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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
@ZorbaTHut Apologies if I'm exhausting your patience or making too many demands on the time of the volunteers keeping this running. I can only assume that this thread being so high up means it's still relevant.
This time, I would like to request a feature I've seen in our sister site rdrama (man, adversity makes for weird bedfellows), namely the ability to create or register to specific interest groups.
I believe it looks !programmers or !geopolitics, and anyone who has signed up for those gets a ping.
(I'm not going to reproduce the versions used on rdrama, though they're a hoot)
I assume the code for that is already open source, and of course a lot of the code base is carried over already. It would serve as a sort of tag for those interested, I know I'd use it for top level posts quite a bit.
I'll leave it to you to decide who gets to make them.
I sorta like that idea but I'm not sure I like that implementation :V
I'm also . . . not totally sold on the idea, honestly. One of the things that I think makes this work is a lack of headlines; you can't just skim the recent posts to see which one is your personal bugbear that you get angry about, you have to actually read things. (Fun fact: I came up with that theory when moderating The Motte, which imported the Culture War Thread from the Slate Star Codex subreddit. I later found out that this was actually an intentional design decision when the SSC subreddit mods created the original Culture War Thread.)
Setting up pings kind of turns this on its head, and I'd be worried about this making things a lot more toxic.
I sort of had a similar design philosophy when setting up the Vault categories; you'll note there's intentionally no Culture War category, no [Political Group] Behaving Badly category. They're all categories, but none of them is a category that you can click with the intent of getting mad about.
I think if I were going to do this, I'd want to use the Vault categories or similar, and I'm not sure anyone would actually use the feature then, which sort of defeats the point :V
I'm not seeing how that's the case? I've usually seen pings put at the very bottom of the post, or as a separate comment entirely where the entire point is to just ping and draw attention to a post itself.
I see it as primarily drawing attention from those who've opted in, and not having any effect on those who haven't.
So:
Topic X
...Wall of Text...
!transhumanists
It doesn't seem obvious to me that this has any pertinent drawbacks!
After all, you can already use markdown to make headlines
And I don't see any injunction against it, even if it's rarely used
The whole "notifies people that it's happened" thing is the problem. I could, say, add a ping for !lgbt, then show up to every single lgbt-related thread to get angry about it. Whereas right now, you kinda have to read the culture war thread to find the LGBT-related posts, which acts as a damper on that whole behavior.
Part of the duty of an admin is figuring out how to tweak the community culture, because personal behavior feeds back into the culture which then feeds right back into personal behavior. If every LGBT thread is filled with the same half a dozen people who specifically want to get angry about LGBT subjects, that hurts the community for everyone.
Quite honestly, you don't see any injunction against it because it's rarely used. Rules have costs, and this issue seems to be mostly not a big issue right now . . . but if it became trendy to make big post titles for controversial stuff, I might honestly start cracking down on it.
And yes, I recognize "the war against headlines" sounds ridiculous :)
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