Design and Visuals

Lanz

Anyhow I think the new forum should be blue because it’s easy on the eyes while not being full on dark mode levels of background/text contrast

syndalis

Or, we just make it a toggle in user preferences to turn off specific embeds. Some people might do it because nazi bar, some might do it because embeds cause issues for them or whatever.

If we can add pronouns to the profile, we can add checkboxes, and if the pronoun can be displayed on a page, your preferences can be stored in json up in the page header for use in js handling on the page.

It strikes me as an easy thing to make everyone happy, and not worth a bunch of agita.

Lanz

I’d be fine with a profile setting toggle for embeds, I just find the blanket “NO TWITTER HERE” arguments to be a particularly shortsighted and narcissistic bit of bullshit.

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Hahnsoo1

This is getting into the weeds a bit specifically over Twitter, and not specifically the role of embedded media in the new forums. There are three Twitter or Twitter-adjacent threads in SE++ and DnD that folks can use to argue over the utility of it. I think, for right now, we can assume that there will be some form of embedding of media in the new forum (given that this is the standard that is used in other similar forums across the Internet), and the shape and form of that will be something that can be more clearly defined once we pick a platform (looking a LOT like XenForo at this point, given the discussions).

minor incident

No one's paying a fascist to embed tweets. When I say "embeds cost Elon money" I'm saying on the very micro scale that every API call to twitter costs the company a very small amount of bandwidth and server resources, and they get no money back on it because embeds don't display ads.

Also tweets can only be edited within the first hour of being posted, so that's not really something to be concerned about?

In any event, twitter embeds will be supported with almost 100% certainty on our new forum software, and we can deal with options for people who would rather not see them. Whether that be technical (per user toggles to disable seeing them), or social (per thread rules against embedding twitter links). It's nothing to get hung up on now.

Hahnsoo1

I think a good takeaway, as mentioned by syndalis, is that we can have it as opt-out, which is helpful. I personally think that embedded media should automatically also spoiler-tag or some way to shrink it to click it open, so it avoids a lot of issues (people being actually spoiled by a YouTube preview, or graphic imagery, or NSFW stuff) right off the bat. But we'll see what the platform allows us to do.

syndalis

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

I think a good takeaway, as mentioned by syndalis, is that we can have it as opt-out, which is helpful. I personally think that embedded media should automatically also spoiler-tag or some way to shrink it to click it open, so it avoids a lot of issues (people being actually spoiled by a YouTube preview, or graphic imagery, or NSFW stuff) right off the bat. But we'll see what the platform allows us to do.

Global things like that? like spoilering embedded content with click to open? So long as they let us embed scripts in the page and provide our own css, that's a solved issue.

Giving users options comes down to how much flexibility we have adding fields to user entities and modifying profile forms.

Bowen

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

I think a good takeaway, as mentioned by syndalis, is that we can have it as opt-out, which is helpful. I personally think that embedded media should automatically also spoiler-tag or some way to shrink it to click it open, so it avoids a lot of issues (people being actually spoiled by a YouTube preview, or graphic imagery, or NSFW stuff) right off the bat. But we'll see what the platform allows us to do.

I would love either it spoilered or a tag with maybe a little + like reddit does where I can click it if I'm potentially interested.

Mvrck

SB Nation's comments, through all their other faults, has a good system where it displays the link to the embedded media, and then underneath it a "Show Post" button. Something like that should not be difficult to work into whatever system we use.

Tofystedeth

Dibbit wrote: »

Feral wrote: »

Modern web design has been getting away from distinct "mobile" sites. One of the principles of responsive design is that the site should flow consistently no matter your screen size & orientation.

Basically yeah. It does sometimes leave the "desktop version" lacking though, with a sparse information layout, overly generous white-space and large "touch friendly" controls and font choices.
But these things are highly solvable.

Though honestly narrower desktop views for text are fine. Some people get all up in arms over big gutters on their 4k monitors, but study after study shows that for the vast majority of people it's more comfortable/easier to read columns of text under a certain width, which is why even on desktops those limits are starting to show up. I guess have a wide layout option if people want it and whoever is building the style sheet can fit it in to their schedule, but I'd definitely prefer a view where I don't have to drag my eyes across my entire monitor to read a single sentence.

Death of Rats

Stretch goal (not that we have stretch goals or a kickstarter) should be an accurate geocities style stylesheet that effectively turns the forums into the old school internet love letter that it should be.

Commander Zoom

Permanent UNDER CONSTRUCTION gif at the bottom of the main page.

Vitari

HTML frames with individual scroll bars or nothing

Hahnsoo1

Commander Zoom wrote: »

Permanent UNDER CONSTRUCTION gif at the bottom of the main page.

Webring at the bottom, under the Under Construction gif.

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Death of Rats

Y'all forgot the most important visitor number.

What neighborhood would the Popcorn Association (which I'm assuming is the new name) be in?

Unknown

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Phyphor

Dibbit wrote: »

syndalis wrote: »

RiemannLives wrote: »

If there is no way to disable X embeds, need to look into a notification that pops up when hitting Post Reply for anything containing the string "x.com" or "twitter.com". Something like those warnings on cigarettes. "This site is owned by a Nazi and is known to the state of California to cause depression, anxiety and some monsterism".

There are lots of people who love the embeds though.

It would be awesome if, in user preferences, you pick which services embed, and which remain links.

Seems relatively easy to implement if we have hooks into adding fields to user preferences and delivering that payload into the page render pipeline for some js to consume.

You mean as in "A post I create does embedding or won't" or "I don't want to see the embeds in other posts?" Because while both are possible, the second one would cause a cache invalidation with every user pageview, as the embed preference needs to be checked and applied, and that's bad.

Well nothing is cached anyway. Each page is going to have some sort of status indicator for unread PMs & notifications and those have to come from the backend fresh. While you could theoretically cache the rendered page content separately and just combine them in an intermediate server you'd still have cache invalidation problems on edit / profile change, the online/offline indicator if we keep that and ignore list

You could cache things for logged out users sure but that's unlikely to be a significant fraction

Inquisitor77

I think it's worth pointing out that a lot of these "choices" aren't really choices in the manner that they are being discussed.

Whether or not Twitter embeds are a thing are largely going to be determined by what technology is chosen and its associated feature set. Including whether it supports Twitter embeds, and if so if that's something that can even be turned off.

It's probably valuable to get general sentiment on the value of Twitter embeds in general, as that might help understand the best overall technical direction, but it's not something that any community will be able to take a vote on and make real via fiat.

syndalis

Phyphor wrote: »

Dibbit wrote: »

syndalis wrote: »

RiemannLives wrote: »

If there is no way to disable X embeds, need to look into a notification that pops up when hitting Post Reply for anything containing the string "x.com" or "twitter.com". Something like those warnings on cigarettes. "This site is owned by a Nazi and is known to the state of California to cause depression, anxiety and some monsterism".

There are lots of people who love the embeds though.

It would be awesome if, in user preferences, you pick which services embed, and which remain links.

Seems relatively easy to implement if we have hooks into adding fields to user preferences and delivering that payload into the page render pipeline for some js to consume.

You mean as in "A post I create does embedding or won't" or "I don't want to see the embeds in other posts?" Because while both are possible, the second one would cause a cache invalidation with every user pageview, as the embed preference needs to be checked and applied, and that's bad.

Well nothing is cached anyway. Each page is going to have some sort of status indicator for unread PMs & notifications and those have to come from the backend fresh. While you could theoretically cache the rendered page content separately and just combine them in an intermediate server you'd still have cache invalidation problems on edit / profile change, the online/offline indicator if we keep that and ignore list

You could cache things for logged out users sure but that's unlikely to be a significant fraction

partial caching with keys on a per asset or per asset set bases, with page reconstitution at time of server-side render is fun, but nothing we should be trying to manage. Solved problems if we go with a large enough managed solution.

And traditionally, forums usually only cache for anonymous page views. Too much changes based on roles, language, location, etc.

MNC Dover

Gonna second (third? fourth?) the idea for pronouns in bios. Not only because it's a cool thing to do for our LGBTQ+ people, but also because it will quickly help us weed out people that are going to cause trouble.

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Elvenshae

“My pronouns are fuck / off.”

“Well, thank you for registering. You’ve now been permanently banned.”

zagdrob

Most of the problems with Twitter embeds aren't something that can be solved on the forum side?

A lot is just they keep ratcheting down their API and unless you are logged in and have an account you get nothing at all.

Their embeds do still scrape any sloppy cookies from people who hit them so even embedding a direct tweet gives info back to that shithole.

Vitari

There's bound to be some browser plugin that can block embeds of your choice. It's probably baked into ublock origin somewhere and I just haven't tried yet

Aldo

You can also block them as Javascript elements with NoScript. It dislike X as much as the next guy, but what I hate more are annoying style elements on my webpages to contend with. The option to have them hidden by default and folding them open would look better.

There's also a the existing rules about sourcing and quoting tweets that mean that the embed isn't very useful anyway. This would definitely go on the Nice To Have pile for me.

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V1m

As long as there's a dark mode please

Mvrck

V1m wrote: »

As long as there's a dark mode please

For everyone but you. Here's the color scheme you're getting: https://coolors.co/d84797-ffffff-d84a05-3abeff-b60b02

[Deleted User]

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minor incident

expendable wrote: »

Instead of captcha's the user has to draw a horse?

Well that's the one thing we're collectively very good at!

HerrCron

I dunno if I'd say good

minor incident

You're right. Good undersells our talent.

Commander Zoom

Zek wrote: »

I like the mobile dark blue + orange and see no reason to change it.

This might be controversial but I could do without Agrees or even Awesomes. I don't like the social media psychology of chasing after "points" on your posts. Maybe without them people would use their words instead.

History suggests that over 90% of those words would just be "Agree", "This", "Limed for truth", etc. This adds nothing but clutter.

You can't make people contribute more than that. They will do whatever requires the least effort, and if you require more or prohibit less, they may decide not to engage at all.

Tox

But! Xenforo (that seems to be the current front runner) may be able to hide a lot of that? So like maybe just "This" reaction but you only see the number of reactions on that post and you don't see tracking for reactions anywhere else

Delzhand

The reaction system in xenforo needs a little bit of work to bring it into alignment with what we have currently, but is fully customizable.



You mouse over the reaction button, which defaults to the text of the first reaction (which I'm not pleased with and plan to change if I can), and it shows all the available actions. Graphics are customizable, I just used two existing emojis for awesome/agree.



It appears as a reaction and then a list of usernames. I happen to think Vanilla's method of displaying it is better, but functionally it all works out of the box.

Mvrck

Delzhand wrote: »

The reaction system in xenforo needs a little bit of work to bring it into alignment with what we have currently, but is fully customizable.



You mouse over the reaction button, which defaults to the text of the first reaction (which I'm not pleased with and plan to change if I can), and it shows all the available actions. Graphics are customizable, I just used two existing emojis for awesome/agree.



It appears as a reaction and then a list of usernames. I happen to think Vanilla's method of displaying it is better, but functionally it all works out of the box.

If we have to write a plugin to bring them in line with what we have here, can we please name it Improved Reaction Time?

Delzhand

I'm not able to put the demo into development or debug mode, so my deep dive is blocked on the visuals side of things. It seems like we've got broad control, but on account of it being highly configurable, that means it's also highly opinionated. There is definitely a "correct xenforo way" to approach things, we won't know how easy it is to plaster over it until we get a real copy of our own.

minor incident

Delzhand wrote: »

I'm not able to put the demo into development or debug mode, so my deep dive is blocked on the visuals side of things. It seems like we've got broad control, but on account of it being highly configurable, that means it's also highly opinionated. There is definitely a "correct xenforo way" to approach things, we won't know how easy it is to plaster over it until we get a real copy of our own.

I figured as much, which is why it’ll be important to move quick so we have an install live for you folks to tear into well before we move in. I’m sure it will take a long time to get *everything* to our liking, but I hope with a couple months of time to experiment we can knock off the biggest items on our list before we move in and just tackle whatever’s left on a less stressful timeline.