From: bk3587110@gmail.com
To: vroom@********
Bcc: johndporter@********
Fri, Feb 2 at 3:18 PM

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Looking back over the patches for the last few years, it strikes me that despite lots of patches, mostly from jdporter, there has been lots of good fiddling around the edges. The biggest flaws in The Monastery remain. I believe these are turning people away from The Monastery.

I would like to propose what I think are three priorities that would be a step change for The Monastery without removing any of it's existing strengths:

1. WISIWIG editor for posting along the lines suggested by cavac in WYSIWYG editor
2. A revamp of the main menu navigation bar
3. Address the issue of unencoded passwords

I am not suggesting someone else does the work to make these happen. They are all things that I have implemented on other sites multiple times. However, I don't have the knowledge of PM's codebase or sufficient access for some of these. So I would need help to make them happen.

We only have to look across to Everything2 to see how relatively small changes can have a big impact on user experience

Javascript

I'm going to preempt an objection...that 1 and 2 would require Javascript and not everyone has it enabled.

A few years I ran a test on one of my sites to see how many people have JS switched off. After over 700k visits, less than 0.2% has JS off. But, I accept that PM is mostly frequented by older developers (me included) who are more likely to switch off JS.

But whilst JS is needed to make WYSIWYG functionality, we can have a user setting to switch back to the existing raw-HTML editor and also do that switchback automagically if JS is not enabled on the user's browser.

None of this is new...but is there any mileage or appetite for addressing it now?

since I'm trying to patch some linking stuff for better convenience I need to know where this feature is documented for users

[id://1169071< Node=%N &mdash; Author=%A &mdash; Date=%d]

--> Node=[id://1169071] — Author= — Date=

Already looked into

• site how to
• What shortcuts can I use for linking to other information?

Thanks! :)

PS: I can only imagine eyepops using it for is extensive link collections ;-)

I've been to view jbc66 and it currently says in the Writeups field that they have "none". But if you follow that "none" link the writeups list correctly lists one entry which is Convert TK table to equivalent HTML. So it seems that the total writeups number is incorrect for this user at least. Another user with just 1 writeup has the correct total listed, however.

Some time in the last year or two I suddenly realized that I should be keeping a log of the interesting things I learn from day to day. A couple months ago I was talking with my brilliant young nephew about how I didn't have a really satisfactory solution, and he suggested Notion. He set up a Notion workspace where we can both enter our #TILs. It works really well. Notion is amazing. But I can see how it might not scale too well with a large number of contributors.

Long story short — I have created Today I Learned, a page where anyone (meeting certain minimum elibility requirements) can share interesting factoids. Please check it out. What do you think? Is it worthwhile? If not, could it be made better? If so, how? If snot, blow?

I also want to note that the extant page, Today I Learned, is based on a generic mechanism which can be easily leveraged for other similar tasks. The main configurable parameters are: who can view the page, who can add entries, and who can delete entries. (readers/writers/deleters, in short.) These can be based on a user group (such as janitors or breathers of fire), or on monastic level (such as Level 10: Hermit). Can you think of a use for such a feature?

I thank you, and Paco thanks you.

* On the Today I Learned page, entries can be deleted by the Janitors, and the Editors Nodelet contains a link to that page labled 'TIL'. When there is a new entry on that page, a little flag (*) is appended to the 'TIL' link.

Many Hacker News titles use U+2013 EN DASH. When listed in the "HackerNews nodelet" these are rendering as "–" instead of "–". Would it be possible to convert these?

I know nothing of the code behind the scenes. Here's a couple of potential options:

$ perl -Mutf8 -C -E '
    my $HN_title = "Show HN: Auto Wiki – Turn your codebase into a Wiki";
    say $HN_title;
    say $HN_title =~ s/–/\N{EN DASH}/gr;
    say $HN_title =~ s/–/–/gr;
'
Show HN: Auto Wiki – Turn your codebase into a Wiki
Show HN: Auto Wiki – Turn your codebase into a Wiki
Show HN: Auto Wiki – Turn your codebase into a Wiki

Using &ndash; is possibly the better option; but I'm just guessing.

I'm a trifle confused about my search results

 Found 0 nodes roughly between 2024-01-04 and 0 (searched 561.01% of D
+B).


where title contains "sudoku"

Date:    Author/owner:    Title:    Node type:

Press

to continue searching remaining 303.53% of DB.
Please be patient after submitting your search.

Link to preload this search: [href://?node_id=3989;HIT=sudoku]
[download]

I'm rather surprised that the percentages are greater than 100%; this is not someone usually sees. Is this a bug in the search function or is it something intentional?

How do I find what directory the perl script is running from? is blessed and tagged as "gui programming", but I'm not sure that's the correct tag for the question.

I don't contest the blessing, just the tag.

(Dec 14, 2023 at 16:38 EST) erzuuli has blessed XS Modules - why and when? by Bod!

I may have missed this, but I saw three posts that were 'blessed' by people in the Notices section of the side panel. Is this new? What does it mean?

Is the site working ok? been mighty quiet the last few hours...

It has happened from time to time that some monks have expressed concern over the unexpected and prolonged absense of another monk. In at least one case, a monk contacted the gods to see if a reachout could be done. Unfortunately, we had to say no, because the contact information stored in the user profile consists only of an email address, and our policies explicitly state this this email address "is used only to send you your password". I believe that this creates — correctly — a strong expectation of privacy around this personal information.

Therefore, I would like to propose the addition of an "emergency contact" field, which would probably normally be an email address, but with a different expectation as to its potential usage. The use of this field would be strictly optional. That is, as a user, you wouldn't have to put anything in it unless you want to.

Alternatively, we could add a checkbox which, when checked, indicates that you are OK with site administrators using the existing email for "emergency contact" purposes, in addition to its current purposes (i.e. password recovery).

Any thoughts?

"such like as" is my homage to blazar.

Assuming the Monk Level Summary in "Voting/Experience System" is correct, the table in "Levels of Monks" is missing a row:

I'm not aware of any special privileges at this level. If there are, they should be added.

Update: It would appear that there was some sort of misunderstanding regarding this post. Please see: "Re: Levels of Monks: missing a row [Clarification]".

As you might know, Tanktalus is retiring his CBStats/last hours of cb service. In agreement with gods and Tanktalus, i have taken over the duties of providing these services.

I've been working hard to get the new codebase for last hour of cb and cb stats to work reasonably well. Stats are still a bit bare, though. And i'm pretty sure there are plenty of bugs.

The new services (and the PM nodes) are run by the new chatterbot account. It's profile provides the official documentation, that is, it will provide it as soon as i get around to writing the damn thing. Technically, i'm running TWO of these services under the same account, one live, one for development/request-for-comment purposes. So, i might sometimes link to one of the dev pages and ask for feedback.

All bug reports and feature requests and questions, at least for now, should go into this discussion, directly as an answer to THIS post (that way, CB automatically notifies me of any new messages). For short things, send me a private message. (Don't send it to chatterbot, i seldomly log into this account, except by way of perl scripts).

Q: So this new CB stats is a downgrade?

A: Yes and no. The stats are not as feature rich as the old ones. I'm working on that. But on the bright side, chatterbot has the ability to understand commands. Currently, there is only 1 useful one:

!snapshot

This will generate a snapshot of the current "last hour of cb" and send you a link via private message. This may take about minute, and it currently doesn't always work. But when you see something in chatterbox that you like, give it a whirl.

!cookie username

Make chatterbot send a user a cookie. It's one of my test commands, so no guarantees that cookies will be, in fact, delivered.

When you are not sure what commands are available, you can type !help in chatterbox.

Command parsing and answering takes some time, because of the relatively long work cycles i've set in the software. (My software could run hundreds of calls to PM a seconds to make processing lightning fast, but running a denial-of-service attack on my favourite website would be counterproductive).

Edit: The current command list is now available in the Chatterbox FAQ