Trayce, thanks for even understanding that some kind of outlay is involved! And I hope all is good with you. But yeah the outlay is already enough for me... Storage is one cost, bandwidth the larger and more unpredictable one, as in, if all of a sudden some thread I dunno ‘goes viral’ then me and stet wind up paying a load of cash. Plus we would have to deal with what kind of stuff people are uploading—it needs management to stop people uploading the wrong kind of stuff. It’s really rather messy, but something we take very seriously.

Kate, thank you, in the sense that it’s really rare that people tell me stuff they like, rather than stuff they don’t like.

Kate, thank you, in the sense that it’s really rare that people tell me stuff they like, rather than stuff they don’t like.

yeah, it’s one of the most frustrating things about working on any project... it’s a litany of “i don’t like this, i don’t like this, i don’t like this”, which is, i mean, it’s an important part of testing—there are things right now that i find confusing or disorienting, and after using the sandbox for a little bit, if i haven’t figured them out i’ll mention them. this genuinely is cool and i genuinely do like it.

oh! i also like the revised thread URL format! it’s much more elegant and succinct.

Above the text editor box it says “Posting as: sadbonx (change this)”. If I click “change this” it goes to the settings page where it auto fills in my email address as my nickname. Screenshot redacted.

Hey I’ve always been mindful that this site costs someone money to host and run. And I honestly feel like some people don’t think of that. You are going out of your way and I thank you.

I did all of that as you outlined and it didnt work :( all good I must have done something amiss.

Thanks, Trayce—hope all is good with you.

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.

Have to dash now... Hope nothing is broken too badly!

I’d like to say something positive about the reactions. I wasn’t in favour of them either, and indeed I was one of the first to say so, but I’ve just found a genuinely useful reason for having them.

I was able to acknowledge what Trayce said directly on her post rather than replying further down the thread and potentially breaking up the conversation. I feel it as a politeness thing.

I know it’s a very minor thing, but it’s a use I hadn’t considered. With further testing, we may discover other useful purposes for them, or we may not.

Either way, I think it’s worth trialling things like this on the Sandbox before Keith makes any permanent changes. That’s what the Sandbox is for, after all, and Keith has the far more important job of fixing bugs and getting everything working properly.

Wide View plus post metadata at the bottom of each post improves readability immensely. Thank you!

Now we just need Divider 2 (Line) to be across the width of the post.

more polite to acknowledge something with actual language

If we put reactions to a vote, “no reactions” would win by a landslide based on comments so far.

Yet I sense that we will have reactions with the ability to turn them off no matter how lopsided the comments. This seems deeply misguided.

Compromise: keep reactions on here for the 2ish posters who don’t actively hate them but don’t roll them out on ilx proper ever

haha I just realised that the thumbs up reaction is a nod to The Fonz.

re: “breaking up the conversation”—one of the things that’s magical about a message board is that you can verbally acknowledge or give a coherent shout-out or response to something from earlier in the conversation, and everyone can “hear” it, and yet it doesn’t break up the conversation!

Don’t want this stuff to be missed with it moving up thread, as a bunch of you asked for it:

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.

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

This does look better to me, mostly because as I as I said over in the other thread having two lists of threads side by side but with different layouts is quite hard to process. So with this option I only have one list to look at at a time.

Would still be interested in the viability of a single generic “list of threads” view where you can switch between recently updated/recently created/random.

PBKR, please see here, particularly paragraphs 3–5:

I Love Everything

I strongly suspect we are on the same page. A lot of what I did here was to encourage that discourse, not least the typography, respect the history (make it easier to look at!) and hopefully make it easier for people to use.

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. The absolute last thing I personally would like is that it turns into some kind of popularity contest or upvoting/downvoting.

People are perhaps interpreting me not immediately turning them off as some kind of dogged resistance. And it is, in a way, but only in as far as giving people a chance to see things and let them sink in. Right now, it is my view that your opinion will prevail, but I do think it’s reasonable to give people a chance. 147 people have looked at the Sandbox, out of around 1,000 active users, and maybe 20% of the 147 plus a… View message

Keith

The Future of Ilx

Also, I will draw you a line. I know that sounds like a joke, but I drew the existing line and it wasn’t easy! There’s also an offer if you want to draw your own line—it needs to be an SVG and you’ll need to try it out, but if not, I will draw one when I get enough time—as I say, it’s harder than it might seem to get it right (spacing; how browsers deal with images and aspect ratios etc.)

Metadata below post is a huge improvement, thank you! I’m trying it out without “wide view” to see if I do prefer a narrower column for readability.

Metadata below post, with no separator, reads really cleanly.

I’m glad you like it. The column width without that is based on Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, which typically sets maximum readability between 45–75 characters, and ‘ideally’ 66 on a line—this varies with different fonts, as they have different metrics. The research in this space is odd, in that some people it seems can read longer lines well than that, although it also suggests that they typically do not prefer that.

But all that being said, whatever people feel comfortable with.

New settings are an improvement, thanks!

This was almost definitely my browser/password manager filling in my email address, so never mind it.

PS I’m doing the auto-quoted reply to myself here, and it’d be nice if I could edit/truncate the quoted text as I post (especially to make sure the screenshot doesn’t get quoted, which I fear it is about to).

Right... Still odd TBH, I’ve just checked in case I C&Pd an email input, but it’s not. Part of the problem is that browsers sometimes guess, based on heuristics. Not much I can do about that.

The reason I didn’t allow editing of quotes is because (a) it’s not obvious how to do and (b) if I could do it, there’s a possibility that people could look like they’re quoting someone, but actually just edit what they said to something completely different.

if I go to https://sandbox.ilxor.com/recentactivity and click on “New Thread” it gives me an error message saying “Please select a message board to post your thread on, and then click ‘New Thread’ on that page.”. Seems confusing to show a button that by design doesn’t work?

It’s because I’m told people regularly look for it there, so it’s to gently tell you that you need to do it from the board.

Is it hard to support posting a thread from there? Once you do get to the “New Thread” page you can select which board to post it on anyway.

It’s just that you’d have to select which board.

If you’re on a board, the board is already filled in for you.

A little bug I noticed. In dark mode if you quote reply to a post the editor with the quoted text is white on white

just a couple of observations after using the site a bit:

• the “you read up to here” arrow will cause the horizontal scroll bar to appear if your window isn’t wide enough to show it.

• i do a lot of clicking and highlighting of text as i’m reading any webpage, and this is constantly triggering the actions drawer. some way to expand this only with a button would be greatly appreciated

• i’m on the fence with the emoji-style reactions, but i do see the potential they may have for the community to express itself and play in new ways. the suggestions of “OTM” and “LOL” being the only two options is closer to that — we already express ourselves as a community in those ways with those words. i think the feature should be to enable play rather than to clean up or change discourse.. i mean it’s a part of ILX culture to necrobump a 20 year old thread to just say OTM

Keith, thank you for directing me to these thoughts on reactions. I can appreciate a trial period; it’s just that there seemed some contra indications that they might be here to stay with user-by-user disabling. I will shut up about them for a little while.

On the line, I am so technically disinclined that your reference to drawing my own sounds like magic. I’ve never heard of an SVG so I’m going to have to wait for you to work through your mountain of tasks. I’ve done a lot of complaining, so I will say thank you for your efforts.

In a poll with a delayed start, could new options be inserted into specific spots in the list? Right now they can only be added at the end, I believe. For example, in my British Invasion poll set to start tomorrow, I have the options in alphabetical order but can’t put a new option into the correct place without deleting some and re-adding. This is an extremely minor request so if it’s a lot of trouble, don’t worry with it.

Thanks for all the work you’re putting into this, Keith.

hi, I am also against reactions as a general principle and would prefer they not be coded in. Keith I do understand the points you are making in favor, but I am more sympathetic to the many eloquent arguments against them on the other thread(s). At the very least, I would want a way to disable them, and would also suggest that disabled be the default setting for all users :D

I am not seeing any other issues so far! I would also like a better delineation line between posts as well, I guess.

Woohoo, hide images and embeds! It’s on! :D

I mentioned it on another thread (was going to insert thread url but doesn’t seem to working as in old ilx? where the thread title is automatically displayed after you post the url? that’s going to break some jokes... anyway) but to my great surprise I’ve very quickly come to enjoy the two-column view with poster name on the left :O

Personally do not see any need for rich text editing, would prefer it were possible to just choose simple html/bbcode or smth.

I’m really warming up to this and confident that the reactions are not here to stay and that bookmarking specific messages will probably be introduced at some point.

there’s def a lot of white space on the sides but the overall length of post lines seems similar to “regular” olde ILX. If it could be widened a smidge I’d like that, but I suspect the majority of users are mobile? poll?

OK see it was hard for me to see where my post ended and corrs’ began

I am pro-tagging but anti-notifications so idk how that would work, if at all, and I am more anti-notifications. I have enough already!

seeing on the other thread that we’ve lost the ability to bookmark specific messages? among other things, this is important functionality for users to report buggy posts to the mods, as well as for specific linking.

and thanks for all your work Keith, I got cranky on the other thread about reacts but I do think this is cool and my initial posts on ILX were excited.

You can “save” them instead. What is currently lost is the ability to bookmark a thread at any point other than the final post when you last loaded it, which is valuable to those of us who use this function when we haven’t got time to read the whole thing but want to come back to the place we’ve … bookmarked.

ah got it, thanks

Yes, I’m not too surprised, Dark mode is hard and a pain in the arse, and also I can’t ever remember all the nooks and crannies to check. I’ll sort it.

Sleeve, don’t worry about getting cranky. As long as you don’t think I’m deliberately trying to piss in your cornflakes. Thanks for the helpful, constructive comments. I’m also glad you like most of it—it is you guys I do it for.

I’m not sure I have made some big defence of reactions, although I can understand why people might think that. I have made a defence of giving something a chance and making sure more than a few people get a chance to see stuff. The alternative is switching it off when only forty out of around a thousand active users have had a chance to even see it (it’s now about 160 people, but it was 40 or so at that point).

FWIW, I am also sympathetic to the arguments against them. As I’ve said before, although perhaps I will be a bit more. blunt now, the smart money is on me ‘removing’ them (most likely on a disable by board way, is my thinking, and please don’t anyone kick off, just disable them on the boards you want them disabled on, even if that’s all of them, I don’t care one way or another).

Perhaps people think because I put the time and effort into developing it that I’m keen on forcing it through—no I am not, and nor am I trying to ‘sneak’ them in by having an option to hide them—I also fully understand and have some sympathy with the view that even if you can’t see them, they alter the discourse. I once did an hour long talk about Marshall McLuhan to about a thousand bemused IT people (one person’s comment “yeah all very interesting, WTF does it have to do with us?”).

I’d like to think that because a bunch of us went through this twenty years ago, when I made something because the board was broken and because no-one else volunteered, and was swiftly followed by everyone hating me for it for some months, but I did work with people, and we made a bunch of changes, and it seems now everyone loves it. I like to think that at least those around at the time understand that I will do the same again, because I have that track record. The same goes for stet, and indeed the admins, who give their time freely to support the community.

What I would ask people to recognise, much as I fully understand it is hard to do so (I certainly didn’t 20 years ago), is that pretty well everyone thinks they know what ILX is and what everyone else wants. I learned the hard way back then that this is absolutely not the case—everyone has a different experience of it, because I, and Graham before me, developed a piece of kit that can be highly customised. That means that there is no one ILX, there are a lot of ‘versions’ of it, and everyone likes/dislikes different things about lots of bits of it.

Also, I’m kind of busy with various things in between trying to make things more the way people want them, but I did have a bit of a chat with Table about kind of existential ILX stuff, and I will get back to that. I think the most helpful thing for this is to understand what we want ILX to achieve, what we want it to encourage, what we don’t want it to be etc. etc. but that’s a longer term chat—it’d just be great if you and others would join in on that.

Okay, I fixed the bug with wide mode, where it didn’t really work unless you had the other setting about putting usernames below posts.

Hey William, it’s not particularly easy, I mean it means deleting the existing set and redoing them and building a UI that lets you insert at the right point... I guess I think that sounds like quite a lot of effort for something maybe a little niche?

That said, I am awed at your attention to detail there!

Thank you... I completely agree about the first. TBH I think it’s kind of cute, but also a sort of shit solution and I know of a better one. I suspect I will replace it at some point in a way that doesn’t get on yours or my tits.

To your second point Yeah, I’m actually the same, and kind of compulsively drag text around. The problem is I did try what you’re suggesting and everything I came up looked disgusting, because it’s essentially a repeating button, whichever way you look at it, which makes it look less like a nice piece of text and more like a spreadsheet. So I totally sympathise with your point, and I’d like to do it, I just need the great idea that makes it work!

This is a low priority comment, but I would love an option to have poll results appear as they do on ILX (vertical list in descending order by number of votes) without any graphics.

That’s fine, I have it on the list. The graphics are also useless on mobile, so I’ll probably just make them disappear by default on mobile too.

Okay, I removed the graphics on phone widths. The option will take a bit longer as it’s more work, but I’ll get to it.

I just need the great idea that makes it work!

Compress the menu into a single line including poster name, timestamp, and abbreviated action buttons, and have it always visible beneath each post? I’m thinking it could look something vaguely like this:

Okay, there is an option now for removing poll results charts, if you want that. Again, it might require some fixing if stuff shows up.

Who Voted For What

Can there be an anonymity option when answering a poll? What if I’m ashamed of my love for On the Beach and don’t want the shame attached to my username? I think we’d get more poll participants (I’m thinking more of ILE-type polls about personal info)

Hey William, it’s not particularly easy, I mean it means deleting the existing set and redoing them and building a UI that lets you insert at the right point... I guess I think that sounds like quite a lot of effort for something maybe a little niche?

No worries. I suspected that would be tougher to do, and I agree it’s a little niche. If the pollstarter wants alphabetical that badly, they’ll do the work. (as I will)

BUT, please see here:

I Love Music

Elvis, William, I can possibly help with this stuff. I’m not really that familiar with your polls—not in close quarters, but what I did was 100% influenced by how (at least what I casually see of them) you ran them.

The 50 limit takes ten seconds to change, so if you need more, just say the word. Other stuff is likely a bunch more work, but as I say, the work to date was totally influenced by your work, so just let me know. Not everything is easy/practical, but we can definitely have a chat about that to arrive at something that might work better for you.

Keith

rank the neil young albums

Hi Keith, thanks for all your hard work. I wanted to share my thoughts on reacts, though I may just be repeating things you have already heard by now.

I joined ILX in 2019, and this was one of my first posts:

As someone who just showed up here a few days ago, here are my possibly inaccurate impressions:

1. This place doesn’t seem cliquish or unwelcoming, though clearly the regulars know each other well.

2. I like the absence of likes or upvotes, it really lowers the sense of pressure around posting/checking back.

3. I probably wouldn’t come here to talk about literature that much, though I read a lot. It seems like the chances of getting an interesting conversation going around music are much higher.

― Lily Dale, Thursday, August 8, 2019 12:08 PM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

So to me, the absence of reacts has always been a defining feature of ILX; it’s part of what drew me to the site and kept me here. When I tell people about ILX, I usually say something like “There’s this old-school message board I post on that I like because it hasn’t really changed since 2001; it doesn’t even have likes or upvotes, so it’s kind of a vestige of the internet as it used to be, before everything got horrible.”

But I hadn’t really sat down and thought out why reacts make such a difference to me, and I think it’s mainly the sense that on social media you are constantly being ranked, graded, evaluated, given multiple ways to compare yourself to other people and to earlier versions of yourself, and that this omnipresent environment of self-comparison is seeping into our lives in toxic ways. ILX is one of the few places left where you can just post something and let other people respond to it if they want to, but you don’t have a constantly updating metric of exactly how many people liked it or didn’t.

On a personal level, I also find that upvotes, likes, etc. mean that I can never just write a post and walk away; I end up tethered to my computer refreshing the page, looking for those little hits of validation like a rat hitting the cocaine lever (which is very different from just checking the conversation to see how it’s going), and that compulsion feels so unhealthy that at a certain point I just have to disconnect from the site entirely. And I don’t want that to happen with ILX.

That said, I also really appreciate all the things you actually did put into the site—I don’t mean to imply that it’s just about the notes you don’t play.

Good post, thank you for your feedback!

I mean I would like it or love it or whatever, but it seems inappropriate!