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  • Showing only topics in ~tildes with the tag "feedback". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Tildes should show the name of user creating link posts

      In text posts, like this one,, we can see the name of user who created it. But if it is a link post then it shows site name in it's place. To see who created that post we have to open the comments...

      In text posts, like this one,, we can see the name of user who created it. But if it is a link post then it shows site name in it's place. To see who created that post we have to open the comments page. Site name can be moved to article details line where the date of publishing and word count is. That way both info can be shown.

      Reason. Both information is shown at same place currently 1. which can confuse new users. for example. Notice after four times mentioning site name there is a username. 2. both can't be shown together.

      12 votes
    2. Thanks

      Feedback here is honest, thoughtful, constructive. This is one of the few places that remind me of the constructive and supportive web I grew up with. I'm just happy projects like Tildes exist....

      Feedback here is honest, thoughtful, constructive. This is one of the few places that remind me of the constructive and supportive web I grew up with. I'm just happy projects like Tildes exist. Thank you, Tildes community.

      31 votes
    3. A Thank You For A Small Detail

      I've noticed a small typographical detail. When you look at messages at one's user page, second level headers (aka <h2>) are shown with a smaller font. I really appreciate that. Don't see rules...

      I've noticed a small typographical detail. When you look at messages at one's user page, second level headers (aka <h2>) are shown with a smaller font. I really appreciate that. Don't see rules for other header levels, but as is the feature is pretty cool.

      5 votes
    4. More feedback on comment reading

      I wanted to say that I really enjoy the "[Back]" link that shows up when you select "Parent" on a comment. Frequently, when I want to navigate to a comment's parent via the parent link, it's...

      I wanted to say that I really enjoy the "[Back]" link that shows up when you select "Parent" on a comment. Frequently, when I want to navigate to a comment's parent via the parent link, it's because there's a lot of other comments in between the parent and child comments, so being able to easily navigate back is just delightful. It's so thoughtful and demonstrates an understanding of the reading experience that multiple times I wished reddit had. More like this, please. :)

      10 votes
    5. Feedback and future development of Tildes Extended

      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...

      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.

      43 votes
    6. New "voted" formatting - less improved

      I notice that the formatting of my "voted" status on topics has changed. It used to be that, when I had voted on a topic, its vote count displayed with a solid purple block (I'm using Solarized...

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

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

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

      50 votes
    7. Collected UI feedback

      I've been grumbling about many of the things Tildes is trying to address for years. And I'm not alone. OTOH I have seen some sites that do some bits right, and some sites that almost got it right...

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

      Tildes, the good:

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

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

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

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

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

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

      #2 Missed opportunity, fixable:

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

      #3 Vague datestamps

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

      #4 Preview and save button

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

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

      Saveable filters (long term feature)

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

      Post auto indexing (long term feature)

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

      Rapid browse mode, paginated

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

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

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

      Other sites

      Google+

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Ello

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

      Twitter

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

      Usenet

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

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

      Web Forums

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

      Reddit

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

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

      Wikis

      Placeholder

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

      Email lists

      Good for: digests?

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

      Mornington Crescent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Am likely to revist.

      16 votes
    8. Accessibility of ~

      I ran a Lighthouse audit for performance and accessibility on a comments page (specifically this one); the results are pretty good on the whole, but there are definitely a couple of things I think...

      I ran a Lighthouse audit for performance and accessibility on a comments page (specifically this one); the results are pretty good on the whole, but there are definitely a couple of things I think ~ could do better.

      Performance

      IMO the performance of ~ is fine; Chrome thinks that the time to first meaningful paint is a bit high (3.1s on a simulated 3G connection with CPU throttling), but I don't know what you can do about that without doing things like inlining all the CSS, which would make the very first page load faster but hurt every request after that. Maybe minifying the CSS/JS would help? I don't know if the performance benefit would be enough to justify the increase in complexity to handle the minification, and you'd also lose the easy legibility of the source (which I personally really like).

      Accessibility

      There's some really small text on ~! The Lighthouse audits I ran don't catch it, but the SEO audit does, and it's not hard to see it with your own eyes either. The suggested minimum size for easy reading in that audit is 16px, which is the current size of all post and comment text on desktop, although mobile only gets 14px (I don't know if this is actually a problem, since you probably hold your phone closer to your face than your monitor).

      Edit: posting this from my phone - yes, the 14px font on mobile is definitely harder to read than 16px would be. I don't know if that's just me (I have a fairly severe visual impairment), but I would definitely prefer 16px text everywhere, not just on desktop.

      There's also a good amount of text that doesn't have a great deal of contrast (even using the default white theme – I'm sure it's much worse with Solarized). This is mostly all the grey text, although Lighthouse also complains about the links when they're on a grey background (especially the "visited" colour, which is much closer to grey than the normal colour).

      Some specific examples: The timestamp and "Link" text for each comment is only 10px, which is a bit small for me, especially with the low contrast on "Link". Similarly, the post timestamp is a bit hard to read.

      The worst offender by far, though, is the "Comment deleted by author" notice (example). It's tiny and grey and incredibly easy to miss, and is directly relevant to the flow of the conversation, unlike the timestamps. I'd really appreciate it if that could be bumped up to at least as large as usernames are currently displayed.

      35 votes
    9. Link to userpage should be more obvious

      Currently, it's just sitting in the top right corner. Considering the fact that it's hiding useful settings (like dark modes!) behind it, it should be a bit more obvious that it's a button,...

      Currently, it's just sitting in the top right corner. Considering the fact that it's hiding useful settings (like dark modes!) behind it, it should be a bit more obvious that it's a button, especially on mobile.

      5 votes
    10. High-priority things to fix/add

      Here's a quick list of things that I'm working on getting ready in the very near future. Please let me know if you have particular thoughts on any of these. Fixing the site icons for link topics...

      Here's a quick list of things that I'm working on getting ready in the very near future. Please let me know if you have particular thoughts on any of these.

      1. Fixing the site icons for link topics (currently just shows the blue dashed square).
      2. Putting some information in topic sidebars - any thoughts on what would be good to have here? I think I'd like to have some of the more-detailed metadata about the topic once there's more of that being generated (for example for videos, this could show which channel it's from, how long it is, etc.), but that still won't be very much and there's a lot of space. Commenting rules? Something else?
      3. Inbox/notifications for replies to your comments and topics, as well as username mentions. Any opinions about how it would be good to do this in a way that's convenient and not too annoying?
      4. Collapse buttons for comment threads (possibly by being able to click the line as well, similar to the reddit redesign)
      10 votes