New stuff

Some of you may have already noticed the new comment highlighting. I think this is especially useful for this site since we have bump sorting like a chan site as one of the factors. A chan site benefits from the fact that the new posts are always on the bottom. But with a tree comment system it is helpful to know what here is actually new. So comment highlighting should be especially useful. I think the CSS works but anyone can make a /s/Theme if you have an idea for something that pops more.

The next thing I just put in is I've made it so others can toggle if the player in chat is default on or off. There is a /player and /close command for users to open or close it in either case. But for movie nights it's good to have it open on it's own so people who join don't have to run a command. I think I like keeping the player off when we don't have move nights because it's a lot of distraction in the chat otherwise to always have media playing. But my judgement on that is something where I am very open to feedback.

One downside of me turning off the player is that if other users want to organize an event, either something pre-planned or last minute, the player being shut down would be an extra barrier. So I've made it so users can toggle the global state. Users would need to refresh if you turn it from off to on if they were already in the full chat. Like I mentioned before users have /play and /close to toggle it themselves locally. The global state just controls if they run /play when entering the full chat.

That toggle does require a badge to run (any badge). But a pretty significant percent of the most common users here have badges. I added a few more earlier today for people who sounded like they might play with the player. That also let's you /skip /seek /pause /remove /back. If you want to do something with the player where a badge would help just ask for one. I don't know why but badges aren't always rendering next to usernames so if you need to check if you have a badge just look in your settings. If you have one you'll have a toggle for whether to display it or not.

But, yes. I really want to encourage people to organize things or make off the cuff use of the player on their own. It's great if you have an anime you want to watch, happen to have the links, and want to watch it with others.

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Future things

I may be modifying the comment sort soon. I'm playing around with the idea of sorting them the same way I sort posts. Even within that there are a few ways I could approach it. I could have it mirror the default sort factors. I could bind it to your sort factors you use for posts. I could give comments their own sort factor controls. Or I could just leave it the same. Currently it's using a standard "hot" algorithm. Score/age.

The most significant result that would come from using the same algorithm as posts would be the bump effect. New comments would end up even higher on the thread because all of their parents going up would get bumped. This would also mean you could basically have sub-threads inside of threads. If a 4chan style of posting was adopted it would be easy for someone to start a variant inside of the thread and it would prevail as people contribute to it.

The big question is, this is most definitely cool; Is it positive? If we think it might be I can experiment with it.

Also, nominate theme ideas for November movie themes.

Also I'm thinking about toying around with a monthly tech theme. I want this place to be a place where we grow. It's not just an asshole-pit like voat or poal. We are 100% different. That is not anywhere close to where we have in mind as a target for this place. This is a place for creatives and ambitious people to share ideas and what they are working on, and get feedback. Yes we post a lot of outbound links to standard internet content. But this is secondary filler we add to keep the site active. The main purpose of the site is what we work on. We value creative projects, self promotion, learning, and self development above random arguments with strangers on the internet. We definitely want you to share the site with people who are on board with contributing something to the world. We don't want to be reddit. But the goal is to be above reddit rather than below it.

So to keep ourselves grounded in that mission and taking into account the varying technical skill level users have here, a monthly tech theme might be the trick. Feedback is welcome if you agree or disagree. The idea is that tech posts can often go over the heads of some users. It depends on how advanced the post assumes the reader is. But if we select a theme then by the end of the month those posts shouldn't be over the head of most users. Ideas for themes or topics and if this is a good idea (or not) are welcome and appreciated.