Fall 2010 Meta Thread

I had the same problem going through my own overview to find a specific comment. As far as I can tell, if I wanted to reference my first comment on LW, I would have to page back through all the ones I've ever made.

I would also appreciate this.

I'd like to see a larger textarea for comments. Some places have it resize depending on how much has been typed into it so far, but I'd settle for one which was simply a bit bigger (or a setting).

Of course, whether this is actually a good idea depends on how much you want to encourage me to write essays in the comments. (The bigger input field only matters when I've written a lot and want to skim back for errors.)

Record upvotes and downvotes separately, so that we can see the difference between "this post was polarising" and "this post was uninspiring"

ETA: Thanks to Bongo (below), I realise this suggestion is redundant, so instead I suggest that it would be nice to have upvote and downvote totals for users. Although.. I'm not sure how one would distinguish between someone with few downvotes because everything they say is awesome versus someone who is excessively conservative in their commenting (or worse, only posts applause lights)

Oh and in case it hasn't been suggested yet: it would be nice to be able to have a comment feed for single posts, or to filter out comments on posts that we really don't care about. (and while I'm at it, could I also get a pony? Thanks)

I'd like to be able to sort a user's contributions when viewing them, e.g. by score or age, like the posts-by-tag view.

Before someone posts an article, let them be able to enter a guess as to what it's Karma score will be in three days. After three days reveal the guess.

Show read/unread comments in a different color.

I'd like to see a way to save comments. Of course, I could just bookmark the permalinks, but it'd be nicer to have an in-site mechanism.

I posted something which is said to belong here.

I would like some way to arrange to be notified by email or RSS of additions to my inbox. That way I could be responsive to PMs and replies to my comments even on days when loading LW in my browser to check for the little red envelope is too much of a temptation to procrastinate.

There has always been an "RSS feed for this page" link on the /messages/inbox page, but it has never worked.

I'd like to be able to read the LW archives when I'm without internet. So, it'd be nice to have a dump.

I think best would be a git repository with a file for each article, and another file for the comments.

Require new top-level posts to use a tag that indicates which facet of LW's interest it lies with. So each new post would have to choose on (or maybe more) of tags like "bayes", "selfimprovement", "philosophy". So, if I think that Lesswrong should really dedicate itself to the study of Victory and nothing else, I might read only posts with selfimprovement tags.

Could you be sure to update the instructions for reusing the code? I tried to play around with it months ago and couldn't get it working.

This is hugely awesome software so it should be made as easy as possible to adopt.

Suggestion: Two different kinds of voting: good post/bad post, agree/disagree. Only the first would count towards karma - the second would be displayed seperately/adjacently.

Then there's export to NNTP so that I could use a decent desktop UI for threaded reading. Or my 'hyperbolic threading' idea which I haven't gotten around to writing the web prototype of.

There's desktop apps for threaded reading? New to me.

perhaps we don't count it if linked to by same author

And if linked to by someone who's already upvoted it.

Recent comments for particular posts would be a huge gain in convenience, but I think it would probably make this place less of a community, as well as less of a temptation to akrasia.

I brought up the recent comments for posts request a few months ago. I also got a lot of upvotes and agreement, but nothing actually happened.

I commented on this post after it conveniently showed up as #1 on my logged in reddit homepage. http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/dgrpc/is_it_possible_to_believe_that_truth_is_relative/

I said this in channel, but in case you're keeping it organized here:

I'm available for this if it's useful to you to have someone is more experienced as an irc op than as an LW community member. I won't take it personally if not. ;) I'm relsqui there as here.

There is an IRC channel? Does it have much of a following?

Whoever else you're going to add, I'd appreciate it if you could get around to it sooner rather than later. It's getting very tiring sitting here watching trolls spam up the place when there's no one around to do anything about it.

Nick is Boxo. I'm on #lesswrong a lot.

docl

If it's just a matter of being reachable in case something goes wrong and available to kickban trolls or whatever, I can do that.

I'm Adelene, there.

None. I've never usefully employed it on Wikipedia; dicks don't realize they are dicks or they value the rules over normal editing. If dicks are not dealt with through other means, you have already lost.

'Ignore all rules' is very similar - as WP:ZEN says, "Only the use of IAR that is unnoticed is a true use of IAR."

Actually, downloading Less Wrong via email would take longer on a slow connection, since the pages are sent with gzip compression over the web, which makes it a whopping 86% smaller. Put another way, getting it over email would take more than 7 times as long. Of course this may vary some from page to page, but the compression should be pretty consistently excellent when you consider the high redundancy of the HTML for handling comment boxes and so on.

I took a look at Less Wrong from a browsing speed standpoint, and it's doing pretty damn well. All the static files are cached for 7 days, and if you refresh a page that hasn't changed and you have it in your browser cache, the server just says "HTTP 302 That page hasn't changed" instead of sending it all over again. My only quibble is that some of the large JavaScript files, like /static/psrs.js, are not gzipped or minified. But again, they get cached for 7 days, so you only need to download them once a week.

So no, someone who's got a slow connection should not view LW over email. The web is actually faster.

Why not use RSS, it sounds perfectly designed just for that.

Extremely. Need to set up a mail server and some sort of daemon service to reply - and reply with what? The output of lynx -dump on the HTML pages that make up the site?

Not to mention it's implausible that email would save either time or bandwidth, considering how barebones the site is. If such people exist, they are best off being told they are idiots, to prove their cases about email being more efficient, or working on the codebase to reduce use of JavaScript (which is the principal tech that breaks textual browsers).

Try adding it to Adbock.