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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)
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:
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
The main one: I don't like your attitude, this is signalling crap not discussion. Stick it.
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.
Before people can submit their own posts, it would be good to have it spelled out what's considered on-topic.
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.
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
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.
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.
Is there a way to make strike-through text? I'd like to be able to make revisions like this one without deleting the record of what I originally said.
There is no way to do this at the moment. I've raised a feature request for it. #123
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
A full comment page (with feed) is now available via the Comments tab.
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.
A way to see the number of comments a particular post has would 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?
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?
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.
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.
Four-digit karma is not readily legible in the little green circle.
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 turns out there is such a page, it was just hard to find.
If anyone else wants to see replies to your comments (though not your posts), from most recent replies to oldest, just go to your inbox.
This can be accessed by following links instead of by knowing the url to type in, but the route is complicated enough that perhaps it should be shortened in the long run.
(The only current route I know: 1. Go into my "account preferences"; 2. Click on the "friends" tab; 3. Click "Send message", as though I were going to compose a message; and then 4. Click on "inbox".)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Requested feature: a 'user list', possibly sorted by karma - just like 'top contributors', but listing everybody. Preferably on its own page somewhere.
Highlight comments made since I last viewed a post, or hide old ones.
Comment karma!
Somewhere there needs to be formulas explaining exactly how you compute the sorting for the LW top tabs, and for the various numbers sitting next to posts and comments, all in terms of the various voting actions that are done. I'm really quite confused about it all.
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.
I am definitely no better than Anna at ignoring gold stars. I think the situation might be improved if the "top contributors" box wasn't there on the right margin looking temptingly like a scoreboard.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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/)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I'd like more context.
Since there are anchors, is there any cost to replacing context=1 with context=3 ?
Alternatively, context for the parent button (or even the permalink button) could be controlled from the preferences page, at the cost of UI proliferation. This might make more sense for people who want context on the recent comments page, which is a feature that would have cost to people who don't want it. (hmm...I guess greasemonkey could make parent=context=3)
Incidentally, the combination of deleted comments and context is buggy. If you go here where the parent is deleted and visible, there's no obvious way to proceed up (permalink, then parent is a non-obvious escape). If there are two deleted comments in a row, I think it's impossible to navigate up, short of editing the URL to context=9.
Spam bots are preparing a siege for the wiki, several of them register every day (although there were no attempts to edit the pages yet). Maybe a captcha extension on registration could fix this?
There 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.
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.)
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.
I would probably not like this to simply replace the current functionality.
Indented numbered lists don't wrap properly. For example,
Indentation implies preformatted text. The 1. should be at the start of the line.
If you want to nest lists, then you need to indent the second list item.
Full Markdown documentation is available on Daring Fireball
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.
I've since posted the article, but I'd still like an explanation of drafts and saving.
Think of 'drafts for username' as a private site where you can post articles - i.e. a 'holding area' - until you think they are ready to be viewed in Less Wrong.
An article can only exist in one 'area' at a time, either drafts or lesswrong.
If you delete an article, it will remain deleted regardless of which site you post it to. (I'm unsure if you can undelete an articles, but its status would remain deleted if you moved it).
Also, when you are logged in, you should be able to edit posts via their 'edit' link on the bottom right hand side of the article.
If you've ever used reddit, think of it as a private subreddit (as that's what it is).
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.
Full content in the RSS feed has been implemented now.
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?
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.
Drafts shouldn't be counted as contributions in the sidebar widget.
Google Custom Search leads to http://staging.lesswrong.trike.com.au/ instead of this site.
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...
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...
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).
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.
This post imported from Overcoming Bias misses some spaces around formatting, possibly an importing bug.
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.
LessWrong.com sends the user's password in the clear (as reported by ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 8.
Please consider warning people that is so.
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.
Terminology. Try to be consistent. "Liked" and "Vote Up": pick one and stick with it. IMHO
"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?
Downmodding bobdole caused an integer underflow in his karma, wrapping it around to 2^32-1. With any luck, though, with karma that high he'll achieve nirvana and go away.
as noted here, we need some sort of spoiler capability in comments. if this is already available in standard Markdown, I missed it. It would be cool if it worked like those on the XKCD forums.
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.
Can we get a date next to each post title in the recent posts page?
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'?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Is the recent comments page broken right now or is that just me?
Edit: Working again!
No indent
Maybe there should be a sandbox?
Use your own old comments, then revert.
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.
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.
There is a problem with <math> plugin on the Wiki: see this page for example. The error message is:
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.
This URL causes an error: http://lesswrong.com/user/G%C3%BCnther_Greindl/
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)
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
"Recent Comments" is currently broken, though I must confess I enjoy the error messages.
Sometimes browsing of old comments on the comment feed fails. This is an example link that doesn't work now.
Post tags should be visible on the main page, rather than only on the article's page.
"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.
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 :)
How about a basic Users' Guide, and include a link to it right in the top links bar?
PhilGoetz is not on the "Top Contributors" list, despite having more karma than many on that list (Goetz has 646, while five others listed have 615, 536, 513, 504, 495).
I don't know if this is due to a bug or to some feature I don't know about.
We've deployed a fix for the Top Contributors that should see all 10 users listed. Although it may not be immediately visible due to client and server side caching. You may need to give it up to an hour before it shows up.
A "Reply" button is present in the list of comments on (other) users' pages, but doesn't work.
On the global "Comments" page, it's not possible to edit your comments, even though it's possible to write replies (and later edit them).
On the Recent Posts page, there is an option to sort by new or sort by rising. If you selected "sort by rising", it does not display any posts
An easy way to see when your comments have been replied to, and to read those replies, would be great. Reddit has this feature. Right now I'm unaware of any way to do this on LW besides checking each of the individual parent posts.
http://lesswrong.com/message/inbox
The feature we really need is the little red/grey envelope link to appear on every page.
I can't see this post on either the recent posts or what's new lists anymore.
<edited to test a LW bug>
It's 9/11 truthism. I removed it. There needs to be some way to indicate this on the post itself, I suppose.
It wasn't clear to me whether the post itself was 9/11 truthism rather than merely using 9/11 truthism as an example. After all, the title was "Seeing patterns where they don't exist" or something of the kind. I did think it would have been considerably improved (and looked less like preaching) by having a link to the lengthy Litany of 9/11 Conspiracy Evidence rather than incorporating the whole thing in the post.
... Though "And" has stated elsewhere that s/he believes 9/11 was an inside job, so it looks like you were right.
Well... it's down the memory hole, but it exists. And it will accept comments if anyone feels like a spot of debunking.
Is 9/11 truthism a specifically banned topic, or is it just too crazy or too offensive?
Are all conspiracy-related topics banned? Can I, for instance, talk about the assassination of JFK?
Is there a way for admins to take ownership of posts, so you could replace the text with a notice saying what was there and why it was removed?
Admins can edit posts without taking ownership. For anything but an egregious wrong, adding a takedown notice should be preferred to deleting the post.
http://lesswrong.com/user/Annoyance is currently reported as having a karma of 2^32 + 437
I get "Error encountered" in place of my user page. Other people's seem fine. It was OK yesterday.
I am now getting this error also. Only my own user page, only when I'm logged in.
This is now fixed. I'll leave the comment in case it happens to others.
<Edit> - Error happened again, then gone again a few hours later. Happened both at home and work, happens for a while, no apparent link between occurrences, logging out doesn't fix it.
<Edit 28Mar> - Now happening all the time. Still not fixed by logging out. I can see dclayh's page (mentioned above). This is potentially very serious if it keeps spreading.
For affected users, you can still see replies to your comments here, and possibly still http://lesswrong.com/user/<you>/submitted/, /liked/, /disliked/, /hidden/ and /drafts/.
<Edit 31 Mar> Can now access my user page after 3 days broken, but can't get to page 2 of my comments. So it looks like it's breaking trying to display some type of comment on user the page, and fixed when said comment dropped to page 2. Maybe a certain combination or nesting of editing flags confuses it?
<Edit 31 Mar> Broken again, but can access all pages that don't list my comments. The only comments I made/edited since it worked are this one, this one, this one and this one, but clearing the comments out doesn't fix it.
<Edit 1 Apr> 1st page of comments accessible again, and all 4 of the above comments are on that page. Go figure.
<Edit 2 Apr> Broke again, no comments made since last worked.... ...Working again, again no comments made.
There is a way to send people messages, but there doesn't seem to be any way to read your own messages, or find out whether you have any.
http://lesswrong.com/message/inbox
Big problems with this:
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.
Which reminds of one possible new feature: on forums, the whole thread is usually brought to the top when someone adds a comment. I think it'd be an improvement if, say, instead of the useless "Controversial" list, we'd have a list of articles sorted by the time of last comment.
A thousand times yes. This will keep the discussion in the older threads alive. I was going to suggest this myself. It would be even better if there was a way to quickly find out where in the thread the discussion is going on at the moment, and which comments are new.
One possible solution is to use flat view, like in the Comments stream, but localized to an article, with the links to a threaded view, linked to from the list of articles. Also, this list of articles should probably show title only, without summary parts of the text.
There's a link on the bottom of every page that says "Report Issues" that leads to this thread.
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.
I agree! A good starting point help page is here.
For example, the rule you found is findable from this page, (via "what is markdown?" > Syntax > Paragraphs and Line Breaks).
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 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: SelfDeception" should link to a search on the SelfDeception 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.
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?
Not counting the free first point for every comment toward karma would be an improvement, I think.
Every comment/post you make is an opportunity for the community to subtract karma from you if they feel you are wasting their time.
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.
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.
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".
Having some sort of acknowledgment when I fail to log in properly might be nice.
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.
No spaces or periods in usernames? Was that <i>really</i> necessary? Did Silas put you up to this?