Oh, I was using Zing on my phone.

I don’t mind the narrower text, it’s easier to read. More like a book. I don’t mind the “You’ve read up to here” thingy, I think it’s kinda funny.

I don’t understand a lot of the settings and I can’t figure out the differences between the modes. I’m letting smarter people than me figure that stuff out and I’m taking their recommendations.

Personally, and I know I am probably the only one that wants this and I’m not going to whine about it, but I would actually like user icons. Like, an image of my face (or whatever) by the username. This is just because I’m really, really bad with names and it would help me keep up with who’s who. But that’s my problem and I think changing it would not suit the spirit of ILX.

I have been on ILX for over 20 years and I think it took me 10 years before I figured out there was more than ILM.

I just figured out bookmarks a few months ago. I might be the worst ILX user in terms of exploring and using features so that might be why I’m not bent out of shape about all of these changes.

Thanks to everyone for making this happen including the people pushing back and making this place the best it can be.

I think that would piss off the already aggressively pissed off even further tbh

XP Haha, well done for getting there. TBH failing to discover anything but ILM I would consider a ‘feature’.

Oh yeah, I’m not even mentioning the icons thing on proper ILX, I think peeps would melt down.

They refuse to even register here where Keith will answer them. Can you imagine adding user icons? lol

I did my first edit! I meant to say that I figured out bookmarks (with a lot of help) a few months ago, not years.

I don’t think I agree with ‘Reactions disincentivise discussion.’ as we know from experience how common it is just to post ‘OTM’ or something similar. It’s not clear that the option to react to a post in this way will even lead to a reduction in those kinds of non-discussion responses—might be interesting to find out in practice imo. I think both approaches are reasonable and I’m generally pro-options (a number of options I’m seeing here don’t interest me at all which is good :).

But apart from that I can take or leave emoji and don’t have a strong argument for them just sympathy for what I understand is the reason they’ve been introduced here. I find them enjoyable to use among friends on e.g. WhatsApp (tho at the same time hate that we’re on WhatsApp go figure) in ways that don’t necessarily add anything besides a basic acknowledgement that I read their post (tho ofc you’d want more than that usually). This is not the same as that but I think it explains reasonably well my relative acceptance of them (leaving aside how they look, which ones are available etc.).

the setting you’re after is ‘disable sticky menus’ (which is not very intuitive and took me a few days to find)

Again, I know you’re likely to disagree, but my reasoning (apart from some people suggesting over the years that they would be fun) was that it might free up threads from less information-heavy comments, if that makes sense.

i think this is just not a real problem that needed to be solved, especially with how lightweight ilx already is. it’s not like a single ‘otm’ post (which isn’t like, super common) takes up a ton of space to scroll past because you have a giant flashing avatar and signature to scroll past or anything.

i don’t really care if reactions go ahead, i don’t expect to really use them much & it sounds like a lot of others would use them even less, but i completely understand why some absolutely hate the idea

What if the site played the nyancat song on a loop at maximum volume

Just going to weigh in on the reacts issue, although I have already stated I am Team No Reacts: it is actually a hill I will gladly die on, we shouldn’t have them. I don’t think this one is a matter of time to get used to it, I just straight-up think it’s a bad idea. As others have said, even giving us the option to hide them isn’t enough, as they’ll still inform a change in culture on the boards.

What if the site played the nyancat song on a loop at maximum volume (DJP)

This, on the other hand, is a change I’d 100% support.

• What ILX is... What does it represent? What is it not? What should it not be like? For example, is it a music discussion forum? Is it a general discussion forum? How does it differ from other forums, as in, what makes it different?

• What should it be? I would expect that what people would like it to be is most likely different to what it is, in some way or another

it’s primarily a music message board to me. a lot of what makes it different is the community and its distinct tastes, but the forum software is also quite distinct from every other message board out there (in a good way), it’s pleasingly minimalist and very functional at facilitating discussion—it has all the necessary features and most of the ones that would be nice to have and nothing more.

what should it be? i’d like it to keep being the same thing really, it’s good at that. two common message board features it doesn’t currently have that would be useful additions are

• a ‘quote post’ button, which is basically here in the new reply feature, although it doesn’t work quite the same as other message boards—if clicking on the quote scrolled to the original post that would be a lot smoother

• an on-site private message feature to replace the awkwardness and problems of ‘send an email to this user’, but it’s completely understandable if that’s too much hassle and is hardly essential, very much ‘would be a little nice to have’

What ILX is...

Not sure if this has been stated, but the thing most central to the identity of ILX is the people who participate. So a primary design goal of the new software should be to not alienate those people.

what is ILX?

ILX is a hamhock in your cornflakes, yeah

ILX is the ring around your bath.

ILX is a joint rolled in toilet paper

ILX is rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps

ILX is you, big mama.

i knew reactions would be the most triggering part of the nu-nu-code and I said as much to keith before we flipped the switch on this test. I genuinely don’t know where I stand on them, though I do quite like them on Slack, especially custom ones, and istr the ILX slack made a fair bit of use of them.

I’m not sure we’ve got quite the right set here, and I admit I’ve done a bad job with the ones I chose for Zing bc I basically just whacked some in to make it work and those need revisited for sure.

But to be more philosophical a lot of the reactions to reactions are coming from posters, who by definition don’t mind posting. And ILX has lots of lurkers too, who are also part of the community to my mind. Reactions might be a good way to let them participate?

One thing that most online forums don’t have in comparison to in-person conversation is you don’t get to see how the listeners are reacting to things—you don’t see the nods of agreement/the chuckles/the furrowed brows of confusion. Done right and done well, reactions might be a solution to that. I think it’s pretty risky — gamifying and engagement-farming with reactions has led to some horrors on reddit and elsewhere — but I don’t think it absolutely has to be a bad thing.

Which is a long way of saying I was and am pretty open to the idea of testing it out a bit, seeing what was helpful and what was awful about them, tweaking and then deciding further. I don’t think we should just rule it out because everything is perfect about how things are today.

XP

It’s a music discussion board for me too. The email thing is a vestige of a prior era and has to go, and indeed it has.

Sadbonx, I kind of agree and disagree; I mean I’d need to elaborate... I think the thing central to ILX’s identity is the posters who started it 26 years ago. Pick only one, classic or dud, pick only ten, OTM etc. etc. all come from that time.

I think it also depends on what you mean by participants... In that I agree if you mean readers too, of which there are always 100 times as many writers. I would also include potential future users in that.

Part of the reason for asking is that ILX is basically dying slowly—it peaked in April 2004, and now has ~16% of the posts from that time and considerably less ‘traffic’. I think that’s definitely within a wider context of social media decline; however, ILX’s decline precipitated social media’s decline by a good fifteen years, so I think it’s a useful question to ask.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that it is now more than a generation old. For over 20 years I have seen posters complaining that “this has been discussed before”... No shit! Some people who may be here now might not have been born when it started!

So this is the context in which I’m keen to hear people’s views. E.g. why did it start declining 22 years ago (quite sharply too, I might add)? What might stop that? Do you even care?

It’s whatever De Subjectivisten say it is, IMO.

lol

OTM

I genuinely don’t know where I stand on them, though I do quite like them on Slack, especially custom ones, and istr the ILX slack made a fair bit of use of them.

they can work fine in a live chat format (especially where there’s custom emotes and a million options so people have all sorts of weird idiosyncratic reactions to use) but add far less to this sort of message board format where discussion is just slower to begin with

yes — chat rooms and slack are about being in the moment, they’re ‘live.’ message boards are something you can read back later. in the same spirit: pointing out something has been discussed before isn’t necessarily a complaint! it’s a citation, because you actually can go and read the old discussion, which can provoke new thoughts which you then bring to the table. this is a feature, not a bug.

oops, just noted a bug: i typed three consecutive dashes and the site converted it to an emdash. trying to test that out and i’m getting more: if i type three dashes on a new line and it creates a horizontal line across the whole box. if i try to type a dash followed by a blank space, it wants to create a bulleted list. please let me just control the text i’m typing.

It’s not necessarily a complaint for sure, but it certainly has been!

That’s not really my point there Doctor C... More just that the remarkable age of this community does mean that because society and views change, some discussions are worth having again, in a modern context.

if i type three dashes on a new line and it creates a horizontal line across the whole box

Wow, I did not know it did that. Some of it is not stuff I have done, it’s the rich text editor that I am using, which I can only control to a limited degree.

On the football forum where I lurk, which I judge to be roughly as disputatious and slow-paced as ILx, though perhaps shorter-winded, there reads and they are used sparingly and rather well. I find it quite helpful to understand which things are being laughed at or whatever. Very occasionally they get discussed “what is to you think is funny about my post concerning our football club’s responsibility for world hunger??!!”) but mostly they’re a useful temperature check.

So, I’m in the “don’t mind them” camp, and the “think they’re quite funny” camp, rather than being mad for them.

this sort of message board format where discussion is just slower to begin with

I remember stet and I having a discussion 20 years ago about whether the speed of the (then) new stuff would change things, as particularly in the year or two before, it was sometimes taking upwards of two minutes to make a post.

WYSIWYG editor seems like a great option to be able to enable/disable in settings.

So this is the context in which I’m keen to hear people’s views. E.g. why did it start declining 22 years ago (quite sharply too, I might add)? What might stop that? Do you even care?

2004 is well before my time but the obvious reason is failure to bring in new users and i don’t really know how you solve that these days, it’s just a niche corner of the internet that i was lucky to stumble onto. iirc i found it via the singles jukebox, which i found because a friend of a friend was writing for it at one point? when i joined over a decade ago this place came across as insular and a bit cliquey, though it seemed to have been mellowing out around the time i joined?

it’s not clearly a music message board for any particular sort of music either which makes it a bit of a harder sell too. it has its leanings and those are unfortunately a bit narrower than they used to be as a lot of people have moved on

The small caps are super cute though

My own take on why reactions don’t fit in with what I think of as ILX:

ILX has always, to me, been a place for lively discussion, and one where ideas can matter outside of a context of cliqueishness and groupthink. When I post something, I have no idea what everyone in the room thinks of what I’m going to say, and this encourages me to be as clear and considerate in my thoughts as I possibly can. In forums that use reacts this is not the case—because posting a react is so quick and easy, any statement rapidly gets categorised as good or bad due to group consensus. So if I post something and get a bunch of downvotes, I won’t further explore the topic even if I think I’m onto something. Likewise, if I get a buncha upvotes, it is easy for me to get arrogant about it and take what others are saying less seriously. So there not being the furrowed brows and/or nodding heads, that to me is a feature, not a bug. Every other place I post I am very aware of the pecking order; here it is less clear, and that allows me to focus on the substance more.

This dynamic holds even when we’re just posting OTM or emojis to previous posts—because you’re still going out on a limb on your own, stating that you think a certain point is worth agreeing with, as opposed to being, like, user number eleven to click on the thumbs up react.

To be clear I am not a purist about this: if someone has shown themselves to be out of order to a significant degree they should know the community thinks that, which is why the suggest ban feature is good. But a constant update on what everyone thinks of every thought posted would, I fear, lead to blander, less interesting discussions.

that makes sense. kinda unfortunate to lose control over how our stuff looks. (in the same spirit i’m against the option to force other people’s writing to display with capitalization they didn’t select.) but that’s one that i’d accept as the cost of having an overall more workable and easier-to-maintain typing interface.

also just now discovering that new posts pop up while i’m typing??? that’s both kinda cool and kinda really distracting. makes me feel like i have to race to keep up, losing my train of thought while things bounce into frame. again ——chatroom versus message board. (let’s see if the double dash followed by single dash gets the same conversion treatment.)

fwiw Keith I just posted my overall feelings about the design on the main site. i’m sure you’re keeping up with both—just felt suddenly weird to be sharing micro-feedback here while i’ve inadvertently written an essay there.

Yes, I know, I read them, thank you.

Re: them popping up, I will be putting in an option to let you disconnect from that if you want.

quick idea: instead of “Replying to Keith,” maybe it should actually insert (in the blue typeface) “@ Keith” next to the start of my paragraph. like:

@ Keith—that makes sense....

(where it’s blue, rather than bold/underlined). i’ve never gotten used to “Replying to...” tags in any environment, my brain really gets jumbled trying to run back up the stack. whereas ILX has a very established rhythm of just saying who you’re responding to, and that’s enough to distinguish your post from the ongoing flow. it also uses less vertical space.

Appreciate that, on both points.

OTM

I mean thumbs up

Oh FFS, something like that.

In forums that use reacts this is not the case—because posting a react is so quick and easy, any statement rapidly gets categorised as good or bad due to group consensus.

this is v. good point – groupthink’s already enough of a problem on every damn website. I think HN hide post votes to try and get around that. maybe reacts should be sealed for 10 years and only made visible after that

OK weird feature on my last post — I had full carriage returns between my different lines there, but they got dropped.

Thank you for your comments, Daniel... Out of interest, do you feel that ILX is a considered, polite place? It’s not a trick question in that sense, I just know so many people who think the exact opposite. And I wonder if it’s one of the reasons for the 22+ year decline. If you read early threads, it’s not that way at all for the most part.

My comment about De Subjectivisten was 95% a little joke and 5% a serious comment—my view of ILx is that it’s a series of somewhat connected communities that have coalesced around a space which gives them room to talk about what they see fit.

Like most—perhaps all—of the other places I’ve loved on the internet, this has been owned, operated and (lightly) governed by one or (at most) two individuals who have an idea for the thing and how they want it to be and set about creating the space for that to happen. And then it has.

Which isn’t to say that it always works, of course, or works forever.

Very surprised by this post tbh, because I don’t associate the decline of ILX with the decline of social media at all; I associate it with social media hegemony! The way I remember it ILX started losing members when they started deciding that Twitter and Facebook were better places for networking and communication; this mirrors my experience on other old school forums.

As to what is to be done about this, I’ll admit I don’t know and have sort of gotten comfortable with the idea of this place as a hangout for an established community. Vaguely I feel like the best type of new blood would be people actively googling, I dunnom Haroumi Hosono or Javier Cercas or whoever and stumbling upon this place. But I guess that’s also working with an outdated view of how people use the internet.

I found ILX a frankly terrifying place to be in the early 00’s! People were mean as fuck, but I will say that for me personally that also held some value, it showed 18 year old Daniel_Rf that he was not the genius he thought he was.

These days I would categorise it as basically pretty chill compared to most online spaces, but this is also a bit a byproduct of the retirement home vibe—we all know each other’s quirks, know that some posters tend to be more abrasive in ways that would I’m sure be quite discouraging to newcomers.

Yes, I think there is truth in that.

suggestion: the “update bookmark” button should visually make clear it’s about updating a bookmark—like maybe a bookmark with a little “circle of arrows” in it, rather than a “cloud” icon. it took me a minute to understand that this was how you updated bookmarks.

THIS IS A RED LINE I WILL NOT CROSS.

Joking. Can you provide me with some example of the type of thing you’re meaning and I can try to sort something suitable.

oh! i’m just saying, for the “Update” icon, take the current “Remove” icon and replace the “X” with the “arrows” from the update icon. does that make sense? i think if you had that, you might not even need the words “update” and “remove,” but others might disagree on that one.

wow control-enter is a nice shortcut for posting, i gotta say.

... maybe call it “bookmark” to match the funky “you’ve bookmarked up to here” arrow?

Ah okay... I mean the problem is that I’m not like drawing these icons (I wish!), I’m buying them! And I don’t mean the expense, it’s a subscription thing, so it’ll be dependent on whether they have such a thing! I will look.

Tim, it is called bookmark, up until you have bookmarked it, then it becomes update. I could make it ‘Update bookmark“ to be clearer.

ok here’s another design suggestion: the ‘thread stat’ box at the bottom of the thread should take up less screen real estate. it’s fun if you’re curious but not something you need 99.99% of the time that you’re reading a thread or editing a post. right now it’s half of my screen, along with this posting window. could it actually be something you get by clicking on the big blue thread title at the top of the screen? or! what if that had a little “(i) for information” type of graphic next to it, in subscript at the end of the thread title, and you click that to get the metadata/activity/top poster stuff?

Ah! If there’s room, that sounds cool

Ahhhh that makes sense, fair enough.

wait, how are some of you managing to “reply with quote”? when i reply to a post, it shows the entire post in my edit box, but then when i hit post, it only shows the “Replying to Keith.”

I mean I agree with the point, I did this like 15 months ago and had completely forgotten, some weird refreshing cloud icon is a bit strange. I’ll try and find something.

It’s a modal thing (like Jazz). If you reply to something more than IIRC 8 posts ago, it quotes a chunk of it. If you’re replying to something ‘roughly above’ you, it doesn’t. I felt huge chunks of repeated text would be pretty ugly. The number 8 is tweakable.

Hmm—I think the idea of just keeping the vanilla bookmark icon, but changing the word to ‘update,’ makes the most sense.

Confused! It does say update... Do you mean ‘Update bookmark’?

Hmm, I found a different icon, I mean it’s not exactly what you want, but it’s bookmark shaped and has a sort of star in the middle. The problem is, it’s been drawn by someone different and looks different, and hence a bit shit when they’re side-by-side. What about just the same icon that’s in the main menu for bookmarks?

Testing out replying to an older post to see if block-quoting shows up. But it doesn’t seem like I can edit the post to control how much is shown? If that’s the case, I’d suggest turning off the auto-quoting entirely. We should feel fully in control of what our posts are going to show up as, and it’s going to be weird if you think a quote will appear and it doesn’t, or vice versa.

What might massage this, if possible: “Reply” doesn’t quote anything by default, but it DOES allow you, while you’re writing your post, to select text from the post you’re replying to, so that you can copy-paste into the edit window and apply the convenient block-quote formatting in the text editor, Is that possible?

re: bookmarks: Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I mean, keep it saying “Update,” but swap the “Cloud” icon for the “Bookmark” icon, and it’ll be clear that one of these buttons updates bookmarks and the other one removes bookmarks.

I kind of did both... If you refresh, see if that works.

A few points:

• we all know how divisive and hurtful some people found the ILX Slack, so bringing up the way emojis work/ed there isn’t actually a decent metric as to how most ilxors, who aren’t/weren’t on the slack, feel about them

• i agree that lurkers are a part of this community, but think that anyone positing emoji reactions as “participatory” is willfully misunderstanding the point of the boards, which is discussion. if lurkers don’t want to or don’t feel prepared to discuss, that is fine, but the passivity of emoji reactions is antithetical to the spirit of discussion. in other words, if lurkers want to participate, they should post!

The reason it truncates replies is to stop a reply to a three-screen-high post doing all of that. If you’re to edit what you’re quoting, then that sounds like it would likely be misused, but I feel a bit like I’m responding without thinking it through properly, so I’ll do that for a while, if that’s okay.

i think the ideal would be for it to work like something other message boards, where there is a ‘quote post’ button that inserts a quote that links back to the original post, but allowing that quote to be edited, so you can respond to only one sentence in a longer post if you want

Big improvement over the cloud! I still think it doesn’t need the word “bookmark”—would be fine with just “Update” next to the bookmark icon.

Okay, it is done! More space is always helpful.

Nice tweak! Thanks.

Yeah I don’t know WTF I was thinking with the cloud thing anyway. Head in the cloud.

Daniel Rf OTM about why reactions would change how ILX discussions work, great post.

it’s not clearly a music message board for any particular sort of music either which makes it a bit of a harder sell too. it has its leanings and those are unfortunately a bit narrower than they used to be as a lot of people have moved on.

Nor should it be. It’s a music messageboard for all music. (Im not saying you think it should be)

One thing that most online forums don’t have in comparison to in-person conversation is you don’t get to see how the listeners are reacting to things—you don’t see the nods of agreement/the chuckles/the furrowed brows of confusion.

I do not have strong feelings about many of these changes. However, I do think that the ‘replying to’ feature creates a funny kind of multithreaded discussion that I don’t enjoy very much.

Although I privately seethe a lot about writing something I think adds to a discussion and feeling like my post is ignored in the scrum of two strident weirdos taking chunks out of each other in a personal BOEUF, I also like the simple linear reading experience, top to bottom, of ILX discourse.

Remy, I do tend to agree, although a lot of people have wanted over the last 20 years. I tried to make it quite inobtrusive and certainly avoid any kind of threaded discussion-type thing.

How do you set a bookmark that’s not at the most recent post in a thread?

I didn’t do @reply-type things, although someone asked for them upthread or on the other one. That was because that fundamentally works by notifying you, and (a) people might not want to be and (b) that would lead to some really complicated system of OKing and not OKing reply notifications from people.

Dr C, you can’t, but it’s been replaced by another function, which is the Save thing in the menu... Those go into the saved posts (star thingy) in the main menu, so they operate independently of bookmarks.

Hmm. Is that baked deep into the code? Like, for example, could “Update bookmark at this post” be added to the options that come up when you click on a post?

I ask because, while I get the value of having the save-post option for its own purposes, it sorta limits the power of bookmarks. In 2.0 I can use bookmarks both to keep up with a current thread that’s frequently updating, or a big long thread that I’m slowly reading through over multiple sittings. The latter functionality isn’t that well-served by “Save Post,” since saving posts every time I stop reading means I’m creating a bunch of bookmarks (effectively) for the same thread.

Is there an example of the “thread activity chart” that “will become available once two months of data is recorded” that you can share?

never mind, I forgot there are older threads on here

Lurkers represent !

Fwiw, Keith, answering some of your more existential questions:

I think that of course there is the rise of social media to blame for dwindling population and posting on ILX, but I think in addition to that, the level of interaction with digital interfaces and screens has increased so much since 2004, and that creates new issues. I think many potential new users are already overloaded by not just social media but everything else, and so adding one more thing— especially one that looks and feels different than most of the internet and doesn’t have the same priorities as the rest of the internet— can be extremely daunting.

That said, I want more new users. I would be overjoyed to talk with new people about NNCK (speak of necroposting, that recent thread bump alerted me to their upcoming show, for which I bought a ticket) or weird books or any number of other topics. This isn’t because I don’t like talking with the people here— far from it— but because new perspectives could be enriching to the community.

How to attract new members? I don’t totally know, though I have some ideas. One thing I will say is that given the exodus from social media, making the site look more like social media is clearly not the good choice if we’re trying to attract new people.

I can use bookmarks both to keep up with a current thread that’s frequently updating, or a big long thread that I’m slowly reading through over multiple sittings. The latter functionality isn’t that well-served by “Save Post,”

Yes I’m the same as Dr C. I don’t use bookmarks to save particular posts I use them to mark where I’m up to, and on busy threads I often haven’t got time or inclination to fully catch up in one sitting, so I’d really miss this feature.

Sure, just look at a Sandbox thread that’s older, e.g.

I Love Everything

are we done here? : /

mookieproof

i don’t want it to be the case, but it kinda seems like it

in any case i always will/absolutely continue to love you all

especially harry

[Image]

Please don’t get excited about it, it’s not massively exciting!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the reactions because my gut feeling when I first saw them was URGH NO PLEASE and I’m afraid that hasn’t changed. I’m going to explain this in a really badly muddled way so please bear with me.

I think what it boils down to is not how reactions are used by you and me and anyone with a social media account. It’s about how reactions are used by big tech.

They’re a way to get people to keep coming back to check how many likes they have, because the more you come back, the more other stuff (ads or whatever) you will see. They are a way of measuring a kind of blank engagement (lower in the hierarchy than comments, which require more effort, but a measurable nonetheless) which enables them to collect more data about you and what you like, and sell you more stuff. They are a tool to make a product sticky (aka addictive) and they help create an environment that enables Big Social Media to do what Big Social Media exists to do, which is categorically not to give you somewhere to chat to your mates and have a nice time.

And so I think the gut feeling of URGH NO PLEASE is justified because I know the intentions behind reactions here are 100% good, but it still feels like adopting a nefarious tactic for our little corner of the internet, and more so if you’re going to send people a notification every time they get a reaction.

TLDR: ILX isn’t big and it doesn’t exist to sell people stuff, so reactions feel wrong here. It’s about perceptions, which do matter. To me.

Also I’m scarred by my father’s constant use of one single emoji in WhatsApp. I could win a gold medal at the Olympics, or give birth to quintuplets, and he’d still send me a big yellow thumb.

Dr C, Alba, was in the middle of replying and got dragged away. Yes it’s an interesting unintended consequence of bookmarks (WHAT IS THIS SHIT? WHAT ARE THEY EVEN FOR? TURN IT OFF—sorry, this is 20 years ago) that I hadn’t designed it for back then.

But I get it, and no there’s nothing particularly hard outside of UX in making that work... In fact, it’s basically easy. Can we see how others feel over a bit of time, please? I know that’s sounding a bit like no I’m not going to do it, but that’s not true, I’m fine with doing it, I just want to get a good feel for how others have used the same stuff in case there’s a good way of solving everyone’s needs there. This is actually the same as other stuff—part of my challenge is kind of collating and synthesising stuff into a coherent whole. A lot of that came from the Ideas for ILX, but the interesting thing about times like there is exactly what you guys are saying—you use it in a way I never thought people would.

I realise the only thing I’ve posted here so far has been about reactions but I do think the rest of the updates are pretty strong and in some cases genius!

Tabes, thanks for this... It’s going to require more time and thought from me though, and I have to go out now, but I will get back to you properly tomorrow. I certainly don’t know all the answers either, but it is a really good conversation to have.

I think that is the best most measured post on this than I’ve seen and I agree with you.

I wish everyone was as polite and constructive. Including myself.

p.s. re the previous point about bookmarks, what I mean is that I will do it, I just want to see if others have needs to that helps inform how best to do it.

Keith, you gave me a thumbs up on purpose, didn’t you? runs out the front door triggeredly

Haha!

Of course that’s okay! I floated it in the spirit of a suggested tweak, just one of those little things around the edges.

I genuinely found it interesting. I do find it continually weird how some people have come to love something I didn’t design and didn’t think through!

(That’s not quite right, to be fair. Loads of thinking went into making the thing actually run properly, and not crash the instant it was hit by loads of traffic, which as you’ll remember, it was back then)

The problem these days, is that the heavy traffic comes from AI scraping bots, not actual people. FFS.

Oh actually what does the sub board mod side of this look like? (Not gonna ask about site mod, do not want to go back down that route)

It looks AMAZING.

https://sandbox.ilxor.com/board/25

Is there a way to block ai scrapers from accessing the site? That’s kind of gross, worse than ad scrapers even.

Also, great job! V impressive.

So is the only way to get poster names below their posts to make my browser window super tiny?

That, or browse on a phone

Yah in phone browser they show up under posts (as is best and correct). The separator is still centered rather than left-aligned, but there’s also a little more white space so it’s not as needed. However, the top-of-the-screen stuff spills into two lines (maybe cause I selected too many boards to follow).

I’m not bothered by the board getting smaller and I’m not sure what could be done about it if growing the board was a goal. Besides the aggressive tone of early ILX, the amount of people made it harder for me to keep up and more intimidating. I’m fine with smaller parties, and ILX will have a life cycle like anything else. Doing anything contrary to our current path for the sake of attracting newbies is bogus.

I hope you don’t see this as confrontational, Keith, but instead of us having to justify why we don’t like a feature, I honestly feel the onus is/was on you to justify why add it to begin with? Anything that goes beyond simple QoL features (like the editor, etc) and deviates dramatically with the layout and feature set of the old site should require some justification and explanation to the community.

Building it out does feel a bit of a “arguing or proposing in bad faith” kinda tactic, whether or not that was the intent!

But rather than us having to say with so many voices why something is bad, I think, to an even bigger extent, you need to justify why it’s good for ILX.

I also feel a bit of trust has been broken for some peeps, and it is indeed on you to help rebuild that!

Hey, I’ve not read this thread all the way through—will go back and do it—but is there an option to bookmark a thread part-way through, like you can bookmark any post on the existing site? I have loads of threads I’ve bookmarked part-way through on purpose (e.g. TV threads where I’m only a few episodes in). on Sandbox I can only seem to bookmark at the end of a thread.

Sorry if this is addressed already but, I can’t bookmark where I was at so....

my wishlist fwiw (20+ year poster)

• no reacts (though opportunity for hijinx / trolling is tempting)

• old.css look and feel (i.e. names under posts, full width posts)

• ban louis jagger

• engage with feedback on main board (ILX 2)

• put mark C back in airplane mode

With the reduced width (still the no. 1 readability issue for me—sorry ) I’m noticing a lot of te-xt broken up by dash-es at the end of a line and now THAT’S annoying me too! I feel like the flow of long-form answers is totally wrecked and it’s just like “type into this corner of the screen”.

I don’t think I’ve registered my dislike of the reacts either yet, so here it is. If I could change one thing it’d be the small area of readable screen real estate, not the reacts. And I could live with a ‘lol’ and ‘otm’ react ONLY.

EDIT: And the 5-min edit function is a great addition—with the ability to view before/after edits. Will hopefully reduce ‘oops, typo’ posts.

Yeah ultimately if it looks and feels like old ILX, whatever backend changes are fine, but the look and feel of this place is important and shouldn’t just be changed.

And I don’t even use old.css! (I use new.css)

new.css users… they walk among us

if we have to have reacts, make them OTM, lol and RP (resultant paste)

I love new.css and wish everything was like it, tbh!

I have now scrolled through and seen that my bookmark comment has been addressed (but also would love to bookmark a post instead of save it...?!)

I think the ‘reply to’ function is great in theory but needs a couple of tweaks/ make it user policy to quote some of it, because I’m seeing people being replied to and agreed with but I can’t remember who said what or what is being agreed with. C&Ping to quote was a bit clunky but it did make you focus in on what specifically was said and what you’re responding to.

will I be able to report/FP a user’s reactions??

(And of course thank you Keith for the huge amount of work you have put into this)

OTM, lol, RP (resultant paste) and FP (flag paste)

I see reacts are gone! that’s awesome, thank you Keith, and appreciate the quick turnaround.

For updates on changes, are you just posting here? I wonder if making separate posts for each iteration of updates would help? You could share what you’ve worked on, what you’ve taken into account as stuff to do, and offer up things for us to test out too, and each being a separate thread helps reduce noise and confusion.

OH WHOOPS. My bad, my own browser plugin’s dark mode was hiding them. I take it all back

Testing what a horizontal line would look like

Looks like they don’t appear!

But yeah hope they can soon—I will absolutely pre/postfix all future posts here with them to enhance readability of at least my posts and those adjacent (until the layout us updated). It’s extremely hard to read and understand who wrote what without them

I turned on horizontal line as the ‘separator’ in the settings (gear icon), where Keith is offering a number of options (polled in another thread). It only shows up when posts shift from one poster to another, not between multiple posts by the same poster. You can also forcibly create one by starting a new line and typing three dashes. But overall I stand by my belief that posts need stronger horizontal separators, and there’s no reason not to keeping using the poster’s ‘signature.’ It’s on the screen already, it works as a separator, and it’s desirable anyway because it makes it a lot easier to keep track of who’s saying what.

kinder

With the reduced width (still the no. 1 readability issue for me—sorry ) I’m noticing a lot of te-xt broken up by dash-es at the end of a line and now THAT’S annoying me too! I feel like the flow of long-form answers is totally wrecked and it’s just like “type into this corner of the screen”.

I figured out why this annoys me too. Books don’t break words (usually), but newspapers do.

I don’t see any functional or even aesthetic reason to justify the lines into tidy blocks (except I guess because you can?), but boy, of all the things I’ve gone on about, this is low on the list.

I don’t see this in the mobile browser, interstingly

There is a screen width where the user name falls under the message (so small though). Which means there’s a screen size delimiter in the css for it. In which case it would be trivial to apply that look/feel at a wider screen width

Hi all, I think work mode is the mode for me—feels most like old ILX in terms of what I actively enjoyed about it—supremacy of text and discussion, minimal everything else.

So thank you for this option! If I were to make a humble suggestion it would be that the control bar at the top of the page be repeated at the bottom of the page, making returning to ILM or ILE one step quicker.

Also, I use the site in my phone browser (Safari) and the rich text bold button doesn’t seem to do anything, at least in the mode I am using. Underline and Italics work ok.

Treefell, are you the guy that lives in the old Luma factory building? I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere on the thing, or maybe I’m getting you mixed up with someone else.

I’ll reply properly tomorrow to a bunch of questions. Late at night tonight!

Awesome! Yes that’s a huge win already for readability. Nice, Keith.

Dark mode might need a good gander from people. If you reply it appears to not dark mode the reply text when typing

Can you make it auto-FP users who post imgur images?

You’re getting me mixed up with someone else. I’m Edinburgh based

hey! i’m ‘new blood’ i think! i found this forum around 2024, forgot about it, and rediscovered it and made an account this year. i’m still more of a lurker but i have gotten a lot out of this site (not this one, you know, the main one). indeed i probably spend more time than i’d like to admit reading through old and new threads alike. i wonder if there are others around who, like me, are younger than the board itself?

Ah sorry... Right you are. That means we could probably meet in the pub tomorrow 🤣

I’d be happy to buy you a pint some time for all the hard work you’ve put in to ILX. Unfortunately this weekend isn’t great. Anyway I should really head to bed now

That’s kind of you to say, thank you. Another time. All the best.

I always thought the anti-poll crowd on ILX were cranks but all the new poll stuff makes me insane. I don’t come to ilx to look at data visulaizations about polls with <20 responses, which is what most ilx polls get these days unless Pavement is involved. Having to wade through every dumb poll on ilx being rerun because someone can’t keep the new tech in their pants is going to turn me into a terrorist.

It seems the basic flow here:

1. Massive change to the basic look/feel of ILX, like posters names, dates, and times of posts no longer appearing between each post.

1. Response seems overwhelmingly in favor of retaining the basic look/feel, with a couple of shrugs in favor.

2. Those making the changes request justification for denying the shruggers their new toys.

This seems completely backward from the way it should be.

By the way, apparently you can’t make a numbered list without ILX 3.0 taking charge and screwing up the indentation. Fucking hate this Microsoft Word ass site.

i agree that the rich-text editor automatically turning any paragraph starting with 1. into a numbered list is really frustrating

just made it to the sandbox, I haven’t read everything and I don’t have big thoughts on the essence of ILX but some first uh reactions

• I am in the anti-reaction camp. At work/Slack they are fine when I have to acknowledge something but don’t have anything else to say. Here I don’t have to do anything ever and that is good. There are no threads with long chains of lol/otm that somehow need cleaning up. If someone wants to participate beyond lurking they should write some words and see what happens.

• Like other posters I enjoy using the bookmark feature to mark my place in a long thread, e.g. when watching an old show and I want to follow the discussion in “real time”. Would be unhappy if that was dropped.

• The data visualisation blobs really add nothing and nobody will ever use them.

• The thread formatting changes are very jarring and don’t look like anything else I use (closest to idk comments on some Wordpress sites), but I don’t hate trying something new.

• I deeply respect the work that keeps ILX alive, and support stet/Keith in pretty much any changes they need to do to ensure it’s maintainable without constant firefighting.

is there no warning if someone has posted ahead of you?

The recent activity page has:

(1) A list of recently updated threads

(2) A list of new threads

You can also click through to

(3) A list of random threads

Each of these three lists has a different layout and shows different per-thread information. Just a suggestion but imo it would be cleaner if these were all the same thing: by default I would see (1) but I can switch it to (2) or (3) if I like. A really nice experience would allow filtering/searching in the same view though I don’t know what that would be like for perf.

On polls, I think it’s really important (as far as any of these things are important) that it’s crystal clear to people when their responses are going to be public. That might seem trivial on a music poll but on a personal matter much less so.

I turned the little post separators on and I dig em but if one user posts two or more posts then these posts don’t get the little line between them and my brain feels they should

Thank you for reading this, the single most crucial piece of nu-ILX feedback, you won’t regret it

Oh and I am also, respectfully, anti-reactions

yes otm i don’t see a good reason to treat posts by the same user differently

Alba, yes agreed. Thanks for the feedback too, emsworth...

If you don’t mind, can we post on the bugs/comments thread as it’ll help me keep views in one place and stops me needing to post what I’m about to post in both places... I’ll lock this later.

I made a bunch of options, based on your feedback. This is a real first draft and it’s quite possible some of them won’t work; they might even break existing things, because it’s been done quickly, but I thought you’d like to have a look.

If you look at the bottom of the settings page, there’s an experimental settings section, which has:

• Post metadata below post, i.e. similar to the mobile configuration, but for all sizes

• Hide images and embeds—a few people asked for this

• Place new threads below recent activity—on the board/recent activity pages

• Wide view—for those that want a wide page

• Disconnected mode—for those that don’t want live updates

I did try to make one to set the base font size, but it’s not going to be a quick thing that, as not all the font sizes are relative to the base size and they need to be for that.

See what you think.

It would probably be a good idea to keep actual bugs and small details in the other thread, but keep this one open for the more macro discussion of what our visions are of ILX? I think it’s pretty challenging to juggle those two in one thread.

Okay, sure.

I just mean the other place is where I’d like to track bugs/comments etc.

I can’t see the bugs thread. Could someone link to it?

Oh, I hadn’t thought to look on other boards. It’s the one on “Keith’s board”, yes?

Thanks for adding these settings. I’m playing with them now

Thanks for implementing wide mode as an option.

I also use bookmarks to follow along with tv or film threads where I don’t want to go to the newest post, I bookmark at the discussion prior to the latest episode / watching the film—and it would be good if I could still do that

Thanks for implementing wide mode. I’ve found it only makes posts wide if the ‘Post metadata below post’ option is also enabled.

Gotta admit after trying it out for a while I kinda like the poster name to the left of the post. Should add I’m on Scrolling Mode 2, Work Mode and using the line divider between posts.

Glad to hear I’m not alone in missing ability to bookmark specific messages. Also useful when finding an interesting part of an old thread you want to read through.

Dislike the notifications and notification counter in tab title (or whatever that’s called).

I also prefer the poster name to the left of the post.

ditto (otm? thumbs up?)

Thanks for implementing wide mode. I’ve found it only makes posts wide if the ‘Post metadata below post’ option is also enabled.

Thanks for saying this. I went wide and it only moved everything to the left, but that next step fixed it.

I only quoted your post above and not your name, snoball, because I couldn’t highlight it all. It even skipped over your name and went straight to corrs’ post. Again, dealing with extra fancy stuff that makes simple processes more difficult.

Why didn’t I just reply to the post? Because it hides the post I’m replying to and just says “Replying to snoball” — which could be a post you made an hour ago or nearly twenty-one years ago.

It is modal I believe. So it will include the text of the post if it’s more than eight posts ago but just show “replying to snoball” if it’s more recent than that, to avoid too much duplication.

Ok, this one was from over 24 hours ago.

So it includes the text from some posts but not others. And you can’t just copy and paste the text and poster’s info.

Thanks for implementing wide mode. I’ve found it only makes posts wide if the ‘Post metadata below post’ option is also enabled.

No bother, and I did it way too quickly, so I’m not surprised there are things wrong with it. I’ll take a look. So hang on, are you the guy who lives in the old Luma factory? I’m probably gonna be wrong again here, but I asked someone else yesterday!

Yeah, I’m not sure what that’s about. That one should. A bug, I guess.

I will be doing the bookmark thing; in fact, I would’ve done it already as I looked at it this morning, but it turned out to be a bit more complicated than I initially thought, so it’ll take a bit longer.

Hey N, well no way to block them in a sense, strap yourself in... They make themselves look like normal web requests, because if there were some clear marker it were an AI bot, people would just block them. What a lot of work here has been to do is to at least cope with that situation as best I can.

Traffic is placed in different buckets:

• Anonymous traffic

• Logged in users

• The front page

• People trying to log in

• Also anonymous API requests (computer to computer messages)—these are just blocked

And within that there are two controls

• How many concurrent requests you are allowed (i.e. requests at pretty well exactly the same time), and

• How many requests in a thirty second period you are allowed

The numbers are unimportant and I don’t know what they’ll actually be yet; they’ll require tweaking, but:

• Anonymous users (AI etc.) get a certain amount of computer, but it’s capped at a certain point (based on the two aforementioned criteria)

• People trying to log in get certain amount of computer—quite small, as it doesn’t require much, but it’s ring-fenced from the anonymous user stuff so it’s not overwhelmed—it’s so real users are able to log in during an ‘attack’

• The front page also gets it’s own allowance to make sure people can find the site, even if it’s ‘under attack’

• Logged in users get unlimited access (i.e. the rest of the available compute)

So you can’t prevent this stuff happening, but if this works the way I intended, then it should mean that even under attack, logged in (and trying to log in / front page) users can still operate as if nothing is happening.

I have tested it at 5–10,000 transactions per second on my laptop, depending on the type of transaction. By way of comparison, the existing site managed 400 transactions per second when I last tested it, although that was years ago.

Thanks,

Lemmy.

Oh and if an AI thing tried to register as a user and do it that way, I haven’t done this yet, but it’s quite easy to deal with, because real users don’t throw thousands of requests per second at the machine, so I would just cap logged in users at something way above real users generate, but that would stop AI bots easily—basically at that point if they’re logged in, then you can identify them.

The live notifications of new posts makes me fantasize about a Keith is typing... sort of notification so you know who’s imminently about to post also.

Sorry, I draw the line about fantasizing about Keith.

Wide view seems to work! Thank you Keith