I seem to have a persistent "1 new comment" notification in the upper right of the page, even though I've viewed that comment several times. Is there a way to mark something as read?
After adding the ~health.coronavirus group the other day, I've just made a couple more updates to try and keep the site more usable as the flood of news and information keeps coming in.
First, I just added a bar in the header when you're on the home page that has links to two "specialized views" in it. One of these views will show only coronavirus topics, and the other one will filter out all the coronavirus topics. These should be helpful for both logged-in users as well as logged-out ones (who previously didn't have the option of unsubscribing from ~health.coronavirus to hide those topics more easily).
For the purposes of these views, a "coronavirus topic" is one that's either inside ~health.coronavirus or has the "coronaviruses.covid19" tag on it (in any group).
The way I did this was definitely pretty hacky and isn't intended to stay around over the long term, so please let me know if you notice any strange behavior with them.
Second, earlier today I set up a scheduled post in ~health.coronavirus for general chat, questions, minor updates, and so on. The first one is here, and that will continue posting every day for now. If the activity in it starts dropping I'll probably reduce the frequency, but I think it should be good as a general spot for discussion for now.
It's looking like we might be living in this situation for weeks or months, so I'm definitely open to making other changes that will help keep the site usable and enjoyable during it. Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions, thanks!
As suggested, I've created a new group now named ~health.coronavirus that we can use to try to keep the topics about the coronavirus somewhat more quarantined contained. I've subscribed everyone for now, but if you want to segregate the information more easily I'd suggest unsubscribing from it (which you can do from its sidebar or the groups list) and visiting it individually when you want to look at coronavirus news.
I know there are probably some quibbles about the name, but I decided to go with this one for a few reasons, including that it's by far the more commonly-known and used term overall, it's generally easier to type (especially on mobile), and some XKCD-style "the spider" logic.
One specific thing we need to discuss is how to decide when some topics should be in there vs. some of the other groups, especially since there are so many widespread effects. Like most moderation-ish subjects, we won't be able to draw a perfect line, but I think in general we should try to put more "general" updates/advice/discussion in the new group, while topics can go into other groups only when their impact is especially heavy on that group's subject.
For example, I think it makes sense for the announcement that NCAA games will be played without fans to stay in ~sports, because that's a very major announcement for a sports event. E3 being cancelled similarly makes sense to stay in ~games. Those are major, important announcements regardless of the cause being the coronavirus.
Deciding when something goes in ~news vs. ~health.coronavirus will be more difficult, but I'm sure we can probably do a reasonable job of it by trying to base it on only putting the very most significant events in ~news. It's not incredibly important to have everything categorized perfectly and most people probably subscribe/check both groups anyway, so we'll just do the best we can.
I'm going to start trying to move a lot of the existing topics into there, and I'm sure some others will too. This might be kinda chaotic for a bit.
I think it would also be great to start trying to put together some good resources on the ~health.coronavirus wiki. If some people are willing to start taking that on (and feel free to post a topic in there to ask for help/suggestions), it would be much appreciated. And if you don't have wiki permissions but would like to be a part of that, message me about it or leave a comment here asking, and I can give you the ability to create/edit pages.
Anything other feedback or discussion about it to start with? Should we set up any regularly scheduled posts in there or anything?
I've noticed that, even when I choose the "Keep me logged in" option, I usually have to re-log in to Tildes at least once or twice per day. Under what circumstances might the session cookie expire on such a short time scale? I can see that the Max-Age is set to one year, so I'm not sure what might be causing that.
Has anyone else encountered this issue? It's entirely possible that some of my add-ons are interfering (although I don't see how), which is the reason I ask.
I have to pull up my Tildes password and my TOTP generator in each case, which is just enough pain to encourage me to navigate to another tab instead.
So, I cannot really financially contribute, but I'm a backend developer and I'd like to be able to authenticate using U2F 2FA.
I'd like to know if you would be open to let me try to make a patch that would add this feature to 2FA mechanisms.
I just deployed a major update to the site's permissions system, which involved rewriting a lot of the related code. This is pretty much all internal details, and there should be no noticeable changes, but it's definitely possible that I missed something. So if you notice anything unusual that seems like it might be permissions-related (such as a button missing or a functionality not working), please let me know.
None of it's really being used yet, but the rewritten system allows for multiple new capabilities that we'll need as the site grows, like granting permissions to users only inside specific groups (instead of site-wide) and denying permissions in specific groups (like "able to tag topics in all groups except ~music").
On that note, most permissions are still granted manually, and I haven't given them to many people lately. If you're interested in helping with some of the site's organizational work and think you have a good understanding of how things are currently organized, please send me a message and ask, and I can give you some permissions to help out.
These are the permissions that are currently available (and there are at least a few users that have access to each of these):
Thanks!
And as usual, I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.
I love this website can’t think of anything bad about it apart from really not liking that communities are called groups, I feel this is due in part to Facebook using it but also it’s such an over used term on the internet, could we not think of something more unique for tildes to call it’s communities
I'm complaining mainly because <these> 2 keys tend to be in the symbols tab on a mobile keyboard and are really annoying to keep going back from and to while making something like a <details> box.
Some replacements I imagine (0 programming knowledge) could be:
>small text here< ( for > to not make quotations at the beginning you could maybe put some unrelated character like ) or ] before it)
^superscripted text here/ (or you could just use parentheses to delineate which text is formatted like on reddit and probably all normal places)
_subscripted text here_ (admittedly I know this messes with underscore being equal to asterisks in formatting, but I don't know which key you could use avoid this that still is intuitive)
{Details
[Summary text here]
Details text here}
Replace the <details> prompt with { and </details> with } and presumably everything should work, right? (The brackets can have the summary functionality limited to within the details box because they're encased within the curly brackets? Admittedly I don't really know.)
This question has come up a few times now in the "Unofficial Tildes Chat" Discord server meta/curation channels, but I wanted to open up the discussion to ~tildes at large so we can perhaps finally get a more definitive judgement on it. So here goes:
What are people's thoughts on using the above topic tags in cases where a Tildes user posts something that they themselves have created, have hosted on their own site (or another), and/or could potentially profit from (monetarily or otherwise)?
Should only one of the tags be standardized on, or is there enough of a distinction between some of them for their use to be situational?
Should such tags be required?
Can anyone think of any better tags for such situations than the ones listed?
@deimos has expressed before his dislike for alt-accounts, a position I happen to share. Alt-accounts makes users less accountable and more prone to misbehavior.
At the same time, deeply personal threads frequently require anonymity to be of any value.
To avoid alt-accounts altogether, I propose an anonymity with caveats:
Hacker news and lobsters pop up in these threads as answers pretty quickly but I find them to be too tech focused, not subdivided into communities, which reinforces these few focuses and make finding large amounts of related content hard. Also the lack of delineation between responses makes the discussion difficult to follow. (At least to me.)
So basically I'm looking for sites that:
Have some sort of subdivision of their content
Aren't very focused on any one thing
Have some sort of thread subdivision
Value good discussion
So does anyone have any sites?
I just noticed today that in ~music, the "topic-info-source" metadata isn't visible in listings; it shows the author name instead. Clicking through to the post it's clear that it's been scraped, it just doesn't get a site name or favicon.
eg: Youtube link on ~movies versus Youtube link on ~music
Is this intentional? It sorta makes it look like everything on ~music is a text post.
Over the last week, a number of updates have been made by people other than me contributing code to Tildes through its open-source repository. I wanted to make a post to highlight some of these changes and let everyone know about them, since there are some great updates and fixes in here:
@deing made it possible to create links that will pre-fill the subject and message for private messages. For example: https://tildes.net/user/Deimos/new_message?subject=Test+Message&message=Please+don't+actually+send+this+to+me
@blitz saw me make an offhand comment about a rare bug when someone submits a link to an IP address, and got a development environment set up and fixed it right away.
@Bauke has been on a tear, fixing a lot of long-outstanding issues and adding features. So far:
There are multiple more merge requests still waiting for me to review, and I'll probably be making some other posts soon once some of those get merged in as well. Thanks, the contributions are greatly appreciated! If anyone else is interested in looking into contributing, the CONTRIBUTING file in the repo is probably the best place to start.
And as usual, I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.
So I’ve forgot my password I’m still logged in thankfully but if I get logged out I’m screwed any advise?
One of the unique feature of Tildes when it comes to content moderation is the usage of "labels". While there are guidelines, there are no hard and fast rules as to when to use one label or the other (nor should there be!). I am curious what criteria you all use when deciding whether or not to apply a label to a comment, and also how frequently you find yourself labeling things. For reference, the current labels are:
Are there labels you find yourself using more than others? Are there some you think are unclear? I feel like this is an often overlooked and underused feature, but that may just be because I personally do not use them that frequently. For example, I have only given a few Exemplary tags, a few noise, and I don't think any of the others.
I personally find it uselful in certain cases, like getting an overview of areas where we have many solutions to a problem, like who should the Democratic nominee be or how should we make money.
Looking at the Activity page right now, there are 2 different pointers to 2 different articles about turning off auto-play on Netflix. I totally get why people are excited about this!
My question is, do we care about duplicates? Some forums ask people to notify a mod and they combine the threads. Others just let them be. Is there an official stance on this here?
Pretty much self explanatory: what did you set for your default tildes.net post sort?
I currently have it set to top activity in the last three days, but I'm not sure if that's the optimal way to find posts that are likely to have ongoing conversation. On the other hand, filtering to just the past day often eliminates too many posts.
I’d specifically appreciate being able to open tildes from my iPhone’s homescreen and have it launch a PWA in a sandboxed safari. The experience will benefit, I’m sure :)
Basically a sort that only shows user comments with a specific label. Admittedly exemplary is the only one I'd actually recommend.
One thing we take for granted in social media is that any comment may receive a reply from anyone. Maybe we should rethink that? What would happen if it were optional?
For example, for someone posting in "What's a widely criticized thing that you feel is worth defending?" topic, I am not sure that everyone posting there really wanted to start a discussion.
Having replies shut off might be frustrating sometimes as a reader, particularly when something you disagree with gets a lot of upvotes. But it would make the author's intent clearer. If you're inviting further conversation, leave replies on. If you're not, turn it off.
Everyone has the right to walk away from conversation. This would make it explicit. Maybe it would make heated threads less likely, since they'd stop sooner? It seems like it's more difficult to walk away when you're also letting the other side get the last word?
I might've missed something, but why did the Financials block disappear from the main page? And the numbers on the financials page are zero.
Also, while we're at it, there should probably be a “Financials” link in the footer.
There are three platforms that I'm aware of that are included in the Tildes SiteInfo dictionary—YouTube, Vimeo, & SoundCloud—that support linking to specific parts of a media resource via timestamps. This is useful to reference a particular portion of the video/song during discussion.
It should probably be possible to automatically apply hyperlinks to timestamps in the video (link this) when someone posts a comment with a timestamp-like string inside of it. This would make it a bit easier to share and link to specific portions of what's being shared in the main topic.
This seems like a decent value-add feature for Tildes. Whether it's a good idea to directly edit the comment string, I'm not so sure. I'd probably be in favour of implementing either a post-markdown middleware that added an icon next to the timestamp, kind of like how external links on some sites are suffixed with an icon that indicates the resource is not on the current domain.
Clicking on "Roadmap" at the bottom of any Tildes page brings up an issue board. I'm wondering if that's still being maintained and whether it's worth keeping?
The items listed under "in progress" don't look like they are actually in progress. For example, "Add sticky / pinned topics" is marked as "In progress" but in fact it's a year old and there's been no activity for four months.
Hello, I was invited by my friend, Z. It would be nice to have a home for occult topics. I am testing my magical prowess. I wish to have a space for the occult.
I personally think it could be helpful as a group for us to attempt guiding ourselves to cooperate and do stuff like timasomo. Alternatively it could end up being swallowed by petty drama and be really horrible.
If you bookmark enough content, it can become really hard to navigate without some type of sorting. Currently you can't even search your bookmarks!
As discussed last week, the site is now marking new comments for all logged-in users. This has two effects:
On the listings pages, you will see something like "5 comments (2 new)" when a topic you previously viewed the comments on has new comments since your last visit.
When you return to a comments page with new comments, all old comments will start out collapsed, unless one of the new comments is a direct reply to one of them. New comments have a colored stripe down their left side, with the color varying based on the theme you're using (but I think it's generally an orange/red-like color).
You can expand collapsed comments by clicking the "+" button in their top left corner, or expand them all by using the "Expand all" button at the top of the comments section. If you don't like this initial collapsing behavior, you can disable it on the Settings page by unchecking the "Collapse old comments when I return to a topic" setting.
I'm working on some other adjustments and changes related to this, so there will probably be some more tweaks coming into place soon as well. I'd like input on one in particular:
Do we need a separate function along the lines of "stop indicating new comments on this post", or does the ignore function serve that purpose well enough? Are there reasonable cases where you want to stop seeing the "(x new)" on a topic, but do not want to actually ignore it? And if we do want to implement a function like that, any suggestions for a brief name/description for it that will fit in the Actions dropdown?
As always, any other general feedback about the feature is welcome as well.
And as usual, I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.
Something that's come up in discussions a few times recently is how important it is to have good default settings. Even users who are quite technical and involved don't always explore which settings are available, and that's totally fine—they shouldn't need to. The default setup should be as good as possible, with changing settings mostly for specialized cases.
One particular place on Tildes where this isn't currently being done well is for the "mark new comments" feature, which has always been disabled by default. I think it's one of the best features on the site and makes it much easier to follow ongoing discussions here than on other sites with similar comment systems, but overall, not many users have enabled it.
For example, Tildes got some attention on Hacker News again yesterday, and about 80 new users have registered so far from that. Only 9 of them enabled "mark new comments", even though the welcome message strongly encourages it. Looking at longer periods of time, this seems typical: only about 10% of users ever enable it.
As it says on the settings page for the feature, my reason for disabling it by default was out of privacy concerns. However, I've been doing some review of the data that Tildes stores lately and realized that this was kind of misleading and inaccurate. Because I have HTTP request server logs and some other related data (which is all only kept for 30 days), I effectively have topic visit records from the last 30 days for all users anyway, whether they have the feature enabled or not. The data is more convenient to access for users with the feature enabled, but it's available either way.
Because of that, and because the data will be very useful to combine with some of the upcoming changes I mentioned in the last ~tildes.official post, I'm planning to enable this feature for everyone. Here are the general plans:
Please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns about this. If nothing major comes up, I intend to make this change later this week.
Simple question. For people's original poems posted in ~creative, should they be tagged "poem" or "poems"?
"poetry" is the broader category, and includes discussions about poets and poetry in general. However, when someone posts their poem, should that be tagged "poem" or "poems"?
The tagging guidelines say (or used to say - since I re-organised the Docs pages, I can't find this reference any more) that tags should be plural. That indicates that "poems" is the better tag. But the post contains a single poem, which makes "poem" the better tag.
Opinions?
EDIT: In the end, I went with the popular choice. When I looked at the tags used in ~creative, I found over a hundred topics tagged "poem" and only four topics tagged "poems". It seems that most people naturally choose "poem" when posting a poem, so I standardised the few differently tagged topics to use "poem".
Would it be possible to limit the number of posts that are shown on the home page pointing to a given domain at one time? There have been a few times I've come to Tildes to see what's new and there are 5 or 10 posts that all link to different pages on the same site. I think this would help increase the amount of variety in the stories that are showing and make the site more interesting to users.
It's been quiet from my end lately—I mentioned in a comment last week that I had been taking some time off, but now it's time to get things moving again.
As I said in that comment, the next major steps for Tildes are going to be bringing in more people, along with more (and more varied) content. To help with that, I'm going to be working on some structural and functionality changes to make it easier for people to see the types of content they want, as well as avoid content they're not interested in.
So, I've just deployed the first piece of that: you can now ignore individual topics when you don't want to keep seeing them in your listings. Thanks yet again to repeated open-source contributor @what, who got this started a long time ago in a merge request that I was able to finish up and add a little more on top of.
Currently, the only thing that ignoring topics does is hide them from your listings, but I'm still thinking about some of the details and possible other effects and wanted to ask for input first:
A listing of only topics you've ignored is also available through the sidebar on your user page as "Your ignored topics", in case you need to check on any of them or unignore one of them.
One other piece of this is that there's now an "Actions" dropdown available on every topic in a listing, underneath the vote button. This dropdown allows you to bookmark or ignore topics without having to go into their comments page first. I'm not totally certain about this yet, and will probably make some more adjustments related to it. In particular, it's pretty far off to the right on a wide desktop monitor, so I might try some other options after seeing how it feels to use on the live site.
Let me know if you have any feedback about these changes, or notice any issues. Hopefully there should be multiple more updates coming up over the next week or two.
And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.
I switched to the light theme the other day. I'm typically all-in with dark themes for everything, but there was some convincing research.
I started working on a light theme, but it's fairly basic.
I was digging through the old thread and found a few gems, but I'm wondering what everybody has been up to since. Time for some show and tell!
I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where currently on I would like
I know there's a task for grouping synonymous tags together, like "humor" and "humour". How high a priority is this?
I ask because poor @mycketforvirrad shouldn't have to feel like he needs to add a tag for "wildfires" every time someone posts a topic about the Australia bushfires (and tags it "bushfires").
Nearly every time most of us want to mention someone, we need to find a post they commented in or posted, which will get increasingly harder over time, and especially so for less active users.
As someone comes to this site a lot and has toggled this feature on, a sort that shows only the threads where new comments have been posted since I last left would be great so I don't need to scroll down the homepage anxiously looking for new comments on the topics I like.
Prologue: Feeling cranky, trying to be civil.
I posted a link to an article, in the ~news, about two of the top US dairy producers declaring bankruptcy ... and Someone moved it to ~food.
Harumpf.
~food is "check out this new latte recipe" or "how to survive the vegetarian keto diet" (yes, that's a thing; I'm on it. May be why I'm cranky).
My post was ~news, about the US economy, shifting societal norms, potentially about climate change.
But forget about this specific categorization issue. This is the first time I've bumped into Tildes' moderation methodology.
I don't subscribe to ~food, so for me, my post just vanished, w/o notification or explanation. Took me a few minutes to find it. I don't see any way to ID who moved it (may well have been @Deimos, for all I know), nor any way to challenge the move.
Have I overlooked some 'moderation dispute' button, or some such? Or is moderation here beyond dispute?
ETA: For anyone visiting this post down the line, here's the official/original statement on this ...
Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧhelp me
Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKESdid I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED? Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.
Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.
Anyway.
This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.
When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.
Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.Hint, this was one of the fishy responses
Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat
Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.
All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT
Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.
Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.
Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.
Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.
The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.
So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟
Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.
I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):
Economy - 7,02
Diplomacy - 6,9
State - 3,8
Society - 7,48
Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?
When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.
IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREMEEveryone else will remember that All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.
And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.
OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.
Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.
When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.
As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.
Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.
Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1
Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay
Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt
Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.
Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.This is how it works, right? Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.
To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.
And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.
Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.
How does this work, why are some tags on separate line?
~news australia · Article: 207 words
natural disasters bushfires
The australia tag is next to ~news, not in the tag list below.
I'd be interested in a feature where I can have a list of top-level domains that I want to ignore content from. For example, I'm never in a position to watch a video when I'm browsing tildes. So I'd like the option to just not see any link to youtube.com or vimeo.com. Maybe I think all content posted to example.com is inflammatory click-bait, so I just want to ignore those links, too.
Would that be possible?
(Emphasis on Some.)
Could there be a rudimentary auto-tagging system for automatically scraped stats? (Auto-tagging video content as videos, music artists by their names, long reads/watches,individual blogs and YouTube channels?) It could serve as a QoL feature and save some taggers and forgetful posters some time (I almost always forget to tag my videos accordingly and they're only tagged because someone remembers to, which is way too menial a tag to still need be added by humans.)
Hello everyone, it's me again, that guy who can't create online forms reliably.
As some people might've noticed, the last attempt backfired on me in two ways:
This has lead me to create a new form on a new site: JotForms. As this is commercial site, it shouldn't break after a handful of replies and also is still privacy conscious. They do not save any data as the recipient of the data (me) is declared as the controller. Be assured that I will use all collected data solely for the census (i.e creating fancy graphs and analysing it).
The only positive aspect here is that at least I got to address valuable feedback you guys gave me. I've updated the political section and expanded the work and education section. I'm sure it can still be improved though.
The currently only problem I have is that on the free tier of JotForms, you're limited to 100 submissions, which we'll surely exceed based on the numbers of the last census. Buying the premium for one month (actually subscribing and then cancelling it) would cost me USD 19. That's not the world to me, but would you guys be fine with me appending a paypal link to send some voluntary donations my way if you think I'm doing a good job? I don't want to make a profit, I'd just like to recoup the cost.
Currently, the form is still in editing, you can view a picture of it's current form here. Nothing is set in stone, and I'm open to all suggestions.
I think that if we aren't allowed to vote on old topics, we shouldn't be allowed to label them either. Not out of any privacy standpoint, but rather from the fact that this way, people can affect ordering of comments even in old topics, which isn't something one would expect to happen. This is potentially confusing, as newcomers to a topic can affect comments even years after.
Personally I'm partial to solarized dark since I also use that in my IDE's usually.
Dark but not too harsh, since tildes supports a bunch of themes by default.
I'm wondering which one are you using and why?
A few pretty quick things to talk about today, with some input wanted on each:
As announced last week, the site now has native scheduled topics (which need to be configured by me). There have been a couple of these posted now, with the most recent one being today's "What are you reading these days?" topic in ~books.
Here's the schedule that I have set up right now. Times are in UTC (Pacific time is UTC-7 and Eastern is UTC-4).
| Topic | Timing (UTC) |
|---|---|
| ~talk - What are you doing this week? | Monday, 15:00 |
| ~games - What have you been playing? | Monday, 16:00 |
| ~tv - What have you been watching? | Tuesday, 16:00 |
| ~anime - What have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga) | Wednesday, 16:00 |
| ~books - What have you been reading lately? | Every second Thursday, 16:00 |
| ~creative - What creative projects have you been working on? | Every second Thursday (alternating with ~books), 16:00 |
| ~talk - What are you doing this weekend? | Friday, 15:00 |
| ~music - What have you been listening to this week? | Friday, 16:00 |
These were all pre-existing topics that had been getting posted consistently. The timings are a bit arbitrary, but somewhere around 16:00 is usually the time the site starts getting more active each day, and I went with every 2 weeks for ~creative and ~books since I think people don't change through those as quickly.
There are a few other topics I think would be good too, let me know what you think or if this is starting to be too many:
One other question I wanted to ask, since I'm doing some work related to it: Is there any reason for people to still be able to post new top-level comments in old recurring threads? I'll definitely still allow posting replies to existing comments so conversations can continue, but I can't really think of a reason why anyone would need to post a new top-level comment in any thread except the newest, and may just disallow that to keep people from inadvertently posting in the old ones.
I deleted the three ~science subgroups (~science.formal, ~science.natural, ~science.social) and moved all the topics back into ~science. These were confusing (I had to keep checking which branch certain subjects were in), and the activity level across the science groups really isn't high enough to need 4 groups.
I also deleted ~hobbies.automotive and moved the (very few) topics from it back into ~hobbies with an automotive tag. The group was getting less than one topic posted a week, and doesn't seem necessary yet.
One other change I want to make but haven't yet, because I want input first: I think I'd like to move ~creative into a sub-group of ~arts. What do you think of calling it ~arts.original? Any other possible names that would work better as "content created by the poster?"
Finally, I've also just deployed a change that starts showing a "content type" on each topic. Currently it doesn't do anything other than get displayed in the listings, but the plan is to be able to use this for searching, filtering, and similar purposes. This will be able to cover the common requests like "I'd like a way to see only videos", and will also make some other things easier to customize (for example, there's no need to show word count on Ask topics).
Here's the list of content types that are shown right now, but I'm fairly sure that I'm forgetting about some others:
Update on Oct 11: if a type for a link topic isn't detected, it will display "Link"
What other types of content get posted to Tildes that aren't covered in there?
I've previously written about long-running topics and I've asked about software for blogging. But I keep coming back to doing some simple blogging on Tildes. I don't think Tildes should try to compete with real blogging software, but maybe Tildes can support a minimal version of it, enough to make it worth doing it here when starting an independent blog isn't worth the effort? An example would be a project diary (like for my accordion synthesizer project). We could encourage people to start a topic for each of their creative projects that they want to talk about and to post updates as they make progress. Or, perhaps this would be a way to cover some ongoing story that they want to live-blog?
I've refined my ideas a bit about how it might work: Suppose a Tildes topic contains a list of zero or more updates in chronological order? Only the original author can post an update, but anyone can write comments responding to any update. When you post an update to one of your topics, the comment tree for each previous update gets collapsed, encouraging people to comment on the latest update.
When a topic gets an update, it reappears in the topic list with a separate set of votes, showing both the original topic's title and the update's title concatenated. Any old listing is removed, so we don't show the same topic twice. However, maybe the topic heading shows the last three updates or so if the topic is getting multiple updates in a short period of time, as might happen when live-blogging.
So someone asked about which themes are used the most, and I went to check this
survey and then realized it was deleted and that no new surveys have been done since.
So are most of us interested in this becoming a formal and regular thing?
