[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.
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:
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.
Feature request: profile pages, at minimum an empty box where the user can put text and links.
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?
This might be slightly off-topic, but there isn't another place to post it right now...
The design here is awesome, especially compared to Reddit (or OB). Whoever designed the basic layout/look deserves major Kudos. The kind with chocolate chips. It's clean, usable, and (on my browser/display) not a pixel out of place.
We'll see how the entire site evolves in terms of usability.
Before people can submit their own posts, it would be good to have it spelled out what's considered on-topic.
I can find no way to link to my home page (or provide any other information on who I am) from my visible user profile.
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.
Four thoughts:
Show the number of comments on posts from the front page.
Add a favicon. I usually have at least 20 tabs open in Firefox at once, and favicons are invaluable navigation aids.
I like the tree view because it allows direct comment, but a flat view would be helpful to catch new posts.
Display the full text of a post in the RSS feed. I'm glad the feed shows the number of comments though.
This site has a lot of features, but I don't see anything that explains how they're used. A general help page and/or FAQ seems necessary. Example:
What's Karma, what does the number represent, and what makes it change?
Is there a way to systematically notice new comments as they appear? Ideally I'd like to receive them as individual e-mails with subject being equal to post title, for gmail threading magic to facilitate efficient skimming.
As it is, tree view makes it difficult to keep track of the conversation as it unfolds, it's even worse than on OB where there was no native way to subscribe (I use backtype for that purpose, a still buggy comment scanner). Maybe the simplest step for now is to allow flat view for discussion.
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.
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.
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.
The site should implement a kill-filter - a method of hiding all comments, messages, and posts from specific users.
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.
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.
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.
Automatic reply-notification would be nice in the long run. If there was a page where we could automatically see any new replies to our old comments, or if commenters/posters could choose to be notified about replies, then people might more often bother to reply to old threads, and conversations could be more on-going.
It would be handy to see in your user's page which comments of yours had been replied to without having to check each one individually.
Reddit's up-arrow/down-arrow system with the selected arrow highlighted is much more intuitive and easier to see at a glance than a "vote up" and "vote down" with the selected link in bold. It also makes sense to have the point count next to the vote buttons. I spent my first few seconds on this site wondering why there was only a "vote down" button before I realized the minus sign next to the point count had nothing to do with voting.
I agree with the people saying show the number of comments on the front page.
The site needs an icon, even if it's crude and temporary, say "LW" like on Yudkowsky's and Bostrom's sites.
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?
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.
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.
LessWrong.com sends the user's password in the clear (as reported by ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 8.
Please consider warning people that is so.
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 ...
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 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) i...
Requested feature: a 'user list', possibly sorted by karma - just like 'top contributors', but listing everybody. Preferably on its own page somewhere.
It would be desirable to be able to tell which comments/posts I'd already voted on once I've done so.
It would be nice to have some definition of what the "friends" feature is supposed to mean. Is it like facebook "friend" or like twitter "follow" or... any number of other possible interpretations? Is it supposed to be reciprocal, or are these just people whose posts you want to read more of / that you like?
The design of this site is rendered fairly poorly in browsers that are configured to enforce a minimum font-size above a certain bound. Specifically:
Steps to reproduce with Firefox 3.0.6 (I haven't tested other versions, but this is likely to also work with...
On what basis will free people vote on an idea they disagree with but that is explained well? A hilarious but unrelated pun? A brilliant comment on a post that has nothing to do with it? A valid point by a well known troll?
It seems like the only criterion for the rating of comment/post be the degree to which it contributes to healthy discussion (well-explained, on-topic, not completely stupid). However, there is an strong tendency for people to vote comments based on whether they disagree with them or not, which is very bad for healthy discussion. It discourages new ideas and drives away visitors with differing opinions when they see a page full of highly rated comments for a particular viewpoint (cf. reddit).
The feature I would recommend most for this website is a dual voting feature: one vote up/down for the quality of the post/comment, and one for whether you agree or disagree with it. This would allow quality, disagreeable comments to float to the top while allowing everyone to satisfy their urge to express their opinion. It also would force people to make a cognitive distinction between the two categories.
Even people like me who try to base their ratings independent of their agreement with the comment are biased in their assessment of the quality. It would be very healthy to read a comment you agree with and would normally upvote (because your quality standards have been biased downward) only to see that a large fraction of the community finds the argument poor.
Incidentally, you might allow voting for humor or on-topic-ness so that people can (say) still be funny every once in a while without directly contributing to the current discussion per se.
(Sorry that was so long. It was something I had been thinking about for awhile.)
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).
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
I want to be able to click on one of the Recent Comments and see the entire comment list, not just the "thread" that contains the recent comment.
Indented numbered lists don't wrap properly. For example,
1. This is a numbered list item. In the text box, it was 4 spaces, followed by "1.", followed by the rest of the text. If this line is longer than your browser window is wide, it won't wrap properly.
I am having some trouble posting an article.
I first tried posting it to Drafts For Yvain to see what it would look like, and it showed up with karma 1 on the main site (but I could only see it when logged in). Although it looked good, I didn't see any obvious way to change it from draft to official post.
So I deleted the draft, went back to the editor, and posted the article to Less Wrong. But it redirected me to a version of the article with [deleted] next to the title, and it doesn't show up on the main site.
Also, I saved my draft, but don't see any way to load the saved file. There's nothing in the tab that says "saved" on the right of the top menu.
4 digit karma total should be common soon enough, several users are past 100 after mere days.
Minor problem, but at this rate the green circles are in trouble.
There's a bug that shows users as having millions of karma, the excess numbers just spill over the side.
I am sure this had been said, but I would really like a full-post RSS feed. I don't want to come to the actual site every time I want to read a post; I just want to be able to read it on my RSS reader.
In my preferences, I've marked the checkbox for making my votes public. However, I'm not sure where I can see the votes I or anyone else has made. Is this simply not implemented yet, or hidden somewhere?
When I go to my userpage and click on the title of this post (above one of my comments on this post), it links to
http://lesswrong.com/a/5/issues_bugs_and_requested_features/
But that page 404's...
A map of where we are, automatically generated with the Google Maps API from the data in the Location field of the user profiles.
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.
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...
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.
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
As I mentioned elsewhere: recent karma changes to posts and comments.
Also, a 'preview' feature for comments would be nice.
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).
"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.
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?
Karma earned from comments is not removed when the comment is deleted. This is salient for those of us who frequently post comments, reread them, hate them, delete them, post something different, and so on three or four times before getting them right. Also, if someone wants to game the system they can post spam comments, delete them a second later, and repeat until they have the karma they want.
On the bottom of the main page, the 'Next' link leads to older posts, and the 'Prev' link leads to newer posts. While this functionality is found on other similar sites, I think it should be rethought as it may be unnecessarily confusing. Perhaps 'Older' and 'Newer'?
Sorting by Popular or Controversial isn't working for me for either posts or comments. Is anyone else having this problem? New and Old sort fine.
The editor helpfully relativizes LessWrong URLs (even if I enter it as an absolute URL) and then the relativized URL, though it works from the front page, fails from the sub-page itself. It is not possible to not relativize it!
I.e., try clicking the "Followup to" from within the article (not the front page).
This thread has no inherent way of noting when a bug is fixed in an official manner. Shouldn't there be some utility for bug reports/feature requests in place somewhere? This seems like an obvious thing to do for a Beta.
The register page should explain what is a valid username.
If I enter an invalid username, it should tell me what is invalid about it (instead of only displaying "Invalid user name", making me guess).
For a checklist for usability issues, I recommend a book: Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points by 37Signals. (Each recommendation made in the book is pretty obvious; the purpose of having a checklist is to remember to do all of them :).
Make it easier to see comment threads. It is hard to tell which comments belong to what thread.
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.
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.
Following up on a comment by byrnema:
It would be nice if we could transplant threads to where they are appropriate, with just a link to and from the old location where they were inspired.
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 t...
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 post Interpersonal Entanglement imported from Overcoming Bias has formatting issues, e.g. italized text has no spaces around it.
(Original report, by kpreid.)
Any chance a feature could be added so that an account's display name can be changed (without changing the account name, email, etc.)?
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".
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)
Sometimes browsing of old comments on the comment feed fails. This is an example link that doesn't work now.
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.
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 :)
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
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.
I get "Error encountered" in place of my user page. Other people's seem fine. It was OK yesterday.
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.
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!
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.
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.
When the site crashes it says things like "looks like today isn't your day" or "it's okay to cry".
One of these phrases links you to the reddit blog, another links to the reddit store, leftovers I guess.
The formatting "Help" list appearing on click under comment edit boxes should also contain a link to a more detailed description of formatting. For example, in this comment I wanted to insert line breaks without creating the new paragraphs, and the way to do that is quite non-obvious: you need to end the previous line with two spaces, and then start a new line. I found this rule here, in an article linked to from a post about the reddit formatting syntax.
Both comments and posts with below the threshold rating should still (have an option to) show wherever the good-reputation notes show, just in the collapsed state and with a low-reputation warning.
If I remember correctly, the down-voted comments currently still show in the comment thread, but in collapsed state (there are either too few of those so I didn't see them lately, or it's incorrect and they do completely disappear), while the downvoted articles don't show anywhere. It's confusing finding a comment in the "Comments" stream on an article that you can't find being mentioned anywhere.
Downvoted atricles don't show in the "What's new" list, but they show in the "Recent Posts" list.
When individuals have negative karma scores their karma reads out as some ludicrously high number like 4394, spilling out of the karma circle.
The post rating stays hidden for a while after a new post is submitted, in a circle beside the author's name, which looks like a good idea. But the rating is still visible in the sidebar listing the recent posts. I think it should disappear there as well while it's hidden in the rendering of the post itself.
A specification of desired tag and sequence behavior for a future version of Less Wrong (don't expect this tomorrow):
Tags should be applicable by any user to their posts. Clicking on a tag should, by default, show the matching posts latest-first, but the switch to read oldest-first should be prominent.
When viewing the posts matching a tag, the URL from the index page to each post should contain the tag query, such as /post/?tag=self_deception. It is preferable to use a query rather than a cookie or any other such methods, because it is desirable to be ab...
Karma earned from comments is not removed when the comment is deleted. This is salient for those of us who frequently post comments, reread them, hate them, delete them, post something different, and so on three or four times before getting them right. Also, if someone wants to game the system they can post spam comments, delete them a second later, and repeat until they have the karma they want.
Headings seem to be having formatting issues. I'll see if I can reproduce them here.
Thanks everyone!
Several days after I posted a suggestion that we rename the scoring system from "Karma", I was feeling kind of bad that my post had earned me nothing but downvotes.
Imagine my delight when I came to Less Wrong today and found my Karma Score to be 4,294,967,293. You guys are the best!
When I edit my comment, comments replying to that comment hide from the page (they don't get deleted, they reappear after I complete the edit).
If karma is the sum of individual post scores, does that reward quantity too much relative to quality?
Links on user pages and on "Recent Comments" lead to individual comments, without any context in which the comment is made. At least the whole thread should be shown, starting from the top-level comment, otherwise comments that reply to other comments fail to make any sense. For example click here.
Hi Eliezer, I had fun at the 2008 summit and the following OB afterdinner. The one issue I had that seems shared with Reddit is that there are no guidelines for password entry on sign-up. I put in a one-character password and it just said "invalid".
The link and comment score thresholds in the Preferences menu give the impression that by leaving them blank, all articles and comments will be shown regardless of their score.
If left blank, the preferences can't seem to be saved, and they appear to revert to zero: nothing with a score lower than zero shows.
The "Help" link below the Comments box looks like a hyperlink, but behaves oddly when "open in new tab" is done to it. It should maybe look like a button, or otherwise have a usability hint that it's not behaving like a hyperlink.
There appears to be something wrong with the log {in, out} functionality on lesswrong.org and lesswrong.net, though the exact misbehaviour is browser-dependent.
With Firefox 3.0.6 I can't log in on those URLs. Using Konqueror 3.5.9 I can log in there, but not out - except by manually deleting the relevant cookies.
I don't have any problems logging in or out on lesswrong.com with either browser.
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.
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.)
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....
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.
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
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)
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.
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?
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.
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?
In Chrome v. 2.0.172.6, any text typed into the comment box is hidden. It will momentarily appear if highlighted, but otherwise is invisible. The submit button also looks like a gray box without text.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
Youtube video embedding currently doesn't work. I place < object >...</ object > html code in the article, but nothing gets displayed when the article is viewed in Firefox. Internet Explorer 6.0 crashes trying to display such page.
In the absence of other contact information, there should perhaps be a way to send/receive personal messages. This would allow non-public comments regarding comments/articles (to point out typographical errors or make an off-topic suggestion, for example).
Although indented (not quoted, indented) text shows up fine in the editor, it does not show in the actual article. Perhaps the "p" tag is not cleared to show the style="padding-left: 30px;" attribute - it shows up in the editor's HTML, but not in the actual article.
I sometimes get "The page you requested does not exist" when clicking on a comment title in user's overview page.
Reddit has a slick iPhone application, which may be portable. It's based more on browsing websites, though. Something along the lines may be possible.
Design suggestion:
All the meta stuff associated with a comment, viz.
Posted by: Kaj_Sotala 02 March 2009 09:32:50AM 2 points Vote up | Vote down | Permalink | Parent | Report | Reply
takes up a lot of space and impedes readability of the discussion. Can all this stuff be made smaller and less prominent (maybe more like it is on Hacker News) and perhaps some of the links only be visible when you're in the actual comment's thread (like the "Flag" feature is on Hacker News)? (Also we don't really need to know the exact second that a post is made.)
I've heard it said that some people are having registration problems. No idea steps to reproduce. Seems CAPTCHA -related.
After creating a new article, the only place I seem to be able to submit it to is "Johnicholas's drafts". If I'm not logged in, I can't see my article at all.
Is that the expected behavior? I thought that general authors could post, even if the posts are not promoted.
I find the justified paragraphs hard to read, please change to left aligned / ragged right as most every web site does.
(There's a reason left aligned is standard on the web and justified paragraphs are standard in books and magazines: computer screens have a far lower resolution than printed material).
Bugs: italics show up in the sidebar with asterisks "new" button becomes "what's new" when clicked, all others become bold
I'd like there to be a separate Anonymous account for posting potentially controversial posts open for all.
Problem might be that it would be used to post frivolous off-topic posts, but reddit-like votes should keep them away from most users anyway.
Advantage would that you could also see what other people have posted as Anonymous nicely collected under single account.
There's not a "Save to Drafts" feature when you start a new article in the Discussion section. I found this out by accidentally publishing a not-even-first-draft.
In the process of writing up a new welcome thread, I've run into an issue I haven't seen before: links in the post seem to eat up the spaces around them, once it's turned into a draft. That is, in the editing mode, my text looks like this:
Here I have a link for you
while in the draft mode my text looks like this:
Here I have alinkfor you
Has anyone else experienced this?
I suspect there's a broken comment-- I couldn't get LW to refresh for a while, and then I could only get the front page but not recent comments. Now I can get the most recent 2 pages of comments, but an error message if I try to go back farther.
I get an occasional gray warning box from Firefox asking me if I want to open a: application/octet stream. Next time I'll take written notes-- I couldn't cut and paste from it.
Selecting cancel on the box lets me keep reading LW, and nothing awful has happened yet, but it's an annoyance, may be a load on people with low bandwidth, and I've never seen it on any other site.
Should we continue to post observed issues, bugs, and requested features here, so that they will later be added to Google Code if someone in charge thinks it's relevant, or do we all just post whatever we feel like to Google Code and then they get sorted out?
Not especially important but if it is easy to code some way of finding out if a user is logged in would be nifty (assuming people don't have privacy concerns).
A human's guide to words on the sequences page just links to the "37 ways that words can be wrong" article instead of linking to a sequence wiki.
A human's guide to words on the sequences page just links to the "37 ways that words can be wrong" article instead of linking to a sequence wiki.
Is it possible to create RSS feeds for comments on a single post? Provided that the feeds contained enough data (e.g. last 100 comments), this would make it very easy to follow comments on your own posts or posts you are interested in.
In Outside the Laboratory, the "Sort By:" box says Old, but I see a comment dated 07 November 2009 followed by a bunch more dated 2007.
The account deleting doesn't seem to work.
Also, asking "Are you sure?" three times is extremely annoying.
As demonstrated in this comment, there doesn't appear to be a way to make a working link in a comment if the URL contains a close-parenthesis, as this is scanned as the end of the URL.
The weird error messages that you get when a page is broken, are unhelpful and apparently from the Reddit codebase. It seems like those should change to a helpful 404 or something.
Something weird is going on with bolding followed by use of underscore. For example:
ETA: I just noticed that cousin_it's
There should be an underscore between "cousin" and "it's", but instead the underscore doesn't appear and "it's" is italicized. Hmm, it's not happening here, but was happening in http://lesswrong.com/lw/13o/fairness_and_geometry/yw4 until I removed the underscore.
About that report link (http://lesswrong.com/ ???): It doesn't say what it's going to do, what it is for (hate speech, strong language, advocating the overthrow, trolling, disagreeing with me...), nor does it give me a chance to explain.
Possibly an unintended feature - I currently can't downvote anything, and won't be able to until my karma exceeds Eliezer's.
Our "top contributors" are disappearing. Now there are only 7. ciphergoth and I should both be on that list. I disappeared because I banned one of my posts. I thought I'd reappear when I figured out how to hide it instead of banning it, but I didn't.
When I try to create a new article, I type it in, click submit and "nothing happens"
That is I get a blank page, no held for moderation, no thank you for participating. Looking at the page source I see
Surely the server should never generate that, I should at least get an error message, malformed post or something.
Checking submitted nothing is found.
I'm running an old Firefox on FreeBSD 5.4, so I tried using Lynx instead, with the same result.
I have a static IP address 80.177.122.150 which might make issues easy to locate in the server log.
I mentioned it elsewhere, but I would like voting limited to just posts. Voting for posts is meaningful as posts have to compete for limited main page space. Voting for comments, and indirectly voting for users doesn't have much obvious use, and might causing perverse effects of groupthink, self-censorship, karma whoring etc. - not now but once lesswrong becomes more popular. It happened to pretty much every other such system once a critical size was reached.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one's own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
Having a "Karma Score" seems out of place on a site focused on rationality.
Sure, I'd like to know if my participation is valued by the others on the board. Let's not call it Karma though.
A specification of desired tag and sequence behavior for a future version of Less Wrong (don't expect this tomorrow):
Tags should be applicable by any user to their posts. Clicking on a tag should, by default, show the matching posts latest-first, but the switch to read oldest-first should be prominent.
When viewing the posts matching a tag, the URL from the index page to each post should contain the tag query, such as /post/?tag=self_deception. It is preferable to use a query rather than a cookie or any other such methods, because it is desirable to be able to link to posts with a particular tag emphasized.
When visiting a post with ?tag=self_deception, the following navigation bar should be visible:
<< Prev | [Post title up to N chars] Tag: Self_Deception [Post title up to N chars] | Next >>
post body
<< Prev | [Post title up to N chars] Tag: Self_Deception [Post title up to N chars] | Next >>
Note that the "Prev" and "Next" must not appear before the post title. Overcoming Bias does this, and as a result, Google often mistakes the text of the "Prev" link for the page title! Searching under that title will turn up the page that has that "Prev" link, not the real link - even though the page title is accurate, Google seems to pay more attention to the first words appearing on the page.
"Tag: Self_Deception" should link to a search on the Self_Deception tag, but should not be prominently underlined/linky without a mouseover.
Obviously, the URLs for the "Prev" and "Next" links should contain ?tag=whatever.
All such pages returned should be marked as not the canonical version. See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Navigating through posts with ?author=Yvain should behave the same as above, except that "Tag: Self_Deception" goes to "Author: Yvain".
Sequences should be created, titled, and owned by a particular author, with arbitrary rather than chronological ordering, but with other author's posts being insertable into the sequence. By default, sequences appear oldest-first rather than newest-first, unlike tags and authors. Aside from this, ?seq=quantum and "Sequence: Quantum Physics" as above.
Being able to mark a post as being part of a particular sequence by default that shows up with no query (overridable by ?seq= or ?seq=none) would let me get rid of a good deal of "previously in series" cruft.
Because tags (especially with choosable sort order) give us a good deal of the functionality of sequences, implementing this behavior for tags can be prioritized above the same behavior for authors and sequences, in order to save some time and let me to do some poor man's sequences to start with. Tags get us 80% of the functionality, sequences get us 90% of the functionality, and anything more in the way of dependency-tracking can be put off into the more distant future.
It is acceptable to start with if various URLs within the page do not reflect the tag used to navigate to that page. We just want a basic tag-navigation system up as fast as possible.
It would be cool if fluid widths let users expand the page to see more of the post titles in "Prev" and "Next", or if narrower pages hid more of the post titles, but this is again not core functionality.
Being able to specify an RSS feed that goes through a tag/author/sequence at a specified N posts per day until the user is caught up, will help users catch up; this also needs the ability to pause for vacations, move back a few days, scroll forward on a click, and otherwise behave intelligently. In short, it's another major feature that should not be rolled out until after core functionality is implemented.