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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 (628)
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:
while in the draft mode my text looks like this:
Has anyone else experienced this?
This thread is dead, create an issue in the bug tracker.
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 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.
The comment in question is 1yp8, judging by my test results.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 that true? I don't know about any recently deleted posts, so I can't check new behavior, but here is an old deleted post. Yvain's comment is visible on his overview.
Probably applies to new posts (new deletion actions) only. It happened with my comment in a recently deleted post (a draft to this one); I can't find links to any entity related to that draft now. The old system was confusing in that people could continue a discussion even after the post was deleted, and its text was still accessible if you knew the link, but not author's name. The new behavior is possibly a result of an attempt to deal with that issue.
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.
Yep. This time around the particular comment seems to be 1rvk in the numbering scheme used in URLs.
On what thread?
I can't tell, since I can't see that particular comment. I've inferred that "number" by some boundary testing, inputting various URLs to see which ones worked and which breaked.
I see - playing with http:// lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_[comment-ID] seems to suggest 1rvj may be responsible, as http://lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_1rvj has 1rvi as the first visible. That said, http://lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_1rxo works where http://lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_1rxn fails, which suggests 1rw8 breaks the page, too.
Edit: At least on my viewer - other people may have their Recent Comments set to show fewer comments.
Not just you. It happens periodically.
Me too.
This URL gives me errors and apparently one comment is breaking the "recent comments" page. Am I the only one seeing this?
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.
I do not observe this phenomenon, although I note that I cannot change the sort away from "Old".
I have my preferences set to "Display 20 comments by default". I think it's using one sorting method for the first 20 and a different sorting method for the ones that appear after I click "load more comments".
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.)
I'm strongly pro-necropost, so I'm not sure I agree. Can't people just watch their inboxes for new posts in their threads, and add notes to the wiki and the Sequence posts saying "Asking questions is strongly encouraged, regardless of the thread's age"? New threads would put an extra step between encountering the question and asking it.
On the other hand, that could contribute to the "I should RTFT...wait, 2000 comments? Forget it" failure mode, so I don't know. (Although the fact that we have threading at least helps.)
[Comment edited 4 times.]
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.
That's what I mean by "cumbersome". :)
Could you use a distributed revision control system directly as a discussion board?
So I pull from a whole bunch of people who I think are worth reading, but I get everyone they pull from, so you can join if anyone invites you and if everyone stops pulling from you, you are dropped. I can edit comments, but everyone gets the history.
Mercurial with the GPG extension might suffice. You wouldn't have the software enforce anything, you'd rely on the audit trail to catch people after the fact.
You could certainly do that, but having more layers of software take care of things is extremely helpful.
In fact, these days there are several wikis that use DVCSs as the backing store, and support offline editing and merging.
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.)
Good Idealistic Books are Rare has the same issue.
Edits 1-2: And Interpersonal Entanglement. I don't remember it having it when I was looking at it a few days ago, but this post suggests that I'm wrong.
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.
Comment links are not nofollow which is a spam problem waiting to happen.
Meh. It's worth worrying about after we start having a spam problem. nofollow is just bad citizenship in this case - Lw has a lot of google juice and links in comments tend to be soaked in semantical goodness.
Yep. And even then, the simple solution is to only nofollow comments with negative karma. (There should be enough people reading the /comments feed to catch spam going to old posts, I would think.)
Brilliant - I wonder if anyone does that sort of thing (I'd guess not, since there aren't a lot of places with this sort of comment moderation)
On Hacker News all comments are nofollow but submissions above a certain point threshold are follow. Same on Reddit.
That would work.
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?
Yes, there should be a sandbox. Here is someone else's sandbox. It probably isn't perfectly compatible.
What's wrong with the edit button?
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?
(For the record, the URL was eventually posted here.)
I might use it, but probably only if it were incorporated into the site. Is it really only possible to view 5 at a time with the current script?
Edit 4/11: Changed my mind; sending PM.
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.
For some funny reason this comment also failed to show up in the Recent Comments box.
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?
It's not completely sorted internally, or at least doesn't display that way to me.
MatthewB doesn't have a user page ("The page you requested does not exist"); example comment of his: here.
I've noticed this with at least one other person, too, but can't recall who.
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.
Have you talked to Wei Dai? I haven't used his script, so I don't know if it currently works for inbox messages, but it seems like something to try.
Edit: Looks like doesn't, at least currently.
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:
And today, pressing "edit" doesn't work ("page not found").
Edit: (On the wiki articles -- see the parent comment).
Works for me. But something I have noticed is that now and then a page from LW will be slightly corrupted in one of the links, and I see a fragment of raw HTML. Clicking on such links can go wrong. Reloading usually gets a clean page.
Just tried "edit" on this comment -- no problem.
"Edit" on postings also works.
I've noticed this as well. For reference, I'm using the latest Google Chrome on Windows XP.
Sorry for the confusion -- I was talking about the wiki.
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.
Questions I have about karma:
* How can I tell if I've voted on something after the vote button isn't bold anymore? Do I just have to keep track?
* How often can I vote on a single post or comment?
It looks like whenever a user's comment is replied to, the reply shows up as a message in their inbox, with the envelope at the top of the sidebar turning orange/red to indicate it to them. Replies to replies don't generate a new message.
After what? The vote button always remains bold for me. (This, incidentally, implies that one can only vote once - either up or down.)
At the moment I can't find a post that I'm sure I voted on that doesn't have one button bolded, so I might just be confused.
Update: no, I'm still experiencing cases where I vote, press control+F5 and find the vote gone. It might be related to the fact that vote buttons still bold and unbold even when I'm not online.
Yes, when you click the vote link, Javascript bolds/unbolds it immediately, while sending a request to the server. If there's a problem with your connection, it will appear as though you've voted but when you go back the link will not be bold, since your vote will not have been received. If you don't have enough karma to downvote, the response from the server will trigger a callback which cancels the bold and informs you of your inability to downvote, assuming you have a good connection and you're still on the page.
I believe the button bolds before the data is stored on the database - I've noticed edits to the texts of posts vanish when I close the window immediately after submitting them.
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.
If account deleting means deleting all comments, it shouldn't be allowed, as it breaks conversation history (unless maybe if the account belonged to a spam bot, so an admin can more easily delete everything it did).
Otherwise, there doesn't seem to be any point in deleting an account.
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.
Not so. Lookit: parenthesis You have to escape the close parenthesis in the URL with a backslash, \) like so.
Ah, thanks.
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 think a common one is "I'm tired of this discussion and don't want to think about it any more."
"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.)
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.
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.
I'm now wondering which specific rhetorical usage wedrifid!2009 was referring to. There are all sorts of meanings depending on the context and quite a few could be considered rhetorical. I think "a" would be more appropriate than "the" here.
Not with this crowd, I hope.
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 was just about to mention the same thing. It's not enough for me to notice actively but enough to make me sick to my stomach.
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?
Does anyone know if these accounts are being managed or is there the possibility as you say for a siege at a later date?
The siege began. Two bots, registered on 2 and 4th June respectively, just posted their spam messages. Furthermore, the messages hack the wiki markup. It may be a while for all the bots to run out, and new ones continue registering as we speak. You should really install that captcha.
ETA: 5 triggered bots so far.
Spam became a rather serious issue now. Just look at the block log: today I had to block 16 spam bot accounts, and delete their spam. I don't even have tools for easily doing that, so each account takes a number of clicks with a delay. Good thing they are only spamming on their own user pages...
I don't know, it was more of a joke. From what I googled, adding a captcha seems to be just a matter of installing an extension.
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.
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.
"Recent Comments" is currently broken, though I must confess I enjoy the error messages.
This comment or one in its thread might be relevant, as they aren't directly viewable either:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/13k/missing_the_trees_for_the_forest/z1g?context=1#z1g
Also, my 'inbox' isn't working, and I had a post on that thread.
I'm wondering if it's possible for a single comment to break these features.
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.
You need to escape it to avoid its interpretation as a markup element.
Thanks. I suggest we add a link to the full comment formatting guide from the drop-down help that appears when you click on the "Help" link at the bottom of a comment box. I think most people probably assume that the drop-down help is all that's available.
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.
Sometimes browsing of old comments on the comment feed fails. This is an example link that doesn't work now.
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.
It should be simpler, letters can be bolder, and there is no point trying to fit the word "wiki" in a favicon, a bar on the same place would serve the same role, but easier to distinguish.
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
Yes, we're working on this. The missing comments were omitted from the Type Pad export. It has been raised with TypePad.
The missing comment's have been scraped off the old OB site and should all now be present,
"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.
I have this problem occasionally. Maybe 5% of the time in the past week. I didn't notice it back in June. But I don't have a reproducible example (eg, if I open it in a new browser, it fixes). What happens is that the parent of the yellow entry has a parent button that provides the right anchor but the wrong page; instead it links back to the same page. I haven't remembered to look at the source of the page to see if it's a relative link.
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.
Thanks for all your work on the site!
My username on OB was slightly different. Is there any way to merge those comments into this account after the fact? If not, no worries.
I don't have any particular interest in claiming the other account if merging isn't possible.
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.
This should be fixed now.
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)
Who is going to end up as an admin on the wiki? PeerInfinity and I have been most involved so far. For example, who should I bug to move this code into the corresponding page of the wiki?