Topic: Little things that bug you/me about the forum - page 4. (Read 2782 times)

OK, I get the idea and the usefulness of this.
But, the icon would only lead to my posts, so what was your idea for me to be able to see another user's posts?

Yup, it's a little confusing, but I think it'll make sense to you when the time comes...

The small feature you're referring to is basically just a throw-in (it's something that I can add, effectively "for free", once the rest of the code is in place). The broader feature is mostly about being able to "teleport" around large topics by focusing and then unfocusing on the posts made by a specific user (but, that's very difficult to appreciate until you've seen it in action).

For example, I often find myself in a position where I'm on one of theymos' posts in an old topic, and I'd like to jump to the next post (in that topic and if one exists) by theymos. Once you're used to that idea (being able from within a topic to one-click see just the posts made by a specific author), it becomes convenient to sometimes see just your own posts within a given topic (to refresh your memory of that topic from your own perspective, by seeing all the things you said, and who you said them to). For that particular use-case, the icon I was talking about ends up being a very natural place to hang a link (it stands to reason that if that's the icon that informs you that you've already posted in that topic, it should also be the icon that lets you discover what you've posted in that topic).

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Yup, ignore-related features have been on my mind for a long time...

I dipped my toes into this back when I agreed to look into a topic-ignore feature:


The thing is, my to-do list has since picked up enough ignore-related items that the approach I'm most drawn to at this point is to just scrap the existing features and replace them with a new unified ignore system that could handle everything [1]: users, boards, topics, etc. I'd even like to add ignore expressions, so that you could (effectively) say something like: "In my topic in the Lending section, only show me posts made by Jr. Members and above."

That previous thought-arc is actually pretty common: With a lot of the suggestions I've internalized, I think about them on their own for a time, and then I think about them on-and-off in the context of all the other ideas from that same universe, and then I sometimes come up with something cool that would tie the whole collection of ideas up into a neat bundle with a nice pretty bow, except for the fact that it cuts across code that I don't have access to, or would involve too much code, either for me to safely/sensibly write or for theymos to comfortably review... so I put the whole thing on ice.

SMF has just about the worst possible architecture for feature development: It's much harder to make bug-free modifications to it than I think most people can really appreciate. By far, most of the time I've spent thinking about Bitcointalk has actually been dedicated to finding a way to lay the technical foundation for me to work a bit more independently and much more safely, but, for now I'm basically stuck working on things beneath a certain complexity threshold (which is why I titled this topic the way I did).

[1] xkcd 927 doesn't apply: I'm talking about replacement not addition.

I already knew this... perhaps because I had already dealt with other forums. 

Now, I don't see any advantage in clicking this icon and only seeing my posts. If you skip to my last post you are fine. Now just my posts? I think it doesn't make sense. But maybe I'm the one who doesn't understand the point.

Speaking about ignore, I would like to see a patch that would improve and expand forum Ignore feature.
I know about some scripts that are used for ignoring individual threads, but I have to use them browser extension for script to work.
Do you know how complicated would be to add Ignore Thread feature/button wirh SMF patch?

that gives posts in all topics, i think powerglove means to show replies in that thread only

This reminds me of the "bug" that I incorrectly reported here[1]. It didn't reach any consensus but I really believe that if I created a thread in a board that I have on my ignore list - due to numerous reasons - because it was the right place to do it, I should still be able to see it on my profile (for updates and such). I know that there's a workaround by just allowing the board to show up during a specific period of time, but I don't believe that is a balanced solution considering that someone in the future may post in the thread and I wouldn't be able to know it if I had the board ignored.

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[1]https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.64235262

Who looks at that?

Most users have funny first posts anyway

I like the sound of it. The problem is, it involves two things (user ignore, and the watchlist) that aren't present in my branch of SMF. There's no harm in posting ideas that I can't currently work on, though: I expect that I'll be able to work on them at some point.

Yeah, I know just what you mean.

But, in this case there's actually an icon-legend at the bottom of the page:



I think so. Behind the scenes it just makes the SQL query (that retrieves the posts) strictly more selective. The pagination and everything else will work like it normally does. Maybe there's some effect that I haven't accounted for, but, I'll probably be able to work around it if I bump into performance problems. It's actually an old patch (October 2022) that I'm re-working: When I originally sent it to theymos I'd only been on the forum for 4 months, so, I get why he didn't make time back then to carefully consider it. (Anyone else feel mildly embarrassed after reading their old posts/PMs?)

Hey, I never noticed that! Thanks for the tip!

I still have a suggestion. Can you add a title attribute to the image so that when the user hover over it we can see more details about what it means?
like this:

Now that I think about it, the Wall Observer topic with ChartBuddy's posts could be a good way to performance-test the new patch.

Or perhaps the Mempool Observer topic but with FeeBuddy if you guys want something smaller to test with.

I can also think of about half a dozen other topics that have a large volume of posts for a single person. (About half of them are created by you by the way.)

I learned something today I really, really hate the trend of having to guess the meaning of icons (and that's a lot worse on any "modern" website than it is on Bitcointalk.

Will that also work on very long topics?

I don't really see the benefit of doing that to be honest, unless you will be able to access this from the "Show latest posts from this user" page.

Maybe it's because I almost never check my updated topics for new replies, but what I have always found odd is that those icons with faces on them only go up to three pages for signifying that this topic has three or more pages.

That's what that "little face" being present in the left-most icon means (that you've posted in that topic before):



(In an upcoming patch, I'm considering making those face-containing icons clickable: The idea would be that when you click on it, it would open the topic, but with just your posts visible, so that you can easily see the things you've already said in that topic. Seems like an odd feature on its own, but, it's part of a bigger patch to allow quickly seeing only the posts within a topic by a specific author.)

When I visit a board such as Games and rounds I would like to know which topics are really new to me and which only has new messages.

More specifically,  I would like to know which  topics I have already posted and which I didn't. All of them have the **new** badge so i have to manually open all of them... eve  if I have already posted in about 3-4

The forum won't tell you that. Best I can do: combine all usernames with banned users.

I don't know how acceptable it will be. It would be nice to have an option, where the list of all forum members (who have not been banned) will be together. From here we can easily find a member.

Here's an idea: if a topic only has a new post from a user on my Ignore list (I'm talking about you ChartBuddy), it shouldn't show up on my Watchlist.

I'd love to see that implemented!

That would be a great replacement for all the people who ask me to use Discord or Telegram.

I don't know what the current default is, but if a user doesn't log again in after creating an account, a PM notification would be the only way to reach him.

Inaccurate solution: create a thumbnail with fixed width, subtract the images. If the resulting image is 99% black, they're probably similar. But this requires far too many checks for large numbers of images.

Yep. I know what you're referring to, and I get why you might consider that behavior to be a bug, but it's working as intended. I do agree that it's a little confusing for the highlighting to work with the "Last post" button but not with the "new" button (especially because, in some contexts, both those links involve a #new fragment, which is a detail that makes the explanation I gave Loyce at the bottom of this post less accurate than it could have been), but, all things considered, the changes that would be necessary to keep fully-precise first-unread-message IDs are a bit too involved to justify, I think.

A little unrelated to your suggestion, but, since vapourminer's post about the placement of the "new" button, I've been half-seriously thinking that it might actually make sense to just get rid of that button and then change the behavior of the "Last post" button to effectively cover both needs: I mean, how often do you need specifically to get to the last post in a topic, rather than the first unread post? (For guests, it would still always take you to the last post, but when you're signed-in it would take you to the first unread post if there is one, or the last post, otherwise.)

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I like your suggestion and your thoughts very much! I'll think about them carefully. In the meantime, here are some thoughts that maybe you'll find interesting:

(*) There's already something (a little) related to this on my to-do list: Exporting PMs. With that one, at least some of the thinking is similar to yours, in that it would be easy for people to then once-in-a-while "delete" their PMs (after downloading a copy of them that they could manage locally, by importing them into Thunderbird, or something).

(*) I'm sure I've bumped into some form of the following idea a few times, but, I've been thinking for a while now about a way to embed easy-to-use client-side encryption/decryption into the PM system. The version of this idea that exists in my head would be almost entirely client-side (in JavaScript, or at least, something that compiles to JavaScript) and would only involve a small server-side change to facilitate staking and looking-up public keys. I think more people would get into encrypting their PMs if the forum had a worked-out way to do that without expecting people to learn and then manually use PGP. (Another reason I think it would be wise for more people to encrypt their PMs is that Cloudflare can, in principle, see and save everything coming to/from your browser.)

(*) Something a little less related to this (but still relevant) is that I think a built-in chat feature would be a really nice addition to Bitcointalk (the relevant idea being that anything that happens in chat wouldn't be long-term stored/persisted). I don't think I've shared this publicly, but, I had something really cool in mind for April Fools this year that I wasn't able to finish in time. I basically spent half of February and most of March programming my balls off, and having/ignoring little anxiety attacks, before giving up right at the end (in hindsight, I had a lot of IRL stuff happening at the time, so it was stupid of me to bite off more than I could chew by taking on a time-sensitive project, but, yeah, the whole experience was pretty humbling: I haven't had to eat crow like that in something like 20 years). Anyway, necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and while the walls were closing in on that project, I came up with a really clever programming technique/abstraction that makes adding certain kinds of features to SMF much, much easier. With that in mind, I think adding a native, no-signup-required, encrypted/ephemeral chat feature where people could establish public (or private) "rooms" to have genuine (unincentivized, unlike a lot of posting) and short-feedback-loop conversations would be very feasible (and seriously cool).

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That's a good point! Taking a quick look at the code, I think it would be pretty easy to improve this, maybe something like:



(I think either "Never" or "Always (subject only)" would make a better default for newly-registered accounts than "Always (with message)".)

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That's right.

Yes.

That's how I'd like it to work. But, for every 100 hours of energy I have for programming, I have like 6.5 seconds of energy for legal research, so I haven't looked into the ramifications: If it turns out that divorcing the forum itself from storing the images isn't enough to legally absolve it, and that technically involving it with even just the uploading process would still expose it to some amount of legal risk (I'm hoping that that's not the case, but, it certainly sounds like the kind of tiresome bullshit that some asshat might have dreamed up), then, it wouldn't be able to work that way (in that case, it would have to work more like a traditional image-hosting solution in terms of how the images are uploaded, and some nice technical advantages would disappear, but the most important ones would remain).

Yup.

(You can even de-duplicate similar images, by defining the hashing to happen over something other than the raw bytes, like, say, over the image data after it's been moved into a consistent colorspace and simplified in various ways. But, I'm unlikely to pursue that. Fun to think about, though.)

I'm not sure yet. Probably I'll explore a few different approaches. From experience, I know which approach I'll try first (something amalgamated, to uncouple performance from the file system and have finer control over reads/writes).

Agreed.

Hmm interesting stuff, in terms of a full image-hosting solution, are you saying users would upload images to a 3rd party [p2p?] imagery DB that is delivering content based on a hash which is derived from the content of the image only?  And it would then provide them a [cai] code?  Or does the user somehow initiate the upload at the forum itself before it makes it to the storage/imagery DB-thingy?  It seems like this would effectively eliminate duplicates and re-used images that are identical but would normally still occupy resources... seems pretty interesting.

Would the storage nodes have actual file-based images or some sort of encrypted/compressed copy?

And in terms of previously uploaded imgur images, if the intent would be to ultimately replace those links entirely with [cai]'s, it might still be best to keep some way to reference the original imgur link, in some fashion, to provide verification on top of whatever independent method is used.