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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 31, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I love the new site UI, even relative to old.reddit. But, I miss two RES features:

  1. custom user tags
  2. the net upvotes I've given a user

Are either/both of these plausible from a scaling standpoint? I'm a backend dev with some spare time the next few weeks and happy to take a stab at 'em. If so, maybe point me to where to start digging?

See e.g.:

/images/1711990313298712.webp

@ZorbaTHut

Edit: I poked around the codebase. I forget this is generally simpler when not in FAANGland. Looks doable, I'm going to see about a prototype over the next few days, starting with #1. I still haven't thought about scaling, but again I suspect the answer is this is not FAANGland, it'll be fine. If we can manage the 'new comment' markers, surely this is doable, too.

You're welcome to give it a shot!

Note that the "new comment" markers are entirely clientside via cookie, we're not storing those serverside. There may be performance issues with trying to make this all work - I don't want one SQL query per user when someone reads a page, for example. But I'm pretty sure this should be solvable, and it will of course be easier to solve with a working prototype.

the codebase we forked from already has #2

@zorbathehut

@ZorbaTHut

While we're doing site UI feedback, it would be great if the site tracked read/unread status while logged out.

When I'm logged in the site tracks how many new unread comments a thread has accrued since last viewed. When I log out and log back in the new comment count resets to all read, meaning I can't see which threads have been active, and I can't ctrl-f through the thread for "~new".