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Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
- One suggestion per comment.
- Upvote all comments you’d like to see implemented.
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!
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Comments (565)
Have a way to show a specific comment without showing any replies to it.
I wanted to email someone a link to a comment today, and realized that they would most likely be distracted by the ensuing conversation rather than contemplating the comment itself. This feature would be useful in such situations.
Make comment permalink pages more visually distinct from article pages. Right now, if a person visits a link to a comment, it looks like it’s just a really short article with a single comment (perhaps with children). Only after closer inspection do I see that the text of the article starts with “You are viewing a comment permalink”, and the article title starts with “[Somebody] comments on”. The linked comment is highlighted in yellow, but this is not enough to signal to me that it is supposed to be the main content – it could simply mean it is a “hot” or “featured” comment.
One factor contributing to this confusion is that the light grey bar with Comments, Save, Report, etc. is above the comment. The grey bar is usually a footer at the bottom of the article, implying that whatever follows is less important reading. I think on comment permalink pages, the grey bar should be below the comment itself, or given a different look from on article pages. I think more changes are necessary for the comment permalink page to display its comment in the most useful, organized, and readable way, but that’s a start.
Children seem to be counted inconsistently - sometimes the root is included and sometimes it's not.
I have an anti-suggestion: no skinning or other proliferation of options. Someone asked for the current graphic appearance to remain as an option, but the designers and those officially approving the redesign need to have (justified) confidence in their decisions. If they're wrong, and everyone thinks it's dreadful beyond mere status quo bias, then they can roll it back and think again. If the general response is that it will more or less do, well, it will more or less do. Everything above that is a win.
An option to have links automatically open in a new window (i.e. "tab" with the appropriate browser settings).
I can't begin to count the number of times I've clicked a link, read through it, closed the page and wondered where the lesswrong article I was reading went. Based on how exceedingly difficult a habit this is to break I would assume many (most?) other sites open links outside the current window by default.
The standard behaviour of links since the web began has been to replace the current page with the new one. This is a strong argument for not making this change. However, often one does want to open a link in a new window or tab, which is a strong reason for making this functionality available in a web browser. So strong, that it has been done: Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all provide this by the use of modifier keys with the click, and you can choose whether focus goes to the new page or stays with the old.
I probably use command-click (open in a new window behind the current window) more often than plain click, but even so, I don't want any one site to make that behaviour the default. I still need all three (open behind, open in front, or replace) from time to time, and having the modifier keys work differently on one site does not benefit anyone.
Also, the Kindle's web browser is incapable of handling links that open in new windows. So tim's suggestion would make LW unusable on the Kindle.
I am confused by the downvotes. Could someone explain why having this feature as an option would be a bad thing?
I think the downvotes come from how it might be difficult to implement, especially with the current hacked-together state of this website.
Ah, as someone who knows nothing about web design it seemed like a trivial feature to implement. Thanks for clearing that up.
Make a section for meetup announcements with a widget visible on the main section, showing pending meetups, as determined by a "Meetup Data" attribute on the announcement.
This would get meetup announcements out of the main post lists, but would keep them visible, so that people will see the titles including locations so they will notice announcements relevant to themselves.
Not sure if this is too late, but it was brought up at the recent London meet-up and it does seem no-one has suggested it:
Make the sequences actually readable as sequences - there are currently no forward links on the actual pages, which is irritating, and navigating them does appear to be an issue for quite a few people.
There are navigation links, but you have to click open "Article Navigation".
Make the main LW site mobile-friendly, or implement a separate site version for mobile devices on http://m.lesswrong.com
Provide an ambient visual cue on how old a comment is. First idea is to add a subtle color tint to the background of each comment, that goes by the logarithm of the comment's age from reddish ("hot", written in the last couple of hours) to bluish ("cold", written several months or more ago).
Old threads occasionally get new comments and get readers in via them, and the date strings in the comments require some conscious parsing compared to being able to tell between "quite recent" and "very old" comments in the same thread by glance.
Awesome idea!
I would like a better interface to see the comments and posts authored by a particular user. In particular, I would like the overview page to display only titles (or perhaps the first few words of comments plus the name of the post to which the reply was made) so that one can more quickly scroll through.
Canonicalize URLs: at the moment, there are several different URLs referring to most pieces of content on Less Wrong. Sometimes it's as simple as one URL having a slash at the end and the other one not; in other cases you have a post that was actually posted in Discussion, but due to (I think) a glitch where Discussion posts as listed on userpages actually link to the post via /lw instead of /r/discussion/lw, and the former works anyway, causing two copies to be indexed in search engines, and the same for every comment posted on them. Preferably, every such piece of content would have a canonical URL, and any other valid means of accessing it should redirect to the canonical form via FOUND or MOVED PERMANENTLY, or at least specify the preferred URLs to search engines via <link rel="canonical">.
Anonymisation of user names in the Anti-Kibitzer instead of hiding them. Not seeing any identificator of the author makes it difficult to follow longer exchanges, and I often switch off the AK because of that. So, instead of seeing something like this
which may be confusing if you don't know who has posted especially the last reply, it may look like
The AK could simply number all participants in a thread starting from 1 each time the page is reloaded.
Enlarge / stretch the green karma button whenever the number doesn't fit in (mainly on individual user profiles with karma > 1000).
Dupe.
Thanks for pointing out.
10k is even worse. at 1k the numbers start getting obscured a bit but at 10k it looks like you are seeing the karma score but you're actually not. Gets confusing.
I would like to just say that in Firefox 4, none of the vote links (for article or for comments) work at all.
Aside from that, I feel that Recent Comments and Recent posts sections are completely useless. (Why would I want to see recent comments. And there is a page for Recent posts.) That whole right sidebar is pretty useless overall, except your own user status.
I use the tag cloud and the recent posts sidebar, and periodically look nervously at the top contributors list.
:) You seem to be pretty safe. But, yes, it seems like enough people use the sidebar to keep it around. Perhaps the recent comments could be shortened (to one comment per 3? lines), where you only see the full comment when you hover over it.
Also, I wasn't suggesting removing any of the sidebar features, just moving them somewhere else (bottom?).
I also use the recent comments sections often - in fact, it's how I found this comment, by way of seeing Swimmer963's in the recent comments section. I actually use the recent comments section more often than the posts lists; it's a good way to see what's being discussed, which is a reasonable proxy for what's worth reading.
I use the recent comments section all the time. If I've already read all of the recent posts, I'll click on the recent comments and see if there are any I want to reply to. That feature is one of the things that actually allows discussions to start in the comment threads.
They work for me in Firefox 4 (Ubuntu 11.04 32-bit x86 distro build).
When you receive a reply to a comment, you get a notification. But when someone posts a comment on a top-level or discussion post you made, you get no notification. It would be nice if you could at least choose whether or not you'd be notified when someone posts a new comment on a top-level post you created, I usually stop checking mine after a week.
This issue was indirectly addressed before by Emile, and commented on specifically in a reply to the previous by jwhendy. But it's probably an important enough usability problem to warrant its own top-level comment.
Currently the parent should have at least +6 extra upvotes going by that second link, possibly more, assuming the same people didn't upvote both. (I rescinded my vote from before, and I am now upvoting this.)
Good request.
Current workaround: Google Reader and the RSS feeds of any post you wish to follow. I have a folder full of lesswrong feeds. (Most of them are obviously inactive so invisible.)
Provide optional notification of nested comment replies to the parent comment's author (beyond the initial reply).
Currently, if there is a reply to one of my comments, I receive a notice. However, if there is a reply to the reply, and so on, I don't. These grandchildren replies are often still relevant and of interest to me, however. Having the option of being notified of them would be nice.
(Alternately, this suggestion would solve the problem also, though that solution would require an additional step from the author.)
The pop-up window you get when you click on a voting button before logging in always seemed ugly and discordant to me.
It would be really convenient to have a superior searching method for comments. I have frequently wanted to refer to a previous comment of mine from months before but have found it difficult to find (as I would need to remember the post it was on, search for that, then search for the comment, or go back page by page through my summary).
I second this.
Next to a user's name, display average karma per post instead of total karma (Total karma could be available, but not put in such a prominent place).
That would give everybody an incentive to post fewer, higher-quality comments.
Jasen would do very well out of this, with an average of over 40 karma/post! (including top-levels)
If I worried that much about karma, I'd be posting nothing but jokes.
I would suggest copy and pasting a couple of quotes per month from a google search. And making contributions to controversial topics that are not inflammatory (at the expense of not having too much actual content.)
My impression is that quotes only garner a lot of karma if they're heavy on the applause lights, though funny doesn't hurt. Finding new quotes which are likely to do well sounds rather difficult.
My impression is that those of my comments which go over 5 karma are very likely to be jokes, and at least at present, I have no ability to tell which jokes will go over that well. This doesn't seem worth trying to get stronger at, though perhaps the question is worth some thought.
The top banner is way too big. When scrolled to the top, content begins halfway down my netbook screen. Most is spent on what is basically a visual in-joke about map and territory. Look to Reddit for an extremely tight banner/navigation area. Reddit's content starts a finger-width from the top of the browser.
Wow. I'd never noticed. Had never even looked at the top of the screen closely enough that I could even have told you whether or not there was an image there at all.
As far as I can tell, the "Show more comments above" link currently shows the parent, and all sibling threads. I would like it to give the option of showing more ancestors, so that after I've gone to a comment I can see the entire discussion leading up to it.
Example: "Show more comments above: 1, 2, 5, All."
UPDATE: After reading the replies, I am less sure about this idea.
--
Make the number of upvotes and downvotes a scarce resource.
Before you click 'Vote up', you will pause and ask yourself, "Does this post/comment really deserve it?" People will use them only on those that "really matter".
Everyone would get a fixed number of upvotes and downvotes a day. This number could be the same for everyone or based on a formula. (I.e. number of upvotes/day = number of downvotes/day = 20*log(Karma Score)) for Karma Score > 1). Something like that.
Unused upvotes and downvotes couldn't be carried over or saved for later. Every day, the counter starts over. It's use 'em or lose 'em.
Sounds like a lot of additional stress without a significant reward in improved content.
From my informal understanding of human psychology these changes will make karma much more strongly desired. I don't think a spiral around karma is what we want; much more importance on karma, in fact, and we might see something analogous to what search-engine optimisation is doing to internet content.
Incidentally, what is search-engine optimization doing to internet content? I've noticed machine-generated non-content scoring pretty highly on searches, is that what you're referring to? Or are there more subtle, pernicious effects I'm not entirely aware of?
This is a pretty good overview - in particular, the last paragraph under the heading "The Downward Spiral: Industrializing OBP Exploitation".
Great, thank you! That pretty much matches my expectations, but the specifics were quite interesting.
Is content designed more specifically to be liked by others really a problem?
I'm not sure, but keep in mind that karma score isn't exactly 'how good a post is', it's a proxy - and intelligences optimizing for a proxy measure can end up stomping on your supergoals.
Edit: There's a new utility-function proposal - have your AI simulate each member of LW, and have them up/downvote its ideas!
Which is why my proposal isn't necessarily linked to Karma Score. You can just give everyone the same number of votes.
I think it's more of an effect of making them a limited resource at all than an effect of making them a resource that's correlated with being approved of by a high-karma LWer.
I don't follow. How does making upvotes a limited resource make karma more strongly desired?
Making upvotes a limited resource means that there will be fewer upvotes in total, and slower karma gains, and thus each point of karma that one gets will be more meaningful, and a stronger incentive to 'do more like that'.
Kind of like how if you have an income of $10,000/week, $1 doesn't mean much, but if your income is more along the lines of $500/week, $1 is much more significant.
It would also skew total karma scores to users who posted heavily before the change.
True.
There's precedent for making changes with this effect. It used to be that you could vote on (and would automatically vote up) your own comments, and those points did not evaporate when new comments started to appear at 0 karma without the option for the poster to vote on them.
Fair enough. If a change in the karma system was worth doing, this issue is unlikely to tip things back in the other direction: it would have to be really borderline.
In exactly that way.
Abundant things are not valued. Scarce things are, or may be. This is why gold is usable as currency and rocks are not.
Ability to display images in comments.
I needed this when Luke asked for feedback on a writing sample.
This appears to be implemented, although I don't know the markup for it.
Ability to disable images in comments.
Markup is:
That doesn't work for me. I can't tell what the problem is.
You may need to put some text in the square brackets. I know this works, 'cause I lifted it from an old comment of mine:
Still doesn't work. It might be a problem with the site hosting the images. I'll have to experiment.
What image URL are you trying to use?
Got it.
I'm confused about the difference between "Promoted", "New", and "Top". When I'm not thinking about it, I default to "Promoted", but then I miss good posts.
I would like to see "Promoted", "New", and "Top" condensed into a single tab with a sort function on that page that allows the user to decide how they want to view it.
Same goes for "Comments" and "Top Comments".
Automatic flattening of linear segments of discussion. A comment that is the only reply to its parent should be placed at the same depth as its parent. This will make long mostly-linear discussions easier to read and avoid unnecessary shifting-to-the-right-and-beyond (i.e. hiding and extension to a separate page).
(This probably shouldn't apply to comments whose parent comments have siblings, to more clearly separate sub-discussions.)
Perhaps without color alternation (as is currently implemented for the last and second to last comments displayed on a page such that you have to click through for more) during these segments?
I'd prefer to keep the color alternation, actually. It makes it easier to differentiate one comment from another, which makes it easier to skim, among other things.
Yes, but the boxes around the comments should line up directly instead of being separated by a gap as different comments of the same level are.
If we think people are taking "karma" too seriously, change the display to be qualitative like Slashdot's ("Excellent", "Good", "Fair", etc.)
I suspect this would be controversial, or at the least require significant discussion.
The "help" button on the comments should include a link to a more extensive help file; probably both the generic Markdown help file, and a more specific one here (there's a page on the Wiki that does this, right?). (Including the more specific one to remind people that e.g. HTML doesn't work, and how to do that hack to include LaTeX.)
Fix the bug where permalinks to a post - even new ones! - do not work when a post is moved between subreddits.
Is there currently a rules page? If not, there should be a rules page and it should be readily accessible for new readers/posters.
Fluid width, please.
User profiles? Click someone's username, and get taken to a page with some basic personal information, such as sex, location, homepage, etc. that the user in question can provide.
The site is very good the way it is; between the threaded comment format and the upvote/downvote feature, the technical design of this site makes it much, much better for having conversations than the typical blog commenting system. There isn't much that needs to change - at this point, it's more important to avoid screwing things up than it is to try to improve on what's already there.
In comment threads, the 'show more comments above' link appears even if the topmost comment shown is the first one in the thread. It shouldn't.
Add a control to each reply that collapses the whole comment thread. Label it "[--]". That way, when I belatedly realize I have wandered into a dead end, I can move on to something fresh without much scrolling.
As a new reader, I would very much like to have a method for marking how far through the sequences I am. A dot next to read articles, or possibly a timestamp of last access could work, as could a button at the bottom of the article labeled "Mark as read" that would display the article title differently in the main sequence page. I feel lost when I hop around on different computers as to what articles I've read and where I have seen them before, and simply saving read articles every time is unsuitable for this.
EDIT TO ADD: Based off of what other commenters have said, I feel like a clarification is in order. What I'm looking for is a way to mark the sequence pages I've read, so that when they're linked to in the newer articles I can tell right away if I've read that particular post. Hopefully, this would work for both backward-linking sequences AND new posts that also link to sequence pages. Perhaps a way to store the URL of a read page, link it to my account, and when that URL is displayed again within LW a new graphic could show up to the side of the link to show that it has already been read.
Trailmeme for the sequences has approximately what you want, I believe.
That's really cool! This will really help with my journey through the sequences. Thank you!
This is an awesome idea! I've been reading LessWrong for years, but I still fairly frequently click on links within articles that look interesting, read the first few paragraphs of the article linked to, only to realize that I've read it before (sometimes a few times before!)
This might be too hard to implement, but here is the system I would like: a way to mark articles as 'unread', 'in progress', or 'read'. This information would be saved and links to articles that you marked 'read' would change colour. (Of course, maybe I'm the only one absentminded enough to need this!)
Exactly! My problem is that I read an interesting article, and when I come to a link I open it in a new tab to pick up the context before continuing. When I haven't read the article I learn something new, but when I've already seen the linked-to article I can't tell until I'm into the second paragraph or so. Then, I have to re-read the original to get back to where I was.
Perhaps better reading comprehension techniques would fix this for me, but I suspect that a lot of new readers run into this problem.
That seems useful. It might be good to have a notes-to-self field, too.
I like this idea. I started making comments in a separate file per sequence with the goal that after I've finished all of them I'd go back and see if my viewpoint changed or if issues that were fuzzy at the time cleared up.
Comment preview.
Seeing the comment as it will appear before you submit would be very helpful.
My workaround for this missing feature (when I care enough) is to PM myself with a URL like
Implement this (xkcd).
:-)
LW generally does not have that problem.
A link to the markdown rules should be printed right above the comment box.
I entered <a href="example.com">...</a> on my 1st lesswrong comment because I thought it would turn into a link. It did not. I had to search Google for "lesswrong markdown" to find the rules since they were not very discoverable on the site itself.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/51f/guilt_another_gift_nobody_wants/3voh
I guess having the link on the right makes people miss it.
The "Help" link below the comment box does that.
Thank you. Should the new design make it more prominent, or was I just too careless?
A lot of people don't notice it so making it a little more clear could be helpful. I know I missed it entirely when I was unfamiliar with how the syntax worked. I applied the 'just f@#% google it!" injunction to myself to find how to do the quotes, links and lists. I was surprised a couple of months later when I discovered that the guide was only a few pixels away!
It may be good to change the text to something that makes its purpose clearer than "Help" does, maybe "Formatting help" or "Formatting syntax".
Chuck the Help link right next to comment and cancel.
Is the site any less functional without JavaScript? If so, inform the user via a <noscript> tag that displays a conspicuous message: "This site works better with JavaScript enabled".
Blogroll / Side Bar Section for Links to Rationality Related Websites. I love Overcoming Bias, but it seems a bit biased that Overcoming Bias is the only other website linked from here.
Reply to this comment with a comment for each website nomination?
Hmm... maybe with this feature new links could be added by users (presuming a minimum karma criteria), and then each link other users could vote up and down, so that the ordering of the list was organic.
PredictionBook
TakeOnIt
Those considering including Take On It, may want to look at prior discussion on Less Wrong about the website (summary of that discussion: I and a few other editors have issues with the website. Most commentators here seem to disagree with those criticisms.)
You Are Not So Smart.
Measure of Doubt.
Unenumerated.
I don't like this idea. The choice of websites to put on the sidebar is likely to be contentious. What exactly qualifies a website to be endorsed by LW? How should a website be judged considering the various PR implications of endorsing it? Also, who exactly stands behind the endorsement, considering that LW is a group blog?
What's more, LW members already have the option to put website links in their profiles, and the websites authored or endorsed by prominent LW contributors are thus already given significant promotion.
A website has a specific goal that it's trying to uniquely achieve, and a general goal that places it within a community of like-minded websites. Less Wrong's specific goal is to refine the art of human rationality, and its general goal is to raise the sanity waterline. If other websites are successfully raising the sanity waterline, it behooves Less Wrong to link to them.
I agree that there's genuine challenges in selecting which websites to link to, especially for a community blog. But a community blog, if it meets those challenges, actually has the greater potential to choose a good set of links. Less Wrong should strive to have a better set of links than its sister site, Overcoming Bias. These links matter. It's a standard feature of blogs, and for good reason. I've discovered many great websites this way. Unfortunately, never via Less Wrong.
While I think high-karma Less Wrong users deserve promotion, it's not the only criteria for which promotion is justified. If there's a great sanity waterline raising website out there, it should be linked to, whether or not there's a high-karma Less Wrong user running it. On my own website I link to Wikipedia's argument fallacy list and cognitive bias list. Without digressing into a debate as to whether Less Wrong should link to these lists too, I'll merely point out that with the criteria you're suggesting, such links would necessarily have zero value. I think JGWeissman's proposal would choose the appropriate value for such links.
What I dislike most about the idea is that it gives some sort of official collective endorsement to external websites. One thing I like about LW is that except for the institutions that historically gave rise to it (OB and SIAI), it has no official doctrine and official endorsements. There are issues of broad consensus, but they are never officially presented as such. Thus, even if I have some disagreements with the majority on these issues, I can always voice my arguments without the unpleasant feeling that I'm invading the forum as an outsider trying to pick arguments over matters of consensus. (Which would constitute borderline trolling even if I'm right.)
Now, if there is a list of officially LW-endorsed websites, and I think some of them are bad and I don't want to endorse them by any means, raising such concerns would mean picking fruitless and frustrating arguments with the majority. And frankly, I think it is quite plausible that some websites hit enough "applause lights" that they might find themselves on the LW endorsement list, even though their intellectual standards leave much to be desired.
If individual LW members wish to promote external websites, I'm all for it. They can post links in discussions, and by all means allow them to post links in their profiles more conspicuously and prominently than now, not just to their own websites but also to a list of favorite websites. But please don't insist on an official list of collectively endorsed links.
You've articulated some of the problems of a blogroll well. Perhaps the blogroll idea could be evolved into a concept that better fits the needs of this community, while retaining its core value and simplicity:
1) Along side a link could be its controversy level, based on the votes for and against the link. By making the controversy explicit, the link can no longer be seen as a straight-up endorsement.
2) Along side a link could be its ranking based on say only the top 50 users. This would let people explicitly see what the majority vs. the "elite rationalists" thought - an interesting barometer of community rationality.
3) Split the "blogroll" in two - all-time most votes vs. most votes in the last week/month. This would alleviate the problem of staleness that Nancy pointed out. This is also nice because the links could be for not just websites, but any interesting new article.
4) Allow discussion of any link. Comments could warn users of applause lights etc. This is perhaps why the current voting system works well for choosing top posts, despite the problems you point out with majority opinion. A poor post/link can never get past the gauntlet of critical comments.
You could generalize this to the point that ordinary posts essentially become a special case of an "internal link". Anyway, enough about a technical proposal - at this point I'm reluctant to push any harder on this. An impression I have of Less Wrong is that it's somewhat of a walled garden (albeit a beautiful one!) and that such changes would open it up a little, while maintaining its integrity. The resistance people have seems to be rooted in this - a fear of in any way endorsing "inferior intellectual standards". What we should instead be fearful of is not doing everything we can to raise the sanity waterline.
I wouldn't do this. The top 50 users by karma score are more likely to be members who make a lot of comments than "elite rationalists".
The controversy meter and using recent votes are good ideas (I wouldn't split it, use only the recent votes).
What about 'links to blogs which discuss similar things and/or use a similar approach to LW'?
This strikes me as the most cultish-sounding thing I've seen here-- more so, say, than the boot camp.
This may be unreasonable on my part since I don't have specific blogs in mind, but really-- in the huge universe of blogs, no others are rationalist enough?
We couldn't even settle on science and math blogs which would be of interest?
I dunno Nancy. I mean you start off innocently clicking on a link to a math blog. Next minute you're following these hyperlinks and soon you find yourself getting sucked into a quantum healing website. I'm still trying to get a refund on these crystals I ended up buying. Let's face it. These seemingly harmless websites with unrigorous intellectual standards are really gateway drugs to hard-core irrationality. So I have a new feature request: every time someone clicks on an external link from Less Wrong, a piece of Javascript pops up with the message: "You are very probably about to enter an irrational area of the internet. Are you sure you want to continue?" If you have less than 100000 karma points, clicking yes simply redirects you the sequences.
It's cultish to say we don't have a consensus on this?
You feel a good bit more strongly about this than I do. I would be inclined to look for a mild recommendation to head the blogroll-- "possibly of interest" or "frequently rationalist" or somesuch.
However, your arguments remind me of another reason not to have a blogroll-- they generally don't get maintained, which means that they're likely to include discontinued and inactive blogs.
I agree. The link to Overcoming Bias is a special case, because LW used to be OB, before the site split into two.
A way it could work:
Have a section of the site where people can submit suggestions for the blogroll. This should be structured, with fields for a title, a URL, and a free form comment explaining the submission. The submissions can be voted on like comments, and the top 5 by voting score appear in the blog roll widget. The blog roll header can link back the submission section.
It's not that significant. I watch my site traffic like a hawk and I get almost no hits from here.
FYI, I just tried to click through to your food blog from the link on your wiki userpage, and it is broken, I think.
Fixed, thanks.
I think I've clicked on all profile links posted by people on the top contributors list at one time or another (and many others as well), but I guess I'm an exception then. What could be done is to make people's profile links more conspicuous and directly accessible, perhaps as a part of making profiles generally more informative for those who wish to make them so. (I think someone already mentioned the idea of merging them with wiki profiles.)
Meteuphoric.
Nomination: Common Sense Atheism.
I have a couple of teeny tiny issues with markdown.
At present a numbered list always begins with item 1, even if (for some reason) you want to begin at 2 or 0 or whatever. (Often nice to begin a list with 0 when there's some funny point you want to 'get out of the way' before proceeding to the 'real list'.)
[ETA: Ignore this point] Links don't work if the URL contains parentheses. This can be worked around if you use tinyurl, but it's annoying. A quick (but not perfect) fix would be to allow nested parentheses within a markdown link.
Refer to markown syntax for how to escape markdown syntax operators. It is handled the same way as handling, for example, literal_underscores_insteadofitalics.
Yes, that's as good a solution as one could hope for.
My first point is clearly a 'bug' though: writing "2. something" shouldn't create output that looks like "1. something".
Or, at least, it is a feature which someone could legitimately not desire. The numbered list feature is just a way to specify html - so like in html the formatting is up to CSS. If you don't want a vanilla html numbered list generated then you just have to do the numbering manually and once again escape the character for the unwanted syntax. In this case that means the period.
2. One
1. Two
Yes, this is somewhat annoying to do. It is also annoying that you don't have control of the CSS used from inside the markdown. Which gets frustrating for nested lists when the default formatting sucks. Come to think of it that's another feature request. Change one line in the CSS to improve nested lists.
You can link to a URL that ends in a parenthesis by escaping the parenthesis that belongs to the URL.
Thanks - useful to know.
Ability to hide all comments from a user. I want to be able to put people on ignore and just as importantly I want people to be able to put me on ignore. Arguing on the internet is often pointless and the cost of avoiding said pointlessness is not negligible.
I worry about the effect this would have on understanding threaded conversations with many participants, or I'd be in favor.
My thought was make ignored comments do the same thing as highly downvoted comments. You can click on them if you really want to.
It is certainly a more viable option than attempting to implement the ignore feature inside the brain of the person you wish to ignore. That doesn't seem to work to well.
Yeah, the implementation on that one is very buggy. (Although I'm working with a variant of an outright ignore, which your feature wouldn't strictly improve on.)
I like to save my mind hacking energies for features that can't be coded in greasemonkey. ;)
Make text more readable - especially in comments, since you can't use Readability on them.
Would an acceptable compromise be to allow you to change what font is displayed in your preferences? (Assuming that is not excessively difficult)
What in particular do you find unreadable about the site's text?
I'm not a designer and my taste in typography might be unusual, but I can try to pin down what makes reading it uncomfortable for me personally:
(1) Arial (the default font) is much less readable than other fonts. At least one informal survey suggest users prefer Verdana over Arial 2 to 1. I agree completely. Readability uses Georgia, which also seems more readable to me.
(2) "Justified" text (where each word lines up on the rightmost edge of the paragraph) is harder for me to read than unjustified text. According to Wikipedia, it noticeably impairs comprehension for people with dyslexia, too.
(3) There are too many characters per line. My understanding is that in web typography, the "standard rule" (not universally accepted) is 55-75 characters per line. On its default setting, Readability averages around 70, which feels comfortable to me. Less Wrong has ~115 characters per line, which feels too wide. With a more readable font, this might not be an issue, but I definitely notice it with the current design.
(4) Text is too small. This is a minor complaint, since you can adjust it in the browser. But by default, the text feels uncomfortably small to me.
I prefer sans-serif fonts for reading on any kind of screen. Why not try specifying no font face or font size at all and use the browser default?
I do not normally notice this, since I have set an absolute minimum font size on my browser. I agree it looks awful under the default settings.
A nice thing about Verdana compared to most sans-serif typefaces is that Verdana's uppercase letter "
I" has serifs, so it doesn't look like a lowercase letter "l" (or, when italicized, a slash).Make that all sans-serit typefaces. By definition. ;)
I have a very strong preference for justified text. It makes the shape of paragraphs regular and less distracting.
Absolutely. Non-justified text died when we stopped using monospaced fonts with double spaces strewn between every second word to fill up a line. Flush left text just looks terrible now.
Have the Article Navigation work in the discussion section. Currently it only works on the main page, and if you try to use it in the discussion section it will take you to main page posts with the same author or tag.
Be able to edit posts from looking at your own comment page.
Condense and reorganize personal items.
I have difficulty navigating all of my "personal" things such as my comments, drafts, preferences, saved, friends, etc. These are scattered about in a not very intuitive way.
I think that when you click on your own profile, it would be nice if the side-bar changed to include links to the different things I mentioned above. To re-access the 'recent posts' I would have to go back to the main page.
The ability to sort my own comments/posts by recent vote activity. That is, if I suddenly get a 20-karma bump or drop in my overall score, I want to know what caused that.
Use case: If upvotes and downvotes reflect "I want more of this" and "I want less of this" reactions, it is helpful to notice when they happen and know what posts/comment people want more/less of.
Event calendar.
I'd like to see the site move away from the blog frontend.
It should start with an overview of rationality, some articles, and maybe the blog for people who want to discuss things further.
This might be good for newbies on their first visit, but if retention is the ultimate goal, it would quickly become redundant for the regulars to click through a static front page to get to the new content.
The ABOUT link under the header already serves the purpose you suggest.
Regulars will probably have the page they want to skip to on autosuggest, so I don't think that's a big problem. :)
Currently, the "Show more comments above" link on a comment permalink page stops working after some number of uses. This should be fixed.
For that matter, both the "show more above" and the "parent" button seem to randomly break sometimes. This should definitely be fixed.
The site only allows you to see a certain number (10?) of levels of nesting at once. If the 'root' comment that you're trying to view grandparents of is nested that many levels in from the multi-great-grandparent you're looking at, you won't be able to go further up the thread. Changing the 'root' to the great-grandparent will allow you to go further up the thread, but the original comment won't be on the page any more when you do.
Given how that works, it's probably non-trivial to fix this - allowing arbitrary levels of nesting to show on one page probably breaks the layout. There may be workarounds, though...
Provide some sort of view showing the source of your most recent karma losses/gains, something like the notifications on Facebook. It's annoying when somebody votes up/down ten of your 2-year-old posts and you register a karma change, but have no idea of knowing where it came from.
Possibly dangerously addictive, though.
An option for shared authorship on posts, showing the names of both users and splitting the karma gains between them. The karma could be either split equally or in a manner specified by the user posting it. E.g. Morendil could have tagged me as 20% responsible for his post on status, and I'd have gotten 2 karma points for each upvote.
Provide the option to "follow" or "unfollow" any topic, so that you get all of the comments posted to it into your inbox. (Yes, there are RSS feeds for individual topics, but adding something to an RSS reader is an inconvenience and clutters the reader.)
Provide the option to view the Discussion section with the topics sorted according to the newest comment. (In other words, each new comment to a topic "bumps" the topic to the top, like on most forums.)
It's possible this was already suggested, in which case I apologize, but: the ability to sort my own comments/posts by descending vote total ("popularity"), ascending vote total ("reverse popularity"), and descending (upvotes + |downvotes|) total ("controversial"?).
Use case: If upvotes and downvotes reflect "I want more of this" and "I want less of this" reactions, it is helpful to notice when they happen and know what posts/comment people want more/less of.
(EDIT: Split into two suggestions)
You gave more than one suggestion-- they're both reasonable, but I've been wanting to track recent karma changes for my posts/comments for a long time.
Edited
Automatically detect linear threads* and format them in a different way, rather than the current optimized-for-tree-structure way. The difference might be as minor as not indenting, but there are probably a few other things that could be done as well, looking at various forums and bulletin boards for inspiration. Another thing one will likely want to do is to make continuing in a thread-like fashion is easier and branching is harder.
Add support for BBCode in comments, as well as those instant buttons to add the markup that many forums and bulletin boards have.
HTML works for top level posts, but for quick comments it's to elaborate and powerful. The LW specific markup on the other hand is not powerful enough for many things, and suffers problems from being very non standard.
It's not LW-specific -- it's Markdown. (Actually a subset of Markdown since Markdown proper allows inline HTML.)
Oh...
Well, I have never encountered it elsewhere which means at least some users are unfamiliar with it, and I see no conflict that keep both from being supported and mixed.
Get rid of the "post saving" feature, which takes up screen real estate but is probably used by a minority (though some people here say they use it, so I may be underestimating). Or hide the "Saved" link in the top bar unless you have actual saved posts.
(You could also make saving an option that can be activated / deactivated in the options, but I don't think the "Save" link under posts is as much a waste of "screen real estate" as the link beneath the header, which is distractingly close to other useful links)
Get rid of the "Report" link under comments and posts. Some possibilities, in decreasing order of preference:
Just remove it completely, and handle spam and other crap by giving the moderators a page where they can easily see the recent comments that got a lot of downvotes (if they don't already have one)
Rename it "Flag" so it doesn't get confused with "Reply" (I bet that happens more often than people reporting spam)
Remove it for any post or comment older than a day, or for any post/comment that has positive karma.
Give users an option in their preferences (on by default) to hide the link.
It's good to have an option for the "something is going on here that probably shouldn't, a human moderator should take a closer look" case, even if it's not needed that often. I've used it on some spammers and an occasional drive-by gibberish trolling.
Calling it "flag" instead of "report" would help with the confusion with "reply", but on the other hand it's less clear what "flag" means. Since most users can safely ignore the option anyway, this is probably a smaller problem than confusion with "reply", so supporting this one.
Since the site opened I have found the need for the Report button a total of zero times. And that is hardly due to lack of participation. I certainly wouldn't mind it gone.
I may have used it two or three times on spammers selling jewelry or pandora shoes, but that problem eventually got solved by different karma rules.
A vote for the flag rename.
Provide a free-form text box for users to enter "user profile" type data.
People who care a lot about what pronoun gets used to refer to them can say so; people who prefer to be handled via Crocker's Rules can say so; people who have particular interests can say so; etc.
Variant suggestion: Merge LW and wiki.LW account systems so that each user's wiki user page can be their profile page.
Excellent idea! Get people to actually edit the wiki!
Yes, that too. The need to create a separate account on the wiki is an unnecessary technical barrier to casual contributions.