This post will serve as a place to discuss what features the new LessWrong 2.0 should have, and I will try to keep this post updated with our feature roadmap plans.
Here is roughly the set of features we are planning to develop over the next few weeks:
UPDATED: August 27th, 2017
Basic quality of life improvements:
- Improve rendering speed on posts with many comments
- (A lot of improvements made, a lot more to come)
- Improve usability on mobile
- (After the major rework this is somewhat broken again, will fix it soon)
- Add Katex support for comments and posts
- Allow merging with old LessWrong 1.0 accounts
- Fix old LessWrong 1.0 links DONE!
- Create unique links for each comment: DONE!
- Make comments collapsible
- Highlight new comments since last visit: DONE!
- Improve automatic spam-detection
- Add RSS feed links with adjustable karma thresholds
- Create better documentation for the page, with tooltips and onboarding processes
- Better search, including comment search and user search: DONE!
Improved Moderation Tools:
- New Karma system that weighs your votes based on your Karma
- Give moderators ability to suspend comment threads for a limited amount of time
- Give trusted post-authors moderation ability on their own posts (deleting comments, temporarily suspending users from posts, etc.)
- Add reporting feature to comments
- Give moderators and admins access to a database query interface to identify negative vote patterns
New Content Types:
- Add sequences as a top-level content-type with UI for navigating sequences in order, metadata on a sequence, and keeping track of which parts you've read DONE!
- Add Arbital-style predictions as a content block in posts (maybe also as a top-level content type)
- Add 'Wait-But-Why?' style footnotes to the editor
- Discussion page that structures discussions more than just a tree format (here is a mockup I designed while working for Arbital, that I am style excited to implement)
- ...and we have many more crazy ideas we would like to experiment with
I will also create a comment for each of these under the post, so you can help us prioritize all of these. Also feel free to leave your own feature suggestions and site improvements in the comments.
Very nice!
Some comments on the design, pro and con:
Cons
Grey text
Grey text makes it harder to read than plain black. If you want to reduce contrast, consider instead making the background off-white (either #fcfffa or #f9fff5 would be fine — 99% or 98% lightness of the same hue as the theme color green).
Post visual separation
A bit hard to detect when one post ends and another begins, on a skim. Some possible solutions:
Add border to posts (on class "comments-item", add border: 1px solid #cbd6c2, padding: 4px 6px); or,
Add background color to posts (on class "comments-item", add background-color: #edefeb, padding: 4px 6px); or,
Greater v-spacing of posts (on class "comments-item", set margin-bottom: 30px)
Bugs (?)
The hamburger menu only closes with another click on the hamburger menu (best practices is for a click anywhere else on the page—outside the menu—to close it)
Upvote/downvote buttons and vote count appear twice on each post (above and below)
When adding a link in a comment, hitting Return/Enter in the link URL popup does not cause it to close (i.e. does not have the effect of hitting the Submit button) (Mac OS X 10.9, Chrome 60.0.3112.101)
Miscellaneous
Mini-hamburger menu on each post has just one menu item (Subscribe); consider simply having a Subscribe link on the post itself, in small text
Hamburger menus considered harmful in general; consider substituting an on-hover drop-down (achieves the same effect, but with fewer clicks)
Typography
Line spacing ("line-height" CSS property) of body text of posts (not comments) is too large (more than 1.8); consider reducing to 1.5 (with the short line length—which is good!—this should be more than sufficient to ensure readability)
Conversely, line spacing of body text of comments is a bit too low (1.25); consider increasing to 1.35
The bold weight of the body-text font is barely distinguishable from the regular weight. This is, unfortunately, an uncorrectable feature of the "ET Book" font; no heavier weight is available, as far as I can tell. Consider using one of these free alternatives:
Alegreya
EB Garamond
Crimson Text
(or something else; in any case, the kind of font is just right, but this particular font family happens to have this flaw...)
Comment editing UI
Consider adding something to visually distinguish the comment currently being written, from surrounding comments; perhaps, a lighter, or darker, background (depending on whether you implement one of my suggestions above for visual separation of posts)?
The reason this is helpful is that, when writing a comment, I might scroll around the page—to the OP, or to other comments—to reference other people's words, etc., and then want to continue writing the comment. (Note that the Tab key does not take me to the comment editing field, which would mostly obviate this issue; this, I presume, is just a feature of how this editing UI is implemented...)
Archive browse feature
Or rather, the lack thereof. To be added in the future, I hope?
Pro
Almost everything else!
Typography
The body text font is attractive and readable and the default text size is good for readability (on a 1080p desktop monitor, anyway) (but see Cons)
The text column width is good
Layout of comment blocks is attractive and uncluttered
Overall typography is well-done
Layout
Uncluttered and aesthetically pleasing visual design
(mostly) excellent front page layout (but see below); puts the interesting stuff front and center
Layout of post pages also solid; easy to navigate
Seems like the layout will transfer quite well to mobile platforms (looking forward to seeing the design of the mobile version of the site!)
UI elements
Well done on the redesign of the post sort order widget! This is spot-on
Very nice comment composition/editing UI! I haven't been actually impressed with one of these for a long time; is it custom or third-party?
The stripes to the left of the comments (indicating comment hierarchy) are quite useful
Performance
Seems good so far; no major issues!
Extra bonus commentary
Front page layout
Here's how the front page looks on a 1080p screen…
Ok, nothing too wrong here...
And here's how the front page would look like on a 4k screen…
Hmmm.
Consider allowing the front-page content to occupy two columns, on wide viewports. (Perhaps, Recommended Reading and Featured Posts on the left, and Recent Posts and Recent Comments on the right?)
Navigation UI
Currently, when I'm viewing a post or comment page, and I wish to navigate to somewhere else on the site, I have to first go to the front page, then go from there to where I want to go. This is not quite optimal.
As an alternative to removing the hamburger menu (or transforming it into an on-hover drop-down), consider expanding its use; perhaps, for example, put a copy of the Recent Posts/Recent Comments/Feature Posts feeds in there?
In closing
Overall, good work on the redesign! Thumbs up :)