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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Just as an FYI, we just deployed a major performance improvement for this site. It also might be buggy. Please report any issues you run into, especially those involving the display of the front page or comment threads (like this one).

(At the same time we're currently working with a significant performance degradation because of a library bug. Hopefully we'll get that one solved soon too.)

Edit: So far there are 414 janitor submissions, y'all are great, I was expecting to have to wait a week or two to get a good chunk of useful data but nope this is going fast.

(one post is considered one submission, not one set of posts)

I have almost two hundred new notifications over the last 17 hours. It looks like I'm getting a notification every time someone comments on this thread.

Did you hit the "subscribe" button with the eye next to it?

I didn't think I did. But I just unsubscribed. Thanks.

I got a popup asking to rate a post.

Excellent! It appears to be working.

My too. Just some random comment. I rated it.

I also accidentally fat finger upvoted it. That should probably be disabled when rating comments.

Works fine so far. Thank you for your efforts.

You might be jannies, but you're our jannies. <3

The janny volunteer popup dialog seems to be in light theme even if you're using dark theme.

Sigh, I admit the themes are an annoying amount of work. I'll fix this one though.

I didn't actually realize there was a 'dark' theme until this comment. White text on dark background is my preferred look, so I switched over. However, I'm pretty sure there's a bug with the dark themes ('dark', 'midnight', and 'tron' all share this issue), where the interface doesn't register if you've clicked the upvote or downvote button, it stays the same color regardless. Any chance this could be fixed as well?

The problem is that I've been making serious changes to the base theme but not wanting to invest the time on fixing up the other themes. I think I might:

  • Change TheMotte to light

  • Fix up dark a bit

  • Rename the other themes to include (unsupported)

  • Remap users to light or dark as appropriate

  • Send a message to everyone who was using an unsupported theme saying "your old theme is kind of deprecated and may look crummy, we've changed you to a supported theme, you're welcome to change back if you really want or volunteer to fix up the theme"

I should also do a check to see which themes are most popular.

actually lemme just do that now, I need to get into the DB anyway

TheMotte: 1477 (obviously a lot of these are "I just left it as the default")

reddit: 98

dark: 96

midnight: 74

dramblr: 27

coffee: 23

4chan: 19

win98: 15

tron: 7

light: 4

transparent: 1

Per Transtellung's comment I just switched to the 'reddit' theme, and already I can tell it is much better. It does leave the big 'The Motte' site name in the upper left black (unreadable against the background), but now all links are clearly highlighted in blue, and upvotes and downvotes are clearly visible as orange and light blue respectively. Very much support his recommendation to turn 'reddit' into the official dark theme.

EDIT: it appears that the 'reddit' theme does not highlight unread comments in the same way as the 'themotte' theme does. So if I had one other suggestion, it'd be to incorporate that change into this theme. Thanks!

I am one of the people using "reddit". It actually doesn't resemble Reddit very much; it's just a nice theme: dark, but not too dark like the actual "dark" theme. (The background on "dark" is apparently literally #000000, which no one ever does!) It seems "midnight" is basically just "reddit" but worse (the contrast is terrible), so if you combine the two, "reddit" is the de facto dark theme and therefore it should, in my totally unbiased opinion, become the official dark theme.

The "transparent" theme has something to do with custom backgrounds, which are non-functional, so I think you can just remove it completely. I can't even get it to work, no idea how that one person did it.

The background on "dark" is apparently literally #000000, which no one ever does!

OLED display users (mostly mobile, but not all) do.

>phoneposting

Edit: Oops, just noticed you said there are non-mobile OLED displays. My bad. Anyway, would it be too much to have a "dark", renamed from "reddit", and "OLED" or "superdark" or something, renamed from "dark"? Or perhaps rename "reddit" to "light dark"? Again, I am very biased, but "reddit" is the most popular non-default theme.

My suggestion would be for default theme to use the prefers-color-scheme @media query to switch the base colors to bright-on-dark-gray if you have your browser/OS set for dark mode. "Dark" would be moved to "OLED black".

Personally, I use "coffee".

The volunteer/janitor page has a link for the rules which should https://www.themotte.org/rules instead of localhost/rules.

Oops, not my finest moment. Should be fixed now, thanks!

Hmm, can you give me screenshot examples of those? I think this is the first I've heard of either, for the record.

Huh, I like the "double-tap to collapse" idea. I don't actually use mobile so I'm sorta in the dark on what people want there :V

Task added!

Today I learned there are lines indicating how replies are nested in the light theme on mobile! I have been using dark theme since launch and while I thought I remembered lines at one point, collapsing threads without using the minus next to a user name has always seemed like a random crapshoot when I tapped to the left of a comment. As another Johnny Bench I think double tapping would be light years better (and an option to remove the collapsing function of the lines if possible (oh and make the lines visible in dark theme please.))

Could we also see how many child comments a particular comment gets when collapsed?

I think this may actually be difficult, we don't track that info anywhere. But I'll add a task for it.

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