A way in which a user can be notified of recent activity within a particular post. Could this be extended with a 'watch' feature for posts that are interacted with after a longer period of time goes by?

There is a rudimentary form of this already in place. On the other hand, for users that are subscribed to all tildes it requires that they spend a lot of time scrolling down through the feed.

At the very top of the 'new topic' submission form there is this message:

Tildes prioritizes high-quality content and discussions

Please post topics that are interesting, informative, or have the potential to start a good discussion.

Please avoid posting topics that are primarily for entertainment or that don't have discussion value.

From this box, would it be a good idea to link users to specific places in the Tildes docs, where they could find more detailed information?

What's the opinion on posting non-oc fanart? Is it considered fluff (which seems to currently have a negative stigma attached to it based off of my reading of previous threads)? Would more effort need to be put on the behalf of the poster before it's accepted (theme / several works from the same artist / some sort of comment showing analysis, reflection, or appreciation)?

I've been thinking about the way some people use their opportunity to share in places like Tildes.

There are weekly topics what the music the users listen and the books they read. Since the community is small, there are rather few people interacting with those, which has the capacity to create stronger interpersonal connections.

There's also the fact that I see a few names very often, in many different threads. Unlike some other places, though, I don't automatically map them to an idea of a person behind them. It's more Reddit than a small forum: people share their opinions and discuss subjects, but there's little personal interaction. It's a more a space of intellectual, rather than emotional, engagement.

And yet, there are threads here about oneself where the person asks questions or raises subjects that are of importance to them. Some time ago, someone asked what to do with their existential dread. I bet there were similar threads here that I didn't get to see. There was also the "Hey, whatcha working on?" thread a while ago. So it's not that asking personal questions is opposed here: you can, if you want, ask for community support.

So I'm wondering: what's Tildes' attitude towards more personal content? Things like life updates: "So hey, I'm doing okay, am still in a relationship (going great), looking for a job, working on the pet project I mentioned" etc. etc.. Is this something the users and the admins approve of? would enjoy?

Knowing Tildes for only a few days, I’m not so sure about some of the (written and unwritten) rules that apply here.
Partly inspired by this earlier post I’d like to ask you Tildonians (btw, what is the common term to refer to Tildes users?) how you feel about promoting one’s own work.
I am a musician and would like to share my music with this community (that I find particularly thoughtful, considerate, diverse and interesting) but certainly don’t want to appear inappropiately full of myself and/or presumptuous.

I found an old post about this here. On the other hand, this still seems to be an unresolved issue. Instead of the external site's favicon appearing, there's either I dotted line around a square or there's nothing at all.

Have there been other Tildes developers that have tried to fix this?

Right now I'm not only utterly broke, but also don't have access to international payment methods (you may ask the reasons for this, but I probably won't answer :P). But I wanna give back to Tildes somehow.

I know enough English to communicate and have a general understanding of programming (with a focus on basic Python and very basic C) but never did anything beyond book and class exercises. I'm also familiar with Regex, Vim (including patterns) and Emacs.

I also have some Inkscape skills (not a designer), and wouldn't mind working with documentation and other things actual developers usually find trivial or dull.

One of the most off-putting and distressing experiences that I've had with discussion groups, forums, and the like is brigading types of behaviors.

For example, I'll go to a subreddit that I haven't visited before in order to seek guidance or ask a question. Then it's as if all of the regular users of that sub are lying in wait ready to pounce on the newbie. Typically, they'll pick some very minute detail and blow it way out of proportion. Then they'll proceed to downvote everything that you say, no matter what it is, into oblivion. Next, they will deride and criticize you of things that you have not done. Then a moderator will step in and agree with all the assholes, remove your post, and top it off with a bullshit reason for doing so. And it could snowball into an unnecessary and unsolicited tirade from there.

This scenario has happened to me and others so many times. Frankly, I'm fucking sick of this type of shit.

What are our plans here to ensure that this won't become a frequent experience for the users here?

So, votes are supposed to be used on quality content and comments that contribute to the conversation, right? I think the problem with this is, most of the content on Tildes is to that standard, and if it isn't, we can just tag/report it. Voting feels redundant to me. What does everyone else think?

I am wondering if it is planned to provide the user with methods to control the content they see, ie; filtering the topics in a group or comments in a topic based on various criteria including keywords.
I looked around to see if this has been asked, or if there was a roadmap document, but did not find anything. (this is no criticism, I do realize we are early in the dev cycle and I cannot image just one person being able to do all this!)

I do hope so. No matter how high the quality of the topics/comments there will always be things a user may not want to see.

What is our policy about posting original contents (e.g. me submitting a blog post I wrote, which I just did a few minutes ago)?

IMO, if it is a personal blog, it should be okay, and not really different from submitting a text topic here. Especially if the blog is not tracking you.

I've seen a number of topics that have had unrelated comments regarding Tildes as a whole and the direction in which we'd like to steer it toward. While I realize much of these sidebar conversations have been occurring naturally and very frequently in well-nested comments, I wonder if it isn't going to become distracting to some going forward.

On one hand, I have enjoyed passively gaining insight into the vision of Tildes. On the other, I can see how we might want to start setting examples on the type of organization and behavior we'd want from users as the site grows. If new users who are joining after Tildes goes public see a regular occurrence of off-topic conversation, they might fall into bad habits and it may take root and grow.

What are your thoughts? Maybe start creating new topics in ~tildes and tag users along with quotes from outside threads so that there's still a reference point to start discussion from?

Are we able to filter things like music and anime by simply adding those keywords to the filter?

I tried adding the tilde in front and that didn’t work either.

Is this operator error or perhaps a good place for me to learn some pyramid and make a PR?

While browsing through the Tildes documentation, I stumbled across this in the Technical Goals section:

Tildes is a website. Your phone already has an app for using it—it's your browser.

Tildes will have a full-featured API, so I definitely don't want to discourage mobile apps overall, but the primary interface for using the site on mobile should remain as the website. That means that mobile users will get access to updates at exactly the same time as desktop ones, and full functionality should always be available on both.

This got me thinking. Despite Tildes preferring mobile browsers over an app, is there still a chance for one? I usually avoid using websites on mobile unless I must, as mobile websites generally don't have the full functionality of the website. Labelling comments 'Exemplary' and 'Malice' on mobile is an example of what doesn't work (there's more), and it's usually very unresponsive for some of the things that still do work. Also, there aren't any notifications on mobile websites and some people, me included, have cumbersome browsers that make the feel of using the website slow and laborious.

Another thing is, if the app has no chance of happening, could Tildes get desktop notifications? I usually like to respond to replies to my topics and comments as quickly as possible and I'm not a fan of the whole 'constant login to check my notifications' thing. Email notifications aren't possible because of Tildes' privacy belief.

I know that tildes is still a small community (sub 9k) but I find the number of groups too restrictive. I am mainly a redditor so I am used to subscribing to many subs, most of which are not "main" subs.

For example, shouldn't there be a group for "countries", so one could post in countries.germany or countries.finland in the future? Also, how come there is no videos? I can understand the reasoning that a video is (almost) always about a given subject but where should I post, for example, a video of "ASMR"? Should it go to health? Should chess posts go to "games" or "sports"?

I find this idea of groups a bit too comfusing, perhaps because I am used to subreddits..

Maybe it is not a bad idea to create some kind of map, with an handy link in the site, so one knows in which group one should post a certain something.

Hi, I just joined an hour ago or so.
So far so good, site seems a welcome change as opposed to other certain content aggregators.

I'm just wondering what the userbase is like: what's your age group(not too specific if you want), occupation(again, vague is okay), continent of origin and gender? What draws you to this website as opposed to other social media? Do you expect Tildes to gain traction and grow to become a worthy Reddit(or other aggregator) competitor/successor?
Just to get a taste of the crowd and what kind of people we'll find here.

I'm in my 20's, currently studying engineering and living in western Europe. Applied to this website following a comment I saw that described the Tildes system compared to Reddit; seemed like a nice change on the clickbaity and sometimes not as fun-content on that website. Hoping this ends up a good place for discussion / quality content / fun chats, and also hope it can help me detox from social media by purposefully using a less active site(for now, of course).

_{Small note: while the site is closed right now, it might be opened up later, which means this post might be visible to the internet whole. Please keep your personal info in mind and only share what you want others(including crawlers/scrapers) to know.}

I don't think Tildes have or should have an official position on that, but I'd like to know what other Tilda Swintons™ think about the subject. Do you think the use of profanity cusswords is in accordance with the implicit behaviors we've established so far? Is there any advantage in trying to "keep it clean" site-wide?

Just a few minutes ago I moved this topic from ~creative to ~music, but almost immediately began second guessing my decision. I'm not exactly sure where that belongs, because it's music, but it is creative/the OP's original song. What do you think? Is ~creative more for crafts, IE woodworking and the likes, or anything creative done by the OP? Similarly, I can think of more examples for this, such as if someone wants to show off their Raspberry Pi project, do they put it in ~comp or ~creative? Where does it belong?

I'm interested in possibly developing a tildes client. In order to experiment with the currently disabled API, as well as to become more familiar with how Tildes works internally, I've been trying to set up a Tildes development environment on my machine following the instructions on the docs site. I've run into a problem with the 'vagrant up' stage of the setup.

...  
==> default: Running provisioner: salt...  
Copying salt minion config to vm.  
Checking if salt-minion is installed  
salt-minion was not found.  
Checking if salt-call is installed  
salt-call was not found.  
Using Bootstrap Options:  -F -c /tmp  
Bootstrapping Salt... (this may take a while)  
bash: /tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh: /usr/bin/sh: bad interpreter: No such file or directory  
The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.  
Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!  
  
/tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh  -F -c /tmp  
  
Stdout from the command:  
  
  
  
Stderr from the command:  
  
bash: /tmp/bootstrap_salt.sh: /usr/bin/sh: bad interpreter: No such file or directory  

So the Salt provisioning is failing, and it seems like it just has the wrong path to the shell it needs, but while I could probably just tweak this script, it seems like that goes against the concept of using Vagrant in the first place. I was wondering if anyone else ran into this problem, or if the bug lies between the seat and the keyboard.

Deimos and I were discussing the use of "ask" topic tags this week, and we agreed it might be a good idea to get a consensus on these.

At the moment, Tilders are using four "ask" tags on topics:

• ask

• ask.survey

• ask.recommendations

• ask.help

(There may be more "ask" tags created in the future, but these four are what we're all using at the moment.)

Anything that's a question gets tagged with "ask". Some specific types of question will then get tagged with "ask.survey" or "ask.recommendations" or "ask.help", depending in the type of question being asked.

• "ask.survey" is for questions about preferences and favourites. "What's your favourite horror movie?" "What's the best place you ever visited?" "What's your favourite type of holiday?" The asker is collecting data about people's likes and dislikes (even if they're not going to publish the results in a report later!).

• "ask.recommendations" is for questions asking for recommendations. "What's a good browser to use?" "What book should I read next?" "Which brand of phone should I buy?" The asker is looking for people to recommend things to them.

However, Deimos and I wondered about "ask.help". One interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for a specific answer, where it should generally be possible for people to think "yes, this is the right answer to the question". This would include questions seeking help learning about an academic topic, such as happens in /r/AskScience and /r/AskHistorians over on Reddit. Another interpretation we came up with was that "ask.help" is for questions looking for guidance on doing something, like a "how to" type question. This would be more like the types of questions in /r/Help and like the Help menus in software and the F1 key - helping people get things done.

What do you think about the "ask" tags? In particular, what should the "ask.help" tag be used for? In general, are the existing "ask" tags okay? Do we need more "ask" tags? Do we need different "ask" tags?

I was reading over tildes' privacy policy and saw that passwords are stored hashed, but are they salted as well?

https://defaultnamehere.tumblr.com/post/163734466355/operation-luigi-how-i-hacked-my-friend-without#fnref:salted

not that tildes is big enough atm to have big public database breaches, but in the future it's a good idea to store passwords with a secure salting system, especially to help users that might have common passwords like "Diane" in the Tumblr post.

I have posted a few topics on tildes so far, and someone edited the tags on it. I looked at that person's profile but couldn't see any indication that they were a mod. I am aware of the coming 'trysf' system, but I think it hasn't been implemented yet. My question: how does one edit tags? Is this a certain account age required?

I got invited recently and registered my account, but since hearing of it I was curious of where the name comes from. Tildes are dyacritics in Spanish that you put on top of vocals líké thís, and they stress syllables and help with pronunciation. Now, it is a coincidence, isn't it?

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'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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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

I've posted two topics using an archival site when the original is unavailable or paywalled:

• https://tildes.net/~tech/6fx/amazon_investigates_employees_leaking_data_for_bribes
• https://tildes.net/~hobbies/3rm/global_latinists_on_latin_as_an_alive_and_spoken_language

This confuses the Tildes UI to some extent: the front page shows the archive domain instead of the original, and the archive.is link is a short opaque ID without the original URL available at all.

Now that Tildes supports querying metadata, do we want to treat archive sites specially? I imagine something like (wsj.com via archive.is) for the topic summary, and the full original URL inside.

This came up in a post today on ~LGBT about violence / hate directed towards a trans child. I wanted to see if the Tildes community wanted to employ a "trigger warning" tag on certain topics, or maybe within certain communities.

It could be helpful for certain folks to be able to filter out any topics with a trigger warning tag, or maybe provide it with a special flair color like the "spoiler" or "NSFW" tags to make it stand out a bit.

Another point brought up in the discussion was whether it would be better to trigger warning different specific topics with their own tags, such as "trigger warning violence" or something similar.

I have not really been involved in any communities that use trigger warnings, but understand its a serious concern for a lot of folks and am interested in hearing people's opinions on the subject.

For those unclear on the definition: desktop threads involve, at their simplest, people sharing screenshots of or writing about how they've configured their computer in specific ways. This could be anything from custom programs they've written to cut windows in two, self-made window managers, or simply gifs/screenshots showing what their desktop looks like.

Some setups involve a lot of spent time and effort, and can spawn 100+ comments related to discussion around their configurations and setup. However, as there is effectively zero barrier to entry in taking a screenshot, it can also result in many low-effort setups (e.g. people just changing their wallpaper) or dozens of near identical setups which encourage little discussion.

Similarly, while many posters will happily answer questions about their exact setup and e.g. supply their .vimrc config file to inquisitive users, it is also a problem when posters do not engage with commenters, only providing an image of their current setup and contributing nothing further - preventing much further discussion.

There was one previous post on ~comp which was effectively a desktop thread here, and it seems to have had a positive reaction and spawned some relatively high-quality discussion. However, given that Tildes is supposed to primarily be about text-based content and high-quality posts/discussion, and desktop threads can potentially be the polar opposite of that, I thought I'd ask for other's opinions on whether future desktop threads would be a good fit for and/or welcome on Tildes.