2y ago

/kbin - preview of upcoming changes

Hi there, in the upcoming kbin releases, I will be describing the changes along with author tags, but for now, you can check out what's happening here: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/activity, as well as my personal feed: https://ernest.dev

Today, two test instances will be created where we will be looking for bugs for some time, and then the changes will be rolled out to kbin.social and hopefully other instances as well :)

I want to accept as many pull requests as possible, currently, there are still 50 open ones. I'm also following your posts and adding new things to the to-do list.

Have a nice day!

83 comments

Appreciate all your work and I am enjoying kbin but please make sure you are not burning yourself out. I have seen it too many times, especially in open source projects that become super popular all of a sudden. Take care of your mental health and work at a pace that you still enjoy. You don't ow us anything.
Have a great Sunday!
- There's quite a few of us now helping out with tickets. Great to see lots of people coming together to make the site better. Good to get lots of bugs squashed :)
  
  Love it! But that is or can be part of the "problem". Suddenly it's not "I am working on the software I like" anymore but "managing merge requests all day". Not saying that's what's happening here tho. It can be a problem.

Nice!
The PWA rotation issue is really annoying, happy to see this will be fixed. :)
- Definitely a big annoyance point for me!
- Is this about the PWA rotating when auto rotation is set to off? Sounds like a bug on the device, as it's not happening to me.
  
  That might be android only, I'm not sure. I remember seeing a pull request about it having to do with something in the PWA manifest.
  
  @mr47 This issue is browser engine specific rather than device specific, and (annoyingly) falls within valid interpretation of the web manifest standards so it's not really a bug for the browser engines either. The fix is also within the standards, so that's good.
  
  Are you using Chrome or Firefox or something else? I don't see this on FF.
- Which issue? Don't see it in the links and I'm not seeing anything I can think of that sounds like that (I'm using the PWA on Android, but using Firefox so maybe that's why)
  
  Firefox doesn't have this problem,only chromium browsers.
- Oh thank god, I thought it was a "feature" and here to stay.

I'm really looking forward to https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/167 . Maybe I'm just old or something, but the indent is quite slight sometimes and hard for me to see what belongs at which level at certain levels of nesting.
I wish I could contribute, but I've hardly touched anything UI-related in a decade, and likewise haven't worked with newer PHP at all.
- I'm super super keen on that one. It's actually the reason I got kbin running locally, so I could implement a quick toggle open/close for deeply nested comments.
  Been following that thread and hope it gets out soon, it's something I severely miss from Reddit mobile.
  
  I just wish I could hide things I've already read. I hate having to scroll past 100 things I've already seen/commented on.
- This script does collapsible comments with nesting. It's fantastic.
- Yes! Collapsible comments is my most painful missing feature.

Will the test instances be publicly available?
That would be greatly appreciated by us over at /m/kbinStyles so that it’s possible to see that everything still works before the new version goes live.
Obviously not exactly high priority, but I thought it was worth asking anyway.
- Sure thing, I will manually approve accounts from time to time. These scripts are mind blowing ;)
  https://lab2.kbin.pub/
  https://lab3.kbin.pub/
  
  Was lab1 destroyed by a zombie outbreak?
  
  @ernest heads up, looks like lab3 is down atm
- Some of the userscripts could, longer-term, be converted into server-side Web UI features; I think that that'd make them available to a wider audience, since they become available to all browsers without user effort then. However, for any that don't, I also imagine that it'd also be possible to set up some sort of automated regression testing using Selenium or something like that that warns if it looks like they aren't working in a new version. That'd take load off human userscript maintainers if the userscripts are going to be around for the long haul, and it'd give a heads-up earlier, potentially as soon as the breaking commit goes into git.

This thread gave me a thought that we need a good place to discuss new features and bugs of existing features. I know we have kbinMeta but that is more like discussion of the overall site and the “meta” of things.
Anyways, @kbinfeaturerequests is the place I made for us to discuss feature ideas, pull requests in the pipelines, and pretty much anything in that realm.
- The link gives me a 404...?
  
  https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/317 ;)
  
  https://kbin.social/m/kbinfeaturerequests
- Maybe that magazine should be linked on this one’s description so people can know about it and its purpose

@ernest Hi, this open issue might be worthwhile looking into/raising priority on.
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/398

@ernest just want to thank you for all of the hard work you've done and are doing. Kbin is something really special and you've been going above and beyond with it.

Thanks for all the work you're doing!

Thank you for all your continued hard work, Ernest! I can't imagine the amount of work you have put in as a server admin, as a developer, as front line support, etc.
For those people reading, if you have the means you can buy Ernest a coffee to thank and support him and his efforts.

Jumping on this to mention two things:
Firstly, thanks to all that are helping develop this. Once I got our instance up and running i was impressed with the whole thing. Potentially related: I have more gray hairs now. Let's just say I'm glad to see that work is being done to simplify the docker setup and improve the admin documentation.
Secondly, one behaviour I've noticed is when searching for a new magazine/community, one of the instance admins is listed as owner and moderator and is automatically subscribed to this new (to our instance) magazine/community, and the created date is listed as when we first searched for it.
Is this a bug (known or otherwise) or expected behaviour? Just seems a bit odd...

Stay safe and don’t burn out.
Make the donation page more prominent!
- I added it to the Readme

Please don't make me scroll the whole thread with comments just to reach the comment input. Super discouraging
- Yep, this one has been brought up a few times and it looks like it's under discussion (the idea of it being at the end is to encourage everyone to read first etc)
  While that's a good philosophy overall, a thread like this is a perfect example of why we should have one at the top also, you just want to post a quick comment saying thanks for the work and move on, having to scroll heaps far especially on mobile is rough
- 1 this needs to be fixed
- I'm sure it's something that'll be moved at some point, but for now - it's in KES.
  
  Awesome, thanks. But that's only for desktop, I assume

Cool stuff, thanks all for the hard work it's appreciated!

Somewhat off topic but does kbin currently have a working API? Every instance I've attempted an API call on just errors out. Same thing when running a local test instance.
Would also likely be a good idea to distribute an OpenAPI spec so people can automatically generate API clients in the future.
Thanks for making such a great platform by the way. Genuinely impressed what a solo dev is able to build with activitypub.
- Not yet, see https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/357
  
  How is an app being developed for kbin without an api?

@ernest
sounds nice but what about better moderation tools
- Some fixes are awaiting review, while the rest is still on my local branch. On Monday morning, the changes will be pushed to testing.
- @dekkzz76 @ernest Most things going in atm are from community members who are "scratching their itch"
  Mod tools will/are happening but there will always be way more or these sorts of things.
  
  @pieceofthepie @ernest
  mod tools are core part of the kbin experience, so it should be important for the core devs,

Thanks for the great work on this @ernest, and every contributor who's dove in and made a PR.
- You are writing from your instance, so it's @ernest@kbin.social. In the future, there will probably be some sort of suggestion when mentioning people, similar to Mastodon.
  
  That'll be slick!

Cheers for the ongoing support mate. I've been pretty keen on contributing and getting some of the UI/UX polished up, keen to see these all hit prod so everyone can benefit ❤️
Love to make the experience on mobile good enough that if you want you won't even need a third party app.

This is some good work! Excited to see all the improvements once they are implemented here!

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for all the hard work!

Cheers!

Thank you for your work!
I'm especially looking forward to the bug which causes notifications not to be sent when you receive replies to your comments being fixed. This one is a huge drag on conversation.
As for features, very much looking forward to being able to collapse comments.

Great updates as always, keep up the good work!

Love it! I'm desperately just waiting for the ability to hide posts, that's causing the most disconnect from what I'm used to over on reddit. Would also love the option to save posts, but I'm sure all that is an eventuality

A couple things I would like to see on kbin:
Setting to switch the default homepage from "hot" to anything else, or add an option to only see posts from magazines I follow
Setting to move the "make a comment" box to a place that's above the comments
Otherwise, this is pretty much perfect so far.

Keep up the good work! Hoping broken photos can be deleted soon

83 comments