Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features
[Edit: Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features should be tracked at Google Code, not here -- matt, 2010-04-23]
Less Wrong is still under construction. Please post any bugs or issues with Less Wrong to this thread. Try to keep each comment thread a clean discussion of each bug or issue.
Requested features... sure, go ahead, but bear in mind we may not be able to implement for a while.
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Comments (622)
The site is unusable on mobile browsers. I know that web standards and accessibility were not major concerns for the site's developers, but Lw being viewable on my phone would be a major benefit.
This made me realize that if someone is having a problem posting-- not just a problem with their account, but a general inability to post-- there's no way for them to tell you.
I'm actually swestrup. I can't login. Less wrong has no method of complaining if you aren't logged in, so I had to create a new account.
Less Wrong keeps complaining my password is bad, but I couldn't reset my password because:
a) I had switched mail providers an my email address on record was no longer any good. Again, I couldn't do anything about this without logging in.
b) I managed to temporarily get my old mail address working again, only to find that Less Wrong's password reset feature is also broken.
At 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong, the list is split into two lists numbered 1-5 and 1-32.
Currently, when a post is deleted, the comments get deleted as well, i.e. they are not listed on the Overview page for the author. I think this shouldn't work this way, the author shouldn't have the power to erase the content contributed by other people.
Is the recent comments page broken right now or is that just me?
Edit: Working again!
It's been broken for me, too.
The problem may be associated with comments from a time period-- recent comment is working for me now, but I can't page back.
For reference, it's usually the fault of one particular comment - when this happens, finding any page with that comment will break the site. "Recent comments" works again when that comment falls off the first page.
Not just you. It happens periodically.
I had a red envelope, but when I clicked on it there were no new messages. Does that just mean someone sent one or posted one and then deleted it?
Also, is there an email notification system? I didn't see one in Preferences.
I've mentioned something like this before, but I think a monthly 'Sequence Topics' thread would be a good place for new users to talk about all the background topics. It would be especially convenient to have such threads automatically and visibly linked from the Sequence pages.
(LucasSloan and inklesspen also made recent suggestions along these lines.)
Following up on a comment by byrnema:
We already can - I've just done that.
You might object that the process to do so is cumbersome. I quite agree. On the other hand, the Law of Unintended Consequences applies whenever you think "I wish...". It is always wise, when considering a new software feature, to think of the potential downsides.
I can think of at least one: to some, moving a thread could turn into a "weapon" to be used against comments they would prefer to make less visible. Moving threads at a buttn press would be a power, and power tends to corrupt.
You need to make the reference point in both directions, I think - in other words, to follow up that comment with a pointer here.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/z0/the_pascals_wager_fallacy_fallacy/
This post imported from Overcoming Bias is marked "deleted" and doesn't have author's name.
The third footnote of this post has been hacked. (Garbage text has been inserted.) http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
Can you fix it? I am actually really curious what was there originally...
Welcome to LW! Have a point, for attempting to be useful.
Feature request: profile pages, at minimum an empty box where the user can put text and links.
This is issue 108.
Thanks. Can we get a link to http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/list on this original post?
This post imported from Overcoming Bias has an encoding problem in a link to Loeb's theorem post.
The post Interpersonal Entanglement imported from Overcoming Bias has formatting issues, e.g. italized text has no spaces around it.
(Original report, by kpreid.)
I tried to save a draft using Opera; it zipped up on the New page rather than ending in a drafts area. It was easy to delete, but I'd sure like to save a draft and view it. Maybe Firefox will be friendlier....
Just so you know, if you save a draft to "Drafts for JRMayne", it appears to you (but no one else) as if it were live. To check if the post is really live, log out -- if it's in your drafts, you won't be able to see it once you log out.
It's quite annoying -- one time I thought I was initiating an Open Thread, but no one else could see it. Another time I gave myself a good scare thinking I had made an incomplete post available to everyone.
Feature Request
In the recent past, some LW members have mentioned that karma was part of their motivation to post and comment.
This led to a change in the karma system to re-align incentives: 10 points for post upvotes, 1 for comment upvotes.
Here's another change that could motivate people who seek karma to contribute more to LW:
Instead of just showing the top 10 contributor in the column on the right, we could show more than 10. Even better if we can have a link to a top 100 or full list, like the leaders page on Hacker News.
If this simple change can encourage more people to contribute to LW, it seems like it's worth it. A small improvement in participation can lead to significant gains over time.
Seconded - I'd not only like to see a 'full list' of contributors, but vital statistics would be cool too - how many comments, how many posts, average post karma, average comment karma, how many upvotes/downvotes made, how many upvotes/downvotes received, etc.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p5/brain_breakthrough_its_made_of_neurons/
This post imported from OB has Japanese characters where they shouldn't be (encoding problem).
No indent
Maybe there should be a sandbox?
Use your own old comments, then revert.
I'd like a way to display all of a user's posts and comments on a single HTML page, so I can find things easily. I've written a PHP script to mechanically "press" the "next" button repeatedly and collate all of the pages into one, and I've found it very useful. I would make the URL public and let everyone use it, but unless I add some kind of caching, it might put a lot of stress on my my server and Less Wrong's if many people use it at the same time on some prolific contributor (e.g., Eliezer).
So my questions are:
If the answer to 1 is yes, but 2 is no, then I'll code the caching and make the URL public.
ETA: In case anyone wonders why I didn't submit a patch to the Less Wrong codebase, it's because I can't understand how it works. Is there some documentation for potential developers?
I wrote earlier:
There doesn't seem to be a huge demand for this (or not many people are paying attention to this thread), so if anyone wants to know the URL for this, just send me a private message, and I'll give it to you.
The comments page is badly broken at the moment.
Why does a page pop up when I click on any user's name... But mine doesn't (have a page that pops up when I click on my user name)?
Edit: I see that Vladimir has already pointed this out, Thank you, Vlad.
The Top Contributors list hasn't been sorted by karma since the karma system was changed to give 10 karma per vote for top level posts. For awhile they were obviously out of order; now, the top 10 list is internally sorted, but does not accurately represent the top 10 users by karma (I have more karma than 3 of them). Perhaps it's sorting by number of upvotes instead of amount of karma?
MatthewB doesn't have a user page ("The page you requested does not exist"); example comment of his: here.
Is there a convenient way to access old incoming personal messages? My inbox is obviously fully of replies to threaded comments and I can access old ones by search if I remember details. I can also access sent personal messages with the next tab over. But is there any way to get to an old pm without clicking 'previous' enough times to bring me back to April? If not, this would be a welcome addition.
Some changes to karma have been deployed today. Posts will now show scores less than zero, previously scores below zero were shown as zero. Votes on posts are now worth 10 points up or down to the contributor. Also the threshold to be able to post is now 50, up from 20.
It's unclear -- do you mean that the number of points received for posts gets multiplied by 10, both for positive and negative votes? This factor seems too dramatic. I'd go for 2 or 3, no more. One also has to take into account that posts get more votes than comments simply because more people rate them, so the effect of a post is already greater than that of a comment.
Also should (have) been discussed in one of the open/meta threads in advance of deployment.
Yes an up vote on a post is worth 10 karma points to the contributor, a down vote -10 points.
With regard to discussion, I just implemented what I was instructed to do.
Copying quoted text probably shouldn't produce text with extra spaces in front. (see here and the comments) This behavior depends on the browser, but it is probably possible for the html to make it uniformly good.
There is a problem with <math> plugin on the Wiki: see this page for example. The error message is:
This post imported from Overcoming Bias misses some spaces around formatting, possibly an importing bug.
The site should implement a kill-filter - a method of hiding all comments, messages, and posts from specific users.
I think I prefer things as-is. We pretty much all tend to find the same users problematic, and they don't tend to stick around - either they leave or they're chucked out. I think it's better if we're all seeing the same site.
Seconded.
Such user-specific effects might be better done externally, as with greasemonkey.
For very simple things, you could use yahoo pipes. Here is a filter that removes lojban, from the feed of new comments. rss
It would be nice if the feed were more structured. I had to match the title, rather than the author of the comment.
It would be useful to have an RSS feed showing all descendants of all comments and top-level postings made by the logged-in user. It would help in avoiding accidentally ignoring a comment in a conversation I'm actively participating in.
Alternatively, or also, highlighting in some way all such comments in the other RSS feeds and web pages.
Is there a page for "how to use this website" somewhere that I've missed? For the most part, it is intuitive. But I got a bit worried when I clicked "Report" on some spam and it asked me "Are you sure?". No I'm not sure - I'm just guessing what "Report" means and what it does...
I'd also be interested in knowing how Karma works, who (if anyone) is notified about my comments, what Voting does, etc... Just a general overview of how the website works. And if this information isn't all in one place already maybe it should be.
For my part, I think I accidentally clicked on Report the other day, while expanding a lot of comments for Context. But I don't remember any dialogue so I can hope that it didn't go through.
The reddit FAQ may answer a few questions.
Update: the welcome post has a small explanation of voting and karma.
There are no "next" and "previous" buttons like there were on Overcoming Bias, which especially breaks context on some older posts. Altogether there should be some easy way to navigate / browse through old posts on Lw.
I second this notwithstanding VN's post. Also, I think I'd have gotten further the first time I encountered the sequences if there'd been First/Previous/Next in Sequence buttons.
(edit) Beware Trivial Inconveniences seems possibly relevant.
(edit 2) This post backs me up on Next buttons.
In the meantime, there's the all posts list on the wiki.
That indeed seems like a good resource for now.
Any chance a feature could be added so that an account's display name can be changed (without changing the account name, email, etc.)?
Bug: comments deleted by a moderator behave differently than comments deleted by the user.
The comments deleted in this thread are still visible on the user pages (mjgeddes and outlawpoet); when the user deletes comments, they vanish from the user page, or at least they used to. Leaving them on the user page is probably not the desired behavior, at least for the second deletion.
this post claims to have 1 more comment than it displays. I wonder if this is a deleted comment effect as well. Not a big deal, but worth recording for anyone who wants to debug deletion.
LessWrong.com sends the user's password in the clear (as reported by ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 8.
Please consider warning people that is so.
This URL causes an error: http://lesswrong.com/user/G%C3%BCnther_Greindl/
If you try to write a comment with a numbered list, like so:
Then the points are silently renumbered to "1. 2. 3.", which will mess you up if you refer to the points by number - "point 0", "point 1".
markdown is standard. Use backslashes \ if you want different behavior.
but the help screen should have a link to daringfireball.
Currently, lots of discussions just end without the last commenter or readers knowing why.
So, feature idea: add a way for the author of the parent of a comment to set an "agreement status" with the following options by clicking a button:
"I disagree, and am open to disagreement-arbitration on this particular issue (but not necessarily others)."
I've felt that way on issues on this board before, but didn't continue responding because there were too many comments to reply too. (I'm thinking in particular of the "no one likes the taste of alcohol" thesis that I advanced.)
Just badger the person who fails to respond to a what seems to you an important comment.
I hereby give everyone explicit permission to do so to me.
It is a good idea, and one that would work best if it was a norm. Badgering without such a norm can come across as insecure and play right into the hands of the one using the 'rhetorical inattention' gambit. Fortunately, a concise 'badger' including or consisting of a link to the parent would remove the need to explain or justify oneself and so avoid this difficulty.
Not with this crowd, I hope.
In any case, you cannot force anyone to respond. Thus, in my opinion, the best response to ignorance is to summarize the debate British Parliamentary style and be done with it.
The main one: I don't like your attitude, this is signalling crap not discussion. Stick it.
I find this makes me less likely to write up reasons later. It makes it work.
I don't like this idea, so far. I don't see any good way of adding this to the UI nicely, and for most such conversations my response would be "I walked away from the computer for a week and so didn't check any such box"
What about adding a drop-down list box to the right of "Vote up | Vote down" etc? Or below that line? The selected message can be displayed in the same space for others to see.
I guess this feature wouldn't be useful for a user who comments on a few threads and then leaves for a week. But there are also extended discussions between regulars here that end without anyone except the author of the parent of the last comment knowing why.
A norm for finishing any conversation with such status would be more flexible. This'd take at least a good top-level post, official endorsement of the policy, and some reminders for the participants of conversations that follow this template. Also, without the norm, software option won't be useful.
Yes I agree we need a norm. But we also need the software feature so that we aren't littered with agreement status comments everywhere, and also to make it easier to follow the norm, which would make it more likely to be adopted as a norm.
Actually, what I've done sometimes is I add the status to the end of my already posted comment. That way I'm not adding any 'comment noise' but if anyone reads the post in the future they can see what the outcome/latest state was.
I do that occasionally but sometimes feel a little self-important while doing so. (Along the lines of "who cares what I finally think?") But I rationalize that it would be helpful for someone following the thread, in the near or far future. I think it would generally be a good norm to have.
Did green for non-followed links just get added?
Maybe I'm color-blind, but the gray/green distinction seems too subtle for me.
If it's a standard effect that people under-estimate how much they'll learn to use subtle colors, then of course ignore me. My guess is that I'll learn to tell, but it will cost attention and I won't be able to scan or unconsciously check, the way I do on other sites. The permalinks are not so difficult because they have nearby links for comparison, but links in the main text are difficult for me, despite their larger size.
(it works fine on the yellow background, just not white or gray)
I'd like more context.
Since there are anchors, is there any cost to replacing context=1 with context=3 ?
Alternatively, context for the parent button (or even the permalink button) could be controlled from the preferences page, at the cost of UI proliferation. This might make more sense for people who want context on the recent comments page, which is a feature that would have cost to people who don't want it. (hmm...I guess greasemonkey could make parent=context=3)
Incidentally, the combination of deleted comments and context is buggy. If you go here where the parent is deleted and visible, there's no obvious way to proceed up (permalink, then parent is a non-obvious escape). If there are two deleted comments in a row, I think it's impossible to navigate up, short of editing the URL to context=9.
Spam bots are preparing a siege for the wiki, several of them register every day (although there were no attempts to edit the pages yet). Maybe a captcha extension on registration could fix this?
There are lots of weird things about deleted posts, but showing the author as "[deleted]" is definitely a bug.
I reached that belief from this post and it matches what Yvain says
I don't like the AddThis button (because it pops up when I accidentally mouse over it). I searched for a few minutes on the AddThis site and elsewhere, but couldn't find a way to turn it off.
Well if you use firefox, there are a bunch of extensions that would let you get rid of it. But I agree that it's annoying, badly implemented, and shouldn't be there.
Four-digit karma is not readily legible in the little green circle.
[currently the parent comment is at -1 points]
Interesting: does the downvoter see a statement of status in this true observation, and so feels offended?
It was probably just a drive-by. I get those on a pretty regular basis.
"Recent Comments" is currently broken, though I must confess I enjoy the error messages.
Sometimes browsing of old comments on the comment feed fails. This is an example link that doesn't work now.
Something's wrong with encoding in the references section of this post moved from Overcoming Bias.
More problems with encoding: http://lesswrong.com/lw/rd/passing_the_recursive_buck/
See umlaut in "Godel, Escher, Bach" at the beginning.
Have an option when viewing all recent comments on the site to display the parent along with each comment, because many comments can't be understood out of context, and it's a pain to click on "Parent" for each such comment.
Post tags should be visible on the main page, rather than only on the article's page.
Oh, so completely seconded. Put 'em right under the title where we can see them!
As I mentioned elsewhere: recent karma changes to posts and comments.
Also, a 'preview' feature for comments would be nice.
Seconded. It's a little frustrating when my karma creeps up or down and I have to guess what's getting the approval/disapproval.
And: Sometimes it doesn't creep! I just had a gigantic upswing of karma and an equally dramatic downswing in the space of a few hours (on the order of fifty points in each direction). It doesn't seem to be my latest comments that are getting adjusted, and I would just love to know what is generating such strong opinions.
There is no visible difference between an unpublished draft and a published article. I am not the only one who has written an article and wondered why it seems to have drawn absolutely no response, then remembered there is this feature of not publishing immediately. I then hunted around for something to click called "Publish". In fact you have to click "Edit", even if the text already says exactly what it should, and publish from the edit page.
Proposal. When viewing multiple articles on a page, each article (down to its summary break) is currently followed by a block with "Comments (nnn)" at the left and a set of links ("Edit", "Save", etc.) at the right.
An unpublished draft cannot usefully have comments. Therefore, replace the comments link by the words "Unpublished draft", in the same text style (but not a link to anything).
Add to the series of links at the right, one called "Publish", which will immediately publish the article. ETA: Web conventions might indicate that "Publish" be a button rather than a link, since it Does Something rather than Going Somewhere.
Unpublished drafts also show up on the user's "Submitted" page. But they are not submitted, so they should not be displayed there.
There should be a way to undelete articles, or no way to delete them: currently, deleted articles are still visible from the feed, and it's possible to comment on them, but otherwise they are in limbo: they are not on the sidebar or any other list of articles, and there is no way to restore them.
For the last several days, both overcomingbias and lesswrong wiki (but not lesswrong blog) simultaneously experience some downtime and/or extremely slow responses. The largest outage a few days ago lasted for several hours. Yet another outage started a few minutes ago.
The new favicon doesn't really stand out well - it blends into the background of my tabs. Obviously this isn't a universal issue, but I'm just using standard themes. A white (or other color) background might fix this without sacrificing design.
And to finally re-post from the Open Thread:
It should be possible to tag posts (especially articles, possibly comments) by language, and let users pick what languages they want to see. The interface wouldn't necessarily have to be translated; it would just be nice to have some support for multilingualism.
The links from this post moved from OB to other OB posts weren't converted to LessWrong links, they still point to Overcoming Bias (which promptly redirects back here).
Some comments seem to be missing from some posts moved from Overcoming Bias. For example this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Agree+with+Denis.+It+seems+rather+objectionable+to+describle+such+behaviour+as+irrational.%22
Here's the search result as of now, in case Google updates its index:
Overcoming Bias: The Allais Paradox Agree with Denis. It seems rather objectionable to describle such behaviour as irrational. Humans may well not trust the experimenter to present the facts ... www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/allais-paradox.html?cid=6a00d8341c6a2c53ef0115706bcf8b970b
"Parent" links in comments get confused when the context is on. See, for example this link: clicking on "Parent" on the first thomblake's comment leads nowhere.
The comments on the old OB articles that have been imported appear to be by LW usernames that were created just for that purpose. Any chance of 'claiming' those? (my technical spider-sense says no)
We did our best to try to link up OB names with Less Wrong user names. However as there were many hundreds of names this had be done automatically. For a match to be made the name on OB and username on LW had to match, as did the email address on both sides.
If you supplied an email address on OB then that will have been imported and you can claim the account by following the forgotten password process for the account. Assuming it has your email address you will be sent an email and be able to reset the password.
There are some problems with fonts in the post 2-Place and 1-Place Words moved from Overcoming Bias (see the infinity symbols in the first quotation block).
I'd like the recent posts to show the number of comments, just like the front page does.
I'd like the non-post pages that show comments, like the new comments page and user pages, to show the number of children for each comment.
The picture wasn't inlined in this post moved from OB.
ETA: See also this report.
There is now a new wiki.
All the content from the wikia wiki has been migrated to the new wiki.
However the users can't be exported and hence weren't migrated. You may create an account at the new wiki with the same username as the wikia wiki and then you will have the same user page and all your contributions will match on your username.
For those that have been looking carefully you will have noticed the link to the new wiki next to the about link in the nav bar.
Enjoy :)
For those that have been keeping an eye on the new wiki you may have noticed a couple of things change recently.
First anonymous editing has been disabled, so you have to login to the wiki in order to contribute.
Second the URLs are in wikipedia style format, so articles can be accessed like http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Utilon instead of http://wiki.lesswrong.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Utilon (the second form still works of course)
Three issues:
First, as others have mentioned, posting to drafts seems to actually post the article publicly. Is that just how it shows for the individual user, causing it to appear in "new" only for them but not for anyone else, or is that a bug with LW?
Second, I set some text as bold in a posting, it displayed as bold in the article editor... But in the actual posting... it didn't.
Third: Google Chrome (the browser I'm currently using) has a built in spellcheck that seems to work in text entry boxes, including those for entering comments on LW. But in the article editor, it seems to not operate. I'm not sure if the problem is with Chrome or LW, but I thought I'd mention this issue at least.
New shows all categories you can see including your drafts, others can't see your drafts. See the FAQ
This is an issue specific to browsers that use WebKit, namely safari and chrome. Unfortunately we can't do anything about this, though it appears to be fixed in the latest WebKit (used by safari 4 beta)
I made a change such that where possible the browser spell check will be on. Firefox and safari appear to work and provide support. IE6,7,8, chrome and opera don't.
When I click on links here, the first time my browser usually gives a popup saying that I am trying to open a file of type application/octet stream and asks me what program I want to use to download the file. The second time I try the same link it works fine.
I found some threads on the Firefox help forum about it, and they say the problem is with the server. Any way you can get this fixed? Is anyone else having this problem?
Inbox links!
Massive thanks to whoever coded in a link to my inbox just under my karma score. I haven't gotten a comment reply since this appeared, so I can't tell whether it gives notification -- would anyone care to test it?
It should work fine - I tested it heaps :)
Maybe this is a dumb question, but is there any reason I'm suddenly unable to edit my comments? I've been typing quickly tonight and have been making an annoyingly high number of typos.
Apologies to anyone I've annoyed with them btw.
I'm having problems saving a post in drafts, it keeps on losing the text. Is this just me?
It would be wonderful if those pressed for time could have a link where they could see the top-scoring comments of the last day/week/etc.
Requested feature: a 'user list', possibly sorted by karma - just like 'top contributors', but listing everybody. Preferably on its own page somewhere.
Terminology. Try to be consistent. "Liked" and "Vote Up": pick one and stick with it. IMHO
For those who don't get this one right away, if you check your user page, you see links to 'liked' and 'disliked' as categories of posts that you voted up or down. Since this doesn't seem to quite match the semantics of voting, the names of the categories on the user pages should be changed.
How about a basic Users' Guide, and include a link to it right in the top links bar?
When viewing a post with styles off, the comment headers are shown twice. Example:
badger22 April 2009 05:14:21PM* 2 points [+] (0 children)
badger22 April 2009 05:14:21PM* 2 points [-]
Also, you'll notice a lot of cruft at the bottom of the page, that is presumably hidden by styles.
I don't see a way to send my new article to the mods. When I'm done editing in my drafts folder, then what?
We made a recent change such that when you are creating or editing an article the "post to" selection always shows LessWrong. In the case that you don't yet have enough karma to post to LessWrong then it will be grayed out and have a message next to it explaining why.
Old versions of IE unfortunately don't honor the grayed out option. In this case you can select LessWrong but submitting will inform you that you can't yet submit to the LessWrong category (of course you can always save to your drafts).
To publish an article, you need to have at least 20 points of Karma. Granted, this rule should be placed somewhere visible to the newcomers. It doesn't seem to be on the About page.
PhilGoetz is not on the "Top Contributors" list, despite having more karma than many on that list (Goetz has 646, while five others listed have 615, 536, 513, 504, 495).
I don't know if this is due to a bug or to some feature I don't know about.
We've deployed a fix for the Top Contributors that should see all 10 users listed. Although it may not be immediately visible due to client and server side caching. You may need to give it up to an hour before it shows up.
awesome, thanks =)
I disappeared because I banned my "anti-rationality quotes" post. Today I found out how to unban it and then hide it; but my name didn't reappear on the list.
ciphergoth is still missing, and 1 other person.
Thanks for noticing. :)
"Bookmark" widget is annoying: mouse over it causes the pop-up list of bookmark services to appear, which sometimes doesn't want to go away.
A "Reply" button is present in the list of comments on (other) users' pages, but doesn't work.
On the global "Comments" page, it's not possible to edit your comments, even though it's possible to write replies (and later edit them).
On the Recent Posts page, there is an option to sort by new or sort by rising. If you selected "sort by rising", it does not display any posts
We need to run a periodic process on the server to make rising work. I've raised an issue to address this.
For whatever reason, I am able to access an overview of anybody else's profile, but cannot bring up my own. I have been unable to do so for about a week. I was previously able to do so, so I don't believe it is my browser (I also cleared the cache, logged out and back in, etc.)
Any assistance would be appreciated.
An easy way to see when your comments have been replied to, and to read those replies, would be great. Reddit has this feature. Right now I'm unaware of any way to do this on LW besides checking each of the individual parent posts.
http://lesswrong.com/message/inbox
The feature we really need is the little red/grey envelope link to appear on every page.
Comments vs. Upvoting.
I've been wondering if the number of comments that a post (or comment) gets should have an effect on a karma score. I say this because there are some 1-point comments that have many replies attached to them. Clearly folks thought the comment had some value, or they wouldn't have replied to it. Maybe we need have each comment count as a vote, with the commenter having to explicitly choose +,-,or neutral in order to post?
Just a grab for attention? That would be annoying for the users, bad interface design decision.
What did you mean here?
In what way would it be annoying? How is it bad interface design?
I mean that if the options are the same as they are currently, +1, 0 and -1, then the only difference that requiring to vote when commenting introduces is mandating a "click" on one of the voting options. Since you can always choose "0", the same as ignoring the voting, there is no functional difference, only requirement for the additional "click". This may bring the requirement to think about voting to user's attention, but this is a one more mandatory click in the course of using the interface, inability for the users to avoid the click, loss of control. Users hate losing control.
I would not say that it is a priori a bad thing to complicate a user interface in order to guide users to a particular sort of behavior. Note the effects of defaults and compare Cass Sunstein's 'Nudge'.
Nonetheless, I completely agree with you that this is a bad design decision.
This only applies to the optional features, where you need to discourage the users from doing something usually bad, so that they'll only resort to that if they know that they do need to use the dangerous feature. In our case, the discussed feature wasn't optional.
I agree. I think it's terrible whenever I see a comment that has sparked a large discussion but has a low (or even negative!) score. Either people are feeding the trolls, or folks are not upvoting a comment that clearly did its job.
EDIT: I disagree about needing to click another button in order to comment - voting is separate from commenting.
I can't see this post on either the recent posts or what's new lists anymore.
<edited to test a LW bug>
It's 9/11 truthism. I removed it. There needs to be some way to indicate this on the post itself, I suppose.
Is 9/11 truthism a specifically banned topic, or is it just too crazy or too offensive?
Are all conspiracy-related topics banned? Can I, for instance, talk about the assassination of JFK?
Is there a way for admins to take ownership of posts, so you could replace the text with a notice saying what was there and why it was removed?
Admins can edit posts without taking ownership. For anything but an egregious wrong, adding a takedown notice should be preferred to deleting the post.
Admins can edit any post.
It wasn't clear to me whether the post itself was 9/11 truthism rather than merely using 9/11 truthism as an example. After all, the title was "Seeing patterns where they don't exist" or something of the kind. I did think it would have been considerably improved (and looked less like preaching) by having a link to the lengthy Litany of 9/11 Conspiracy Evidence rather than incorporating the whole thing in the post.
... Though "And" has stated elsewhere that s/he believes 9/11 was an inside job, so it looks like you were right.
So, you think it would be okay to make a post about it as long as I was on the right side of the argument?
I wasn't commenting on whether it was OK to make a post about it, but on Eliezer's description of it as "9/11 truthism". Sorry if that wasn't clear.
For what it's worth, I think the question "how should one evaluate a big messy pile of ambiguous alleged evidence for something?" is a reasonable one, and any number of Things Widely Considered Irrational might make interesting test cases -- "9/11 truthism", ghosts, healing miracles, whatever. But:
I think the most reliable way to avoid giving that impression is to take steps to make what you write not useful as preaching. (For instance: disclaimers along the lines of "This is the opinion of a tiny minority only, and I happen to be one of them. Discount as you see fit.")
Well... it's down the memory hole, but it exists. And it will accept comments if anyone feels like a spot of debunking.
very minor bug: when a comment is submitted, the currently viewed page is updated adding that comment, but the count of comments on that page is not. (Thus this error is only visible to the person submitting the comment and only ephemerally.)
http://lesswrong.com/user/Annoyance is currently reported as having a karma of 2^32 + 437
This happens whenever someone's karma goes negative.
That is very odd as Annoyance has had relatively high karma since he started posting.
Annoyance makes a lot of comments, we haven't yet fixed the bug where every comment automatically adds karma, and LW users seem reluctant to downvote. In any case Annoyance's karma shows as 375 to me.
Based on my score, it looks like it's been fixed now, but based on JerryL's score it looks like people still have the karma gained while the bug was in place. (I'm posting this because it took me a while to figure out what was going on.)
Drafts seem to show up on the recent posts list, when they aren't finished work yet.
I get "Error encountered" in place of my user page. Other people's seem fine. It was OK yesterday.
We deployed a fix yesterday that addresses this problem. The bug was influenced by the caching that is employed, which is why it happens sometimes but not others.
I am now getting this error also. Only my own user page, only when I'm logged in.
This is now fixed. I'll leave the comment in case it happens to others.
<Edit> - Error happened again, then gone again a few hours later. Happened both at home and work, happens for a while, no apparent link between occurrences, logging out doesn't fix it.
<Edit 28Mar> - Now happening all the time. Still not fixed by logging out. I can see dclayh's page (mentioned above). This is potentially very serious if it keeps spreading.
For affected users, you can still see replies to your comments here, and possibly still http://lesswrong.com/user/<you>/submitted/, /liked/, /disliked/, /hidden/ and /drafts/.
<Edit 31 Mar> Can now access my user page after 3 days broken, but can't get to page 2 of my comments. So it looks like it's breaking trying to display some type of comment on user the page, and fixed when said comment dropped to page 2. Maybe a certain combination or nesting of editing flags confuses it?
<Edit 31 Mar> Broken again, but can access all pages that don't list my comments. The only comments I made/edited since it worked are this one, this one, this one and this one, but clearing the comments out doesn't fix it.
<Edit 1 Apr> 1st page of comments accessible again, and all 4 of the above comments are on that page. Go figure.
<Edit 2 Apr> Broke again, no comments made since last worked.... ...Working again, again no comments made.
I've been seeing that error while logged-in periodically as well. But I can't seem to reproduce it reliably, so I haven't reported it.
There is a way to send people messages, but there doesn't seem to be any way to read your own messages, or find out whether you have any.
http://lesswrong.com/message/inbox
Is there a way to see just messages, not comment responses?
Big problems with this:
Thanks! Where is that linked from?
It isn't -- I figured it out by looking at the URL for the same feature on reddit.com.
Time to file a bug...
update: http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=149
I can't find an RSS feed.
You can find the link on the front page (RSS link).
The article pages do seem to lack the usual link on the right.
Not sure if this is already fixable, but I tried to post a link to the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system) in this comment, and the sofware reads the close bracket in the url as closing the bracket around the url (if you know what I mean...) is there a way around this? Or are there too few urls containing close-parentheses for it to be worth bothering about?
Edit: - looks like the same thing happened again!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system%29
You can use %29 ASCII code for the closing bracket instead of the bracket itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system\)
You can also escape special symbols with a backslash \, so you may replace the ) with \). This is also useful for preventing the markup from, for example *italicizing* the words enclosed in ** (source code: \*italicizing\*).
That doesn't seem to work.
EDIT: Ah, I see - the links deliberately have the encoded bits spelled out in them. I had thought it was unintentional.
Then you are doing something wrong, try again. Ask specific questions/describe what you are doing. I explained as well as looks necessary.
Downmodding bobdole caused an integer underflow in his karma, wrapping it around to 2^32-1. With any luck, though, with karma that high he'll achieve nirvana and go away.
as noted here, we need some sort of spoiler capability in comments. if this is already available in standard Markdown, I missed it. It would be cool if it worked like those on the XKCD forums.
Is there a good reason for drafts to show in the What's New list and on the sidebar (maybe it's just an artifact in current software)? It's deeply confusing, I've just had an article lying as a draft for three hours, while thinking that I've already published it. Currently, the only way to find out whether the article is published is to check if it's absent from the draft list, or to log out.
An alternative solution is to add some kind of designation near the articles that are still drafts, like a word DRAFT in big red letters.
There probably should be a place for open discussion, displayed prominently maybe beside the ABOUT link, where people can post comments like this one without going off-topic.
I find the right-alignment of the "continue reading>" link makes it extremely easy to miss. My eye is scanning left to right, so once I don't see something below the last line on the left I typically go to the next post. (Once I happened to notice it, I was able to keep a lookout for it, but if it was left aligned and maybe down a line, I suspect it would be a lot easier to see.)
The "indent" feature on the article writer is spotty. Sometimes it works as advertised, sometimes it doesn't. For example, I indented the quote on the top of my post "How to Not Lose an Argument" , it appeared indented in the editor when I was writing it, and when I click on "edit", it continues to appear indented on the editor. But it's doesn't get indented on the post itself.
The HTML tag attribute disappears in the published version, even though the code is produced by the buttons in the site's editor. We have <p style="padding-left: 30px;"> written by the button in editor, but it becomes just <p> in the published version.
In the original Reddit codebase, you could tell when someone replied to your comment, because they'd highlight an "envelope" icon. I can't see of a way to check for replies in the LW site.
New features and bug fixes seem to be added without any sort of announcement. It seems like there should be something to indicate when the site is changed.
Okay - It's impossible to FIND this thread unless someone else has posted to it recently, or you have a link saved to it somewhere. There's no way to find old threads once they fall off the "New" page.
Which reminds of one possible new feature: on forums, the whole thread is usually brought to the top when someone adds a comment. I think it'd be an improvement if, say, instead of the useless "Controversial" list, we'd have a list of articles sorted by the time of last comment.
A thousand times yes. This will keep the discussion in the older threads alive. I was going to suggest this myself. It would be even better if there was a way to quickly find out where in the thread the discussion is going on at the moment, and which comments are new.
One possible solution is to use flat view, like in the Comments stream, but localized to an article, with the links to a threaded view, linked to from the list of articles. Also, this list of articles should probably show title only, without summary parts of the text.
Clicking on the title 'Recent Posts:' in the right-hand tab takes you to a full list of them.
There's a link on the bottom of every page that says "Report Issues" that leads to this thread.
Threads in the user page (so I can see replies and respond).
See who voted.
Force "make my votes public" to true.
Should a downvote require an explanation?
Threads in the user page seem cool.
I like anonymous comment voting.
I don't see any need to force 'make my votes public'
Downvotes should definitely not require explanations. Anyone with time for that should be doing something more important.
I strongly dislike anonymous voting, because this is a different context than Reddit - a rationalist ought to be prepared to defend their judgments. Similar reason why I don't like drive-by downvotes.
The principle is sound, but what about the time cost? I downvote maybe two or three comments a day, more if it's a particularly bad day. I'm not prepared to write an essay explaining exactly was wrong with each of them, especially if the original commenter wasn't prepared to take three seconds to write a halfway decent response.
Also, we are not immune to status effects. If I wanted to downvote one of Eliezer's comments, I would feel really awkward having to explain to him why I was doing so and why I thought he wasn't contributing productively to the conversation. But I'd do it to some random newbie without a second thought. It's probably a bad idea to implement policies that allow higher status people to gain even more karma even more quickly.
By the way, has anyone else made a link between this community's unhealthy obsession with karma and prediction markets? I recently read some articles claiming that prediction markets with fake money did just as well as ones with real money, in contrast to what most economists predicted. The economists' argument was "Who the heck cares about fake money when it's a meaningless status symbol?" And meanwhile, here we are, having long debates about possible unfair karma allocation systems...
This sentence made me think of something completely different - both illustrate the attraction of pure meta means of truth-seeking, of being able to outperform messy object-level reasoning without having to do any of it - the "algorithmism" that Mencius Moldbug accuses Bayesianism of. Not that karma and prediction markets aren't good ideas, of course.
I've been downvoted for no apparent reason at least twice since I registered. In both of these cases my comments were on-topic, grammatical, and contained entirely reasonable content. In such cases I think an explanation is clearly warranted.
Honestly, I don't like this whole system of voting and karma. I have social anxiety and it frankly hurts my feelings to be downvoted (more so than it lifts my spirits to be upvoted). Does this mean I shouldn't participate in a forum about rationality? I would like to think otherwise. I liked OB just fine (though even there, I tended to keep my comments few and far between for fear of perceived social consequences).
(Yes, I know it's ironic that just a little while ago I publicly downvoted a top-level post. But I did provide an explanation. And this was after I'd seen the author diss modern music before without saying anything. And then somebody downvoted my comment. Revenge?)
I agree with komponisto somewhat, even though I'm a newbie around here. I think the danger of this putatively 'democratically constructed' body of discourse sliding off the precipice into becoming a mutual admiration society or worse are sufficient that there needs to be some discipline applied to dismissive actions. Therefore, some form of reporting on why one has been 'disappeared' might be in order. In the case of being downvoted out of existence, an automatic message stating this could be sent to one's profile (attached to the draft) with minimal effort surely. Where a comment or reply has been specifically removed by an admin, surely it's common courtesy to say so, and maybe even offer a reason and by implication the right of reply where a misunderstanding has occured (yes, it happens!).
What we actually need around these parts is more voting. Then the occasional downvotes for stupid reasons will wash out faster. Meanwhile, don't sweat it.