We’ve started adding support for search operators in the search text box. Right now you can use the “user” operator to filter by author, and the “topic” operator to filter by topic, though these will currently only do exact matches and are case-sensitive. Note that there is already a topic filter on the left side, if that is more convenient for you.
Oooh I'm especially excited for this for comments, but it looks like it doesn't work for comments, is that right?
Yeah I agree and I noticed that too - I posted about it in slack so if it's easy to add it should be done soon. :)
(BTW, Ollie and Will fixed this on Friday, so it should now be working for comments)
What's the main advantage of substack?
See the doc linked in the quick take for our thinking on this. These are the main reasons from there (ones below number 3 are not that important imo), upon reflection I would now swap 2 and 3 in terms of importance:
- You can browse past editions with a much nicer + more familiar UI. I would guess this would convert a lot more people per impression than a signup box with no context
- We want to start crossing over with substack in various other ways (getting authors from there to crosspost on the forum), so it would be useful for us (Toby) to become more familiar with how the platform works, particularly in terms of social dynamics rather than features per se. E.g. I don’t really understand whether most people discover newsletters on substack itself vs being linked from elsewhere
- Substack has a good recommendations algorithm, which will hopefully recommend people other EA relevant content (this feels complementary with the thing above, where it’s facilitating some cross-flow of users between our owned channels and substack)
To clarify, do you mean relative to the current system (i.e. sending emails via Mailchimp), or relative to something else?
Yep vs. mailchimp
Personally, I think the most important advantage is discoverability. This is related to Will's first point around making it easier to view past editions, but also I think it would be easier to find via search engines and easier for readers to share individual editions with others.
It’s been a few months since our last update. In addition to preparing for a big Giving Season event, here are some of the things we’ve been up to.
After evaluating the feedback we received from our notifications redesign earlier this year, we decided to overhaul the UI again. We removed the standalone notifications page and improved the notification icon dropdown menu, so that it stays open on click.
As a reminder, there are many options for customizing your notifications via your account settings page.
We’ve started adding support for search operators in the search text box. Right now you can use the “user” operator to filter by author, and the “topic” operator to filter by topic, though these will currently only do exact matches and are case-sensitive. Note that there is already a topic filter on the left side, if that is more convenient for you.
Let us know if there are other operators you would like to see! And a reminder that our codebase is open source, so you are also welcome to implement them yourself.
We made a quick change to the amount of karma Forum users need in order to suggest new topics, and edit existing topic wiki descriptions. Now you only need one karma, to prove that you are a legit user.
Updating wiki pages makes the Forum better for everyone. :) If you’d like to contribute, see the latest guidelines for adding a topic here, and overall wiki FAQs here (note that the FAQs have not been updated in a while). Thanks to @Gemma 🔸 for inspiring this change!
Thanks to the LessWrong team for this one! Now rather than scrolling you all the way down to the bottom of the post, clicking on a footnote number on mobile will just open the text in a modal.[1]
This is a niche but very welcome fix. We’ve updated our editor software, so now when you, for example, start typing a post and change it to a linkpost, or start typing an answer to a question and change it to a comment instead, the textbox no longer gets cleared.
Thanks to everyone who voted or otherwise participated in this debate week! There were a lot of great discussions, and we plan to incorporate some of this tech into the upcoming Donation Election as well. If you have any feedback on the event, please let us know. We’ll continue to run debate week events in 2025.
Our team has changed a bit more than usual recently, so here is a quick summary:
You can see some of this reflected in our half-quarterly OKRs. I’ll also quickly plug that you can hire us for software and/or design work.
Thanks for reading! :) Let us know if you have feedback or questions about these changes. You can comment on this post or reach out to us another way. You can also share feature requests in the feature suggestion thread.
A few of our team will be attending the upcoming EAG Boston, so feel free to connect with us there! Toby and I will be running a Forum workshop, and we’ll have office hours afterward. We also plan to run a similar session at EAGxVirtual.
No more scrolling around and losing your place!
I feel like my experience with notifications has been pretty bad recently – something like, I'll get a few notifications, go follow the link on one, and then all the others will disappear and there's no longer any way to find out what they were. Hard to confidently replicate because I can't generate notifications on demand, but that's my impression.
Oh gosh, do you mean that literally they no longer appear in the list in the dropdown? Or do you mean that you perceive it that way because all the notifications get marked as read when you open the dropdown?
I would love to hear more thoughts from others as well, about what specific things about notifications they find frustrating about the current setup, or examples of sites that do notifications particularly well.
I get exactly the same: it's the upvote/reactions notifications, not the replies
Ah thanks for clarifying! Now I see what you mean. Yeah I think that has been an issue with the karma notification system for a while, and we didn't fix it when we updated the UI. I do think getting notifications right is pretty important, so I'll plan on getting our team to look into this issue.