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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   4953 thread views

[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes

There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.

EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong

Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")

Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.

Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.

(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)

Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.

Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.

Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:

The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.

If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.

Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.

Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.

I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.

On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.

But on the gripping hand . . .

. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.

If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.

On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.

Feedback wanted! Again!

The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.

The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.

At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.

(Feedback wanted on this also.)

I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.

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Hmm. You could be right. I'll toss this into the list of stuff to check.

Might just be that the symbols should remain the same size but the hit area should be boosted.

This is all kind of awkward for me to test because I hate browsing on mobile devices, so I may not be the best judge here :V

Just noting, something in the last day or so broke that collapse/uncollapse functionality on this waterfox classic browser (both the +/- signs and the vertical bars)

I hate to say it, but I'm not sure working on ancient obscure browsers is a good use of dev time. If you can find the issue I'd happily take a pull request, or even a solid diagnostic, but I'm not gonna direct anyone to work on it.

Yep I get it, and I'm resigned to using different browsers for a few sites that break over time. Just seems crazy that simple things can be incompatible, but I don't know my way around javascript or github to spot how after working forever, now onclick "collapse_comment" reference could be not defined for me starting ~2 days ago. edit: I think a version update will fix it on my end, so all good

not sure btw why this would be happening unless something is incredibly strange. are you blocking JS by any chance? we load the collapse_comment function from comments.js so if you're using any extension that's blocking that script, blocking it will make some things break.

otherwise if you have a devtools screenshot i can take a quick second and take a look

Strange yes, although I realized it was very similar to how the stackexchange sites broke backward compatibility with older browsers 1-2 years ago for comment collapsing/uncollapsing. And I knew that was fixed for waterfox in a later update. So I just tested it and found the release was 2022.06 where they said "Web compatibility improvements to fix breakages across a variety of websites". In waterfox v2022.04 comment collapsing is broken on stackoverflow and in the new motte as of a few days ago, but both working fine in v2022.06. Just unfortunate for me because that's all after the 2021.09 version update which made their whole browser way slower, which kind of defeats half the purpose of using an older nonstandard browser.

okay sent in a fix: https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/pull/654

thanks for the report

Awesome, thanks! Interesting to hear what that compatibility issue was (sounds like a handy operator). I probably do need to jump to Basilisk or just finally give up on XUL addons and go back to Firefox, but you may have given me a final stay of execution

optional chaining

so essentially instead of writing code like

const x = somethingThatMightReturnNull();
if (!x) return;
const y = x.doSomething();
if (!y) return;

we could do

const x = somethingThatMightReturnNull();
const y = x?.doSomething();
if (!y) return;

but apparently this doesn't work on some older browsers I suppose, such that even having an unrelated function that does it makes other things in the file not work.

hmm. yeah, the weird thing i think is from what you're saying it was working before. we didn't really change anything except to fix an issue with the the unread indicators (although that was in a separate function, so not sure why it'd affect it other than maybe parsing?

okay i'm able to reproduce this on Waterfox Classic 2022.04. will dig into it a little bit.

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