LW Update 3/14 – Community, Markdown and More

post by Raemon · 2018-03-14T18:29:06.532Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

Contents

  Community Page
    Groups
    Events
    Resources
    Frontpage
  Editor Update
  Odds and Ends
None
6 comments

We've been working on a lot of changes as we gear up for the final vote to migrate to lesswrong.com. Many of these changes are still in progress, but it seemed like a good point to stop and take stock of them.

Community Page

We now have a functioning community page. The core functionality is creating groups and events, which populate a big central map, which you can filter to only show particular information.

Groups

Groups are a local organizing body for events. Right now you can select multiple "types" of groups to give people an idea of what to expect and what ideas people will probably be interested in.

When you create a group, it'll autocreate an "welcome post", which'll be the first thing people see when they click on your group page. The welcome post works like a normal post but is autopopulated with suggested questions to answer, and you'll want to edit it into something more useful.

Events

Events can either be created from a group page (in which they're associated with a that group), or from the main community hub (in which they're a freefloating one-off event).

Right now, anyone can create an event from a group page (regardless of whether they're the official group organizer). Eventually we'll build a fleshed out permission system for groups, right now we wanted to err on the side of making it easy for people to set up meetups.

In addition to location, time, etc, Events have most of the functionality that a post has. You can comment on them, upvote/downvote, etc.

Resources

Right now, this is a small stub, but we intend to expand the community page to provide a lot of help getting new meetups started, links to various corners of the rationalsphere (such as discord, slack, irc, explanations of how Rationalist Facebook and Rationalist Tumblr work, etc)

Frontpage

Right now we have a placeholder solution for exposing meetups to the frontpage – it's just a small stub-section. Once more meetups have been created we'll create a "nearest events" section, and eventually probably rework the page slightly so it's better integrated instead of an awkward extra posts section.

Editor Update

We're in the process of making some changes to the editor. We've pushed some updates that:

Odds and Ends

6 comments

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comment by Raemon · 2018-03-16T02:37:24.871Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Update: Today we tried getting rid of all markdown from the Rich Text editor, and:

a) immediately found it pretty infuriating to not be able to quickly insert headers, quotes, and bullet lists, as well as to occasionally do some of the more obscure markdown things.

b) we're pretty confident that removing the parsing of * and _ to determine italics and bold will solve most of the issues (and italics and bold can easily be done via ctrl-b and ctrl-i, so it's not as crucial). There may be some remaining issues for pasting in entire markdown documents, but this is better suited for the new markdown editor anyway.

c) in the future, we'll likely want to include some LessWrong-specific functionality in the editor, and it seemed likely that it'd be easier to do so using the markdown editor as a base than building things from scratch. In general it seemed better to refine issues with the markdown editor which is easier if we're actually using it.

So, we pushed that update earlier today. If you run into particular issues let us know.

Re: Bold Text

The biggest remaining issue people have complained about is that copying and pasting text from the site results in bold text which is super annoying. We have diagnosed the problem, which is that when our editor copies text, it considers font-weight of 500 or more to be "bold". We're attempting to get a PR merged with the editor framework to fix this. Will see how it goes.

comment by avke · 2018-03-14T21:53:01.011Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is there some general bugs/suggestions box? I've occasionally noticed things that were not a big enough deal to warrant making a post or something of the sort, but were also probably not intentional.

Example: when I search some words/phrases, such as "markdown", using the top search bar, the results are sometimes formatted strangely, where the title of the post and the keyword highlighting run over the top of the comment icon and number on the right. (I'm not seeing a way to insert a screenshot into a comment, but hopefully I've described it well enough to identify.)

Replies from: Raemon
comment by Raemon · 2018-03-15T02:26:03.809Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You should see an intercom widget in the bottom right corner, and you can also create issues in our github repo:

https://github.com/Discordius/Lesswrong2

Either of those work fine.

comment by Joshua_Fox · 2018-03-15T14:25:38.190Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How do we create a group? Please post a URL.

Replies from: ofer
comment by Ofer (ofer) · 2018-03-15T14:31:41.395Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In the community page, under Local Groups you have "Create new local group"

Replies from: gjm
comment by gjm · 2018-03-15T16:20:33.818Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I can't help reading that as "Create new Local Group" and thinking, ye gods, what power...