2023 Update, January. USER INPUT REQUESTED

Lumeinshin

Hello all, Chief Janny here!

First off, I wanted to thank you all for your posts and activity so far, we have been growing at a steady rate and you all seem like a cool bunch, so I am very pleased.

An experiment of sorts that I have been running this month has been the implementation of google adsense. I am not against banner ads and little ones on the sides, so I have implemented them and they do (for the most part) work. However there are moral considerations on both using google ads, and the safety of those ads.

If you have any friends, internet or otherwise that you think would enjoy the site, feel free to let them know we're here.

Cookies

Without ranting and raving and rambling about GDPR too much. TL;DR is:
Cookie prompts are annoying. So I have invoked googles secret hidden "Limited Ads Policy". This means the ads are set to have defaulted to 'no' on any annoying prompts that would come up, hopefully meaning I dont have to have a pop up at all. They do still however send 1 cookie, the cookie to see what state it is, which returns a big fat 'no'. Somewhat annoyingly, this means that most browsers that anyone who has even heard the word 'adblock' uses will by default block them.

This is a bit of a shame, however they do that for me too. The way it works anyway so far logging in prevents them from running. No its not a thinly veiled ploy to get more users lol.

Tags and Categories

We have two different ways to view categories/tags/boards/subforums whatever you want to call it. As our userbase is relatively small it benefits us to have pretty much everything on the front page, however this may not be the case in future. So this little bit is a bit of a PSA,
Categories are available on the left sidebar.
Tags are available on the top header.

You are able to follow a tag by pressing the big follow button when in a tag view/ or set it to one of the other settings to be notified depending on what you choose.

Features and performance

I think for the most part, the site has a good list of features and they all work pretty well from what I can see. I dont have any plans at this time for more features (mostly because I cant think of much)

I can imagine wanting to in future see if I can manage some sort of chat implementation, preferably one that would allow users to use the accounts offsite (ie: XMPP), I think that would be something that would give you guys more value than just a site-exclusive chat. I will have to think about it more.

I think the site performs pretty well now, we used to have a lot of issues with people getting stuck loading the site, but I think its infinitely better now. Let me know if there are any issues. I know image loading can take a sec but I think that is okay.

Questions

a) I think that I will add subcategories for articles (i have for tech and games) so we can post current events/news related to our hobbies and post our opinions on them, the question is:
'do we have these visible on the homepage, or just limited to the tag view?

b) Advertising, I like the idea of making some money off the site, at least to the point where I can subsidise the server costs and advertising fees used to help grow the site. Do you know any better ad hosts? I know there are alternatives but I don't know which are considered good.
I'd be more than happy to do individual ads for specific sites but that requires some manual scripting and such on my part. And i'm not sure the site is large enough for it to be considered.

c) Features, Are there any features you guys would like to see me try to add? anything that would make the site better?

Last bit

Once again, a huge thank you for reading and for being on the site, this is a passion project of mine and its been so nice to see people using the site.

I'm going to pin this blog post to the homepage to give it more opportunities to get your input, if you have any other ideas please let me know and i'll see what I can do, either comment here, create a 'moderation, question' thread or reach out on the fediverse

Have a lovely day and i'll see you out there in the threads!

histoire

Lumeinshin a) I think that I will add subcategories for articles (i have for tech and games) so we can post current events/news related to our hobbies and post our opinions on them, the question is:
'do we have these visible on the homepage, or just limited to the tag view?

1 - what's the difference between categories and tags?
2 - do a hierarchy like in the first pic
i.e. category - most recent post in
subcategory(ies) - most recent post in
category - etc etc

Lumeinshin b) Advertising, I like the idea of making some money off the site, at least to the point where I can subsidise the server costs and advertising fees used to help grow the site. Do you know any better ad hosts? I know there are alternatives but I don't know which are considered good.
I'd be more than happy to do individual ads for specific sites but that requires some manual scripting and such on my part. And i'm not sure the site is large enough for it to be considered.

nothing to add aside from the ads are still not centered in my browser. firefox. I'll look with nyxt also to see if that has an effect.

Remove

Lumeinshin Features, Are there any features you guys would like to see me try to add? anything that would make the site better?

I'm finding it a bit difficult to use the formatting options on the mobile "app". Specifically with using numbered lists; when I press that button, it only gives me #1, but no #2 when pressing Enter.

I was also going to mention the lack of a preview mode, but saw the eye icon in the corner and realized one was already added. It certainly wasn't the first thing I saw.

histoire

tl;dr

Lumeinshin

histoire

what's the difference between categories and tags?

purely cosmetic tbh, I think the guys who made the addon just wanted to avoid trouble (even though it removes the tags button from the sidebar)
perhaps because its more like a traditional forums 'categories'. Tags is an odd name tbh.

do a hierarchy like in the first pic

in the first image
japan is the main category and 'anime, culture, vtuber' are the subcategories. Both in the admin GUI are considered 'primary tag's. Secondary tags are like the 'genthread,blog,NSFW', which can be added to any category.

Basile

Thank you for running the website. For the functionalities, polls and private messages would be great for any forum I guess. Correct me if it already exists and I can't find it.
As for the display of categories, I don't think it's a good idea to potentially hide topics for the sake of sorting. If you do that people will have less incentive to answer to threads from the categories they don't browse, and that's bad for such a small community. Moreover if the category you like is at the end of the page you are more likely to just stay in this subset of the website as to not scroll down every time. I think a better design would be to let the user hide the tags they really don't want to participate in.

Lumeinshin

Basile
Polls are already a thing, although I think they are only an option for a thread OP and not after. I did a test poll in November on a test account.

Private messages arent available at the moment, I need to read the docs on the implementation that is already available or i'll try/commission something more suitable, ie XMPP like i said (its okay if you dont know what it is). If I think the currently available one will work well enough i'll maybe add it, I just dont want to have the site itself have 'too much' as it were, although I understand that people may disagree with that notion.

Basile If you do that people will have less incentive to answer to threads from the categories they don't browse, and that's bad for such a small community.

I very much agree with this, but I also want the front page somewhat(?) curated so its not just a poor mans reddit, with the days drama front and center. Although definitely for now I think it can all go there, maybe if each thing was 'self sustainable' post wise i'll reconsider hiding them from the front.

Basile I think a better design would be to let the user hide the tags they really don't want to participate in.

Closest that I can think of with the way its set up currently, is to follow what you want and not follow the rest, and have your default view set to 'following', I will look at how things are laid out to see how else we could go about it.

I am tempted to in future set the 'home page' to tags or categories, but same with hiding things from the front page, this is a consideration for later.

Sandro I think one thing to make sure is up and running is a password and email reset.

yeeeah I know, had some real issues getting it working so I've left it for now, i'll have to set aside some time to deal with it. At the moment though I can be emailed directly or messaged via XMPP or on the fediverse to manually change your password. It would just help with site automation and a sense of security for users.

Sandro I can't speak for ad hosts themselves, but I remember A2Hosting and Hostinger being good sites to work with.

I'll look into those to see how they do it, currently i'm thinking they arent worth having as it stands since to make them not awful you have to neuter them to the point where you dont get much for them and I think I feel bad about having them lol. I'd rather have ads I manually manage arranged 1 to 1 with whomever, even if it made less money overall.

Donations are up to you ofc, I have a couple ways where you can if you wanted to, let me know if there are other ways you'd like to see and all that. Only if you have the money to spare.
Don't worry about using adblock, I think every sane person should be for the most part.

I will have to take some time to do some boring documentation for myself and lots of reading to see what I can change and improve. but thats a job for after work.

Sandro

I think one thing to make sure is up and running is a password and email reset. Otherwise I've enjoyed the forum so far. I wouldn't hide topics, but a filter for tags would help with folks specific interests. I can't speak for ad hosts themselves, but I remember A2Hosting and Hostinger being good sites to work with. Ads might be good on the side but fair warning, I use AdBlock for almost everything. If it's not done in an annoying way I don't mind turning it off. As for costs, I don't mind pitching in for a few months. That's about all I can think of at the moment.

Anonicus

I think this is a solid update.
I understand having to run ads to upkeep the site and it's also good to keep your donation bucket around.
Also the new Following Categories section is a really good addition too.

Lumeinshin

Remove

yeah a couple of those formatting buttons are a bit naff, a tad quicker than manually doing it i guess but yeah, they dont auto format on desktop either. I would just get rid of almost all the buttons to simplify it if i had the choice.
I am gonna say the eye thing is a skill issue your end 😆 Although the Husky fediverse app has a similar button so maybe I got lucky from being used to that.

Basile
There is a 'mark all as read' tick on the notifications, and on the feed

Basile

Something slightly annoying is that you have to click on each notification to make them disappear. You should be able to make that in bulk.

Basile

Lumeinshin ooh right

Trondei

Not sure where else to ask, but what are the points? Are they just a count of how many times my posts are liked?

Lumeinshin

Trondei
Pretty much yeah, you get a number and it gets bigger/smaller. There are 'titles' tied to your score, but thats about it.
For future reference, I have added a category for questions/suggestions etc under the moderation section

Fantasy

This is my only input so far.

Lumeinshin

Fantasy
does it not stay gone if you click x?

if not you can set it to X in account settings
I will look at setting the default to no (I thought i already had)

Fantasy

doesn't seem that way

EDIT
it is not there currently

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