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Recent updates - repost warning, topic-tagging improvements, group-specific search, markdown strikethrough formatting, wiki/docs updates
There have been a number of updates over the last week or so, but I felt like none of them really warranted their own post individually:
- There's now a repost warning/confirmation if you try to submit a link that's been posted before. A list of the previous posts will be shown along with how old they are, and you have the option of re-posting anyway if you want to. Currently, this will warn you no matter how old the previous post(s) were and regardless of which group they were in, but I'll probably restrict it at some point.
- A couple of improvements to topic tagging:
- If two people happen to edit a topic's tags at the same time, there will be an error if there's an edit conflict, instead of just having the second person's changes overwrite like they did previously.
- @deing added a check for people trying to add tags with invalid characters, and it will now show that the tag has an error before you try to submit.
- You can now search inside a specific group by using the search box while inside that group. The search results page will have a note at the top saying that it's only searching inside that group, along with a link to search the whole site instead. If you search from the home page it will still be site-wide.
- Writing strikethrough text in markdown now requires using two tildes on each side of the text:
this text ~~has some~~ strikethrough. Previously, one tilde on each side of the text would work too, but there were some strange edge cases because of us using~when referring to groups as well. Requiring two tildes should be a lot less ambiguous. About 90% of posts with strikethrough were already using two anyway, but this change affected a small number of past posts (sometimes in a positive way by fixing accidental strikethrough). I'll send messages out today to anyone with posts that were affected, so that they can go edit and fix the formatting if they want to. - @Algernon_Asimov has been doing a massive rework of a lot of the official docs/help pages. They're currently all in the ~tildes.official wiki, but I need to work on moving them over to https://docs.tildes.net, which involves making some changes and updates to that site.
That should about cover it for now, let me know if you have any questions or notice any issues with any of this (or anything else).
Hallelujah! I never mean to repost and I always feel bad when I do.
(That said, I am a believer in allowing reposting after an appropriate amount of time, but I'm talking about times when I post a current news article and there already was one from yesterday that I just missed.)
Thanks for the constant iteration @Deimos & contributors. Good things take time and a small change every week will eventually produce a really functional and high quality website. It hasn't really felt like an "alpha" at all.
Lots of small quality of life updates don't get the flashy reception that a new subsystem would, but over time, they add up to far more. ;)
Right? Big ups for the continued work
What's funny to me is that, and I know it's a bit of an apples to oranges situation, but there's more improvements here in this relatively minor update post than all of Reddit's frontend development in 2019
After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.
I think this suggestion warrants its own separate post, for more visibility.
If @Lawrencium265 doesn't make a ~tildes topic for it, I can add it to the list of potential topics for the weekly discussions too, since expanding the topic tag filtering feature is definitely something that needs to happen eventually.
I would like to see what the community thinks of it in the next discussion. I was thinking this would allow people to create their own groups (ala reddit) within the regular framework of the site. So if you're into a particular video game/Linux distro/cat breed you can just use the tag for it. Then your 'community' will still be participating with everyone else on the site.
It probably won't be the next unofficial discussion, since I have a topic for that already, but I will definitely add the idea to the queue if you don't want to make a topic about it yourself. And yeah, I think there is a lot of untapped potential in the tags, so I would also love to see a community brainstorm session related to the system and how it can be used/improved.
Advanced tag filtering rules would be great. Something like RES's custom filters
There could be filter rules, that filter out posts you would normally see, and subscribe rules, that show you posts you normally wouldn't see.
Nice. Thanks, @deing!
Thank you. :)
While it's not integrated into the site, and quite some time will probably pass before it is (if it's even a feature Deimos desires), you can run a full text search using GitLab's Project Wide Search.
No particular plans. It shouldn't be very difficult overall, but there also aren't many wiki pages yet so I don't think it's a particularly urgent need just yet.
Like @deing said, you can also use GitLab search for now if needed, since all the wiki pages are on there.
I wouldn't do project-wide search since that will also find matches in the site code, but you can just search the wiki repo directly: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes-wiki/Oh whoops, for some reason I was thinking "project" would be all the Tildes stuff, but the term for that is "group". Guess I can use some of that hot new double-tilde strikethrough now.