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