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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)
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.
This is probably too much of a hassle to implement. It would mean that you'd have to have a separate class of account (with this one instance for now) where the password may not be changed, past posts may not be edited or deleted, preferences are restricted, the account cannot be deleted, etc. If it were a normal account, trolls would render it unusable immediately.
An alternative is to just allow commenting without being logged in or anonymously while logged in, but I assume they have specific reasons for setting things up the way they did.
It would be nice to be able to post things from time to time without having to worry about it being an unpopular viewpoint that the agree/disagree-bots will vote down as much as they can. I like the slashdot system, where anonymous posting is allowed, with anonymous posts starting with a lower moderation value, and users being able to assign a positive or negative karma modifier for anonymous posts.
It could be more conveniently presented by having a checkbox under a comment editing form, "post anonymously".
When I hide something I see no way to get it back.
If you visit your user page then click Hidden in the top bar it will list posts you've hidden.
A way to see the number of comments a particular post has would be useful
This has now been implemented.
It would be nice to have jsMath installed (a Javascript renderer for TeX math -- you just drop it in your page and it shows TeX math prettily). Yeah, you can read and write math in pure HTML, but... :-)
Seconded. However, as an interim solution, we can do things like this: the Golden ratio is (1+root(5))/2.
That looks like a reasonable workaround. With Markdown you can embed images so your image above can be embedded directly:
I've also added a feature request for jsMath.
Ah, I didn't know you could embed images because it wasn't in the help. Would it be a good idea to put a link to a Markdown tutorial at the bottom of the table that pops up when I click the help link?
Yes, I've added an task to include a link to more thorough Markdown documentation.
No spaces or periods in usernames? Was that <i>really</i> necessary? Did Silas put you up to this?
Also, [i]italics[/i] would be nice.
italics is done with asterisks (*). See the help link on the bottom right of the comment text area.
You have italics :-)
There's a "help" link right below the comments box to the right -- LW uses Markdown, apparently.
… and I can't see any reason we shouldn't support basic HTML either, so we'll make Z_M's first comment (above) do what he meant (italics == <i>italics</i> == <em>italics</em>).
(winces)
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?
I can immediately answer that the valid point by the troll should be voted up, and it seems that the disagreed-with idea that is explained well should at least not be voted down.
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.)
Also, I am going with the crowd and changing to a user name with an underscore
I'm not sure this is obviously right. I would probably insist upon some usability study to determine how people actually use such features. Of course, if the cost is low such a study could just be implementing them and seeing how it works.
I imagine there's a name for this cognitive bias, but I've noticed well-informed folks tend to think agreeable opinions are better-argued, and less agreeable ones are worse-argued (probably a species of confirmation bias).
For example, someone posting against physicalism might get downvoted quickly by people who say "but they didn't even consider Dennett's response to this premise". But they might not have the same objections on-hand to an unsound argument in favor of physicalism.
Yep, what I wrote is just based on my best guess. A usability study would be great.
I'd prefer a clear explanation of intended semantics of voting, linked to on "About" page, and posted one of these days on the front page to get anyone's attention and users' suggestions.
It might also be good to stick a reminder of what up-voting is intended to mean right next to the up-vote and down-vote buttons. Or to change the names: instead of "vote up" and "vote down", perhaps something like "high-quality discussion" and "low-quality discussion".
Not sure about that - those labels at least would look ugly. Maybe a title attribute on the "vote up" and "vote down" would be sufficient.
How about buttons "High quality", "Low quality", "Accurate", "Inaccurate". We're increasing options here, but there's probably a nice way to design the interface to reduce the cognitive load.
Using the word "vote" seems broken here more generally -- we aren't implementing some democratic process, we're aggregating judgments (read: collecting evidence) across a population.
I completely agree about the word "vote".
"High quality" / "Low quality" has good brevity, but for myself I'm still tempted to blend in agreement/disagreement with my ratings when I picture those words -- to regard comments I disagree with as "low quality". If we could have the question "Does this add to or subtract from the conversation?" surrounded by up/down arrows (or by "adds" / "subtracts"), I imagine myself voting better.
For example, I just up-voted James Andrix's and Kurige's comments about their religious beliefs.
I up-voted the comments because they're good data, I'm glad the commenters shared it, and it looks like stuff more eyes should look at within the thread. But I hesitated, because "up-voting" gives the appearance of agreement. Rating Kurige's comment "high quality" feels a bit similar, like calling it "high quality reasoning". But clicking up-arrow next to the question "Does this add to the conversation?" would feel obvious, to me in this case.
This makes... quite a lot of sense, actually. And of course the posts would be sorted by quality votes, not agreement votes.
If agreement votes aren't going to be used, why not do away with them altogether and just use the current system to vote based on quality only? True comments are higher quality than false comments so agreement should factor into quality judgments anyway.
Because quality and truth are separate judgments in practice, and forcing them to be conflated into a single scale is losing information. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality this will fall out automatically: highly truthy posts will tend to have high quality. Low quality and high truth are not opposites.
I agree it's losing information, but that's something you have to weigh against the inconvenience of multiple dimensions. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality you're just making people click twice, and I suspect clicks are a limited resource.
As I see it the voting system is there to put comments in a convenient order and remove the really bad ones from sight, not to provide opinion poll information.
That's exactly the point: voting is supposed to put comments in order according to quality, so that you can read the worthwhile comments in a reasonable time. My claim is that the current voting system will not do this well at all and that a dual voting system will be better. (That second bit is just a guess). The opinion poll information is just a nice side effect.
OK, so according to you and Benja the point is to have the agree/disagree buttons there mainly as a lightning rod to prevent agreement from affecting quality votes. That's a good point, but I wonder if it's worth it and if there are better ways to accomplish the same thing.
I also wonder if there should be a button labeled "malevolent cantaloupe" so the unserious people will click on that instead of voting.
I like Jess's proposal because I think it has a better chance of working in practice. Most of us, I think, do want to express agreement / disagreement, and I think separating it out into a separate vote would work better with real humans' cognitive systems than relying on people following an explicit instruction to ignore one of their motivations. [Yes, I would like to see a study testing this assumption somehow, but in the meantime, that's the prediction my subjective probability is going into...]
Besides, I would find the agree/disagree info interesting. And I think it probably reduces "me too" posts. And the info presumably could be used for the "most controversial" page.
(edited: s/separate out their motivations/ignore one of their motivations/)
I disagree, because I see these factors as necessarily closely connected, in any person's mind. I rate not quality of prose, but quality of communicated idea, as it comes through. If I think that the idea is silly, I rate it down. If the argument moves me, communicating a piece of knowledge that I at least give a chance of changing my understanding of something, then the message was valuable. It doesn't matter whether the context was to imply a conclusion I agree or disagree with, it only matters whether the idea contributes something to my understanding.
A second question about the semantics of voting: should I be up-voting all good posts regardless of score, and down-voting all bad posts regardless of score, or should I be voting to correct points-numbers that are misaligned with post quality?
Upon reflection, I'd say we should be voting to correct points-numbers that are misaligned with post quality. Otherwise, if people continue to up-vote more posts than they down-vote, comments will accumulate more and more points the older they get, and a setting like "show me all posts above 3" won't be meaningful across threads or comment-ages.
Added: The "odd social dynamics" point is good. I'll follow Eliezer and thomblake here.
I would actually say that voting to correct post-quality would lead to some odd social dynamics. I'll vote up if something is negative for no reason, but otherwise I'll vote my opinion, not corrections - unless something seems really out of line.
I'd rather have the sum of people's individual components then see everyone trying to correct everyone else's voting.
Agreed - I've been using voting the same way:
if (score < 0 && myPreferredScore >=0)
vote up
else
vote my conscience
Edit: had to camelCase the name above due to odd behavior of underscores. I should learn MarkDown.
Make it easier to see comment threads. It is hard to tell which comments belong to what thread.
They do get a bit tricky when nested deeply. I've added an issue to track your request.
Can new comments be added by default to the bottom of the discussion instead of the top?
The comment listing has a drop down 'Sort By' at the top of the listing. If you change this to 'Old' it will sort the comments in reverse chronological order. As far as I'm aware the setting is stored and will be applied when you view comment listings in the future.
Bugs: italics show up in the sidebar with asterisks "new" button becomes "what's new" when clicked, all others become bold
The unformatted comments in recent comments is a temporary workaround and will certainly be addressed. You're the second person that's mentioned the changing menu text as a bug when it is intentional (inherited from the Reddit code not done on purpose by us). Given that it will probably be modified to show the same text when not active and active.
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...
Noted this in Issue 104.
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 2.x and other 3.x):
I also have a few feature requests:
On comment previews: You can edit your comments after you've posted them, so this is probably something nice-to-have rather than urgent.
Agreed, but when you do that the comment tends to jump up and down and I've had trouble finding the posted comment / edit box in the thread.
On more horizontal space: We'll hopefully be fluid width before many of you read this comment.
The 'delete account' function appears not to work... or perhaps I've been outsmarted
Hmm it should be working but I've raised an issue to investigate.
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 :).
There's plenty to improve about the registration page. I've logged an issue for this particular suggestion.
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.
Using Firefox 2, I have similar issues. The .com domain appears to be working fine, but I'm having problems with the .org domain. The same problem is also present in IE6. In IE with a screen resolution of 1024x768, the sidebar also gets pushed down below the posts and comments.
The .net and .org domains should redirect to .com as its the only one that will work as you have experienced. I have raised an issue for this and emailed our sys admin.
.org and .net now redirect to .com.
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.
Seconded. Even a generic box people can look at where I can write
http://thomblake.com http://thomblake.mp twitter: @thomblake
would be good
Also, in comments - single line-breaks being converted to <br /> or whatever would be cool. Or is there MarkDown for that? Is what's under "Help" all there is?
Most features of Markdown are supported, except inline HTML. According to the official spec line breaks are made as follows (which I tested and it works on Less Wrong)
Perhaps we should include a link to more extensive formatting info in the help table.
I've raised an issue to track this feature request.
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.
Agreed - I didn't see what you were talking about at first, but now I've noticed that once I've already read several posts, it's hard to find new comments on threads I've already read. Since some situations call for following comments in real-time (when possible), a flat view, or some other solution, would be awesome.
We'll add individual post feeds including all comments very soon, but it sounds like many of you don't use feed readers, so need something on-site.
If you use do use a feed reader the following seems like a good model:
If you don't use a feed reader, a flattened reverse chronological comment view is the best idea I have.
There's got to be an open-source feed-reader gidget out there somewhere. So just develop the feed as pure RSS, and then link to a page that reads the feed and shows the standard gidget's view of the feed?
A full comment page (with feed) is now available via the Comments tab.
You just linked to moreor. It appears at the main site here, but there's no "Comments" tab visible as yet.
Oops jumped the gun on my announcements, they should all be live now. Fixed the link too.
Thanks! Could you add anchors to the links from there? The "Parent" link on the comments in the Comments tab seems to be the most useful one. Also, an additional pair of "Prev | Next" links at the top of the Comments pages would be convenient. It should be "In response to a (the?) comment". The Edit and Reply actions don't work.
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).
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.
Added as Issue 110.
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.
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.
Sorry, it's explained on the overcoming bias post that linked here: This isn't "less wrong is open", this is "less wrong is in beta, no general posts allowed".
Can we have signatures, like in a forum?
I'm against this; signatures are the same information over and over. However, better user pages (particularly those linking to a social site, or an LW Frappr) would be nice.
Well, basically, I just want to append
to the end of each of my comments, so everyone knows that I comment under that name in other places.
Can't you just go by Doug S. here then?
I've heard it said that some people are having registration problems. No idea steps to reproduce. Seems CAPTCHA -related.
Yes, I had problems with the CAPTCHA. Did it after 5 tries or so.
I'ts being alleged that there have been some attempts already by this site to silence dissenting opinions, and that was the source of the above problem. Of course, there's no reason to think that's going on, since any trolls / etc should be quickly downvoted, while honest dissenting opinions should be encouraged. But would EY do such a thing?
I wouldn't do such a thing - I'm looking forward far too much to seeing Caledonian downmodded into oblivion on any site with voting.
See? That's what I thought. c.f. this OB comment
The site needs an icon, even if it's crude and temporary, say "LW" like on Yudkowsky's and Bostrom's sites.
Google Custom Search leads to http://staging.lesswrong.trike.com.au/ instead of this site.
Drafts shouldn't be counted as contributions in the sidebar widget.
This is a known issue to fix. Issue 29.
They currently don't add to Karma, they are just counted on the right.
Also, drafts show both in the "drafts" and the "submitted" lists.
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.
It doesn't track the bugs/requests in this thread, at this point, but here's the official issues list (as linked from About Less Wrong).
Edit: Many points from this thread have made it there now (thanks to wmoore).
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?
Till then, as the code's forked from the Reddit base, here's their help which tells you have the default system works.
It says you get Karma by writing submissions which pander to the whims of the majori^H^H^H^H^Hare popular, and it's used to upgrade your post-Singularity consciousness. Hope this helps :)
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.
Why? While "Karma" doesn't translate directly to "cause and effect", it's a related concept and basically captures what we're going for. In addition, it's already a jargon term on these sorts of systems.
Are you just against it because it "sounds mystical"?
Not because it sounds mystical. Because the Bhuddist concept of reincarnation does not pertain here.
Yes it's common jargon. But can we be Less Wrong?
This is an example of why we need a "disagree" button separate from a "low quality" button.
Why do we need "disagree" as a button? Buttons filter content, and so should rate for attention, you upvote what you want other people to read and downvote what you don't want them to read. In this case, for example, the case of disagreement should result in a reply comment and upvoting of original comment.
Because if the person who modded you up had written a "me too" post instead and the three people who modded gspence down had all written "me not" posts, we would have four essentially content-free posts clobbering up the thread.
Yes, maybe you can make a point that people should either make a new point or not speak at all, because just stating an opinion may be likely to be biased. But (a) I don't think it's going to work -- saying that what happened to gspence's comment isn't what should happen doesn't change the fact that it did happen with the current model; and (b), well, I'd like to state my "me too"/"me not"! :-) Yes, if not stating opinions really does significantly debias, that would outweigh that concern, but I'm pretty skeptical about that actually happening, so the expected utility from the agree/disagree buttons wins out for me.
I had been against 'agree/disagree' buttons but this discussion has convinced me. It is pretty obvious that 'vote up/vote down' is being used as 'agree/disagree' under the current model, and adding buttons for that as well as an explanation of how to use them ("Never vote up / down a comment on the basis of agreeing or disagreeing") should fix that problem.
"Me too" is vacuous if it doesn't add to original comment, while "I disagree" is supposed to contribute the explanation of why. The second "I disagree" which doesn't add anything may support the first disagreeing comment in addition to the original comment.
See Two Cult Koans.
The FHI logo doesn't link to FHI
That's a dicey issue to call a bug. I think it's clearly part of the banner, which by default should link to Less Wrong. However, if the logo was on its own, it would surely be expected to link to FHI - it does seem like there should be a link to FHI, preferably near the logo. Maybe right-justified in the link bar under the logo?
Please consider using a "fluid-width" theme.
I shall disagree, with equivalent explanation.
It could be worse - but on my 26-inch monitor - most fixed-width sides do not look great - I find.
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.
Is anyone else having issues with logging in? After I log in, it doesn't appear to have succeeded until I click off the main page. Not sure if there is an issue, but seems confusing.
I'm also not sure if the 'remember me' checkbox is working.
Is this still happening? I released a couple of login related updates today. If so can you let me know what browser and operating system you're using as well as the location (URL) of the page you're on when trying to login.
Indeed, I'd really like to see the full text of posts in the RSS feed.
By the way, it's also possible to have two or more feeds with different content (e.g., just titles/just first paragraph/complete text), just in case others have other preferences.
Adding content as well as titles to the feeds is on the to do list. I have raised an issue for it.
Full article content in RSS feeds has been implemented.
One last suggestion: would it be possible to set personal time zones?
Good request. Reddit gets around this by only showing times like '21 mins ago' or '8 days ago'. We've made it show times and dates which are timezone dependent. Raised as issue 107.
I'd like RSS feeds please (for http://www.google.com/reader).
There is an RSS feed for the main page, though there have been some complaints about it.
EDIT: link to rss feed
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?
Apparently it's just for people whose submissions you want to follow, so their usernames will appear highlighted & you can read just their submissions here.
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 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.
I'm not having this problem - I set them to blank and saved successfully, and can see negative-score comments.
I tried it again and it worked. Ensuring that the cursor wasn't active in the blanks might have been the cause.
Before people can submit their own posts, it would be good to have it spelled out what's considered on-topic.
The header image is almost 400kb; that seems like a lot.
Also, the longer I stare at it, the more trouble I have remembering that the map is not the territory.
Seriously, it's a really clever image. Kudos to whoever thought it up.
Is it of anywhere in particular? I can't find the places on google.
Ah, they changed the image. It's now of this place
There is a new header in development.
Having some sort of acknowledgment when I fail to log in properly might be nice.
Do you have any more specific details? You should receive messages when passwords are incorrect, etc. If not then I will need to look into it.
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 behaviour is something that we can configure in the editor. I've raised an issue for it.
Eliezer. We've changed the editor configuration to not generate relative paths. It will still generate ones relative to the site root though, which is desired behaviour. E.g. If you paste a link to http://lesswrong.com/lw/5/issues_bugs_and_requested_features/78 it will save it as /lw/5/issues_bugs_and_requested_features/78 which will work no matter where you are on the site.
Karma isn't explained. Voting isn't explained.
There's no way to view old posts.
I'm confused. I can see all of the posts.
Also, it's already been mentioned that things aren't explained.
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".
Valid point, I've raised an issue to make the message and requirements clearer. FWIW the requirements are simply that it be between 3 and 20 characters.
Thanks! I'll look up the process to perhaps raise the issues myself.
Comment karma!
Agreed, we need this and soon.
What exactly do you mean by this. In other words how would it be used? The codebase has the concept of comment karma already. However when presented in the UI, 'Karma' is the sum of comment karma and submission karma.
Right now, karma only seems to be including submission karma, no comment karma.
E.g. this user with many upvoted comments and karma 1.
Comment Karma does affect the "Top Contributors" ranking, though - I did a self-deprication experiment. And strangely enough I fell off the list shortly after you wrote the above link :-)
What's jimrandomh's dark secret?
An unpublished draft that was upvoted?
With comment karma we should definitely stop trying to use upvotes and downvotes for opinion polls.
Yeah, we need "agree" "disagree".
I have mixed feelings about karma; even without karma, I was finding myself a bit too interested in seeing how many points my comments got. But perhaps other people are better at ignoring gold stars than I am, or perhaps the effects of people attending to others' responses are net-positive.
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.
Comments that are in reply to another comment have a parent link that you can click to get some context. A comment at the top level is assumed to be in the context of the post, which is shown. However you aren't the first one to suggest that the whole thread be shown as the default view for a comment permalink. It will be considered.
OK. A little bug with "parent" link: it doesn't have bookmark part if parent comment is not presently on the current page. For example, if I open this page, the Parent link leads to this page, without focusing on specific comment. However, when I click on the same Parent link of the child comment on the Parent page, the link is now this one, with bookmark to the parent comment.
Ahh the anchor is missing. I'll note it as a bug. #116
Better than showing the whole thread would be showing the whole post with all threads, but automatically jumping to the comment's location in the list of all threads.
I don't know about showing the whole thread, but showing just the immediate parent would be an improvement.
Or rather, clicking a comment should just jump to that comment in the thread. But if we have a page of recent comments a la Hacker News, then showing the immediate parent of each parented comment would make that recent comments page pretty effective as an overview of current discussion on LW, I think.
If karma is the sum of individual post scores, does that reward quantity too much relative to quality?
Not counting the free first point for every comment toward karma would be an improvement, I think.
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?
They should show up in the liked and disliked pages of your user profile. If they don't, then there is a bug!
(The 'tabs' will show up if the user, like yourself, has the option selected).
It only says "There doesn't seem to be anything here" to me. (Thanks, though - I hadn't even noticed those tabs before. The tab bar could be made more obvious, it kind of fades into the layout now.)
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.
Full content in the RSS feed has been implemented now.
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 disagree. While the vote etc buttons might be redesigned in some way, I wouldn't like it if any of this stuff was less prominent. Also, I like having complete datetime stamps.
By the way, what does the star mean that sometimes appears after the commenting time? On this comment (to which I reply), I see "02 March 2009 03:18:52PM*", and on the comment below I see "02 March 2009 05:57:13PM", without the star.
I think it means the comment has been edited.
EDIT: This is a test of said hypothesis. SECOND EDIT: The experiment supports the hypothesis.
Nice gag. I wonder whether the children of today understand the scientific method better because they learn to use computers.
Also, time is that of original posting, not of the last modification.
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.
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.
I think the algorithm for these sorts needs to be tuned. They are set for Reddit which I believe sees more activity in a shorter amount of time. The rate of falloff for 'popularity' needs to be reduced.
I sometimes get "The page you requested does not exist" when clicking on a comment title in user's overview page.
This issue was already reported here.
Oops! blush There's so many comments now I missed it.
Maybe post-beta we could start new, seperate posts for bugs and requests?
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.
Yes, and this seems to be a general issue of how comments are represented in the discussion (tree view) vs. how comments are tracked by various means (individually, without any context). The difference in presentations leads to difficulty in understanding the same comment when it's written and presented in different modes.
For example, if the discussion itself proceeds in linear view, people refer to comments to which they reply, or cite them, which makes reading comments linearly simpler. It'll be simpler to read such comments in e.g. a feed reader. On the other hand, when the discussion happens in tree view, comments are written without mentioning their context, and as a results comments streamed into a feed reader individually become incomprehensible.
We need some kind of linear view that cites its context. I suggest (an option for) including comment's parent in all kinds of local or linear views for comments, including feeds.
Specifically for the problem pointed out by Michael, maybe there should be some kind of "subscription" capability, through which you form a set of comments, replies to which get aggregated into a separate feed (or discussion-like stream, like any of the many views that present the content of the site).
It would be desirable to be able to tell which comments/posts I'd already voted on once I've done so.
The Vote up or Vote down link on comments should be bold after you vote. When you vote on an article the + or - in a circle becomes filled in to indicate your vote. Is this not happening, if so what browser are you using?
You're right, that is happening - I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't pointed out the effect.
Maybe most people would notice, and I'm oblivious, but I'd recommend making the difference a bit less subtle.
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).
Link to the "About Less Wrong" page disappears after I log in.
There's another, smaller link at the bottom left of the screen. They probably decided non-newcomers wouldn't need a big about link at the top.
Apparently I'm not a non-newcomer enough.
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.
This is something that is marked for investigation #118
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.
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!
While this may be obvious, I feel that I should point out that there may be an overflow error in tracking Karma using an unsigned int.
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).
You can do this.
Having said that. This feature was inherited from Reddit and hasn't been fully integrated into the new design so I don't think the recipient will actually be notified. They would have to know to check for new messages.
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'?
The 'Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features' page appears to be missing - i can see it when looking at this particular comment (parent) but both the link at the bottom and any other links to the post I find don't work.