Lambda the Ultimate - Site Discussion

another issue/question/hope re: layout

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:29:57 -0400

hi, when looking at a new post on a page that has a long discussion, it can be pretty hard to figure out what is the parent post it is replying to. if there were some more nuanced way of the hierarchy being shown that would be neat. dunno what that would be off the top of my head, but thought it could be a metric used when evaluating possible future new default look-and-feels.

trying to see forum+frontpage posts in order

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:07:03 -0400

i haven't found a way to list all pages posted in e.g. chronological order; i can either get the forums list, or i can scroll through the front page. is there such a view? if not, might it be some day something somebody who knows drupal could enable? :)

too much indentation solution?

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:01:14 -0400

e.g. one of the pages about OO has an interesting discussion that becomes ever harder to read with the default ui template. any way of having a default template that somehow avoids that problem yet still shows threading?

Why isn't every front page item on the discussions page?

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:40:15 -0500

That would seem to allow us to use discussions for everything. Also when front-page only items are posted too after some time has passed it's hard to notice. I know there's the feed, but I thought I'd ask :).

PL Related Blogs

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:03:54 -0500

Chris Okasaki's post '10 Years of Purely Functional Data Structures' reminds me that there have been quite a few links to blogs on LtU over the last few years, e.g. Philip Wadler's blog, Joe Armstrong's blog, Jacob Matthew'sblog, the PLT Scheme blog, etc.

Could we add a page collecting links to these and other PL related blogs?

Branching affordance?

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 02:52:02 -0400

Could it be a good idea to demonstrate policies by making them the easiest thing to do?
Like, add a "OOB discussion", or "Complain" link in addition to "Reply" link, which would just start a new "Site Discussion" thread with a body conveniently containing a backlink to the post to be meta-discussed.

I realize that it may be even better to discuss some topics completely out-of-band, but as noted, there is no single shared private channel between any arbitrary LtUers (emails seem to be hidden?).

[Meta] Bad Usability Problems in LtU

Fri, 18 May 2007 06:07:19 -0400

Here are some bad usability problems I found in the LtU site:

The link for posting is "create content". However the general convention is for this to be "Submit". (or at least "Post").
The links at the left are right-aligned instead of left-aligned which makes them harder to read.
Some of the links do not start with an uppercase letter.
The FAQ is one monolithic text, instead of a list of bolded question + answer, with a ToC. For a good example, see my FAQ.
In http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/add , there isn't any link for adding a post to the front page. This should be added even if it is just a pointer to an empty page.
The navigation menu on the left could use some "<hr />"'s, spaces or Re-organisation. At the moment it's too dis-organised.

Regards, Shlomi Fish.

Almost invisible upgrade

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 21:56:18 -0400

LtU's database was upgraded tonight from MySQL version 4 to version 5. The user session table didn't survive the upgrade, and repairing it would have kept LtU offline for hours, so instead it has been zapped. This just means that if you had an active login, you'll need to log in again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Some other upgrades are still in progress, so there may be periods tonight during which LtU is temporarily unavailable.

Personal messages

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 21:15:11 -0400

I was thinking it would be useful if LtU supported sending personal messages. Perhaps with an account setting to disable it if you don't want such messages? I don't see this as a big need, but on occasion it would be nice to have the option.

As a proof of existence, I did a quick search and found a "privatemsg" module for Drupal.

Subject headings

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:42:37 -0400

When replying, if you leave the subject field blank the current default is to take the first n characters of your post and make that the subject. Alternatively, you can supply your own subject.

This leads to a mix of comments using both approaches. I would like to read the subject if the user supplied their own. However, if the user did not supply their own, I end up reading the same thing twice, which takes me out of my "flow".

Would it be possible to have the default subject be the same as the previous subject, with an "Re: " prepended? That would be a good visual cue when reading, to make it easy to skip over them.

Note that I'm not advocating in any way whether people supply their own subjects or not. It's nice to have both options and let the user choose.

"Recent Post" funkiness

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 04:06:32 -0500

It seems that the "SPAM-report" topic keeps on popping up at the head of recent posts. There seems to be other funkiness in recent posts but I can't recall the exact nature of the quirkyness at this time.

I'm sure a Haskell based forum system would solve the problems.......just freaking kidding:)

SPAM report

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:53:53 -0500

A SPAM post I located:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/944#comment-23957

Ehud--do you encourage reports of this sort? Are you efficient at removing spam yourself?

Missing style for ?

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 20:23:19 -0500

At the bottom of the comment input form, <quote> is mentioned as an allowed tag. Is it just my setup, or does it not work? I don't seem to see quotation marks nor a change of appearance of the enclosing text. Here's an example: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Theme styles

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:22:51 -0500

A question on usability regarding the site theme:

Am I the only one who's getting eyes wet while looking at the bold blue links?

Also, the blockquote tag is rendered in blue... Every day I find myself clicking on it and wondering why nothing happens.

Surely presentation is nothing, but maybe anyone has similiar problems with the site?

Date format in the forum

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 11:19:07 -0500

How do I fix the date format used when I read the LtU forum?

I would like to see DD/MM/YYYY as is proper, not backwards MM/DD/YYYY.

(PS: I love making fun of American idiosyncrasies)