I just read over the Technical Goals page, and I agree with everything you're doing. I feel like I'm the only one who's annoyed by the recent trends of web design and development that involves heavy use of icon-based navigation and JavaScript. I'm stoked to see what Tildes will become given this direction.

I know I'm not nearly as skilled and experienced as you -- Deimos and the Tildes team -- at web development, but if there's any way that I -- a sysadmin with experience in AWS -- can help, I would be happy to be a part of it. Otherwise, I can continue to lurk, occasionally post, and sing praise of Tildes! Cheers!

This is mostly a question for @Deimos, just out of curiosity: is there are particular reason for the choice of Pyramid as the framework for TIldes? Is it familiarity, or clear advantages over sth. like Django or Flask?

(Edit: actually I'd welcome comparisons favouring one or another from anyone too, related or not to Tildes itself.)

I wished to set aside some threads to read on my Kindle. I use the Kindle Chrome extension for that, but on Tildes it only captures the main topic, not the comments. I tried saving the page locally but the Kindle app still didn't work. My only option on Chrome seems to be printing to PDF, but that's a subpar solution. I was able to convert the offline page to mobi using Calibre, though, but this is not very practical and the result was not that good.

maybe I should have written conversion friendly, because printing to paper/PDF is working fine

~news will be populated with mainly U.S news and also mainly U.S politics, ~worldnews could be a group for just world news and events.

also there is a sub r/globaltalk which is basically focused around soft-core news events from around the world. An example of this is this post: "Man tries to open plane’s door, thinks it’s way to the loo - Times of India." it is just like interesting news stories that aren't too serious from around the world. Not sure if that would fit here, just a sugesstion

So this might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe Tildes should remain invite only, albeit perhaps with each user having unlimited invites from the start to hand out to anyone.

This approach can allow Tildes to grow but still keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible, keeping a relatively small (compared to reddit at least) community that stays true to how we are now - focused on thoughtful discussion.

Any thoughts on this approach or other ideas to balance user quality with user-base size?

They could be user submitted and the admins/mods could choose a poll to display every week.

I think it would fit well in the sidebar with the percentage of overall votes being shown once your vote is cast.

I think small things like that help build a sense of community and helps keep people engaged. The topic of the polls could be as lighthearted or serious as the mods decide, though i'd personally like a mix of both.

Thanks to whoever fixed the tags, i'm still not entirely sure how to tag topics appropriately.

I'm here for a few hours during the day while at my shop (EST), and usually about two more in the evening, around 9:00 pm. Every important thread I read (announcements, site discussion, well-commented threads) seems to be at least 12 hours old, with most being more like 19 hours old. It's hard to get in on the conversation when every thread I reach where I'd like to comment is that aged.

If I look at the last 12 hours, I get a bunch of threads with 0-5 comments. Maybe there's not a great solution, but it's hurting my contributing here because no one really wants to dredge up a conversation that people had yesterday or the day before.

So, what sort are most people using, and does anyone else see this issue, or is it just difficult to create a sort that would assure my seeing threads that get "hot?"

Hi, I looked through JS files and I noticed that all JS and CSS are called with weird parameter. tildes.css?aadf6c54 tildes.js?e6d30b42 third_party.js?4393e99 (I changed the string after ?)

Does anyone know why is it done and what does it mean?

Whilst I am no fan of reddit's redesign, one of the features I liked about it was the way you could click on a indent line to collapse the child comments at that level. Whilst tildes displays these indent lines, clicking on them does nothing, and you have to scroll up to get to the collapse button. Another possible solution would be to collapse comments under the cursor when a hotkey is pressed, although this could be awkward due to both mouse and keyboard being used.

Designing, coding, moderating, promoting and doing all the business admin on Tildes must be fairly thankless. But without all this effort we'd not be able to enjoy discussions with each other & share all this interesting content. I don't feel that much appreciation is really shown on here (except maybe miss-voting on all Deimos' comments).

But it is a little awkward, spurious thanks all over the place would just be noise. I thought I'd make a topic especially for people to say thanks in. I'm really enjoying Tildes content and discussion. Plus I'm a big believer in the goals of Tildes as laid out in the docs.

So I'd like to say a big thank you to Deimos and other useful contributors! Thanks for making the site we have to use today and dreaming of the hopefully better possible site we'll see in the future.

I'm also hoping to start a discussion on what enthusiastic Tildes users can do to most usefully help make Tildes good now and better in the future.

A list of stuff we can do:

• Obviously posting lots of good content and interesting discussions. Voting honestly and using comment labels judiciously.

• You can donate and currently we can see Tildes Patreon is at $375 a month. Deimos posted some more figures recently.

• We all regularly get invite codes and bringing in more people who can get excited (and maybe also help) is obviously good.

• The issue tracker and bug reports are all public so you can make suggestions, vote or comment on existing ones and perhaps more usefully see if you can work out how to reproduce reported bugs.

• As of a bit over two months ago Tildes is open source. This means you can track down bugs from the issue tracker or even contribute code for new features.

RFC:

So are other people liking Tildes? What is it you like? Are you excited enough to want to help out?

Also is there anything useful users can do I've missed? In these already mentioned areas what's actually most useful to do? Are some things of negative use? Could Deimos change his process to make more use of community help? Is there anything Deimos could delegate that people would be willing to volunteer on? Gitlab Walmart greeter would be cool but is anyone willing to do it?

I got the new iPhone and my home screen shortcut to Tildes was removed. Found myself back on Reddit and just had an experience that reminded me how much distaste I have for their culture.

Made me wonder if we’ll ever have a native mobile app for Tildes. It’s really the biggest reason I’m not here far more often.

I’m sure it’s been discussed and I know there are tons of competing priorities- only sharing my perspective :).

Tags are tricky-- should they be plural? How granular should they be? How generic should they be?

I think something that could help solve this problem is autocomplete suggestions while typing out tags. As I've been looking at posts and retagging, I've realized a lot are placed in single-post tags. Sure, this is bound to happen, especially on a new site, but autocompleting tags as you type them should help encourage users to tag with the correct one, like academic studies vs academic study.

The main con I can see with such a system would be overtagging. Since tags should actually apply to the topic at hand directly, seeing these tag suggestions could encourage people to use less applicable tags rather than think of them themselves.

Thoughts?

As the title says, I'm wondering if there is any want or need for a Tildes Discord server. I have a few ideas on how it might work, and how to make it a better for discussion than the usual Discord server.

My personal reason for wanting a Tildes Discord server is that right now, Tildes is a slow site. Posts are made once every hour or so, and while I'd much rather have the hourly high-effort and interesting posts than low-quality posts, a Discord server would be able to facilitate more direct and speedy discussion. The problem is that a Discord server is inherently geared towards more low-quality discussion already, so a pretty extensive system might have to be put into place to make it work.

However, I don't want to go through the process of creating only to find out that no one is interested. If there is significant interest, I'll do a write-up of the ideas I have and add them onto this post.

Slightly unrelated, but I'm still getting adjusted to the tag system. If I've done anything wrong there, please let me know.

Edit: Many helpful users have pointed out and shown many problems with the idea, as well as Deimos' stance on them. Right now it just seems to not be worth it, but I'll keep the idea on the backburner for the future perhaps.

It's been a while since I've managed to follow the development of the Tildes community so I don't know how many invite waves we've had since then.

For the uninitiated, back in the first 30 days (I think?) I started a plugin project for Chrome and Firefox that is meant to be the "reddit enhancement suite" light but for tildes. A sort of Tildes Companion (that would have been another good name, damn).

Anyway, after an initial 2-3 weeks of furious development, some of it with the help of the good @Bauke, I've had to slow down quite a bit due to a big workload coming in at my company. After that I've had several family issues to deal with... to cut it short I neglected my beloved little code monster and today I saw not one, but two PM on tildes, asking me if I basically was alive and well :P

So I thought that maybe it was the moment to ask for a feedback and, eventually, help.

For reference, this is the github page.

If you'd like to take part in the project you should know that:

• It's written using jquery
  I thought of using other libraries or pure js but in the end it was the better compromise between spreaded knowledge and ease of use. Even if it's not the faster or lighter, taking up jquery is relatively easy compared to other libraries.
• You have to have a minimum understanding of how plugins works for both chrome and firefox
  I started it after a long hiatus (I think 8 years) between this and the previous plugin I wrote, so if I could do it, you can as well :)
• If you want to have access to the publishing / code review / merge features, you have to show me a decent understanding of code design
  I'm not particularly picky but I'd like to be sure that the plugins doesn't go live with lots of spaghetti code. There are already a couple of points in which I wanted to review and rewrite some code and I'd like to know that whoever will take responsability for the code quality, is at least concerned with quality as much as I am.

To discuss further technical details please, come on slack (you don't have to even install it, you can use the web client).

What I'd like to discuss here with you, is if in your opinion, there is still interest in this project or not. From the end-user point of view.

To have a structured data of the feedback, please use this form. The same form will have a section in case you can/want to help.

Thank you, anyway, for any input.

I've noticed in the last few days that buttons to post a new topic or comment seem to have disappeared from the site. I have to add /new_topic manually to open a post form and press Ctrl+Enter to post it.

Is it just me?

EDIT: If anyone having the same problem with Firefox, it's probably some rogue uBlock Origin filter. What helped me:

• Go to the uBO settings.
• Go to the "Filter lists" tab.
• Push "Purge all caches" and then "Update now".
• Wait for it to update.
• Delete all caches and reload the page.

Either that, or simply disable cosmetic filtering for the site.

Since activity is the default view when looking at tildes, it seems like bumping a topic all the way to the top after each new comment can get a little abusive after the topic has existed for quite a while.

I'm thinking there should be some sort of restriction that after a topic has been inactive for a certain amount of time, it does one of four things:

1. It closes. New comments cannot be added, but votes can still be added.
2. A warning appears upon clicking the reply or add new comment button, warning the user that this will bump the topic, maybe giving the option of a silent reply. (no bumping)
3. As topics progress in age (think more than a week), new comments bump less and less on the list as the topic becomes less relevant.
4. As a plugin to the trust system, only users with high enough trust can bump topics after a certain date.

I just joined this website today and I like it quite a bit already. Several of the design choices seem to be really well thought out and the community seems pretty open to discussion, etc. While reading the initial email you receive when signing up, the creator talks about how this place isn't going to be a bastion of free speech and certain types of content (hate speech, etc) won't be tolerated and I understand where he is coming from.

I'm sure many people are aware of Voat and how it was a response to Reddit censoring several subreddits (/r/the_donald, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc) and if you go there now, it's pretty much exactly the type of demographic you would expect to occupy those subreddits originally.

But while I can see where the creator is coming from with his approach, I guess I'm just curious where you guys would draw the line? Because making a place that caters to people that you could say are on the opposite side of the Voat spectrum seems like a great breeding ground for another echo chamber. And I guess I've become a bit disillusioned with the idea that I can get "balanced" opinions on controversial topics on content-aggregate websites. Maybe that's not even possible with this format. Either way, I'm wondering if anyone feels the same.

The Most Votes/Most Comments/Newest are self explanatory, but what does "activity" mean? I looked at the FAQ and Mechanics blog posts and I didn't see anything explaining it. Is it similar to Reddit's "Hot" view? I'm especially curious because it appears to be the default.

https://usefathom.com/
https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Fathom is a new no nosense analytics platform that is thereby fully GDPR compliant and stores no identifiable user information. It's fully open source, with self-hostable and paid options, and shows great overviews of page views and top referrers.

They have a live demo running the stats for their main site available at https://stats.usefathom.com/#!last-7-days

I've been noticing that people aren't really looking at the group name that a post is sent to. Most notably there's a weekly ~anime post asking what everyone has been watching or reading. Just about every time there's people that post responses that are off topic (not anime or manga).

Here's an example. At the moment half of the posts are not related to anime or manga. It shows that it is something that needs to be considered.

Maybe have a uniquely colored border on the top and sides with the group name in bold perhaps? Also having the same color as the background on posts on the home page?

I'm suggesting a user flair-type option for people to select and display their personal pronouns.

This option would be accessed via a user's settings page. It would say something like "select your pronoun". The user would select their pronoun from a list. The selected pronoun would display discreetly beside their username wherever they post and comment.

The basic minimal version of this option would have three selections:

• him
• her
• them

We don't need to display the longer "he/him", "she/her", "they/them". Most English users know the subjective, objective, and possessive cases for these various pronouns; the important piece of information is the gender itself.

I've chosen pronouns instead of genders because there are many possible genders to include, but only three existing English third-person pronouns.

A slightly more advanced version might show four selections:

• him
• her
• them
• other

The even-more advanced version would include a text box for the user to enter a pronoun:

• him
• her
• them
• other (Please specify: ________)

The user could type something like "zhe" or "hir" in that text box, which would then be displayed beside their username instead of "him"/"her"/"them".

This option would be totally voluntary. Not every user should be required to provide this information, and not every user will want to provide this information. But for those users who want to inform people about their gender, or for those users who want to stop people making assumptions or prevent people having to ask questions about their gender, this would be a handy option.

I have "track my last visit to each topic's comments and mark new comments" enabled in my settings, and it's an awesome feature. One useful aspect of it is I can scan down the page, and the "(X new)" text in red is a line down the page, so it's an easy way to look for "any discussions I haven't seen yet?"

The gap is, if I haven't viewed that topic at all, the "(X new)" marker doesn't show up. So a thread with 50 comments that all are new to me, looks the same on first glance as a thread with 50 comments that already had 50 comments the last time I viewed it.

This all started about 5 minutes ago because I added a link to the EFF story on the post of the Gizmodo article submission about Facebook sharing phone numbers used for 2FA with advertisers, but the more I thought about it in the past 5 minutes since that comment I think it could be more.

There's more information out there and available than ever before. The barrier for for entry on content creation is lower than ever. However this has led to the easy-spread of misinformation. It's not that the right info isn't out there, it's that finding it is harder now.

The idea is to have a site that is essentially a link aggregator. But what makes it different is that if you find a site that talks about the same thing you can tack on the article to the post. Ergo making posts about events, not articles. Bringing sources together and making cross referencing easy.

As a lurker on the somethingawful forums one of my favorite features is a button which will show all the posts a single person has made in a thread. It'd be really handy if someone (like the OP) is answering questions about a topic. It's really nice to have on a more traditional forum website, but I'm not sure how useful it'd be here. Regardless, I thought I would suggest it.

Here is an example: Before and After

Sorry if this has been discussed already, I wasn't sure how to find it. I'm curious if votes on child comments affect the placement of their parent comments. Imagine this scenario:

• Comment 1 (25 votes)
• Comment 2 (2 votes)
  • Comment 3 (150 votes)

In this example, would the popularity of #3 cause #2 to be positioned above #1?

Edit: Oh the nested list formatting looks weird. Comment 3 is meant to be a child of Comment 2, if that wasn't clear.

Could we have a feature where similar posts can be linked/tagged and showup somewhere obvious, so you can access both posts from each other, linking the two. Something anyone visiting the topic can do.

So there is a link from post A to B but also B to A. You then kind of get a chain of relevant posts, like a further reading list. Maybe only showing topics that are two-three links deep, idk that's just details.

I really like the way r/AskHistorians does it where because of the moderation it's always very easy to find the comment that links previous discussion, but again that solution is not reversible, from the linked topics I can't get to the current topic.

It encourages people to look over previous posts and engage in those discussions, and to participate in a larger discussion across the site. Potentially with one topic link you can get 4-5 other topics.

It should help with answering frequent questions or concerns as it's easy to connect relevant discussion. But also pretty much any other discussion, say nuclear energy is discussed extensively here, and follow the links to the other places people have discussed it, give readers the site context for a topic, and a convenient way to look for further discussion.

I mostly see it being used by a poster who has already answered a question in a previous post and will link the reply in a comment, but this way it's far more accessible to anyone viewing the topic and not lost in the comments. Or maybe someone was interested enough to look further themselves and I've got to believe they would feel generous enough to bother linking the two topics they spent time looking for. Making it just more convenient for everyone.

Take for example this foss topic, I posted basically a follow-up topic about specific foss software.

So a comment can be posted linking the relevant topic but that can easily get lost in the fray and does nothing to link the original topic to the new one. Yeah if someone was really interested they could search the foss tag and easily find it but it's much more convenient with it linked and only one person needs to go through the process of searching.

I kind of like the idea but can see how it's very similar to the tag system and groups. In practice though I just use tags and groups to filter out stuff I don't want to see and sometimes to help with searching.
This would be a feature that focuses to continuing the discussion, and making it more convenient to do so.

I was testing topic tag filtering and it didn't seem to work as I expected.

I was trying to filter out a topic with a main.sub style tag, but without a main tag.

I set the filter to main expecting everything nested undeneath that to be hidden, but it did not.

Is that just not implemented yet, or am I just not understanding the feature correctly?

I feel like showing the number of votes a comment has gotten will lead to people voting something simply because it's gotten many votes and that must mean it's right. You see it happen all the time on Reddit. Someone will say something that sounds correct, and before someone else can come correct them they'll get a bunch of upvotes. Partly because they sounded correct, and partly because "all these upvotes must mean this is true".

I don't really see any benefit to showing votes on comments.

I realize preventing people without first reading the link or text is impossible, but the least we can do is to not encourage it. By that, I mean the vote counts on the right hand side here shouldn't be clickable if discussions are the priority for Tildes.

What do you think?

EDIT: Just to be clear - I'm not against showing the votes on the front page (though @AllMight below has a fair argument for that).

I've noticed that some people are adding topic tags to identify the domain of an article. For example, if it's from the New York Times, they'll add a "nyt" tag, or if it's from The Guardian, they'll add a "the guardian" tag.

Why? What's the purpose of these tags? Do people really filter in or out topics based on what website they come from? "Show me all articles from the New York Times." "Show me all articles except if they're from The Guardian."

Is this really a thing that people do?

I've recently gone back to using RSS as a way to keep up with things that I like to follow, and I realized that it could be a good fit for tildes. I'm a developer by trade, so if other people are interested too I could even help with development (though not until I graduate in December, I'm slammed with work and school at the moment).
Any thoughts for or against RSS?

At the moment, my front page (is that what it's called on Tildes) is filled with posts I already commented on or don't feel the need to participate in. So I could really use a hide function.

Do we know when it's going to be implemented?

Sometimes I reply to a comment via my notifications page, then when I go look at my reply in the context of the thread, I see that someone else already addressed my point in a peer comment and I feel dumb.

Has this happened to other folks too?

Any thoughts on possible solutions?

Maybe there could be an indication of other replies to the comment which might prompt you to read them first prior to making your reply?

Until this issue is magically resolved, I feel like I should never reply via my notifications.

Example comment of this happening to me

I come from reddit and I'd like to know what is basically different in the way I should post and comment.

• Are there any private jokes or slang I should know to understand everything ? (like reddit's "/s", "FBI open up" or the verb "lurk")
• Are "mods" uncompromising ?
• Every single post I saw is intelligent. Is this required ?
• There's no downvote. Do I need to make a thoughtful comment every time I disagree ?

I think ~culinary would be beneficial to see, it could include areas like;

~culinary.news

~culinary.recipes

~culinary.videos

~culinary.photography

I am a little biased because of my profession (Sous Chef), but I do see a lot of Culinary related posts that are spread out over several different groups. It would be nice to have them organized into their own group.

And if anyone is worried about it being active, I subscribe to several culinary news sites that I rarely post here so It would give me a chance to share some of that stuff. Not to mention giving us a place to share already popular Youtube series and recipes.

I know this content doesn't lend to discussion as much as others, but it would still be high quality.

EDIT: Maybe a solution is to have more of those posts end up in ~food instead of being spread out. Although I feel like the ~food heading is a little more restrictive, so maybe rename ~food to ~culinary?

I notice that the formatting of my "voted" status on topics has changed. It used to be that, when I had voted on a topic, its vote count displayed with a solid purple block (I'm using Solarized Light). This distinguished it from topics I had not voted on, which displayed a blue box around the vote count.

This morning, the vote counts for topics I have voted on are displayed with just a single purple line to their left, while the unvoted topics still display the blue box.

This change means that my "voted on" and "not voted on" topics aren't easily distinguishable again, like before the change to the big purple box. Again, it's confusing to work out whether or not I have voted on a topic.

I have just posted on ~sports the last results of the major European soccer leagues, but it does not show as I'd want to. I read the Formatting help page, but I did not find an aswer to my question, so if someone would like to help I'd appreciate it.

Basically I would like the post to look like this: Imgur link, but in the end it looks like the spaces I put in there do not show as you can see here: Imgur link.

Is there any way to make the post looks like what I want? I read about the Tables section in the Formatting help page, but I do not need a bold header row, which looks like a requirement for a table.

Thanks in advance for the help