a person.

Welcoming

I want a community that isn't full of gatekeepers, who don't arbitrarily decide who should or should not belong before they've even had a chance to contribute. I want to see people given a chance to show who they can be on a new platform, and how they can make this a better place. The last thing we need is to chase away people who might otherwise make valid contributions to the community by being dicks.

Interesting

More threads, more topics for discussion, more traffic in general. I want to see dozens of threads I can contribute to or at least read on a daily basis, whatever that topic may be. A new book series, a hobby, a viewpoint on politics. But we're not going to get there without a diverse, welcoming group to keep new people engaged.

Hi all,

I've been thinking about this for a couple days, and since there's another discussion about the alt-right/racism/offensive attitudes, I figured it was a good time to hopefully initiate the discussion even though I myself don't have much to contribute to it.

What I'm asking for is ideas to foster inclusiveness on Tildes. I personally haven't noticed much on Reddit that's bad, but then again, I'm a young (well, sorta) white dude. What I have noticed is that, as a man, I am the "default" gender on Reddit. People are always calling me "man" on there, even when I have not given any clues about my gender.

As for my race, I haven't noticed anything making my whiteness the "default"--people call me "man" all the time, but they don't call me "honky man," after all--but I unfortunately might not notice that. Anyway, I should stop blabbing, because I unfortunately don't have much to add to this discussion.

My question is, though--and I hope other people agree that it's an important topic to discuss--what can Tildes do to encourage inclusiveness? What can Tildes do to make everyone feel welcome, regardless of their sex/gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and identity in general? If I were a woman and someone called me, "man," I expect that I would feel less welcome.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm looking for systematic ideas for what to do: if Tildes were as big as Reddit, what policies or structures could be implemented to remind people or encourage them to be more open to everyone? Is there anything that's even possible?

I posted this recently during a discussion on reddit on thread locking and wanted to post it here for discussion as well.

There's no room in a decent society for those who advocate for "race realism", deny the holocaust, or believe women are all mindless whores who can't think for themselves. If that's your (general you) idea of a useful contribution, create your own sub and be as hateful as you want, but I have no obligation to provide a platform for hatred on a sub that's dedicated to, for example, gifs of puppies and kittens.

Tildes is intended to be a place for insightful, high quality discussion. Can people who advocate for topics like race realism be part of that conversation?

Note: I am not necessarily suggesting that such topics be banned from tildes, I'd just like to hear opinions on this topic.

Edit: I posted this same topic, lightly revised, on /r/theoryofreddit to see the difference in responses. It's been enlightening.

Hi,

I have but two accounts on Reddit; one for posting stuff I make, having fun discussions, and maybe small debates about stuff that doesn't matter (games, movies, etc.); and another for political discussion/debates, because sadly, my progressive views (and admittedly abrasive tendencies when the party I'm talking to is themselves abrasive) tend to get me enough negative attention that I've been doxxed twice (admittedly over the course of 12 years, so not much).

Are alts allowed? If so, doesn't that just provide me with another 5 invites (that I will totally not abuse on account I've only used but one of the ones I've got/don't know enough friends to care about leaving Reddit)?

If not, totally understandable-- I'll just avoid posting stuff I make in the event I find myself getting into a political debate.

Thanks for the time/info either way,
Doug

Just wanted to suggest that it would be nice to have a toggle switch button either next to our username or at least on the right in the User Menu after you click your username.

Having to go all the way into settings every evening is a bit awkward.

Original title: "Voting on comments on mobile makes them impossible to reply to"

I was just reading through and voting on a few comments in a thread that was locked between me loading the page and starting to vote, and every time I clicked "Vote" the reply button on that comment would disappear. I reloaded the page and saw a) all the reply buttons had gone and b) there was a "this thread is locked" banner at the top, but until then I had no idea what was happening.

It would be really neat if Tildes could cope a little better with things like this happening. Obviously it's not necessarily realistic for every client to keep a connection open with the server so that posts can be locked in real time, but it would be nice if behaviour in situations like this could at least be consistent – either all the reply buttons disappear and the banner appears at the top, or nothing changes at all. It's really disconcerting to have individual buttons disappearing as you're interacting with them!

I also notice that changes to page state don't get persisted across history navigation; if I click on a post, vote on it, then press back in my browser, the post doesn't appear to be voted for until I refresh the page. Is it possible to fix that too?

I'm going to keep it brief, because there's not a lot to talk about:

• The font size and lightness makes it really hard to read the text for posts. It could be easier to read by changing these aspects.

• Could disabling the inline text for posts be added? I wouldn't mind if I had to view the comments page for a post to read it as I'd read the post if it interested me, so currently I have to scroll past it instead. It makes the post listings harder to skim through, especially because it's hard to read the text on them.

• It made me think of another point; maybe some kind of middle option where text can be associated with a topic, but there could be another field where a brief summary that's more descriptive than the title is placed, or just truncate the post text and explicitly show that there's more.

Is there a plan in place to take tags with certain words and convert them to a standard? Say there is a Tiny Desk Concert posted in music and someone tags it Tiny Desk, someone else tags it TinyDesk, and someone else tagged it Tiny Desk Concert. Is there a plan to take tags with specific words and change it to one things so all of the related content gets grouped together. So in this example, if a tag has tiny desk in it, it is converted to whatever the standard is. So from tiny desk to Tiny Desk Concert. That way everything ends up with the same tag?

I stopped checking the site so regularly, and as tends to happen with not-yet-solidified habits, I fell off the Tildes wagon for a bit.

What interesting updates, news, changes, drama, or discussions would you say has highlighted the past two months?

Thanks!

Solved thanks to @MrGrey in the comments! Leaving the post text here for posterity.

Whenever I join a new site one of the first things I do is customize the style to my liking with CSS skins. I'm having a little trouble here, though, specifically with the fact that no matter what I do, I can't increase the width of the paragraphs in posts and comments.

As far as I can tell, the div.topic-text-full element spans all the way across the main element, with just a little margin space. .topic-text-full's child p elements only span maybe 80% of .topic-text-full's width, though, and my attempts to make them wider have met with failure:

.topic-full-text p {
  width: 10%;
  }

successfully shrinks the element, and so do any other widths under 100%. Setting it to any number above 100% makes no changes. Similarly, setting the width in pixels can shrink the element width, but not increase it.

The same goes if you replace .topic-full-text with .comment-text.

Is there something very simple that I'm missing? It just really bugs me that the paragraphs don't go all the way across, but since that's such a small issue I'd rather fix it on my end rather than file an official complaint about it.

I feel like this would be good for transparency. It's a feature Facebook used to have and then took away— but I think something that either shows each edit's version in a timeline, or a diff, or just a "first and final revision" comparison would be nice.

I'd prefer the first suggestion (a chronological version history), but any form of viewing a comment's history would be really appreciated!

Currently it isn't too difficult to follow people and their posts. That will likely change as Tildes participation grows. I for one would appreciate a feature to follow individuals and their posts. I realize this is likely low on a priority list and since I'm relatively new, my apologies if this has been suggested before.

Thanks for all the hard work.

I've been grumbling about many of the things Tildes is trying to address for years. And I'm not alone. OTOH I have seen some sites that do some bits right, and some sites that almost got it right only to fall flat at the penultimate hurdle. Let's try to collect and enumerate what I think is good and bad, both here and elsewhere. I'm optimistic about here because Tildes is a work in progress and some of these are quite readily fixable.

Tildes, the good:

#1, a long way ahead of everything else: Non-profit.
I think Twitter and Reddit and Facebook all amply demonstrate why any general discussion forum that tries to make a profit is doomed to mediocrity and worse. Google+ is an edge case - the service may be free, but Google is watching and measuring your every move. And constantly optimising for their own performance metrics, of which fostering intelligent discussion totally is not on the list and is actually discouraged. See:
'The Algorithm' is Not an Idiot, It Is Actively Deceptive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/51mme29dSMy

#2 Markdown (also a coutny mile ahead of the alternatives) - elegantly simple markup; not too much, not too little. Even if you have technical quibbles with markdown's capabilities, the system is widely-enough known to outweigh them. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate choice.

#3 Clean simple UI (couple of grumbles though - see below)

#4 'Votes' rather than +1s, thumbs up, likes or or other cutesy shite. Elementary good UI practice - say what you mean.

Tildes, the bad including what I hope are readily fixable or just oversights:

#1 Poor display contrast. Don't use light grey text on white, you numpties, just because it's fashionable. If you want this site to be around long-term you'll have people of all ages posting, some with e.g. poor eyesight. There are well-known guidelines for the optimum contrast ratios for online text. Look 'em up and bloody stick within them. If you go for AAA that will be another point where you're ahead of the Google, Apple and other fashion-driven sites. Don't care if it's unfashionable, and if you want to be around in 20 years (as another successful discussion site I'll cite later has been) you should stick with what's usable, not what's currently cool. KTHXBAI. WebAIM: Colour Contrast Checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

#2 Missed opportunity, fixable:

You can look at activity from the last hour, day, 3 days etc, or enter a flexible range. But you've only made the range one-ended!! So how are you supposed to find a post from 'about 6 months ago' without scrolling through thousands of entries? Again, if you're interested in longevity, you have to ensure that it's possible for humans to refind older posts, and to check back to a specific date range that may eventually be months or years back. My 'long-lived site' inserts markers with month and year so that you can tell where you are in the feed without having to peer at some tiny date in light grey on lighter grey.

#3 Vague datestamps

Use dates FFS. 'About 2 hours ago' is a moving target, duh. How are you supposed to refind a post timestamped 'about 2 hours ago' on a fast-moving thread that was left sitting unrefreshed on your laptop for half a day while you were disconnected from the internet? Useless. For short periods, yes, some users may prefer a vaguer indicator, but once a post is more than about 12-16 hours old, just use the date and time, OK? Vague timestamps, while superficially user-friendly, are a superb and subtle way to disrupt the serious discussions Tildes wants to foster. That's why Google+, for example, does it, and that's why you shouldn't. Also, if the date's in a predictable, stable form, you can search for it. Load a shit-ton of posts going back months, then try searching for a post made 'two months' ago; then search again in a couple of weeks and the same search will give different results!

#4 Preview and save button

Where's my post preview button? I would have like to preview this screed before posting it. And given how long it is maybe saving it as a work in progress would have been useful too!

Missing feature: effective filtering/killfiling
Long-term, if the site gets big, it will live or die on this. Seriously.
You need to be able to filter users, posts, and thread and groups temporarily or permanently.
That includes being able to temporarily hide people you follow and like just to get their posts out of the way. So, mute for an hour, mute for a day, mute for a week, mute for a month (maybe), mute permanently. Applicable to every possible category on the site you can think of. dredmorbius (who is also here) goes on about this a lot. The ability to filter stuff out is far more important than the ability to 'find' stuff. Just filtering out the stuff you don't want helps the stuff you do bubble to the surface!

Saveable filters (long term feature)

When I want to collect cat memes, non-cat memes are noise and I need to filter them out (see above). When I want to read about other sutff, the cat memes are noise and I need to filter them. I don';t want to have to keep creating and discarding filters. As soon as your filtering system is powerful enough to be useful, it will be too much work to keep redoing, so make 'em saveable and organisable. There's uses for all of whitelists, greylists and blacklists.

Post auto indexing (long term feature)

I have to manually write and maintain my own damn post indexes on G+, otherwise all my old posts just vanish into limbo, inaccessible unless you know a unique search phrase from that particular post or are prepared to scroll for hours. [But the Goodle internal servers can access and analyse them all just fine.] My post index, with some comments: https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/XoWoRujTBun

Rapid browse mode, paginated

When you're reading in depth, it may be OK to have a Google+-like UI with only half a dozen posts on-screen at once. (Tildes is currently shopwing me ten at a time, which ain't enough of an improvement to be worthwhile.) But this is hair-tearingly inefficient if you want to scan a lot of posts rapidly. You need a dense display format that shows large numkbers of posts so people can skim and find things quickly. With thumnails for images and indicators for links. Paginated, with the pages staying at consistent points. That way you can keep track of you place when you're browsing back in the archives, and even bookmark old stuff. Sometimes you want leisurely mode, but sometimes you want to jump back a way before switching to leisurely. Having only a slow browsing route is very effective at killing access to older discussions. Anything older than a few days or a few dozens of posts is effectively lost.

Soft auto-lock for old posts
Posts should auto-lock after... about 3 months of inactivity is a good number IME. But ideally it should be a soft lock, which means people can resurrect them. If you post on a soft-locked thread, you get a warning, or the owner gets to decide whether to unlock the thread and let your post appear. So consequently you need a preference setting so that post owners can indicate whether they want a soft or a hard lock on a post, and the time till it triggers.

Per forum thread/post limits
If you've got a forum with 1,000 active threads, you haven't really got one forum. You've either got several, in which case they should be split up, or you've got one forum with a lot of noise. So there might be something to be said for limiting the number of discussion threads in proportion to the number of users; for example, if ~dogs.chihuahuas has 5 users, let them have the default of 20 threads. Of which they might only use six. Nothing says you have to use all 20. But if ~dogs.pugs had 40,000 followers, perhaps it should be permitted 70 threads. If 70 isn't enough, it's probably past time to split ~dogs.pugs up. There is an uppser and a lower limit to how many people you can have a sensible discussion with. The lower limit is 2, and for small forums or up to a couple of dozen regulars 20 threads should be ample. When you get to hundeds or regulars, the thread count does need to go up a bit. But when you get to 10,000s, the noise levels starts to go up and it's time to split the group into subgroups. A thread count is a decent way to enforce that - I'd say even the biggest forum isn't allowed more than 2-3 screenfuls of threads. So 30-60, maybe. If that's not enough, it's time to subdivide, because keeping communities from getting too large keeps discussion quality higher. You can always follow both groups even after the split. But if you dislike regular A in group X, you can switch to group Y where they don't post. If everything's lumps together without regard to community scaling, you never get away from regular A unless you unsubscribe from group X altogether.

Other sites

Google+

Circles (bad, it turns out) - seemed good at the time, but it turns out they're at the wrong end of the broadcast stream. The recipients have no way to filter what you post into the categories they want, and it's their preferences that matter at this point.

Collections (good, it turns out) - this was the better way to do it. If someone posts cat pics, politics, and astronomy, you can just follow the subset of their posts you're interested in. This is reasonably effective, implicit filtering.

Infinite scrolling windows (very bad) - [But excellent for Google's purposes of stifling anything but superficial conversations.] Finding anything older than a few hours may take literally hours of scrolling unless there's a search term you can enter. So tough shit if you wanted to find an image post with no associated text.

Awesomely atrocious search Google used to be good at search. You wouldn't think so from the comedy search tool they provide on G+.

Notifications (meh) - When you only have a few followers, it's nice to know you've been followed or mentioned or whatever. As your user count grows that becomes noise and then spam. Notifications have to scale intelligently, because a user with 240,000 followers has massivly different needs from a user with 12.

My own comments: Google Plus User Feedback Archive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/DUanxsc7ya1

Ello

I like the clean UI, and it's very good for image posting.
The discussions ain't too bad either, but it's maybe a bit too minimalist, and again, there was no way to find old posts,l so they're effectively lost.

Twitter

Well it would be good if people actually used it for short posts of up to 2xx characters or whatever the present limit is. But when you have people writing articles that need dozens of Tweets (and there's aggregator apps to collect them back into full articles FFS) then the system is clearly not being used in the way it was originally intended to be. I think this is what corporations would like the future of all discussion to be. Basically babble, where even the good stuff vanishes without trace after, well, potentially a few tens of minutes if you follow a lot of people. It's like drinking at a firehose. Jeez. You harldy need to exert effort to bury stuff. Just wait a while.

Usenet

Good for: killfiles, threaded discussions, clue, and asynchronous discussions spanning weeks, months or longer.
Bad for: trolls, spam. Especially spam.

I sincerely hope there are some Tilders who are thoroughly familiar with the dynamics, successes and failures of Usenet. It does a lot of things right that you'll also need to get right. And now all the morons are on the web, I'm not sure if Usenet is reverting to clued people only, or if the spammers are killing it off completely. TBH I'm not sure there's much point spamming Usenet these days; next to no-one goes there, and those that do are tech-savvy and exceptionally spam-hostile. Haven't been on myself for years. A very good example of a private usenet area that works well is the Povray news hierarchy. Another demonstration that focus on a single subject (the PoVRay raytracer) does a good job of keeping site/forum/whatever clue levels high. news.povray.org http://news.povray.org/groups/

Web Forums

Good for: focussed discussions on a single subject. In general, the more focussed the higher the quality. The Wesnoth forums, for example, are all about the Wesnoth computer game. So it's easy to tell what's off-topic and remove it. But the Giant in the Playground forums, which also include general roleplaying, are not as focussed and the clue level of the posters, while not atrocious, is noticeably lower, and a much greater degree of moderation is needed. But the GiantITP forums are much bigger than Wesnoth, so there a lot of just scaling effects going on there too. You also see this on, I guess, the Steam forums and Reddit groups, where the small niche communities (e.d. OpenTTD on Reddit) tend to be much more pleasant places to visit than the forums for mega-games like, I dunno, World of Warcraft.

Reddit

Good for: Actually handling collossal volums of posts on all sorts of subjects without collapsing into chaos.
I'm not a big Reddit fan, but I have to give them credit for working at all, given their traffic volume.

Also good for: Reddit Gold isn't a terrible way to fund a commercial-ish site. Aspects of that could be stolen.

Wikis

Placeholder

Suspect there may be some things that could be learned from how Wikis do things, but nothing comes to mind at present. May revisit later.

Email lists

Good for: digests?

Digests might be a useful feature when you're following a long-running discussion?
Google+ almost got this right - you can opt to recieve an email whenever someone comments after you, but you can't get G+_ to send you emails fo your own posts, or to send you a summary/digest of the full discussion. So you can have a partial email archive of threads you've been involved in, but you can't have an email record of your own contributions. So, half of a useful feature there. Nice one, guys.

Mornington Crescent

These sites have been running for decades. They're basically text databases plus a bit of Perl glue code. A decent developer could (and has, more than once) knock out a fully functioning Mornington Crescent site in a matter of a few afternoons.

Good for: longevity, stability, simplicity, 'weak user IDs', asynchronous discussions which can become realtime if you're online at the same time as your correspondent.

Probably bad for: scaling, security
The Crescent sites have a couple of dozen game threads each, and you post a comment wherever you feel like. Then the next person does the same, and so on. Some of the long-running games (e.g. the genral chat thread) have 30,000+ posts spanning years. But becuase it's paginated rather than an infinite scrolling window, you can jump back e.g. 1,000 posts (a few months) with relative ease.

These sites all predate markdown, so they let you use basic HTML instead. A feature which has been horribly abused, most notably in the bad HTML game, and Acre Street (don't ask). A modern MC site, you'd use markdown.

They still work on any browser - even Lynx - they don't even depend on Javascript. It's a web form with two or three fields. You type on your comment, click submit, and your comment is inserted into the page. Then the next person does the same, over and over for years, and the page grows as you do. As simple as a a web forum can possibly be, I suspect. And if bandwidth/performance becomes a problem, you can auto-split it into year-sized or 1000-post-sized chunks. Yes, people mostly only browse the last few tens of posts, but a paginated system lets you jump back further on occasion without placing an undue burden on the servers. (I go on about pagination a lot. I think it's a make-or-break feature, and it's only out of favour at the moment due to the whims of fashion and the web-corps' desires to make and keep online conversations at a superficial level. The black hats are doing it intentionally, and others are emulating them because they wrongly think they're following good - rather than evil - practice.
Speaking of evil practice - check out Dark Patterns in Design for some of the ways we're manipulated: https://darkpatterns.org/

'Weak User ID' - there's a text box you type your name in. Most people use the same name every time, because it establishes reputation. But it's just a text box so you could type in anything. That bit probably wouldn't scale, but for us, given that between us we all know everyone who posts except for the occasional random who shows up, it works fine.

'Non-persistent chat' - one of the sites, which has since shut down, had a rolling chat page that was only transient. Chat posts older than about a week and more than 100 posts ago just disappeared off the bottom of the chat page and were lost for good, unless someone saved the chat. For some discussions - e.g. things like cat memes, this kind of transient chat is probably ideal. You could even implement an infinite scroller, because you know the end of the chat is never going to be more than 5-10 screens away. That wouldn't be so good for 50-100 screen. As a yardstick my G+ posts would probably go back about 1200 screens. Who the hell would ever scroll through that? If Tildes becomes successful, it will quickly hit to same point. Pagination, chaps. It's not sexy, but it's the only reasonable way to manage long data streams.

OK, initial data dump done. This is more complete than I epxcted to get for a first go, but more typos too :-)

Am likely to revist.

Personally, I hope it takes over Reddit’s role of being primarily for discussion and a place to congregate interesting content, staying away from the more mainstream-y aspects, like the redesign. What do you expect/hope for?

So, my latest friend has already forgotten password (that's what you get for not using a password manager sniff). He says he setup a recovery account, but I'm not sure if the email to be sent should be in any particular format. Has anybody tried account recovery process? How can we do this?

I'm probably about to be guilty of causing the problem I'd like to solve, namely the endless iterations of questions asked and previously answered, or seemingly innocent questions that are tantamount to trolling.

I'm sure there have been prior discussions about pinning items, and I've seen prior commentary about further refining the ground rules for some sub-group areas.

For the sake of efficiency and comity, there are communities where it would be helpful to create a common body of rules, reference material or other semi-permanent posts which should be regarded as the minimum governance/factual/technical basis for having a productive discussion.

From a UI design perspective, Reddit, xda-developers, and some other forums have created visually confusing, dis-unified means of handling this - there are multipage FAQ/Wiki top links plus sidebars plus top pins. There's considerable independence among Reddit forums as to which model is chosen, furthering the confusion. I'd like to see Tildes "keep it simple", so pinned topics may be the way to maintain consistency and uniformity.

Seeking thoughts and discussion about whether this is needed, feasible, desirable, etc.

[What prompted this query was a a random response on this topic which posited a strawman argument so disingenuous that I wanted to run off and pull a Wiki together just so I could say, "do this minimal amount of homework and come back later, or get reported for being an obvious troll".]

Note: edited to remove confusion of groups, sub-groups and topics, since I hadn't had enough coffee yet. Sadly I can't do this for the topic title...

If you want to make the site diverse then people need to stop writing as though the audience is one country. Obviously it doesn't count if they're posting in a geographically relevant group eg. ~news.usa

You guys should add the ability to review the posting history of yourself and other users!

I really love the site so far tho, and I'm super happy to express any ideas I have. So far I'm really impressed with what you have here

Would there be a way to show the number of new posts on a topic since the last time you read it? I find a lot of threads tend to linger for a couple days, and I forget how many comments there were the last time I checked. It would be awesome if it could display something like '10 Comments (2 new)' on a topic I'd visited before.

It would also be awesome if there was a way to highlight the new comments on the page when you click through as well to make it easier to find them.

P.S.: Sorry if this has been covered somewhere else. Still not sure what the best way to find old topics without manually reading every post is.

I noticed that Tildes docs make a point out of using words instead of labels. The stated reason is that icons may be difficult to understand, and I honestly don't get how is this the case.

Icons, when used right, are much more usable and intuitive than any text labels. They are small, distinct, they draw attention and you can tell what they do just by looking at them instead of reading them.

Take the classic upvote/downvote scrollers used on Reddit, Imgur, etc. It uses icons for upvotes and downvotes, but there isn't a single person I know who doesn't know what those mean. It's intuitive and usable. It doesn't require localization. It just works.

In contrast, the "Vote (10)" button on Tildes. It uses text, on a page full of text. It's an important UI element, one of the most used UI elements really, but it's not visually highlighted in any way. The amount of votes, which is an important metric, isn't distinct, making it hard to read. The "text button" style it uses is usually reserved for buttons that are used rarely, such as "Edit" or "Delete", or buttons that open more menus, such as "Edit" or "Reply". It's not intuitive.

Yes, this is a minor thing, but it's minor things that make the overall experience pleasant or unpleasant. And it shows how icons (and highlights), when used right, make user experience better.

I know that users can manually set this option as default, but it can be confusing for newcomers to only see, say, 4 threads in the whole group when there are many more than that. This makes it easier to navigate content (especially with a smaller community with less being submitted), is two less clicks for someone who wants to see older submissions, and is easier for new users who may have not found the ‘time sorting’ setting.

So far, I haven’t seen too much moderation aside from bans, etc. dealt out by the admins (unless I’m wrong here and a moderation system is currently in place, please correct me if I’m wrong), but how will this work once Tildes is fully released to the public? Will people who show interest in a certain community be reached out to and asked?

I was posting a something earlier and tried to use an apostrophe in a tag, and it told me off for doing so. Well, kind of, it didn't mention what was wrong, but it was pretty easy to deduce. Can the "tags: Invalid tags" maybe point/link somewhere about what is or isn't allowed?

(also I'm just really curious, what are the limits? I just found out accents [or at least 'tést'] aren't allowed either)

Did you consider putting the name on the bottom of the comment? As tildes invites for high quality discussions witch tend to incent longer comments than elswhere i think it might be better suited to have the name on the end of the comment.

This has some advantages:

• It's easier to notice the autor of a good long text
• When starting to read a comment you don't now the autor yet, so its easier to rate the content instead of the person
• It looks a lot more like a letter, which suits tildes well I think

Maybe it's just me coming from reddit where you close to never meet the same autor twice, so reading the names of the autors does not really matter, and as tildes uses a very similar design I just never seem to notice the name and always have to scroll back up afterwards.

It would be nice to have that functionality (at least as an option), so that the thread doesn't close. I personally instinctively close the tab after I am done reading instead of going back, which can be really frustrating after the realization I have nothing to read now (yeah, I know, CTRL+SHIFT+T, reopen last closed tab etc etc, but it's much more convenient to hit CTRL+W and be back where you stopped reading the thread).

Someone on reddit came up with this idea:

a thread statistics page that would show the average age of accounts replying, the top subreddits those accounts use, the frequency of posted replies and how they group up

This would be interesting to see as Tildes scales up as a defensive measure against bots and brigading (once invite-only goes away...if it does)