Dr C, you can’t, but it’s been replaced by another function, which is the Save thing in the menu...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 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.
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?