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.
- 's comment on Posting now enabled by (5 Mar 2009 18:18 UTC; 3 points)
- 's comment on Interested in a European lesswrong meetup by (10 Aug 2010 10:39 UTC; 2 points)
- 's comment on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features by (23 Mar 2009 23:15 UTC; 2 points)
- 's comment on Open Thread: June 2009 by (5 Jun 2009 18:27 UTC; 1 point)
- 's comment on Wanted: Python open source volunteers by (11 Mar 2009 13:11 UTC; 1 point)
- 's comment on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features by (3 Mar 2009 15:09 UTC; 1 point)
- 's comment on The Aumann’s agreement theorem game (guess 2/3 of the average) by (16 Jun 2009 17:13 UTC; 0 points)
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:
I don’t understand this yet. Still trying.
I don’t understand this. I give up.
I agree.
I disagree, and will write up the reasons later.
I disagree, but don’t want to bother writing out why.
I need to think about this more.
I already addressed this before.
[other options if needed]
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.
I’m now wondering which specific rhetorical usage wedrifid!2009 was referring to. There are all sorts of meanings depending on the context and quite a few could be considered rhetorical. I think “a” would be more appropriate than “the” here.
Not with this crowd, I hope.
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.
The main one: I don’t like your attitude, this is signalling crap not discussion. Stick 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.)
I find this makes me less likely to write up reasons later. It makes it work.
I think a common one is “I’m tired of this discussion and don’t want to think about it any more.”
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.
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.
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:
Is there much demand for this feature from others?
Is there hope to have it implemented on Less Wrong directly?
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?
I wrote earlier:
There doesn’t seem to be a huge demand for this (or not many people are paying attention to this thread), so if anyone wants to know the URL for this, just send me a private message, and I’ll give it to you.
(For the record, the URL was eventually posted here.)
I might use it, but probably only if it were incorporated into the site. Is it really only possible to view 5 at a time with the current script?
Edit 4/11: Changed my mind; sending PM.
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.
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
Before people can submit their own posts, it would be good to have it spelled out what’s considered on-topic.
I can find no way to link to my home page (or provide any other information on who I am) from my visible user profile.
Seconded. Even a generic box people can look at where I can write
http://thomblake.com http://thomblake.mp twitter: @thomblake
would be good
Also, in comments—single line-breaks being converted to
or whatever would be cool. Or is there MarkDown for that? Is what’s under “Help” all there is?
Most features of Markdown are supported, except inline HTML. According to the official spec line breaks are made as follows (which I tested and it works on Less Wrong)
Perhaps we should include a link to more extensive formatting info in the help table.
I’ve raised an issue to track this feature request.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, I’d really like to see the full text of posts in the RSS feed.
By the way, it’s also possible to have two or more feeds with different content (e.g., just titles/just first paragraph/complete text), just in case others have other preferences.
Adding content as well as titles to the feeds is on the to do list. I have raised an issue for it.
Full article content in RSS feeds has been implemented.
Is anyone else having issues with logging in? After I log in, it doesn’t appear to have succeeded until I click off the main page. Not sure if there is an issue, but seems confusing.
I’m also not sure if the ‘remember me’ checkbox is working.
Is this still happening? I released a couple of login related updates today. If so can you let me know what browser and operating system you’re using as well as the location (URL) of the page you’re on when trying to login.
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.
Thanks! Could you add anchors to the links from there? The “Parent” link on the comments in the Comments tab seems to be the most useful one. Also, an additional pair of “Prev | Next” links at the top of the Comments pages would be convenient. It should be “In response to a (the?) comment”. The Edit and Reply actions don’t work.
You just linked to moreor. It appears at the main site here, but there’s no “Comments” tab visible as yet.
Oops jumped the gun on my announcements, they should all be live now. Fixed the link too.
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:
find a post you want to follow
click the feed icon, and add it to your reader
follow it in your reader (which is sensible enough to only show you the new stuff)
If you don’t use a feed reader, a flattened reverse chronological comment view is the best idea I have.
There’s got to be an open-source feed-reader gidget out there somewhere. So just develop the feed as pure RSS, and then link to a page that reads the feed and shows the standard gidget’s view of the feed?
A way to see the number of comments a particular post has would be useful
This has now been implemented.
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.
Four-digit karma is not readily legible in the little green circle.
[currently the parent comment is at −1 points]
Interesting: does the downvoter see a statement of status in this true observation, and so feels offended?
It was probably just a drive-by. I get those on a pretty regular basis.
Hmm… Someone downvoted my comment as well—is that the same person?
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.
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.
Seconded.
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.
That indeed seems like a good resource for now.
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.
this post claims to have 1 more comment than it displays. I wonder if this is a deleted comment effect as well. Not a big deal, but worth recording for anyone who wants to debug deletion.
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.
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:
Go into my “account preferences”;
Click on the “friends” tab;
Click “Send message”, as though I were going to compose a message; and then
Click on “inbox”.)
Nice one!
This is something that is marked for investigation #118
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.
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?
It’s not completely sorted internally, or at least doesn’t display that way to me.
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.
Have you talked to Wei Dai? I haven’t used his script, so I don’t know if it currently works for inbox messages, but it seems like something to try.
Edit: Looks like doesn’t, at least currently.
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.
For my part, I think I accidentally clicked on Report the other day, while expanding a lot of comments for Context. But I don’t remember any dialogue so I can hope that it didn’t go through.
The reddit FAQ may answer a few questions.
Update: the welcome post has a small explanation of voting and karma.
Questions I have about karma:
How can I tell if I’ve voted on something after the vote button isn’t bold anymore? Do I just have to keep track?
How often can I vote on a single post or comment?
It looks like whenever a user’s comment is replied to, the reply shows up as a message in their inbox, with the envelope at the top of the sidebar turning orange/red to indicate it to them. Replies to replies don’t generate a new message.
After what? The vote button always remains bold for me. (This, incidentally, implies that one can only vote once—either up or down.)
At the moment I can’t find a post that I’m sure I voted on that doesn’t have one button bolded, so I might just be confused.
Update: no, I’m still experiencing cases where I vote, press control+F5 and find the vote gone. It might be related to the fact that vote buttons still bold and unbold even when I’m not online.
Yes, when you click the vote link, Javascript bolds/unbolds it immediately, while sending a request to the server. If there’s a problem with your connection, it will appear as though you’ve voted but when you go back the link will not be bold, since your vote will not have been received. If you don’t have enough karma to downvote, the response from the server will trigger a callback which cancels the bold and informs you of your inability to downvote, assuming you have a good connection and you’re still on the page.
I believe the button bolds before the data is stored on the database—I’ve noticed edits to the texts of posts vanish when I close the window immediately after submitting them.
LessWrong.com sends the user’s password in the clear (as reported by ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 8.
Please consider warning people that is so.
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?
Does anyone know if these accounts are being managed or is there the possibility as you say for a siege at a later date?
The siege began. Two bots, registered on 2 and 4th June respectively, just posted their spam messages. Furthermore, the messages hack the wiki markup. It may be a while for all the bots to run out, and new ones continue registering as we speak. You should really install that captcha.
ETA: 5 triggered bots so far.
Spam became a rather serious issue now. Just look at the block log: today I had to block 16 spam bot accounts, and delete their spam. I don’t even have tools for easily doing that, so each account takes a number of clicks with a delay. Good thing they are only spamming on their own user pages...
I don’t know, it was more of a joke. From what I googled, adding a captcha seems to be just a matter of installing an extension.
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.
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.
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.
You can also just click twice. It’s a toggle.
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 share your weakness for gold stars, however, I’m finding thus far that it has a positive impact on my posting. Thinking before I speak is useful, particular since it means more thinking, more effort to consider other’s knowledge and less chance of getting sidetracked on pointless nitpicking.
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.
With comment karma we should definitely stop trying to use upvotes and downvotes for opinion polls.
Yeah, we need “agree” “disagree”.
Agreed, we need this and soon.
What exactly do you mean by this. In other words how would it be used? The codebase has the concept of comment karma already. However when presented in the UI, ‘Karma’ is the sum of comment karma and submission karma.
Right now, karma only seems to be including submission karma, no comment karma.
E.g. this user with many upvoted comments and karma 1.
Comment Karma does affect the “Top Contributors” ranking, though—I did a self-deprication experiment. And strangely enough I fell off the list shortly after you wrote the above link :-)
What’s jimrandomh’s dark secret?
An unpublished draft that was upvoted?
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:
green circles aren’t scaled to fit the digits shown on top of them
the Karma Score value is overlaid on the text “Karma Score”
part of the text box for entering comments is pushed under the right sidebar
the untoggled states of the Vote {Up, Down} indicators aren’t displayed quite correctly
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):
visit about:config
set font.minimum-size.x-western to 24
open LessWrong
I also have a few feature requests:
comment previews
an option for comment entry text boxes with more vertical space
an option for using more horizontal space for displaying articles, comments and comment entry text boxes, when available—the OB design makes much better use of horizontal resolution than the current LW one.
On comment previews: You can edit your comments after you’ve posted them, so this is probably something nice-to-have rather than urgent.
Agreed, but when you do that the comment tends to jump up and down and I’ve had trouble finding the posted comment / edit box in the thread.
On more horizontal space: We’ll hopefully be fluid width before many of you read this comment.
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/)
I think other people have said it, but Slashdot has one of the best commenting structures around.
Different values for different categories (funny, insightful etc....), anonymous posting, reputation, very clear thread structure. All sorts of fun stuff
Because quality and truth are separate judgments in practice, and forcing them to be conflated into a single scale is losing information. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality this will fall out automatically: highly truthy posts will tend to have high quality. Low quality and high truth are not opposites.
I agree it’s losing information, but that’s something you have to weigh against the inconvenience of multiple dimensions. To the extent that truth is positively correlated with quality you’re just making people click twice, and I suspect clicks are a limited resource.
As I see it the voting system is there to put comments in a convenient order and remove the really bad ones from sight, not to provide opinion poll information.
That’s exactly the point: voting is supposed to put comments in order according to quality, so that you can read the worthwhile comments in a reasonable time. My claim is that the current voting system will not do this well at all and that a dual voting system will be better. (That second bit is just a guess). The opinion poll information is just a nice side effect.
OK, so according to you and Benja the point is to have the agree/disagree buttons there mainly as a lightning rod to prevent agreement from affecting quality votes. That’s a good point, but I wonder if it’s worth it and if there are better ways to accomplish the same thing.
I also wonder if there should be a button labeled “malevolent cantaloupe” so the unserious people will click on that instead of voting.
I’m not sure this is obviously right. I would probably insist upon some usability study to determine how people actually use such features. Of course, if the cost is low such a study could just be implementing them and seeing how it works.
I imagine there’s a name for this cognitive bias, but I’ve noticed well-informed folks tend to think agreeable opinions are better-argued, and less agreeable ones are worse-argued (probably a species of confirmation bias).
For example, someone posting against physicalism might get downvoted quickly by people who say “but they didn’t even consider Dennett’s response to this premise”. But they might not have the same objections on-hand to an unsound argument in favor of physicalism.
I’d prefer a clear explanation of intended semantics of voting, linked to on “About” page, and posted one of these days on the front page to get anyone’s attention and users’ suggestions.
It might also be good to stick a reminder of what up-voting is intended to mean right next to the up-vote and down-vote buttons. Or to change the names: instead of “vote up” and “vote down”, perhaps something like “high-quality discussion” and “low-quality discussion”.
Not sure about that—those labels at least would look ugly. Maybe a title attribute on the “vote up” and “vote down” would be sufficient.
How about buttons “High quality”, “Low quality”, “Accurate”, “Inaccurate”. We’re increasing options here, but there’s probably a nice way to design the interface to reduce the cognitive load.
Using the word “vote” seems broken here more generally—we aren’t implementing some democratic process, we’re aggregating judgments (read: collecting evidence) across a population.
I completely agree about the word “vote”.
“High quality” / “Low quality” has good brevity, but for myself I’m still tempted to blend in agreement/disagreement with my ratings when I picture those words—to regard comments I disagree with as “low quality”. If we could have the question “Does this add to or subtract from the conversation?” surrounded by up/down arrows (or by “adds” / “subtracts”), I imagine myself voting better.
For example, I just up-voted James Andrix’s and Kurige’s comments about their religious beliefs.
I up-voted the comments because they’re good data, I’m glad the commenters shared it, and it looks like stuff more eyes should look at within the thread. But I hesitated, because “up-voting” gives the appearance of agreement. Rating Kurige’s comment “high quality” feels a bit similar, like calling it “high quality reasoning”. But clicking up-arrow next to the question “Does this add to the conversation?” would feel obvious, to me in this case.
Yep, what I wrote is just based on my best guess. A usability study would be great.
Also, I am going with the crowd and changing to a user name with an underscore
A second question about the semantics of voting: should I be up-voting all good posts regardless of score, and down-voting all bad posts regardless of score, or should I be voting to correct points-numbers that are misaligned with post quality?
Upon reflection, I’d say we should be voting to correct points-numbers that are misaligned with post quality. Otherwise, if people continue to up-vote more posts than they down-vote, comments will accumulate more and more points the older they get, and a setting like “show me all posts above 3” won’t be meaningful across threads or comment-ages.
Added: The “odd social dynamics” point is good. I’ll follow Eliezer and thomblake here.
I would actually say that voting to correct post-quality would lead to some odd social dynamics. I’ll vote up if something is negative for no reason, but otherwise I’ll vote my opinion, not corrections—unless something seems really out of line.
I’d rather have the sum of people’s individual components then see everyone trying to correct everyone else’s voting.
Agreed—I’ve been using voting the same way:
if (score < 0 && myPreferredScore >=0)
vote up
else
vote my conscience
Edit: had to camelCase the name above due to odd behavior of underscores. I should learn MarkDown.
Is the recent comments page broken right now or is that just me?
Edit: Working again!
It’s been broken for me, too.
The problem may be associated with comments from a time period—recent comment is working for me now, but I can’t page back.
For reference, it’s usually the fault of one particular comment—when this happens, finding any page with that comment will break the site. “Recent comments” works again when that comment falls off the first page.
Yep. This time around the particular comment seems to be 1rvk in the numbering scheme used in URLs.
On what thread?
I can’t tell, since I can’t see that particular comment. I’ve inferred that “number” by some boundary testing, inputting various URLs to see which ones worked and which breaked.
I see—playing with http:// lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_[comment-ID] seems to suggest 1rvj may be responsible, as http://lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_1rvj has 1rvi as the first visible. That said, http://lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_1rxo works where http://lesswrong.com/comments?count=50&after=t1_1rxn fails, which suggests 1rw8 breaks the page, too.
Edit: At least on my viewer—other people may have their Recent Comments set to show fewer comments.
Not just you. It happens periodically.
Me too.
Me too, but it now appears to be working.
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).
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.
“I was only following orders” works less well for engineers than it did for Nazis. As Don Gotterbarn or Richard Volkman would have us remember, programming exactly to specs is not doing your job well.
Downvoted for unkindness—no one likes to be involved in a comparison where Nazis are the baseline.
“Programming exactly to specs” is part of the job, but seeing to it that the specs have desirable outcomes when implemented also is, so I partly agree—I think you could do a better job of evangelizing here.
You might want to check out the User Manifesto, a work in progress.
wmoore doesn’t appear to be a normal LW member; the only comments I see in xyr history are about code changes, so I suspect xe’s simply the person who implements the changes that Eliezer (or whoever has the relevant authority) requests. It doesn’t make sense to me, if that’s true, to make wmoore responsible for confirming that those changes have been run by the group.
The engineers of the software for the Therac-25 were simply implementing a spec. It caused people to die because they did not look at the bigger picture. Something all software engineers should be aware of.
Just doing my “The more you know” moment as a professional computer ethicist.
Is the programmer always obligated to personally confirm that all potentially-affected parties have had an opportunity to comment on the intended result? That seems like a much higher standard than just checking to make sure the spec will do what the customer intends it to do.
No, but the programmer is obligated to personally confirm that all relevant stakeholders have been considered in the analysis of the ethical impacts of their work.
In this particular case, it seems obvious that major changes require discussion, or at least that “I just implemented what I was instructed to do” is not a proper response.
We’re disagreeing mostly on the “personally confirm” point, I believe—I don’t believe that that’s true in all cases.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for wmoore to have assumed that Eliezer had taken care of the moral analysis of this case. (I wouldn’t disagree with you if you were suggesting that Eliezer should have checked with us.) Wmoore doesn’t obviously know how this group is structured, or what kinds of things we would expect to be consulted about; most online groups are structured in a way that relies much more on the low cost of leaving the group and finding another one to act as a balance for the group owner’s considerable power, which makes the assumption that the owner’s power should be supported a reasonable one in most cases. (Do you also object to making add-on modules for PhP forums available for forum owners to use with no oversight?)
I would agree that, in general, programmers (and anyone involved in a project) should make sure that there’s a balance of power, or that someone is considering the moral implications of the project, or both. In this class of cases (management decisions affecting free, open online groups), I believe that the presence of the former is sufficient. In many of the situations I program for, it’s not, and I do make a point of considering the implications of any spec I implement—both because it’s part of my job description, and because it’s a correct thing to do.
Are we still in disagreement?
Indeed, I think that’s the sticking point. Perhaps it would be okay to sometimes offload the moral analysis of a project to a professional who explicitly is doing that (like your company’s ethicist, or a manager who has certified that he’s done some standard analysis) but it’s never okay to simply assume it’s been done.
You give advice that doesn’t apply in the particular case, and rarely in general.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Do you think that in general, it’s not appropriate for programmers to consider the wider impacts of the code they write?
It is rarely important from the moral standpoint, since most things that programmers write (or things that most programmers write) don’t have knowable moral impact. On the other hand, being aware of the wider context may improve quality of the result.
Isn’t “improving quality” a value for a good computer professional?
I disagree, but I don’t have data on the sorts of things most programmers write. In my experience, computer programs impact the lives of people (or why would you write them?) and therefore almost universally should be considered from the moral standpoint.
I do associate primarily with programmers in the ‘hot topic’ fields for computer ethics—web surveys, data mining, military applications—so that may skew my perceptions. It’s significantly easier to see the connection between ethics and one’s work when one is working on the system a robotic soldier uses to determine how much damage it’s allowed to cause to a nearby hospital.
But I would argue that this blog is either in that category or not performing its function. Eliezer argued that it was worth his time to work on this place because it contributed to his (and the SIAI’s) mission that will change the shape of the future of humanity. If that’s true, even minor changes here can be expected to have more of a ‘moral impact’ than most things, military robots included.
This post imported from Overcoming Bias misses some spaces around formatting, possibly an importing bug.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
This is a numbered list item. In the text box, it wasn’t 4 spaces, followed by “1.”, followed by the rest of the text. If this line is longer than your browser window is wide, it will wrap.
If you want to nest lists, then you need to indent the second list item.
First level
This is a numbered list item. In the text box, it was 3 spaces, followed by “1.”, followed by the rest of the text. If this line is longer than your browser window is wide, it will wrap.
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.
Nice
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?
This thing is confusing!
They should show up in the liked and disliked pages of your user profile. If they don’t, then there is a bug!
(The ‘tabs’ will show up if the user, like yourself, has the option selected).
It only says “There doesn’t seem to be anything here” to me. (Thanks, though—I hadn’t even noticed those tabs before. The tab bar could be made more obvious, it kind of fades into the layout now.)
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.
This is a known issue to fix. Issue 29.
Also, drafts show both in the “drafts” and the “submitted” lists.
They currently don’t add to Karma, they are just counted on the right.
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...
I’ve applied a fix for this today. The links should now be valid.
Noted this in Issue 104.
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.
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...
Select the ‘hacked’ text.
Copy to clipboard.
Click on the adjacent link to rot13.com.
Paste ‘hacked’ text into box.
Click cypher.
Enlightenment!
Welcome to LW! Have a point, for attempting to be useful.
No indent
Maybe there should be a sandbox?
Use your own old comments, then revert.
Yes, there should be a sandbox. Here is someone else’s sandbox. It probably isn’t perfectly compatible.
What’s wrong with the edit button?
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.
There is a problem with plugin on the Wiki: see this page for example. The error message is:
And today, pressing “edit” doesn’t work (“page not found”).
Edit: (On the wiki articles—see the parent comment).
Works for me. But something I have noticed is that now and then a page from LW will be slightly corrupted in one of the links, and I see a fragment of raw HTML. Clicking on such links can go wrong. Reloading usually gets a clean page.
Just tried “edit” on this comment—no problem.
“Edit” on postings also works.
I’ve noticed this as well. For reference, I’m using the latest Google Chrome on Windows XP.
Sorry for the confusion—I was talking about the wiki.
This URL causes an error: http://lesswrong.com/user/G%C3%BCnther_Greindl/
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.
This comment or one in its thread might be relevant, as they aren’t directly viewable either:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/13k/missing_the_trees_for_the_forest/z1g?context=1#z1g
Also, my ‘inbox’ isn’t working, and I had a post on that thread.
I’m wondering if it’s possible for a single comment to break these features.
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
For those who don’t get this one right away, if you check your user page, you see links to ‘liked’ and ‘disliked’ as categories of posts that you voted up or down. Since this doesn’t seem to quite match the semantics of voting, the names of the categories on the user pages should be changed.
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.
awesome, thanks =)
I disappeared because I banned my “anti-rationality quotes” post. Today I found out how to unban it and then hide it; but my name didn’t reappear on the list.
ciphergoth is still missing, and 1 other person.
Thanks for noticing. :)
Ahh that’s why there are people missing. When the site first went live and before it was announced someone found it, created an account with a questionable username and posted an article of little relevance. A hasty fix was put in place to exclude anyone from the Top Contributors list that had a banned article. Now that the community is much bigger this fix can probably be reversed, which would see the missing people re-appear.
Are you sure? I don’t have any banned articles, but I’ve also been missing from the list for a while.
You have banned comments.
Hmm interesting observation. Not sure why that’s happening. Raised an issue to investigate.
It got worse. Today I see only 7 people in the list, missing more of those who were there before.
Opened a new issue, since the old issue was closed without a fix, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to reopen it. (PhilGoetz’s karma is quite close to AnnaSalamon’s, but he still doesn’t appear on the list, three days later.)
We’ve just deployed a change that now caches all the sidebar elements both on the server and on the client. As a result its quite feasible that the top contributors may be a little out of sync with user profile page. Its cached for an hour so changes will only appear after an hour.
I’m getting no data in the sidebar except for in the OB feed.
That is, I see all the headers—Recent Comments, Recent Posts, etc. but nothing underneath them.
ETA: That was in Firefox under Linux. Safari under Mac OS is doing fine.
We tested the change in Firefox for Linux (3 on Ubuntu 9.04). What version are you using? Do you have JavaScript turned off or anything like that?
I’m back on the computer with which I originally saw the error, and everything looks fine—sorry for the false alarm.
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).
Raised issue 159 for the first one and issue 160 for the second. In regard to the latter, this behaviour is due to limitations in the current implementation the would require significant rework to fix, which is why it was initially deferred.
“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.
What bookmark widget?
The one to the lower-left of the article text, with “BOOKMARK” text on it.
Fair comments. I’ve raised an issue to revisit its use and location.
Agreed. It’s badly-designed, buggy, and would probably be annoying even if it worked perfectly.
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?
Just a grab for attention? That would be annoying for the users, bad interface design decision.
What did you mean here?
In what way would it be annoying? How is it bad interface design?
I mean that if the options are the same as they are currently, +1, 0 and −1, then the only difference that requiring to vote when commenting introduces is mandating a “click” on one of the voting options. Since you can always choose “0″, the same as ignoring the voting, there is no functional difference, only requirement for the additional “click”. This may bring the requirement to think about voting to user’s attention, but this is a one more mandatory click in the course of using the interface, inability for the users to avoid the click, loss of control. Users hate losing control.
I would not say that it is a priori a bad thing to complicate a user interface in order to guide users to a particular sort of behavior. Note the effects of defaults and compare Cass Sunstein’s ‘Nudge’.
Nonetheless, I completely agree with you that this is a bad design decision.
This only applies to the optional features, where you need to discourage the users from doing something usually bad, so that they’ll only resort to that if they know that they do need to use the dangerous feature. In our case, the discussed feature wasn’t optional.
I agree. I think it’s terrible whenever I see a comment that has sparked a large discussion but has a low (or even negative!) score. Either people are feeding the trolls, or folks are not upvoting a comment that clearly did its job.
EDIT: I disagree about needing to click another button in order to comment—voting is separate from commenting.
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.
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.
This should go away when the free self-vote point is disabled.
On the bottom of the main page, the ‘Next’ link leads to older posts, and the ‘Prev’ link leads to newer posts. While this functionality is found on other similar sites, I think it should be rethought as it may be unnecessarily confusing. Perhaps ‘Older’ and ‘Newer’?
The ‘Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features’ page appears to be missing—i can see it when looking at this particular comment (parent) but both the link at the bottom and any other links to the post I find don’t work.
Yes this was a bug that occurred when the thread reached 200 comments, which is the default cut off. I’ve just deployed a fix for it.
thanks, that was fucked up.
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.
Not working for me either.
I think the algorithm for these sorts needs to be tuned. They are set for Reddit which I believe sees more activity in a shorter amount of time. The rate of falloff for ‘popularity’ needs to be reduced.
Popular and Top aren’t working well. I’m not sure what the difference is supposed to be, but neither of them had the articles I wanted to send to someone—the ones with the most points.
‘Top’ now defaults to ‘All time’, instead of ‘Today’
Top’s timespan is defaulting to “Today” again, apparently. It should appear at right.
It shouldn’t default to “Today”. It ends up looking like the main page. Is this a known bug?
The editor helpfully relativizes LessWrong URLs (even if I enter it as an absolute URL) and then the relativized URL, though it works from the front page, fails from the sub-page itself. It is not possible to not relativize it!
I.e., try clicking the “Followup to” from within the article (not the front page).
This behaviour is something that we can configure in the editor. I’ve raised an issue for it.
Eliezer. We’ve changed the editor configuration to not generate relative paths. It will still generate ones relative to the site root though, which is desired behaviour. E.g. If you paste a link to http://lesswrong.com/lw/5/issues_bugs_and_requested_features/78 it will save it as /lw/5/issues_bugs_and_requested_features/78 which will work no matter where you are on the site.
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 :).
There’s plenty to improve about the registration page. I’ve logged an issue for this particular suggestion.
Make it easier to see comment threads. It is hard to tell which comments belong to what thread.
They do get a bit tricky when nested deeply. I’ve added an issue to track your request.
The site is unusable on mobile browsers. I know that web standards and accessibility were not major concerns for the site’s developers, but Lw being viewable on my phone would be a major benefit.
This made me realize that if someone is having a problem posting—not just a problem with their account, but a general inability to post—there’s no way for them to tell you.
I had a red envelope, but when I clicked on it there were no new messages. Does that just mean someone sent one or posted one and then deleted it?
Also, is there an email notification system? I didn’t see one in Preferences.
Following up on a comment by byrnema:
We already can—I’ve just done that.
You might object that the process to do so is cumbersome. I quite agree. On the other hand, the Law of Unintended Consequences applies whenever you think “I wish...”. It is always wise, when considering a new software feature, to think of the potential downsides.
I can think of at least one: to some, moving a thread could turn into a “weapon” to be used against comments they would prefer to make less visible. Moving threads at a buttn press would be a power, and power tends to corrupt.
You need to make the reference point in both directions, I think—in other words, to follow up that comment with a pointer here.
That’s what I mean by “cumbersome”. :)
Could you use a distributed revision control system directly as a discussion board?
So I pull from a whole bunch of people who I think are worth reading, but I get everyone they pull from, so you can join if anyone invites you and if everyone stops pulling from you, you are dropped. I can edit comments, but everyone gets the history.
Mercurial with the GPG extension might suffice. You wouldn’t have the software enforce anything, you’d rely on the audit trail to catch people after the fact.
You could certainly do that, but having more layers of software take care of things is extremely helpful.
In fact, these days there are several wikis that use DVCSs as the backing store, and support offline editing and merging.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/z0/the_pascals_wager_fallacy_fallacy/
This post imported from Overcoming Bias is marked “deleted” and doesn’t have author’s name.
This post imported from Overcoming Bias has an encoding problem in a link to Loeb’s theorem post.
The post Interpersonal Entanglement imported from Overcoming Bias has formatting issues, e.g. italized text has no spaces around it.
(Original report, by kpreid.)
Good Idealistic Books are Rare has the same issue.
Edits 1-2: And Interpersonal Entanglement. I don’t remember it having it when I was looking at it a few days ago, but this post suggests that I’m wrong.
The comments page is badly broken at the moment.
For some funny reason this comment also failed to show up in the Recent Comments box.
MatthewB doesn’t have a user page (“The page you requested does not exist”); example comment of his: here.
I’ve noticed this with at least one other person, too, but can’t recall who.
Copying quoted text probably shouldn’t produce text with extra spaces in front. (see here and the comments) This behavior depends on the browser, but it is probably possible for the html to make it uniformly good.
Any chance a feature could be added so that an account’s display name can be changed (without changing the account name, email, etc.)?
If you try to write a comment with a numbered list, like so:
zero
one
two
Then the points are silently renumbered to “1. 2. 3.”, which will mess you up if you refer to the points by number—“point 0″, “point 1”.
markdown is standard. Use backslashes \ if you want different behavior.
but the help screen should have a link to daringfireball.
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)
I was just about to mention the same thing. It’s not enough for me to notice actively but enough to make me sick to my stomach.
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.
Oh, so completely seconded. Put ’em right under the title where we can see them!
“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.
I have this problem occasionally. Maybe 5% of the time in the past week. I didn’t notice it back in June. But I don’t have a reproducible example (eg, if I open it in a new browser, it fixes). What happens is that the parent of the yellow entry has a parent button that provides the right anchor but the wrong page; instead it links back to the same page. I haven’t remembered to look at the source of the page to see if it’s a relative link.
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 :)
For those that have been keeping an eye on the new wiki you may have noticed a couple of things change recently.
First anonymous editing has been disabled, so you have to login to the wiki in order to contribute.
Second the URLs are in wikipedia style format, so articles can be accessed like http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Utilon instead of http://wiki.lesswrong.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Utilon (the second form still works of course)
Who is going to end up as an admin on the wiki? PeerInfinity and I have been most involved so far. For example, who should I bug to move this code into the corresponding page of the wiki?
Hi badger,
I see that you are BJR on the wikia wiki. I will send you a separate message.
As for the page you created on the wikia wiki after the migration was done, you can simply make the same edit to the new wiki and create it there. Since there are two wikis they can diverge (see my other message to you).
Hi badger,
What is your username on the wikia wiki?
How about a basic Users’ Guide, and include a link to it right in the top links bar?
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
We need to run a periodic process on the server to make rising work. I’ve raised an issue to address this.
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.
Yes it seems this is something that needs to be brought back, there is an issue for this that I raised a while back.
I can’t see this post on either the recent posts or what’s new lists anymore.
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.
So, you think it would be okay to make a post about it as long as I was on the right side of the argument?
I wasn’t commenting on whether it was OK to make a post about it, but on Eliezer’s description of it as “9/11 truthism”. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
For what it’s worth, I think the question “how should one evaluate a big messy pile of ambiguous alleged evidence for something?” is a reasonable one, and any number of Things Widely Considered Irrational might make interesting test cases—“9/11 truthism”, ghosts, healing miracles, whatever. But:
Your post clearly gave Eliezer (and also me, for what it’s worth, though I was more inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt) the impression that it was preaching masquerading as a useful case study.
I think the most reliable way to avoid giving that impression is to take steps to make what you write not useful as preaching. (For instance: disclaimers along the lines of “This is the opinion of a tiny minority only, and I happen to be one of them. Discount as you see fit.”)
There are some topics (of which this may be one; I don’t know, but maybe Eliezer does) whose discussion consistently generates more heat than light. It might be entirely reasonable to do away with posts on such topics unless they have very strong counterbalancing virtues.
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?
As a general rule, all of your pet hobbyhorses are banned. Got any other questions?
No, I guess that covers it. When you’re ready to debate anything more difficult than religion’s corpse, let me know.
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.
Admins can edit any post.
http://lesswrong.com/user/Annoyance is currently reported as having a karma of 2^32 + 437
This happens whenever someone’s karma goes negative.
That is very odd as Annoyance has had relatively high karma since he started posting.
Annoyance makes a lot of comments, we haven’t yet fixed the bug where every comment automatically adds karma, and LW users seem reluctant to downvote. In any case Annoyance’s karma shows as 375 to me.
Based on my score, it looks like it’s been fixed now, but based on JerryL’s score it looks like people still have the karma gained while the bug was in place. (I’m posting this because it took me a while to figure out what was going on.)
The karma underflow bug should have been fixed now.
Drafts seem to show up on the recent posts list, when they aren’t finished work yet.
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.
- 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.
- 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//submitted/, /liked/, /disliked/, /hidden/ and /drafts/.
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?
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.
1st page of comments accessible again, and all 4 of the above comments are on that page. Go figure.
Broke again, no comments made since last worked.… …Working again, again no comments made.
Error’s back. Odd.
Happened both at home and work, happens for a while, no apparent link between occurrences, logging out doesn’t fix it.
We deployed a fix yesterday that addresses this problem. The bug was influenced by the caching that is employed, which is why it happens sometimes but not others.
I can confirm this is fixed for all pages of mine that were broken. Thank you :)
I’ve been seeing that error while logged-in periodically as well. But I can’t seem to reproduce it reliably, so I haven’t reported it.
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:
there’s no visual separation between comments
there’s no separate listing for private messages versus comments, so they get lost in the mess.
Is there a way to see just messages, not comment responses?
Thanks! Where is that linked from?
It isn’t—I figured it out by looking at the URL for the same feature on reddit.com.
Time to file a bug...
update: http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=149
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!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system%29
You can use %29 ASCII code for the closing bracket instead of the bracket itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system\))
You can also escape special symbols with a backslash \, so you may replace the ) with \). This is also useful for preventing the markup from, for example *italicizing* the words enclosed in * (source code: \\italicizing\*).
That doesn’t seem to work.
EDIT: Ah, I see - the links deliberately have the encoded bits spelled out in them. I had thought it was unintentional.
Then you are doing something wrong, try again. Ask specific questions/describe what you are doing. I explained as well as looks necessary.
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.
Clicking on the title ‘Recent Posts:’ in the right-hand tab takes you to a full list of them.
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: Self_Deception” should link to a search on the Self_Deception 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.
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.
Headings seem to be having formatting issues. I’ll see if I can reproduce them here.
###Heading 1
#heading 2 Paragraph of text
I’ve raised an issue to fix this #120
This problem has been fixed and Issue #120 resolved.
This looks fine how it is. However “Heading 1” is a h3 tag while “Heading 2″ is a h1.
Could someone have a look at at least the h1 so that I don’t have to get ‘creative’ when I’m attempting to format?
#Heading 1
##Heading 2
###Heading 3
####Heading 4
The main problem seems to be that h2 doesn’t put a line break.
I’d rather disable heading in the comments altogether...
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!
I’ve raised an issue for this and fixed your account #121
While this may be obvious, I feel that I should point out that there may be an overflow error in tracking Karma using an unsigned int.
Yes it seems like it but I’m not sure why its happening. Python doesn’t have an unsigned data type. I suspect its the cache causing it as reloading the user’s account from database corrects it.
I currently see his score as 4 billion again, and the same goes for Marshall. At the same time, “top contributors” doesn’t put users with underflown karma on top, so it must be a problem with representation.
No, I’m sure the Top Contributors sidebar just leaves off anyone with karma higher than Eliezer’s.
See? This is why we need a ‘funny’ button. Slashdot really had the right system all along.
That’s why I’m not on there.
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.
I disagree. If someone is posting lots of comments, they’re either relevant and useful or they’re not. If they’re relevant and useful comments, then they should be rewarded automatically. If they’re not, then someone will notice them ‘gaming the system’ and downvote the irrelevant comments.
If they’re relevant and useful comments, then they should be rewarded by getting upmodded.
Every comment/post you make is an opportunity for the community to subtract karma from you if they feel you are wasting their time.
But there is a clear bias towards not voting if the comment is neutral, as opposed to when it’s really good or obviously bad. The cost of wasting anyone’s time is subtle and not obvious in any single comment, hurting only in volume. We shouldn’t create any incentive for additional waste of breath to fill the comment stream.
I agree. I would like some sort of “karma” score that tells me the average quality of work as well as a score indicating the total contribution.
An “average quality” type score would be more relevant in determining the expected quality of a comment before spending the time to read it.
I’d’ve thought so too a priori, but Hacker News tried something like this, and people started worrying that e.g. commenting on old posts would drag their average down.
I guess a really good karma system would need a better theoretical foundation, and tweaking outside of that is a very inefficient activity. Possibly one of these is already described in the academic literature. Maybe one of the qualified members of our community could contribute the effort towards finding one or research it from the start.
What if we had a score for the average of a person’s best 20%? There’d still be a bit of penalty for commenting on an old thread, or posting something unpopular, but it’d be smaller.
Creating a complex system of rewards is a standard management problem, leading to unhealthy amount of attention turned towards gaming the system. In this tradeoff, a simple inaccurate system may be better than a supposedly more accurate, but complex and theoretically unsound one.
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.
Comments that are in reply to another comment have a parent link that you can click to get some context. A comment at the top level is assumed to be in the context of the post, which is shown. However you aren’t the first one to suggest that the whole thread be shown as the default view for a comment permalink. It will be considered.
Better than showing the whole thread would be showing the whole post with all threads, but automatically jumping to the comment’s location in the list of all threads.
OK. A little bug with “parent” link: it doesn’t have bookmark part if parent comment is not presently on the current page. For example, if I open this page, the Parent link leads to this page, without focusing on specific comment. However, when I click on the same Parent link of the child comment on the Parent page, the link is now this one, with bookmark to the parent comment.
Ahh the anchor is missing. I’ll note it as a bug. #116
Hi Eliezer, I had fun at the 2008 summit and the following OB afterdinner. The one issue I had that seems shared with Reddit is that there are no guidelines for password entry on sign-up. I put in a one-character password and it just said “invalid”.
Valid point, I’ve raised an issue to make the message and requirements clearer. FWIW the requirements are simply that it be between 3 and 20 characters.
Thanks! I’ll look up the process to perhaps raise the issues myself.
Having some sort of acknowledgment when I fail to log in properly might be nice.
Do you have any more specific details? You should receive messages when passwords are incorrect, etc. If not then I will need to look into it.
The link and comment score thresholds in the Preferences menu give the impression that by leaving them blank, all articles and comments will be shown regardless of their score.
If left blank, the preferences can’t seem to be saved, and they appear to revert to zero: nothing with a score lower than zero shows.
I’m not having this problem—I set them to blank and saved successfully, and can see negative-score comments.
I tried it again and it worked. Ensuring that the cursor wasn’t active in the blanks might have been the cause.
The “Help” link below the Comments box looks like a hyperlink, but behaves oddly when “open in new tab” is done to it. It should maybe look like a button, or otherwise have a usability hint that it’s not behaving like a hyperlink.
Added as Issue 110.
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.
The .net and .org domains should redirect to .com as its the only one that will work as you have experienced. I have raised an issue for this and emailed our sys admin.
.org and .net now redirect to .com.
Using Firefox 2, I have similar issues. The .com domain appears to be working fine, but I’m having problems with the .org domain. The same problem is also present in IE6. In IE with a screen resolution of 1024x768, the sidebar also gets pushed down below the posts and comments.
No spaces or periods in usernames? Was that really necessary? Did Silas put you up to this?
Also, [i]italics[/i] would be nice.
italics is done with asterisks (*). See the help link on the bottom right of the comment text area.
You have italics :-)
There’s a “help” link right below the comments box to the right—LW uses Markdown, apparently.
… and I can’t see any reason we shouldn’t support basic HTML either, so we’ll make Z_M’s first comment (above) do what he meant (italics == italics == italics).
(winces)
winces *
At 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong, the list is split into two lists numbered 1-5 and 1-32.
Currently, when a post is deleted, the comments get deleted as well, i.e. they are not listed on the Overview page for the author. I think this shouldn’t work this way, the author shouldn’t have the power to erase the content contributed by other people.
Is that true? I don’t know about any recently deleted posts, so I can’t check new behavior, but here is an old deleted post. Yvain’s comment is visible on his overview.
Probably applies to new posts (new deletion actions) only. It happened with my comment in a recently deleted post (a draft to this one); I can’t find links to any entity related to that draft now. The old system was confusing in that people could continue a discussion even after the post was deleted, and its text was still accessible if you knew the link, but not author’s name. The new behavior is possibly a result of an attempt to deal with that issue.
I’ve mentioned something like this before, but I think a monthly ‘Sequence Topics’ thread would be a good place for new users to talk about all the background topics. It would be especially convenient to have such threads automatically and visibly linked from the Sequence pages.
(LucasSloan and inklesspen also made recent suggestions along these lines.)
I’m strongly pro-necropost, so I’m not sure I agree. Can’t people just watch their inboxes for new posts in their threads, and add notes to the wiki and the Sequence posts saying “Asking questions is strongly encouraged, regardless of the thread’s age”? New threads would put an extra step between encountering the question and asking it.
On the other hand, that could contribute to the “I should RTFT...wait, 2000 comments? Forget it” failure mode, so I don’t know. (Although the fact that we have threading at least helps.)
[Comment edited 4 times.]
I tried to save a draft using Opera; it zipped up on the New page rather than ending in a drafts area. It was easy to delete, but I’d sure like to save a draft and view it. Maybe Firefox will be friendlier....
Just so you know, if you save a draft to “Drafts for JRMayne”, it appears to you (but no one else) as if it were live. To check if the post is really live, log out—if it’s in your drafts, you won’t be able to see it once you log out.
It’s quite annoying—one time I thought I was initiating an Open Thread, but no one else could see it. Another time I gave myself a good scare thinking I had made an incomplete post available to everyone.
Something’s wrong with encoding in the references section of this post moved from Overcoming Bias.
More problems with encoding: http://lesswrong.com/lw/rd/passing_the_recursive_buck/
See umlaut in “Godel, Escher, Bach” at the beginning.
There should be a way to undelete articles, or no way to delete them: currently, deleted articles are still visible from the feed, and it’s possible to comment on them, but otherwise they are in limbo: they are not on the sidebar or any other list of articles, and there is no way to restore them.
For the last several days, both overcomingbias and lesswrong wiki (but not lesswrong blog) simultaneously experience some downtime and/or extremely slow responses. The largest outage a few days ago lasted for several hours. Yet another outage started a few minutes ago.
The new favicon doesn’t really stand out well—it blends into the background of my tabs. Obviously this isn’t a universal issue, but I’m just using standard themes. A white (or other color) background might fix this without sacrificing design.
It should be simpler, letters can be bolder, and there is no point trying to fit the word “wiki” in a favicon, a bar on the same place would serve the same role, but easier to distinguish.
And to finally re-post from the Open Thread:
It should be possible to tag posts (especially articles, possibly comments) by language, and let users pick what languages they want to see. The interface wouldn’t necessarily have to be translated; it would just be nice to have some support for multilingualism.
The links from this post moved from OB to other OB posts weren’t converted to LessWrong links, they still point to Overcoming Bias (which promptly redirects back here).
Some comments seem to be missing from some posts moved from Overcoming Bias. For example this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Agree+with+Denis.+It+seems+rather+objectionable+to+describle+such+behaviour+as+irrational.%22
Here’s the search result as of now, in case Google updates its index:
Overcoming Bias: The Allais Paradox Agree with Denis. It seems rather objectionable to describle such behaviour as irrational. Humans may well not trust the experimenter to present the facts … www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/allais-paradox.html?cid=6a00d8341c6a2c53ef0115706bcf8b970b
Yes, we’re working on this. The missing comments were omitted from the Type Pad export. It has been raised with TypePad.
The missing comment’s have been scraped off the old OB site and should all now be present,
The comments on the old OB articles that have been imported appear to be by LW usernames that were created just for that purpose. Any chance of ‘claiming’ those? (my technical spider-sense says no)
We did our best to try to link up OB names with Less Wrong user names. However as there were many hundreds of names this had be done automatically. For a match to be made the name on OB and username on LW had to match, as did the email address on both sides.
If you supplied an email address on OB then that will have been imported and you can claim the account by following the forgotten password process for the account. Assuming it has your email address you will be sent an email and be able to reset the password.
Thanks for all your work on the site!
My username on OB was slightly different. Is there any way to merge those comments into this account after the fact? If not, no worries.
I don’t have any particular interest in claiming the other account if merging isn’t possible.
The picture wasn’t inlined in this post moved from OB.
ETA: See also this report.
This should be fixed now.
Three issues:
First, as others have mentioned, posting to drafts seems to actually post the article publicly. Is that just how it shows for the individual user, causing it to appear in “new” only for them but not for anyone else, or is that a bug with LW?
Second, I set some text as bold in a posting, it displayed as bold in the article editor… But in the actual posting… it didn’t.
Third: Google Chrome (the browser I’m currently using) has a built in spellcheck that seems to work in text entry boxes, including those for entering comments on LW. But in the article editor, it seems to not operate. I’m not sure if the problem is with Chrome or LW, but I thought I’d mention this issue at least.
New shows all categories you can see including your drafts, others can’t see your drafts. See the FAQ
This is an issue specific to browsers that use WebKit, namely safari and chrome. Unfortunately we can’t do anything about this, though it appears to be fixed in the latest WebKit (used by safari 4 beta)
I made a change such that where possible the browser spell check will be on. Firefox and safari appear to work and provide support. IE6,7,8, chrome and opera don’t.
When I click on links here, the first time my browser usually gives a popup saying that I am trying to open a file of type application/octet stream and asks me what program I want to use to download the file. The second time I try the same link it works fine.
I found some threads on the Firefox help forum about it, and they say the problem is with the server. Any way you can get this fixed? Is anyone else having this problem?
I’d like to try and replicate this.
Can you provide some more info so I can make it fail. What OS, version of Firefox? Which links? Recent posts on the sidebar or in one of the listing pages like promoted or new? Can you still cause this to happen and what are the steps you follow to do so?
Thanks :)
Firefox 3.0.9, Windows XP Home Edition.
I don’t cause it to happen, I just click on any link leading to Less Wrong (for example, a recent post in the sidebar, the logo on top, my red inbox icon). This generates the problem, but when I try the same thing again, the page loads fine. The only problem is having to click on each link twice with a popup in the middle to go anywhere. This happened occasionally before, but it’s been getting worse in the past week and now happens ~90% of the time I click on a link here. It doesn’t happen on any other website, including Reddit.
If you want I can give you a screenshot.
Thanks for the more detailed description. I’ve no doubt that it is rather annoying so lets see if we can try and stop this from happening.
This could be an issue on either the client or the server. It sounds like the content type which should be text/html and the content encoding which should be gzip is getting mismatched between the client and the server.
Whilst I have no doubt that this issue is occurring, I have not been able to replicate it on firefox 3.0.9 on windows or linux.
The server appears to be sending the correct headers.
Unless there are other people also experiencing this issue then I suspect it may be an issue with this specific installation of firefox.
I would like to suggest removing firefox and installing the latest version which is 3.0.10. This may be a bit annoying and you may have to customize firefox again but it’s a good opportunity to upgrade and may resolve the issue.
If you do upgrade then please let me know how you go and whether you are still experiencing the issue.
Inbox links!
Massive thanks to whoever coded in a link to my inbox just under my karma score. I haven’t gotten a comment reply since this appeared, so I can’t tell whether it gives notification—would anyone care to test it?
It should work fine—I tested it heaps :)
Maybe this is a dumb question, but is there any reason I’m suddenly unable to edit my comments? I’ve been typing quickly tonight and have been making an annoyingly high number of typos.
Apologies to anyone I’ve annoyed with them btw.
There’s no reason I can think of why you wouldn’t be able to edit your comments. What exactly is happening?
Huh, it looks fine now. What I might have been doing was trying to edit the comments through the recent comments page and my own comments page– which I guess you can’t do. Sorry.
Raised an issue to track this.
Appears that the edit is successful but sometimes pressing refresh will show the old text before the edit and hence it looks like the changes have been lost. In fact they are there and pressing refresh enough will show the new edited content.
I’m having problems saving a post in drafts, it keeps on losing the text. Is this just me?
More details please?
It turned out to be a transitory bug, it all seems to be working now.
What happened was when I saved a draft of a post the text was not saved, the title and tags were saved. I deleted the empty posts, because I didn’t want them, and I had made a few. I probably shouldn’t have done in terms of bug tracking. They all had the title programmatic prediction market, if that helps you track down the sql requests.
I also noticed that there was no most controversial posts or top posts, when I clicked on them.
I’m wondering whether it was some interaction with noscript a javascript blocker I have, but I haven’t changed the settings recently.
When viewing a post with styles off, the comment headers are shown twice. Example:
badger22 April 2009 05:14:21PM 2 points [+] (0 children)
badger22 April 2009 05:14:21PM 2 points [-]
Also, you’ll notice a lot of cruft at the bottom of the page, that is presumably hidden by styles.
There is lots of content that is managed with styles to allow the dynamic aspects of the site. CSS is a required browser feature of the site.
Surely this is not strictly necessary, and against the principles of progressive enhancement? What about accessibility issues?
The behaviour was all inherited from the initial Reddit codebase. It just isn’t feasible to rip out and re-implement all the javascript dependant parts of the site that are already there and working.
I don’t see a way to send my new article to the mods. When I’m done editing in my drafts folder, then what?
We made a recent change such that when you are creating or editing an article the “post to” selection always shows LessWrong. In the case that you don’t yet have enough karma to post to LessWrong then it will be grayed out and have a message next to it explaining why.
Old versions of IE unfortunately don’t honor the grayed out option. In this case you can select LessWrong but submitting will inform you that you can’t yet submit to the LessWrong category (of course you can always save to your drafts).
To publish an article, you need to have at least 20 points of Karma. Granted, this rule should be placed somewhere visible to the newcomers. It doesn’t seem to be on the About page.
In Chrome v. 2.0.172.6, any text typed into the comment box is hidden. It will momentarily appear if highlighted, but otherwise is invisible. The submit button also looks like a gray box without text.
Surely that’s a bug for the Chrome folks, not Less Wrong. It works fine in the stable release of Chrome.
We’ll keep an eye on this. We won’t be chasing fixes for developer releases but if the problem persists it will be fixed.
I assumed it was something with the codebase here because one day it was working fine, and the next it wasn’t, without any changes to my browser. shrug
For whatever reason, I am able to access an overview of anybody else’s profile, but cannot bring up my own. I have been unable to do so for about a week. I was previously able to do so, so I don’t believe it is my browser (I also cleared the cache, logged out and back in, etc.)
Any assistance would be appreciated.
The bug appears to be fixed. Thanks!
very minor bug: when a comment is submitted, the currently viewed page is updated adding that comment, but the count of comments on that page is not. (Thus this error is only visible to the person submitting the comment and only ephemerally.)
Raised issue #157 to track this.
I can’t find an RSS feed.
You can find the link on the front page (RSS link).
The article pages do seem to lack the usual link on the right.
The “indent” feature on the article writer is spotty. Sometimes it works as advertised, sometimes it doesn’t. For example, I indented the quote on the top of my post “How to Not Lose an Argument” , it appeared indented in the editor when I was writing it, and when I click on “edit”, it continues to appear indented on the editor. But it’s doesn’t get indented on the post itself.
The HTML tag attribute disappears in the published version, even though the code is produced by the buttons in the site’s editor. We have
written by the button in editor, but it becomes just
in the published version.
Threads in the user page (so I can see replies and respond).
See who voted.
Force “make my votes public” to true.
Should a downvote require an explanation?
Threads in the user page seem cool.
I like anonymous comment voting.
I don’t see any need to force ‘make my votes public’
Downvotes should definitely not require explanations. Anyone with time for that should be doing something more important.
I strongly dislike anonymous voting, because this is a different context than Reddit—a rationalist ought to be prepared to defend their judgments. Similar reason why I don’t like drive-by downvotes.
The principle is sound, but what about the time cost? I downvote maybe two or three comments a day, more if it’s a particularly bad day. I’m not prepared to write an essay explaining exactly was wrong with each of them, especially if the original commenter wasn’t prepared to take three seconds to write a halfway decent response.
Also, we are not immune to status effects. If I wanted to downvote one of Eliezer’s comments, I would feel really awkward having to explain to him why I was doing so and why I thought he wasn’t contributing productively to the conversation. But I’d do it to some random newbie without a second thought. It’s probably a bad idea to implement policies that allow higher status people to gain even more karma even more quickly.
By the way, has anyone else made a link between this community’s unhealthy obsession with karma and prediction markets? I recently read some articles claiming that prediction markets with fake money did just as well as ones with real money, in contrast to what most economists predicted. The economists’ argument was “Who the heck cares about fake money when it’s a meaningless status symbol?” And meanwhile, here we are, having long debates about possible unfair karma allocation systems...
This sentence made me think of something completely different—both illustrate the attraction of pure meta means of truth-seeking, of being able to outperform messy object-level reasoning without having to do any of it—the “algorithmism” that Mencius Moldbug accuses Bayesianism of. Not that karma and prediction markets aren’t good ideas, of course.
Nick, thanks for the link—there are some interesting comments there.
I’ve been downvoted for no apparent reason at least twice since I registered. In both of these cases my comments were on-topic, grammatical, and contained entirely reasonable content. In such cases I think an explanation is clearly warranted.
Honestly, I don’t like this whole system of voting and karma. I have social anxiety and it frankly hurts my feelings to be downvoted (more so than it lifts my spirits to be upvoted). Does this mean I shouldn’t participate in a forum about rationality? I would like to think otherwise. I liked OB just fine (though even there, I tended to keep my comments few and far between for fear of perceived social consequences).
(Yes, I know it’s ironic that just a little while ago I publicly downvoted a top-level post. But I did provide an explanation. And this was after I’d seen the author diss modern music before without saying anything. And then somebody downvoted my comment. Revenge?)
What we actually need around these parts is more voting. Then the occasional downvotes for stupid reasons will wash out faster. Meanwhile, don’t sweat it.
“Then the occasional downvotes for stupid reasons will wash out faster.”
The frequent downvotes for stupid reasons, however, will accumulate much more rapidly.
Quality control is important. You can’t make things better just by doing stuff faster than before, more than before, not least because there are usually quality tradeoffs with speed and quantity.
Meh. You said yourself that someone behaving irrationally has unpredictable behavior. So downvotes for stupid reasons are just noise, and should in large numbers be countered by either upvotes for stupid reasons, or other comments’ downvotes for stupid reasons. If there is still a considerable amount of voting for good reasons, it should usually show through the noise.
This analysis obviously assumes that there isn’t a systemic bias in the mix, like “always upvote Eliezer” or “always downvote Marshall”.
“You said yourself that someone behaving irrationally has unpredictable behavior.”
No, I didn’t. Someone can be irrational, yet completely predictable and consistent. Go back and re-read what I said—you haven’t understood it.
“This analysis obviously assumes that there isn’t a systemic bias in the mix”
We’re dealing with human beings. There are ALWAYS systemic biases involved.
You’re right—re-reading, I meant to say “people behaving irrationally have collectively unpredictable behavior”, to which I assumed you would agree. I was extrapolating that from here:
I had also argued in the past that one could construct arguments that would convince most people since they’re probably irrational in predictable ways, and you disagreed.
I agree with komponisto somewhat, even though I’m a newbie around here. I think the danger of this putatively ‘democratically constructed’ body of discourse sliding off the precipice into becoming a mutual admiration society or worse are sufficient that there needs to be some discipline applied to dismissive actions. Therefore, some form of reporting on why one has been ‘disappeared’ might be in order. In the case of being downvoted out of existence, an automatic message stating this could be sent to one’s profile (attached to the draft) with minimal effort surely. Where a comment or reply has been specifically removed by an admin, surely it’s common courtesy to say so, and maybe even offer a reason and by implication the right of reply where a misunderstanding has occured (yes, it happens!).
(embarrassment) I admit that was me. I was kind of annoyed you were downvoting a whole top-level post you admitted was pretty interesting because the writer expressed a musical preference you didn’t agree with. And then you made a whole comment about how you were doing that. It just seemed needlessly confrontational. And I thought if I wrote a response saying that, I’d just be dragging the whole topic further from Phil’s reasonable point about utilitarianism, and onto a debate about modern music that I honestly know nothing about. I just cancelled the vote, since it seems there’s too much disagreement about what downvotes mean for me to go around enforcing my thoughts about it anyway. Sorry for any trouble that might have caused.
But yes, I’m starting to agree that this whole system is getting aggravating.
For comparison, I downvote maybe 30 or more comments some days. I’m very negative. Some things just litter the comment threads. So I do have a personal interest in not requiring explanations to downvote.
Thank you for performing this valuable service.
Yes, you’re much more negative than I.
(I feel a little guilty, because I’ve been up-voting practically every at-least-mediocre top-level post. My first top-level post got upvoted and that gave me the courage to write more of them. At this early point in the site it’s more important to encourage good writers to participate than to crack down on posts that aren’t perfect.)
I also tend to dislike anonymous votes and wouldn’t mind being asked to justify my own upvotes and downvotes.
Upvotes might deserve a little more relaxed regime. “Me too” is a valid rationalist response, and an upvote keeps it from being spelled out tediously.
Upvote = agree (so the original is the explanation)
Downvote = disagree (so the original is not a sufficient explanation)
I’m pretty sure ‘upvote’ is not supposed to mean ‘agree’, and ‘downvote’ is not supposed to mean ‘disagree’. Note the discussion earlier about possibly adding these options for voting. High-quality comments that you disagree with (or don’t) should be upvoted, and low-quality comments that you agree with (or don’t) should be downvoted.
Either way, a technical discussion about the quality of the comment is probably off-topic, and so not warranted. If someone says “shmoo” as a comment, I want to be able to just click “Vote down” and not have to write an explanation.
I interpret an upvote as “I want to see more comments / posts like this” and a downvote as saying the opposite. It really does seem like a separate agree/disagree button would be a good idea, but there are other LW improvements with higher priorities.
Ah, I see why I was getting the downvotes, it was cryptic for a bit. I meant “agree with the reasoning”. (And if you read it that way my comment probably makes more sense.) Sloppy of me. Oops.
My excuse is that to me “agree” and “agree with the logic” seem almost identical. If I’m disagreeing, it’s because I think the person has made a mistake somewhere. “Your reasoning is valid and I don’t agree” would mean.. what?
Since we’re not constraining ourselves to something like symbolic logic here, we should only be looking at good arguments on all sides that are not easily refuted. There should be good arguments that lead to interesting discussion involving conflicting arguments that are also good. For bonus points, there can be references or links to additional material, or the comment can even be well-written.
If the comment inspires a response at all, you should probably upvote it. If you want to respond and downvote it, you should probably either reconsider downvoting it, or consider that the comment was merely a troll, in which case you should downvote it and not respond.
Perhaps anonymous votes should have less weight, say 0.5 points or even 0.3 points compared to a ‘personalized’ vote which gives a full 1 point. This would keep the ‘cost’ of upvotes and downvotes equal while discouraging anonymous voting.
Youtube video embedding currently doesn’t work. I place < object >...</ object > html code in the article, but nothing gets displayed when the article is viewed in Firefox. Internet Explorer 6.0 crashes trying to display such page.
This can’t be a good thing. It seems like a link would be sufficient, and I don’t think we need post authors dealing with difficult-to-implement-correctly tags.
I daresay that many sites and blogs do use video embedding, it is considered to be a good thing by many people, so saying that it “can’t be a good thing” is unjustified.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘unjustified’ here. If you mean I didn’t provide a justification, you’re incorrect—I specified two good reasons. I could list more, but I didn’t think it was necessary.
Of course, that can’t be what you meant, since ‘it is considered to be a good thing by many people’ isn’t a reason to think that I didn’t provide a justification.
However, that means that you believe ‘it is considered to be a good thing by many people’ is sufficient reason to think that ‘saying that it “can’t be a good thing” is unjustified’. Are you really taking that position here? If many people consider x to be a good thing, there cannot be a justification for “x can’t be good”?
Reasons not to allow embedding:
it can break stuff. Post authors are not required to know how not to do this.
a link to a youtube video gives access to the same content
adding flash to the page increases the browser’s load and decreases the page’s accessibility, which is annoying when some people don’t care about the video.
embedding flash via the object tag is arguably not the preferred method (as opposed to, say, javascript (for instance with swfobject)) and isn’t backwards-compatible across browsers. (this relates to the accessibility concern)
the default embedding code from YouTube uses the ‘embed’ tag, which is not valid HTML or XHTML by any standard.
Do you need more reasons?
My karma appears to me as 4294967316.
Yeah, it looks like a few karmas are being displayed on the user page as (2^32)+karma. It seems to be associated with recent negative-karma contributions.
My guess is the algorithm that counts your karma for your page is different from the one that counts it for the top contributors list, and that it’s getting horribly confused if the running total in it’s head becomes negative at any point as it counts.
Oops… already spotted.Oops… already spotted.
At any time? Fascinating.
We love you.
Now it’s 4294967304.
In the absence of other contact information, there should perhaps be a way to send/receive personal messages. This would allow non-public comments regarding comments/articles (to point out typographical errors or make an off-topic suggestion, for example).
You can do this.
Click on the person you want to message
In the side bar there is a ‘Send Message’ button, click that then type up your message
Having said that. This feature was inherited from Reddit and hasn’t been fully integrated into the new design so I don’t think the recipient will actually be notified. They would have to know to check for new messages.
Yes, I noticed this feature yesterday but didn’t have access to this post to note that. It should definitely have an option for notification.
Although indented (not quoted, indented) text shows up fine in the editor, it does not show in the actual article. Perhaps the “p” tag is not cleared to show the style=”padding-left: 30px;” attribute—it shows up in the editor’s HTML, but not in the actual article.
We filter user submitted HTML to remove potentially unsafe content. style attributes are one of the things that gets removed because in IE you can embed javascript in them. I thought that all of the markup the editor was generating was permitted but it looks like this one case where that’s not true. I’ve raised an issue to fix it. #122
Potentially related: my italics are showing up fine in the editor, but not in the actual post. Markdown-style asterisks aren’t working either. I see italics in other people’s posts—how are they doing it?
Okay, now I can get the italics to work—by manually editing the HTML source, changing the editor’s tags to such or such. But the editor should really be fixed—or is it just my browser? I’m running Safari 3.2.1.
There’s definitely a problem with the editor—it shouldn’t be spitting out anything with style attributes, since they’re dropped due to an exploit in IE.
Link to the “About Less Wrong” page disappears after I log in.
There is an about link permanently in the top navigation bar now.
There’s another, smaller link at the bottom left of the screen. They probably decided non-newcomers wouldn’t need a big about link at the top.
Apparently I’m not a non-newcomer enough.
I sometimes get “The page you requested does not exist” when clicking on a comment title in user’s overview page.
This issue was already reported here.
Oops! blush There’s so many comments now I missed it.
Maybe post-beta we could start new, seperate posts for bugs and requests?
Maybe a separate sub-reddit for bug related topics, to group them all together, or a tag.
Reddit has a slick iPhone application, which may be portable. It’s based more on browsing websites, though. Something along the lines may be possible.
Design suggestion:
All the meta stuff associated with a comment, viz.
Posted by: Kaj_Sotala 02 March 2009 09:32:50AM 2 points Vote up | Vote down | Permalink | Parent | Report | Reply
takes up a lot of space and impedes readability of the discussion. Can all this stuff be made smaller and less prominent (maybe more like it is on Hacker News) and perhaps some of the links only be visible when you’re in the actual comment’s thread (like the “Flag” feature is on Hacker News)? (Also we don’t really need to know the exact second that a post is made.)
By the way, what does the star mean that sometimes appears after the commenting time? On this comment (to which I reply), I see “02 March 2009 03:18:52PM*”, and on the comment below I see “02 March 2009 05:57:13PM”, without the star.
I think it means the comment has been edited.
EDIT: This is a test of said hypothesis. SECOND EDIT: The experiment supports the hypothesis.
Nice gag. I wonder whether the children of today understand the scientific method better because they learn to use computers.
Also, time is that of original posting, not of the last modification.
A ‘last edited’ wouldn’t hurt. In fact, it seems more important than the original posting.
There is only a certain window of time (a few minutes, from memory) during which edits can be made, reducing the need for the extra complexity of implementing it.
Then again, maybe not. Hmm. Official word?
I second this request.
I third this request, especially since there seems to be no time limit on edits (I can still edit a comment made on Feb. 27th, more than one month ago).
It would hurt (a bit). Never underestimate the sophistication overhead: it adds up until you drown.
True enough. If the ‘last edited’ took the place of originally posted, with the asterix
I disagree. While the vote etc buttons might be redesigned in some way, I wouldn’t like it if any of this stuff was less prominent. Also, I like having complete datetime stamps.
Karma isn’t explained. Voting isn’t explained.
There’s no way to view old posts.
I’m confused. I can see all of the posts.
Also, it’s already been mentioned that things aren’t explained.
The header image is almost 400kb; that seems like a lot.
Also, the longer I stare at it, the more trouble I have remembering that the map is not the territory.
Seriously, it’s a really clever image. Kudos to whoever thought it up.
Is it of anywhere in particular? I can’t find the places on google.
Ah, they changed the image. It’s now of this place
There is a new header in development.
I’d like RSS feeds please (for http://www.google.com/reader).
There is an RSS feed for the main page, though there have been some complaints about it.
EDIT: link to rss feed
The FHI logo doesn’t link to FHI
That’s a dicey issue to call a bug. I think it’s clearly part of the banner, which by default should link to Less Wrong. However, if the logo was on its own, it would surely be expected to link to FHI—it does seem like there should be a link to FHI, preferably near the logo. Maybe right-justified in the link bar under the logo?
I’ve heard it said that some people are having registration problems. No idea steps to reproduce. Seems CAPTCHA -related.
I’ts being alleged that there have been some attempts already by this site to silence dissenting opinions, and that was the source of the above problem. Of course, there’s no reason to think that’s going on, since any trolls / etc should be quickly downvoted, while honest dissenting opinions should be encouraged. But would EY do such a thing?
I wouldn’t do such a thing—I’m looking forward far too much to seeing Caledonian downmodded into oblivion on any site with voting.
See? That’s what I thought. c.f. this OB comment
Yes, I had problems with the CAPTCHA. Did it after 5 tries or so.
After creating a new article, the only place I seem to be able to submit it to is “Johnicholas’s drafts”. If I’m not logged in, I can’t see my article at all.
Is that the expected behavior? I thought that general authors could post, even if the posts are not promoted.
Sorry, it’s explained on the overcoming bias post that linked here: This isn’t “less wrong is open”, this is “less wrong is in beta, no general posts allowed”.
I find the justified paragraphs hard to read, please change to left aligned / ragged right as most every web site does.
(There’s a reason left aligned is standard on the web and justified paragraphs are standard in books and magazines: computer screens have a far lower resolution than printed material).
The ‘delete account’ function appears not to work… or perhaps I’ve been outsmarted
Hmm it should be working but I’ve raised an issue to investigate.
Bugs: italics show up in the sidebar with asterisks “new” button becomes “what’s new” when clicked, all others become bold
The unformatted comments in recent comments is a temporary workaround and will certainly be addressed. You’re the second person that’s mentioned the changing menu text as a bug when it is intentional (inherited from the Reddit code not done on purpose by us). Given that it will probably be modified to show the same text when not active and active.
Can new comments be added by default to the bottom of the discussion instead of the top?
The comment listing has a drop down ‘Sort By’ at the top of the listing. If you change this to ‘Old’ it will sort the comments in reverse chronological order. As far as I’m aware the setting is stored and will be applied when you view comment listings in the future.
When I hide something I see no way to get it back.
If you visit your user page then click Hidden in the top bar it will list posts you’ve hidden.
I’d like there to be a separate Anonymous account for posting potentially controversial posts open for all.
Problem might be that it would be used to post frivolous off-topic posts, but reddit-like votes should keep them away from most users anyway.
Advantage would that you could also see what other people have posted as Anonymous nicely collected under single account.
Of course, if you want to post something controversial, you can always just register a separate account for that purpose. It’s a bit more of a hassle than having a dedicated ‘anonymous’ account, but accomplishes the same purpose. (And if it turns out your controversial post became really popular, you having control of the account means you can verifiably reveal your identity, which you couldn’t do if you’d posted it via an anonymous account.)
It could be more conveniently presented by having a checkbox under a comment editing form, “post anonymously”.
This is probably too much of a hassle to implement. It would mean that you’d have to have a separate class of account (with this one instance for now) where the password may not be changed, past posts may not be edited or deleted, preferences are restricted, the account cannot be deleted, etc. If it were a normal account, trolls would render it unusable immediately.
An alternative is to just allow commenting without being logged in or anonymously while logged in, but I assume they have specific reasons for setting things up the way they did.
It would be nice to be able to post things from time to time without having to worry about it being an unpopular viewpoint that the agree/disagree-bots will vote down as much as they can. I like the slashdot system, where anonymous posting is allowed, with anonymous posts starting with a lower moderation value, and users being able to assign a positive or negative karma modifier for anonymous posts.
There’s not a “Save to Drafts” feature when you start a new article in the Discussion section. I found this out by accidentally publishing a not-even-first-draft.
In the process of writing up a new welcome thread, I’ve run into an issue I haven’t seen before: links in the post seem to eat up the spaces around them, once it’s turned into a draft. That is, in the editing mode, my text looks like this:
while in the draft mode my text looks like this:
Has anyone else experienced this?
This thread is dead, create an issue in the bug tracker.
I suspect there’s a broken comment—I couldn’t get LW to refresh for a while, and then I could only get the front page but not recent comments. Now I can get the most recent 2 pages of comments, but an error message if I try to go back farther.
The comment in question is 1yp8, judging by my test results.
I get an occasional gray warning box from Firefox asking me if I want to open a: application/octet stream. Next time I’ll take written notes—I couldn’t cut and paste from it.
Selecting cancel on the box lets me keep reading LW, and nothing awful has happened yet, but it’s an annoyance, may be a load on people with low bandwidth, and I’ve never seen it on any other site.
Should we continue to post observed issues, bugs, and requested features here, so that they will later be added to Google Code if someone in charge thinks it’s relevant, or do we all just post whatever we feel like to Google Code and then they get sorted out?
Not especially important but if it is easy to code some way of finding out if a user is logged in would be nifty (assuming people don’t have privacy concerns).
A human’s guide to words on the sequences page just links to the “37 ways that words can be wrong” article instead of linking to a sequence wiki.
A human’s guide to words on the sequences page just links to the “37 ways that words can be wrong” article instead of linking to a sequence wiki.
This URL gives me errors and apparently one comment is breaking the “recent comments” page. Am I the only one seeing this?
Is it possible to create RSS feeds for comments on a single post? Provided that the feeds contained enough data (e.g. last 100 comments), this would make it very easy to follow comments on your own posts or posts you are interested in.
In Outside the Laboratory, the “Sort By:” box says Old, but I see a comment dated 07 November 2009 followed by a bunch more dated 2007.
I do not observe this phenomenon, although I note that I cannot change the sort away from “Old”.
I have my preferences set to “Display 20 comments by default”. I think it’s using one sorting method for the first 20 and a different sorting method for the ones that appear after I click “load more comments”.
The account deleting doesn’t seem to work.
Also, asking “Are you sure?” three times is extremely annoying.
If account deleting means deleting all comments, it shouldn’t be allowed, as it breaks conversation history (unless maybe if the account belonged to a spam bot, so an admin can more easily delete everything it did).
Otherwise, there doesn’t seem to be any point in deleting an account.
I agree with this in principle, but since it’s possible to delete single comments manually it would just make it more inconvenient and I don’t see much point in that either.
The account is associated with the user’s email account and the user might not want to leave the account with its associated information floating around if he/she doesn’t intend to use the account anymore. I for one think that account deletion is a useful feature in general and shouldn’t be disallowed.
As demonstrated in this comment, there doesn’t appear to be a way to make a working link in a comment if the URL contains a close-parenthesis, as this is scanned as the end of the URL.
Not so. Lookit: parenthesis) You have to escape the close parenthesis in the URL with a backslash, \) like so.
Ah, thanks.
The weird error messages that you get when a page is broken, are unhelpful and apparently from the Reddit codebase. It seems like those should change to a helpful 404 or something.
Something weird is going on with bolding followed by use of underscore. For example:
ETA: I just noticed that cousin_it’s
There should be an underscore between “cousin” and “it’s”, but instead the underscore doesn’t appear and “it’s” is italicized. Hmm, it’s not happening here, but was happening in http://lesswrong.com/lw/13o/fairness_and_geometry/yw4 until I removed the underscore.
You need to escape it to avoid its interpretation as a markup element.
Thanks. I suggest we add a link to the full comment formatting guide from the drop-down help that appears when you click on the “Help” link at the bottom of a comment box. I think most people probably assume that the drop-down help is all that’s available.
About that report link (http://lesswrong.com/ ???): It doesn’t say what it’s going to do, what it is for (hate speech, strong language, advocating the overthrow, trolling, disagreeing with me...), nor does it give me a chance to explain.
Indeed—another thing for the nonexistent FAQ.
As for the URL, it uses (inline) javascript and doesn’t actually care about the href—a really stupid design decision, since it bounces you around (sends you back to /) if you have javascript off. But then, much of the site is kindof broken in that case.
Thinking about this more I decided to make a start on an FAQ/user guide on the wiki.
Feel free to add anything that you feel is useful.
Javascript is a required browser feature of the site. Its needed for most interaction (as opposed to just clicking around and reading) and to load the side bar.
An FAQ/user guide for the site is needed. In its absence the Reddit help is mostly applicable.
Javascript is only “needed” for basic functionality because that’s the way the site has been designed. It could have been designed to degrade gracefully, in which case everything would work perfectly fine without Javascript, with the exception of a few extra page reloads being required.
Possibly an unintended feature—I currently can’t downvote anything, and won’t be able to until my karma exceeds Eliezer’s.
What are you seeing? Why would you need to exceed Eliezer’s karma? The limit on down votes is based on your karma, so you should be able to cast more than 500 down votes at the moment.
He has already cast about 2,500 downvotes, so he’s now retroactively banned from downvoting for a long time. I think this should be considered a bug.
Btw, the anchor is missing again in Permalinks, so I have to add #comments at the end manually to make nicer links.
The change applying retroactively doesn’t seem like a bug to me. Any debate should be over whether the restriction is a good general rule or not. If people think it’s a good restriction then it should apply equally to everyone. The fact that some people have already significantly exceeded their downvote limit is an interesting data point—it suggests that some users have had a much stronger influence on negative ratings than others. Depending on what people want the feature to achieve that could be seen as either supporting the rule or opposing it.
A law is there to influence behavior. Behavior that happened before the law was known, the law that is far from being self-evident, shouldn’t be punished. The intended correction of behavior is decrease in the rate of downvoting, but retroactive application of a new law transforms that correction into the total absence of downvoting, which is not at all what the law was intended to achieve.
It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the new rule was intended to achieve I have to admit. The fact that some people with fairly high karma had already greatly exceeded the limit was interesting to me though—it suggested a possible skewing of karma scores by certain individuals downvoting with much higher frequency than others, to an extent that surprised me. If part of the intention is to avoid some individuals having undue influence on karma scores (which some comments seemed to suggest) then applying the restriction retroactively achieves that.
I wouldn’t generally support retroactive laws but I don’t find the law analogy very helpful here. I find it interesting that you use the word punished as well—it seems to me that the value of the karma system is as a kind of ‘collective intelligence’ mechanism that provides ratings valuable to the community as a whole through the aggregation of individual votes. I don’t see it as a way to make the forum more enjoyable to use because of the ‘reward’ of up or downvoting other people’s comments. Saying punish suggests that part of the reason people use the forum is to enjoy the rush of saying ‘Yay’ or ‘Boo’ to things they like/dislike. That may be true but it wasn’t how I was thinking of karma.
The anchor was removed when the article content was removed from comment permalinks as the comment should be visible on an average sized screen without jumping down. The content above the comment is also relevant to the permalink now more so than before so this was another reason why it was removed.
I don’t see how that header is at all informative. I link to the text of the comment, everything else is the context of that text, secondary info, accessed only if necessary.
Our “top contributors” are disappearing. Now there are only 7. ciphergoth and I should both be on that list. I disappeared because I banned one of my posts. I thought I’d reappear when I figured out how to hide it instead of banning it, but I didn’t.
When I try to create a new article, I type it in, click submit and “nothing happens”
That is I get a blank page, no held for moderation, no thank you for participating. Looking at the page source I see
Surely the server should never generate that, I should at least get an error message, malformed post or something.
Checking submitted nothing is found.
I’m running an old Firefox on FreeBSD 5.4, so I tried using Lynx instead, with the same result.
I have a static IP address 80.177.122.150 which might make issues easy to locate in the server log.
Unfortunately article submission requires Firefox 1.5 or newer. I was able to reproduce the problem you described in 1.0.7. However I was able to successfully submit an article using 1.5.0.7. This is due to the javascript based WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE being required, which would explain why Lynx didn’t work either.
I have raised an issue to either make it work or make the behaviour more friendly.
Thank you. I’m running Firefox 1.0.3.
I guess that the work round from my end is to upgrade. Upgrading to FreeBSD 7.0 stalled when my new CD-ROM drive proved just as incapable of blowing a bit perfect CD as the old one. However I can do a network install, and I’m greatful to you for checking that it will actually work when I get it done.
I mentioned it elsewhere, but I would like voting limited to just posts. Voting for posts is meaningful as posts have to compete for limited main page space. Voting for comments, and indirectly voting for users doesn’t have much obvious use, and might causing perverse effects of groupthink, self-censorship, karma whoring etc. - not now but once lesswrong becomes more popular. It happened to pretty much every other such system once a critical size was reached.
I think early Slashdot was an obvious case where comment voting was useful. If you don’t have time to read all the comments, it’s useful to have the option to only read the best ones.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
When a post or comment is deleted, its karmic consequences persist. When combined with the automatic upvote of one’s own posts, this creates an exploit to increase karma without bound.
Lowering my karma.
Lowering my karma.
Lowering my karma.
Lowering my karma.
Lowering my karma.
Lowering my karma.
Lowering my karma.
Lowering my karma.
Can we have signatures, like in a forum?
I’m against this; signatures are the same information over and over. However, better user pages (particularly those linking to a social site, or an LW Frappr) would be nice.
Well, basically, I just want to append
to the end of each of my comments, so everyone knows that I comment under that name in other places.
Can’t you just go by Doug S. here then?
Comment links are not nofollow which is a spam problem waiting to happen.
Meh. It’s worth worrying about after we start having a spam problem. nofollow is just bad citizenship in this case—Lw has a lot of google juice and links in comments tend to be soaked in semantical goodness.
Yep. And even then, the simple solution is to only nofollow comments with negative karma. (There should be enough people reading the /comments feed to catch spam going to old posts, I would think.)
Brilliant—I wonder if anyone does that sort of thing (I’d guess not, since there aren’t a lot of places with this sort of comment moderation)
On Hacker News all comments are nofollow but submissions above a certain point threshold are follow. Same on Reddit.
That would work.
Having a “Karma Score” seems out of place on a site focused on rationality.
Sure, I’d like to know if my participation is valued by the others on the board. Let’s not call it Karma though.
See Two Cult Koans.
Why? While “Karma” doesn’t translate directly to “cause and effect”, it’s a related concept and basically captures what we’re going for. In addition, it’s already a jargon term on these sorts of systems.
Are you just against it because it “sounds mystical”?
Not because it sounds mystical. Because the Bhuddist concept of reincarnation does not pertain here.
Yes it’s common jargon. But can we be Less Wrong?
This is an example of why we need a “disagree” button separate from a “low quality” button.
I like the idea. I don’t like the thought of being hesitant to comment with a contrasting point because it is likely to be downvoted in retaliation.
I’d also like to be able to separate my voting responses such that I reserve downvoting for poor arguments or unpleasantries while I have another option for cases which are ‘stupid’ but at least well presented.
Why do we need “disagree” as a button? Buttons filter content, and so should rate for attention, you upvote what you want other people to read and downvote what you don’t want them to read. In this case, for example, the case of disagreement should result in a reply comment and upvoting of original comment.
Because if the person who modded you up had written a “me too” post instead and the three people who modded gspence down had all written “me not” posts, we would have four essentially content-free posts clobbering up the thread.
Yes, maybe you can make a point that people should either make a new point or not speak at all, because just stating an opinion may be likely to be biased. But (a) I don’t think it’s going to work—saying that what happened to gspence’s comment isn’t what should happen doesn’t change the fact that it did happen with the current model; and (b), well, I’d like to state my “me too”/”me not”! :-) Yes, if not stating opinions really does significantly debias, that would outweigh that concern, but I’m pretty skeptical about that actually happening, so the expected utility from the agree/disagree buttons wins out for me.
“Me too” is vacuous if it doesn’t add to original comment, while “I disagree” is supposed to contribute the explanation of why. The second “I disagree” which doesn’t add anything may support the first disagreeing comment in addition to the original comment.
I had been against ‘agree/disagree’ buttons but this discussion has convinced me. It is pretty obvious that ‘vote up/vote down’ is being used as ‘agree/disagree’ under the current model, and adding buttons for that as well as an explanation of how to use them (“Never vote up / down a comment on the basis of agreeing or disagreeing”) should fix that problem.
I want to make the same request I make on every website with comment-scoring- Get rid of this nonsense! Yes I have made comments people think deserve to be voted down… I’d be making this request regardless. It really doesn’t help with discussion. My suggestion: Remove the downvote, keep the report button. Hateful/ outright stupid messages should be hidden; this shouldn’t be decided by mob rule. The “karma” concept results in unpopular or somewhat uneducated comments being removed from discussion, which I do not consider desirable.
This isn’t really true. Long conversations routinely spring from downvoted comments. Karma helps ensure high quality comments and helps me know when I’m on the right track and when I’m being stupid. It absolutely helps with discussion and I doubt the place would be the same without it.
You neglect the flipside, which is that upvoting promotes insightful, witty, or otherwise worthwhile comments to prominence.