In his never-ending quest to keep improving Tildes's theme system, @Bauke has reworked a major portion of it again, this time making it use CSS custom properties (instead of pre-generating a lot of theme-specific rules using Sass).

This new method has a lot of benefits, including reducing the size of Tildes's CSS file to less than half of what it was before. It will also make it much simpler for people to override certain site colors or create their own themes using local CSS changes (e.g. through extensions like Stylus). (Note: please don't invest a lot of time into using it to customize yet, since it may still need to have further changes or even reverted)

This is a relatively modern CSS feature that should have good support at this point, but it's possible there will still be some issues, or things that were missed during the conversion. If you notice any colors being wrong or other appearance changes (even minor ones), please leave a comment (including which theme you're using) so that I can fix them up.

Thanks yet again, @Bauke!

And I haven't done it in a while now, but I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

On the home page of Tildes, there's now a monthly donation goal meter shown at the top of the sidebar. The "(more details)" link in the box goes to a new Financials page, which shows the current expenses and income for Tildes for this month.

This is information that I've always been meaning to make public, and the original announcement blog post even mentioned it as an intention. So far it only includes the current month, but I'm intending to add information about past income and expenses eventually as well.

The Financials page should mostly explain itself, but I want to talk a little more about the goal specifically and why it seems to be set unrealistically high. To be clear, it probably is unrealistically high at this point, but I think it's important to be honest about where the next "stage" in Tildes's sustainability is, and how far away from it we currently are. I could have set the goal to a lower number to make it more achievable, but that would really just be arbitrary and wouldn't represent any meaningful threshold.

The first important milestone was making sure that all the actual expenses were paid every month, so that keeping the site up wasn't actively costing me money. We're long past that point and almost always have been, which is great on its own—so many businesses and sites never reach that "break even" point and are forced to shut down, but there's absolutely no danger of that happening with Tildes. For how small and young the site is, it's amazing that we've already reached that goal.

The next milestone, which the current goal represents, is making it so that I'm not effectively donating my time to continue maintaining and developing the site, which means being able to pay myself enough that I can think of Tildes as a "real job". As you can see, we're still pretty far from that point right now, but I think it's a good reminder (especially to myself) to have the meter showing it. As I said in another comment recently, there are other things I should probably focus my efforts on more that would help, and this will be a prominent reminder of that.

I also want to mention that the overall situation isn't quite as bleak as the goal makes it look. There have been multiple incredibly generous one-time donations made over the last year and a half that you won't see in the current month's numbers, and that's absolutely made a huge difference. I'll try to get the historical information added before too long so that the picture is more complete.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions, and thanks again for all of your contributions, whether they're actual donations or just being active and contributing to the site in that way. It's all important, and I greatly appreciate all of it.

And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

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!

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):

• Changing tags on topics
• Moving topics to different groups
• Editing the titles of topics
• Editing the links of link topics
• Editing wiki pages (or creating new ones)

Thanks!

And as usual, I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

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:

• Added a way for users to view their two-factor authentication backup codes (previously you could only see them at the time you activated 2FA).
• Added "View Markdown" for comments and text topics. This is inside a new "More" dropdown menu, and will show you the markdown that the poster used, so that you can check how they did some formatting or copy-paste if you want to use someone else's post as a template of sorts.
• Added new settings (under "Site behavior settings" on the Settings page) to always open links to Tildes groups and users in new tabs.
• Fixed a few issues with inconsistent interface elements and styling.

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.

As discussed last week, the site is now marking new comments for all logged-in users. This has two effects:

1. 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.

2. 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.

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:

• If you ignore a topic that you posted a comment in, should you no longer receive notifications about new replies to you in that topic? What about username mentions?
• Should users be able to ignore their own topics?
• Should ignored topics be hidden everywhere, or should there be exceptions? For example, if you do a search that matches ignored topics, should they show up in the results? If you're looking at the poster's user page, should ignored topics be shown?
• Is there anything else that ignoring a topic should (or should not) affect?

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.

A few pretty quick things to talk about today, with some input wanted on each:

Scheduled/recurring topics

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).

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:

• ~comp - some kind of "what programming/technical projects have you been working on?" topic, for talking about both work and personal projects
• ~health - the "fitness weekly discussion" that @Gaywallet started today
• ~movies - another general "what have you watched lately?" one
• ~games.tabletop - @aphoenix's weekly discussion

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.

Group rearrangements

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?"

Content types

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:

1. Article
2. Ask topic
3. Image
4. PDF
5. Text topic
6. Tweet
7. Video

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?

It was offhandedly mentioned in last week's post about voting data, but thanks to an open-source contribution by ajbt200128 (whose Tildes username I don't know) there's now a page available for you to review posts you voted on recently. It's linked as "Your votes" in the sidebar menu when you're on your user page.

There's a warning at the top of the page about it, but please don't try to use that page to keep track of posts overall. Because the voting data is being deleted now, you won't be able to keep track of any posts older than 30 days through it. Use "Bookmark" for that—there's a link just above "Your votes" for "Your bookmarks" where bookmarked posts will stay forever.

I've also just noticed that these pages aren't paginated yet and everything's in one big list, so if you vote often, be warned that they might be quite large. I should probably work on fixing that now. Let me know if you notice any other issues with it.

And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

This is a privacy-related update that I've always intended to implement on Tildes, and I finally spent some time on it this week.

Keeping eternal records of everything that every user ever voted on is some of the most sensitive data that sites with a voting system have. Your voting history says a huge amount about you, your interests and opinions, and can even serve as a decent proxy for showing what times you were active on the site, what posts you were reading, and how long you spent reading the comments on each of them. In exchange for these major privacy implications, you get the tiny benefit of being able to tell which old posts you voted on (if you even go back to old posts).

So now, to match up with Tildes's general approach of deleting as much sensitive data as possible after 30 days, the voting on posts closes when they're 30 days old. After a post's voting is closed, the records of which individual users voted on that post are deleted, but the count of how many votes there were is kept. So old posts will continue showing their same "scores" exactly the same as before, but there will be no record of which individual users cast those votes.

However, this isn't a purely positive update: the main downside is that the voting does need to be closed (otherwise there would be no way to prevent people from voting again after their first vote is deleted), which prevents the occasionally useful ability to vote on old topics or comments. Overall though, voting on older posts is extremely rare, with less than 1% of the votes on Tildes ever made on something that was over 30 days old at the time of voting.

When the "delete old sensitive data" job runs for the first time after this update later today, 97% of the voting data in the database will be deleted. That's a massive decrease in the amount of sensitive data the site is retaining, and something that most sites would never consider doing, because of the value of that data for behavior analysis and ad-targeting.

On Sunday, I took the site down for a short downtime to upgrade the database from PostgreSQL version 10 to 12. One of the main reasons I wanted to do that upgrade was to get access to a new search function, and I've updated to using it now, so we have multiple nice new search capabilities available.

These should all be pretty familiar since a lot of other search systems and search engines have similar capabilities with the same syntax:

• As before, by default, searching for multiple words will be treated as "all of these terms". So if you search ~games for steam play, you'll get all topics that have both "steam" and "play" in them.
• Phrases can now be searched for by putting double quotes around them. Searching ~games for "steam play" in quotes will only find topics that specifically have "steam play".
• Excluding terms can be done by putting a minus sign in front of it. For example, if you wanted to try to find ~games posts about Blizzard and exclude the recent China controversy, you could search for blizzard -china.
• Alternatives can be searched for by using "or". This changes to "any of these terms" instead of "all of these terms". For example, searching for overwatch or diablo will find any topic with either of those terms, instead of both.
• These capabilities can be combined, so you can exclude phrases, use "or" with phrases, and so on. For example: blizzard -"hong kong" or diablo.

This all works both through the main site topic search (at the top of the sidebar) as well as the new search for your own topics/comments.

I'm going to write a page for the Docs with info about these capabilities, but I think I want to try to find a full specification of what's supported first to make sure I cover it properly. The PostgreSQL docs are pretty vague about it, so I'll probably need to take a look in the actual code.

Please let me know if you notice any issues with it, or if anything's confusing that I should make sure to document.

And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

Two updates today:

Theme Preview page

This is another contribution from @deing, who's been working on this one for a while. It ended up being more complicated than it originally seemed and still has a few minor oddities, but I think it ended up coming out quite well.

When you're on the Settings page, there's now a "View theme previews" link just below the theme-selection dropdown near the top. That will take you to this new Theme Preview page. The blocks with the theme names at the top give you a quick idea of each theme's color scheme, and you can click them to change the whole page's theme and see what it looks like on the example topics and comments below.

I should also mention that Gruvbox themes (with Light and Dark variants) were added about a month ago by @lugubris. I don't think I ever announced those being added, but you can easily check them out here now.

Search your own posts

@mrbig's recent post with multiple suggestions reminded me to work on this one. You know the drill: it's minimal, the interface is a little weird, etc. but you can now search your own topics and comments (separately).

To use it, go to your own user page and click into either "Topics" or "Comments" from the top, you can't still be on the default "All posts" view. When you go into either of the individual post types, there will be a search box at the top, and you can use that to search your own posts.

Just like the overall site search, the search always works as "look for all of these words", so only include multiple words if you want to find posts that contain all of them. I'm hoping to upgrade the PostgreSQL version that I'm using fairly soon, which should make for some easy enhancements to search, so hopefully soon we'll have some more capabilities there.

Let me know if you notice any strangeness with the search results.

And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page

I've just pushed up a commit that adds the backend for configuring and posting topics automatically on a schedule. I'm still working on the UI to be able to set them up through the site, but I can add them manually pretty easily now.

So first, thanks very much to the people that have been manually posting these recurring topics for months. They've been a source of lots of great conversation, and I really appreciate people making sure to keep posting them regularly. Thanks also to @hungariantoast and @deing specifically for doing the work of writing a script to do automatic posting, and the kinda-API-wrapper that it uses. That made sure that multiple of those topics were posted consistently for quite a while before I got around to implementing this.

I'd like to start setting up all of the recurring topics "properly" in the new system, so let's talk about which ones we already have, and potentially some others that we'd want to add. We should probably also try to space them out a little, so there's not a dump of them at the same times. Here are some of the ones that come to mind immediately for me, but I'm sure I'm missing some, and if there are others that you think would be good to have, let me know. I know there are other ones that have dropped off and it would probably be good to resurrect them:

There are also some others that vary every week, so I probably won't be able to set those up yet (like @aphoenix's recent ~games.tabletop weekly discussions), but once there's a UI we should be able to start configuring them ahead of time.

Any thoughts on those existing recurring topics, suggestions for new ones to add, or old ones to bring back?

Updates have been slow lately—I've been working on some larger projects that have ended up with me getting lost down some rabbit-holes that I probably should have stayed away from. Hopefully there will be some progress to show from those before too much longer.

Anyway, I've just deployed an update that re-arranges a few elements, with the most major change being that most topic tags are no longer shown by default on the "listing pages", such as the home page and when you're inside a specific group. The tags added a ton of clutter to the page for information that wasn't important at all most of the time, and multiple people have told me that they found them intimidating and confusing.

I'll come back to the reasoning behind it, but first: if you want to continue seeing tags on topics in listings, there's a new setting for that near the top of the Settings page: "Show topic tags in listing pages". I've also already enabled this setting for anyone that has the permission to tag other users' topics, since I think those users clearly care more about tagging (and if you'd like that permission to help with tagging topics, send me a message and let me know and I can give it to you).

For more about why, I think this old page by Cory Doctorow from 18 years ago does a good job of explaining why detailed metadata systems often have a lot of issues. Even though some users (including me) care a lot about trying to organize and label everything, most users really don't, and it's intimidating to try to figure out how to tag "properly".

This will only get worse as the site continues to grow and more tagging conventions and history are built up, so I wanted to try addressing this now, before it gets too bad. Not having the tags on listings will also have some other benefits like not needing to worry so much about adding "too many" tags to topics, potentially being able to come up with some new special uses for tags in the future, and so on.

Various other minor tweaks were made to the layout as part of this and some upcoming changes (like being able to hide/ignore topics from the listing page). Just a quick list:

• "nsfw" and "spoiler" tags will still be shown in listings. Other "important" tags will be enabled eventually to continue showing in listings, probably even on a per-group level.
• On a topic's comments page, tags are now displayed below the title instead of being in the sidebar
• On the new topic page, the "add tags" field is hidden (collapsed, requires a click) by default. Once a user shows interest in tagging—either by submitting a new topic with tags or changing tags on a topic—it will be shown in the future. I enabled it for a lot of existing users that have done any tagging recently, so most of you probably won't even notice this.
• The "content metadata" such as word count and publication date is now shown in listings next to a topic's group, instead of in parentheses after its title. Without the tags, we have more room for this and can probably do some more with this soon.
• Link topic favicons (the site logos) are now shown next to the site's name, instead of before the title.

That should mostly cover it for now. Let me know if you have feedback or questions.

And as usual, I've given every 10 invites, accessible on the invite page

Similar to the last topic, I've got some more minor updates to let everyone know about.

It's also been quite a while since we had a general feedback topic, so let's do that today as well—feel free to ask any questions or give feedback about Tildes overall.

Here's what's been happening:

1. @Algernon_Asimov's major reorganizing and rework of the Docs is now live on https://docs.tildes.net. A decent number of changes needed to be made to be able to support having the pages in categories/folders, dealing with some formatting changes, redirecting old urls, etc. Some of these changes have started being integrated back into the wiki on Tildes itself as well (and I'm still gradually working on it). For example, the pages in the ~tildes.official wiki are somewhat organized into the same folders, even though the UI doesn't handle it very well in a lot of places yet.

   If you want to help edit the Docs at all, all of the pages (except site policies) are available in the ~tildes.official wiki, and I'll review and transfer any edits to the Docs site. If you don't have access to edit the wiki, send me a message and ask and I can give you access to edit (and you can edit the other groups' wikis too).

2. Some new HTML-exclusive formatting capabilities are available when writing posts:

   • <small>: lets you write a section of text in a smaller font. Good for "side notes" and such, and much better than using superscript, which some people were doing previously to get that effect.
   • <details> and <summary>: lets you make "expandable" blocks in your comments. This is useful if you want to do things like hide a large block of text or code and let people expand it if they want to read it. @hungariantoast used it immediately in his comment here, if you want to see an example. The current state of it isn't great for use for spoilers (but probably better than just writing them in plain sight), but I may make an adaptation of it specifically for use for spoilers.

3. There's a new site theme available, "Zenburn". It's a fairly low-contrast, and used to be one of my favorite color schemes. I had to do some work on one of my old sites that was using it last weekend, and it reminded me how much I liked it, so I added it. Here's the official screenshot of the vim color scheme for it, if you want an idea of what colors it uses. You can change the theme on the settings page if you're logged in, or there's a dropdown at the bottom of every page if you're logged out.

4. @deing has added a small warning to try to let people know when they're about to reply to an old comment or topic, since it seems fairly common for people to accidentally "necrobump" old threads without realizing. For now, the warning shows up when the topic/comment is over a week old. I set that threshold based on pulling out some stats and seeing that only 1% of comment replies and 2% of top-level comments were replying to anything that old, so it should be quite rare for anyone to see anyway.

Other than that, I haven't forgotten about the new group proposals and should be adding some new ones this week. I wanted to finish some backend changes to the group system first to help with that, and it's... gotten more ugly than I was expecting. Sorry for the delay, hopefully soon though.

Let me know if you have any thoughts about any of those changes, and as mentioned, feel free to use this topic for general feedback/questions as well, since I'm sure there are some things that people want to give feedback or ask about that might not feel like they're worth starting a thread in ~tildes for. As usual, I've also topped everyone back up to 10 invite codes, which you can get here.

There have been a number of updates over the last week or so, but I felt like none of them really warranted their own post individually:

• There's now a repost warning/confirmation if you try to submit a link that's been posted before. A list of the previous posts will be shown along with how old they are, and you have the option of re-posting anyway if you want to. Currently, this will warn you no matter how old the previous post(s) were and regardless of which group they were in, but I'll probably restrict it at some point.
• A couple of improvements to topic tagging:
  • If two people happen to edit a topic's tags at the same time, there will be an error if there's an edit conflict, instead of just having the second person's changes overwrite like they did previously.
  • @deing added a check for people trying to add tags with invalid characters, and it will now show that the tag has an error before you try to submit.
• You can now search inside a specific group by using the search box while inside that group. The search results page will have a note at the top saying that it's only searching inside that group, along with a link to search the whole site instead. If you search from the home page it will still be site-wide.
• Writing strikethrough text in markdown now requires using two tildes on each side of the text: this text ~~has some~~ strikethrough. Previously, one tilde on each side of the text would work too, but there were some strange edge cases because of us using ~ when referring to groups as well. Requiring two tildes should be a lot less ambiguous. About 90% of posts with strikethrough were already using two anyway, but this change affected a small number of past posts (sometimes in a positive way by fixing accidental strikethrough). I'll send messages out today to anyone with posts that were affected, so that they can go edit and fix the formatting if they want to.
• @Algernon_Asimov has been doing a massive rework of a lot of the official docs/help pages. They're currently all in the ~tildes.official wiki, but I need to work on moving them over to https://docs.tildes.net, which involves making some changes and updates to that site.

That should about cover it for now, let me know if you have any questions or notice any issues with any of this (or anything else).

Since it launched, Tildes has always been using "Activity" as the site's default sorting method, which behaves like a classic forum—any new comment in any topic causes it to "bump" back to the top of the list. This has generally worked well overall, and has been a good way to keep threads visible and active over longer periods.

However, there have been a few issues related to it, such as controversial threads staying at the top of the site for long periods of time, and bickering back and forth between two users causing threads to constantly bump back up to the top even if nobody else is interacting with the topic at all. We haven't had great ways to deal with this so far, and have mostly had to work around it by setting the default time period to "last 3 days" so that threads can't dominate the site indefinitely, or even locking threads to force them to drop off.

As an attempt at a better solution, "Activity" has now had its behavior changed so that topics will only bump to the top when something "interesting" happens, instead of for every single comment. The exact methods we're using to determine "interesting" will need experimentation and to be adjusted as we see how they work, but initially it's entirely based on comment labels:

If a comment or any of its parent comments has an active Noise, Offtopic, or Malice label (note: it generally takes at least two users applying the label to make it "active"), the comment will not cause the thread to bump to the top. For example, this means that if a particular comment gets labeled as Offtopic, any replies "below" that comment will no longer bump the thread in the Activity sort. This will also apply retroactively, so if someone posts a new top-level comment, the thread will still initially bump to the top, but if that comment is then labeled as Noise, it will "un-bump" and return back to its previous location in the listing.

Since this will give us a better way to prevent threads from staying at the top of the site forever, I've also now changed the default time period back to "all time".

If you'd rather keep the previous behavior and continue having threads always bump to the top when a new comment is posted in them, you can use the new "All activity" sorting method instead. Logged-in users can set it as their default sorting across the site by changing to it on the home page and clicking "Set as default" to the right of the time period dropdown.

Any feedback is welcome, but these are questions that I'm particularly interested in:

• Are there cases where the label-based "uninteresting" judgment won't work well? Links to specific examples would be ideal, if possible.
• What other methods could we use to judge a new comment as "uninteresting"?
• Should we try triggering bumps from other non-comment events? For example, if a topic is getting voted up a lot, should it bump even if there isn't a new comment?

As usual, I've also given everyone 10 invites again (and don't worry, I haven't forgotten about turning the visible comment votes back on either, and I'll do that this afternoon, along with posting a thread to discuss it).

It's been just over a week since the experiment with hiding comment vote counts was started, so as promised I've turned it back off now, and votes are visible again.

There was already a fair amount of feedback posted in the original topics as well as random other threads over the week, but this can be the main place for "postmortem" feedback now.

I won't bias the discussion in a particular direction by giving any of my own thoughts just yet, so let me know what you thought of it and whether you think we should consider making any similar changes more permanently.

I want to try another experiment today, and unlike some other times when I've referred to something as an "experiment" and ended up just leaving it around forever, I'll set a specific time limit on this one.

For the next week, the number of votes on comments will be completely hidden. This applies to everyone and all comments, including your own. I'm not even cheating for myself with admin permissions, I can't see comment vote counts any more either (unless I look it up manually in the database, but I won't do that).

There's no functional change: you can still vote and sorting will be affected exactly as before, but there's no way to see how many votes a particular comment has. Topic voting is staying unchanged, with the counts still visible.

I know that some of you are going to hate this. I think that I'm probably going to hate this. But I want to try it, because I think visible vote counts have both positive and negative effects, and I want to try and sort through those a little. Tildes is still small enough right now that almost all threads can be fully read through easily, so the voting isn't really that significant, and this is a good time to try it.

Here are the main things I'd like to think about, and want to hear from you about:

• In what cases does not being able to see the votes make things more difficult for you? Are there particular threads that you feel like you need to see the vote counts? Why?
• From a less functional perspective, when does not being able to see the counts feel better or worse?
• Can you think of other ways that we could accomplish the positive aspects (ones that are lost by hiding the counts), without showing an actual vote count?

Thanks, let me know what you think. Initial reactions/thoughts are good, but I'm also interested in your thoughts after a few days, once you've gotten a little more accustomed to it.

(And as is pretty usual with "official" posts now, I'm using this as a good time to top everyone back up to 10 invites)

Friday afternoon just before an American long weekend probably isn't the best time for me to announce a major update, but oh well, I'm doing it anyway:

There is now a basic wiki system available, with each group being able to have its own set of pages. I think this should help a lot for letting people collaborate on information through the site itself. @deing has been running an unofficial wiki (thanks!), but having it natively on the site should be much easier for people to find and help edit, so hopefully we can transfer over most or all of that content.

As always, a number of aspects are pretty rough and I'm sure I'll keep tweaking it over the next little while as I see how it starts to be used, but it should be decent enough to get started with. Various things to know about it:

• As of right now, permission to create and edit wiki pages must be granted manually. So if you'd like to get involved with editing wiki pages, please either comment here and say so or send me a message and I can give you permissions.
• The editing history is being stored in git, which will give us a lot of neat functionality for "free". You don't need to know anything about git at all (or even know what it is)—it's all done internally, but it means that I can do things like sync the wiki pages to GitLab and take advantage of their existing interface to display changes, page histories, etc. instead of needing to duplicate all of those functions from scratch (which might be nice to do someday anyway, but it's neat to have them all already with this method).
• Unlike other content you post to Tildes (such as your comments) which remain your own, contributions to the wiki will be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, in order to allow others to edit, reproduce, and so on. This is explained prominently on the wiki editing pages, and I'll update the Terms of Use shortly to reflect this as well.
• I'm going to duplicate all the pages from the Tildes Docs site into the ~tildes.official wiki. This will allow people to be able to contribute changes to the docs without needing to figure out all the pieces for making changes to that repo directly. It won't update automatically or anything (and I wouldn't want it to), but I'll review any changes made through the site wiki and move them onto the Docs site.

I think that should cover the main points, but let me know if you have questions. Also, it's been a while, so I've topped everyone back up with 10 invites again. Thanks!