And, having just spent some minutes paging back one page at a time (for some reason, changing the comment count in the url didn't work), I'd like to have a "go back to this date" for recent comments.
I'd like a way to track which of my comments have had recent changes to their karma. Or is there a method available which I haven't found?
We're currently have someone working on the LW code. While we can't promise miracles, if you have any ideas, suggestions, or complaints, now might be a good time to air them.
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.
Software feature request: I would like the little [-] button which collapses a subthread to be duplicated in some form at the bottom of that thread. The use is that when a thread looks like this:
comment A
comment B
...really long thread...
comment C
and I am looking at comment C, I can click the new thingy on the bottom edge of comment B's thread to collapse it and bring A in visual proximity to C. It is of course possible to scroll up and count box borders, or follow C's permalink and do 'show context', but these are both tedious.
(Then there...
It would be nice if the top scoring all-time posts really reflected their impact. Right now there is some bias towards newer posts. Plus, Eliezer's sequences appeared at OB first, which greatly reduced LW upvotes.
Possible solution: every time a post is linked to from a new post, it gets an automatic upvote (perhaps we don't count it if linked to by same author). I don't know if it's technically feasible
I've gotten upvotes for recommending that there should be a recent comments for posts as well as for the whole site, and I'm not the only person who's brought up the idea.
I think a LW how-to would be a good idea. I'm not the only person who's asked about how to use basic features like the message box, and I wonder how many people are missing out on a lot of the functionality of the site.
Reminder: We have a subreddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/lesswrong
It needs reanimation.
Related: Posting things from the sequences to appropriate subreddits or conversations is easy reddit karma, and lots of our articles have never been reddited.
I'm currently the only "op" on the #lesswrong IRC channel - I'm told new ops are needed. If you want to be an op, could you reply to this with your FreeNode nick? Thanks!
EDIT: added "Adelene" aka AdeleneDawner
How much of Wikimedia's "don't be a dick" policy do you think Less Wrong should import? I would quite frankly be happy to mirror the entire essay (with link and credit) onto Less Wrong Wiki and link to it in the FAQ in a "Comment Policy" section.
From memory: There were people who said their web connection was too slow, and they wanted to be able to read and post by email. They were blown off, but it seems plausible that we could be losing some good people that way. How hard would it be to make the site accessible by email?
I'd like to see a script for Chrome and possibly Firefox to suppress the appearance of the Recent Comments sidebar.
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.
My assumption was that someone who wanted to read LW by email would be reading smaller chunks-- just getting articles one at a time without the comments, not seeing the sidebar pieces unless they were specifically asked for. They'd really want a "recent comments" for specific articles.
Use this thread for discussion of Less Wrong itself and all things meta, meta-meta, meta-meta-meta, omega, etc.