Now Confirmed! New ILX 3.0 coming. Testing on sandbox now.

Keith and stet have confirmed that they've been working on a new look for ILX (Zing too), and they're currently testing it on the Sandbox.

Older ILXors will probably remember the Sandbox as the old testing site, which was also used during outages.

I'm not sure when it'll be rolled out to the main site, as it's still being tested, starting today but my previous thread about it seems to have been a bit too subtle! So I've been asked to point everyone directly to:

https://sandbox.ilxor.com/

Please have a look around and sign up over there to try it.

I've already discovered quite a few nice new features, and I'm sure there are more to find. There are plenty of settings to explore, ranking polls alongside the traditional polls, and a number of other improvements and Keith has said he's been working on it for 18 months so him and stet have put a LOT of work into it.

Personally, I think it looks great. I found it intuitive to use and got comfortable with it very quickly and I love the new look polls.

Keith posted a few things on the other thread earlier What's going on? and a few folk have signed up on the sandbox and seem to like the look and feel.

Will it support user themes?

And big thanks to Keith and Stet for all they do for us.

xp No idea, only Keith or Stet can answer questions.

So maybe you should have let one of them start the thread?

Thank you XP. It's worth logging in to have a look as most of the stuff isn't available to logged out users.

Will it support user themes?

It doesn't right at the moment, but mainly because the stylesheet that makes the theme on this ILX is about 300 lines long, and the new one is 11,500 lines long, so it's not really practical. However, this should become the case in time, but it'd work as overriding the basic stylesheet, as I don't think rewriting 11,500 lines is really realistic.

So maybe you should have let one of them start the thread?

I am quite happy, thank you.

It does have a bunch of styles in there already though, though you'd need to log in to see them in the settings page->Typography.

So maybe you should have let one of them start the thread?

― bruich, a stór (gyac), Tuesday, 4 August 2026 20:56 (three minutes ago)

Keith asked me to start it.

I hope feedback/suggestions are welcome. I wondered if maybe some kind of contrast between the background and the posts is possible. Also if there will be a dark mode option?

I actually call it ILX6. Not sure why. I just added a few numbers on. There have been a few aborted attempts over the years.

There is already a dark mode option. Try logging in and go into the settings page.

Constructive, polite feedback is welcome. Not the other kind.

Hm! Looks fun! Am content to roll with all changes.

For somewhat obvious reasons I am wondering why usernames have to be a minimum of 4 characters

Cheers, Ned. I hope you are doing well.

Do they, Dan? TBH I had forgotten that I did that, but I'm sure you're right! LOL.

I will change it to:

if length(userName) < 4 || userName = "DJP" then throw exception

In seriousness, I will look at that. I must've thought it was a good idea at some point.

So maybe you should have let one of them start the thread?

To explain, I asked him to. It was good of him to do so.

You guys should really try posting. It does a nice little bounce.

Oh damn, I got all excited about trying it but it doesn't seem to work on my computer at all - the icons are bigger than my entire screen and the text is all smooshed underneath them and basically inaccessible. Can't even register.

I can take screenshots if that description is too vague and you have an idea of how to troubleshoot, but I think it's probably because my OS is still Mojave (I initially didn't want to change as it would prevent me from playing certain games, and now I'm afraid to change as my mac is too old and crashes every time I try to backup with the time machine, yes I should probably get a new computer, no I can't afford one).

That just sounds like it hasn't downloaded the stuff properly. Sometimes happens on a poor connection. It only has to do it once; at least once unless I upload new software. Try forcing a refresh in the browser... Is it Safari? That would be Command-R.

the icons are bigger than my entire screen and the text is all smooshed underneath them and basically inaccessible. Can't even register.

my guess is the CSS isn't loading properly for you?

Registered, waiting to be allowed in...

Okay, I have OKd you.

Please have a look at the Sandbox ILM, and check out the polls. I've created two using the new ranking system, which lets you rank up to 50 options. One is set to begin after a three-day delay to give people time to suggest additional options before voting opens.
Another voting has started and you can see results in real time as they come in.
I've also created a more light-hearted poll on ILE using the old-school format of one vote per person, with the results only revealed at the end.

You can choose in setting which kind of poll and results you want as well as choosing what kind of poll you want to create.

It's amazingly good, honestly.

I use Firefox rather than Safari. But nope, refreshing isn't working. Deleted it out of my history, tried again, refreshed again - all still the same.

I'll give it another go tomorrow but it may just be my bad computer ;_;

Do you have Javascript turned off or something?

Firefox people sometimes do 🤣. It isn't going to work without Javascript. But yeah Curtis is right it sounds more like the CSS not coming down. Not quite sure how to fix your computer... Try another browser?

Firefox should work though, it works fine on mine. Just worth trying something else.

Emily, I think it is the old setup. Mojave is pinning Firefox to an old version that doesn't support certain things this application does. However, I will look into it—there will be an answer, although it might not be perfect.

Thanks, Keith. I tried it with Safari and had the same problem, but yeah, I think both browsers are legacy versions b/c of the old OS. I think this might be the push I need to actually try updating the OS, but I'll have to make time to get my important files backed up in non-time machine fashion so it won't be for a while!

Hold on for a bit, I may be able to send a reverse tachyon pulse into it.

Give it a shot now, Emily.

will we be able to "switch back" to the old site layout once the switch is made?

No, see above. The current 'site layout' is based on which style you have set. The style set up is totally different—details above.

SAAAAANNNDDDBOX!

it's been 15 years since the last one I think?

thanks coders

It's been there the whole time!

And thank you.

Oop, I'm getting off the computer now so won't sign up/have a proper check until tomorrow but I just peeked and the landing page looks good! Fingers crossed that was the only problem. Thanks so much for working on it, you're a superstar.

ha got it, I used to log on it b/c tehresa used to post there and only there iirc

(xp)

Good stuff, Emily.

Sleeve, there was quite a community of people there for years... They're still there (and probably a little pissed off at the moment), but there was a lot less activity in recent months/years.

Dan, I made it accept three characters JUST FOR YOU.

Being able to click on reply to a user now saves so much faffing about trying to quote.

It does some stuff where if you're replying to something from some way back it quotes a bunch of the text; whereas, if you're replying to something just say 4 posts ago, it just puts the username in.

i hate it because i am old an fear change! but it seems really fast and i'm sure i'll get used to it <3

lol i really don't like this, sorry

Because I am very predictable I look forward to redoing a few thousand radio-button polls with ranked-choice versions.

I mostly use Zing to read/post to ilx these days, but after tweaking a few things, I'm a fan of the new layout for the website. Good work!

Thank you!

So Stet is the guy for this, but Zing integrates with this too, you just need to update it from the app store. And it does more and likely will do more on the new thing, as the new thing lets Zing integrate with it much more than current ILX does.

using it now, have a few comments/questions (if that’s ok!), but very exciting! it is a new era for sure, and there are several really cool new changes/upgrades, thanks so much!

but, would you rather we post comments here or on the sandbox?

oh cool we can embed everything now

issues i have so far from five minutes of immediate impressions without having bothered to sign up yet:

-font size is a bit too big
-serif font
-lack of effective separation between posts makes it quite hard to follow - there's only white space between the horizontal lines on the side to separate the posts and this just isn't enough
-username at top of post instead of in the centre would make much more sense as the default
-i miss the current timestamp system which displays both the local time & how long ago the post was, the new system only displays one or the other

but this is just five minutes of immediate impressions. i haven't dug into how the reply system works yet but that seems like the big obvious improvement if it's working well, being able to quote posts with the press of a button is the one feature every other message board has had for decades and is the main thing i've long wished ilx had

my browser (firefox esr 140) redirects https://sandbox.ilxor.com/ to the old https://sandbox.ilxor.com/sandbox/index.jsp and login fails

tor browser shows the new site but login also fails, registered a new account instead

this shit rules

the bullet points / tab indentation thing is seriously 100x better than microsoft word lol. i’m gonna start making my points in bullet form, look out!

xp i suspect the redirect is due to dns, i have ilx IP hardcoded in my hosts file, will update it later

Thanks guys. I hope you like it. UFO, there are a whole load of settings that let you mess with basically everything you mention. You need to register and log in and go to the settings page.

Chihuahua, that sounds like browser caching, you might have to force the browser to forget stuff. XP ah okay, well if you have done that, you'll need to remove it/update it.

I mean it's a totally different application. Used to be Java, now F#.

omg, the notificaitons

this update is going to kill me

trying to be rational but i have a deeply embedded emotional attachment to ilx 2.0

Not uncommon, but I am old enough to remember when everyone hated me for making that one.

OMG

on the search results it has the number of posts in each thread! THANK YOU so much! for real, i know over the years i’ve suggested it in various ways and at various levels of maturity and sometimes i lacked appreciation, sorry, but thank you so much for adding it! it addresses the biggest drawback in the current/previous search system, which was searching for a common topic “rolling stones” and being unsure which of the hundreds of threads was the “main” one. update is so helpful thanks! (sorry to ask for more but is there a way to sort the results by the # of posts to put the “main” one on top? nbd if not, ty ty)

keith i do think the emoji reactions are good and should stay AND that there will be arguments over their very presence and then by people using them. curious to see what happens lol

There isn't, but it's not like I don't agree that would be a good thing. The problem is that search is a heavyweight thing, so you have to be careful, as it can lock up the computer for a long time, so it would be sorting, but only on the current 'page' of results.

HOWEVER, the real problem is in message searches, where there are millions of messages... I can make whatever work on thread searches, because the volume is so much lower, so if you want something to sort on post count for threads, then I can do that.

Did you see the graph at the bottom that shows you when threads were active from and to?

ufo Mode 2 sorted out any problems I had and as Keith says the other stuff can also be changed in settings if you sign up.

all the embedding options seem good, i don’t use that stuff much but i bet others will find a ton of use for them, especially for playlists etc

Yes no doubt some will not like emojis. The thinking was that it might reduce lots of LOL/OTM-type posts and make something more readable. Before anyone asks there is literally no way I will be introducing negative ones.

UFO, except the base font size, but that's what your browser is for...

Can I get a TUI version?? Thx

Did you see the graph at the bottom that shows you when threads were active from and to?

i did not! (still bouncing around exploring)

but i see what you’re getting at and i think that’ll work for most cases!! it’s funny that even on the sandbox, there are several “rolling stones” threads to use as test data, lol

What a difference when people are positive and constructive, rather than just saying that they hate what you have done. Thank you.

https://i.ibb.co/0ySCJf2L/Screenshot-2026-08-04-134923.png

Go to settings for text display options

https://i.ibb.co/fdh4W4Y0/Screenshot-2026-08-05-004117.png

Divider
https://i.ibb.co/1JMZN380/Screenshot-2026-08-05-003920.png

No one has mentioned the Mode 2 icon yet.

All this and more on https://sandbox.ilxor.com/settings

No one has mentioned the Mode 2 icon yet.

I noticed that too. First time I saw it I thought that awesome! Keith has got the thumb in the correct metal position!

Dan, I made it accept three characters JUST FOR YOU.

I AM SPECIAL

(Thank you!)

where do you reduce the font size?

Depends on your browser. It's usually something like Zoom in / Zoom out.

reduce lots of LOL/OTM-type posts

i had no idea this was something anyone wanted to reduce

I'm starting to quite like the thumbs up option now for the reasons Keith says now that he's pointed it out.

Is there, or could there be, an option to turn off or customize the popping-out of the menu with the emojis and stuff on it? For reasons of vision, and other reasons, I'm much more comfortable on an interface where things don't suddenly change their position.

Depends on your browser. It's usually something like Zoom in / Zoom out.

― Keith, Tuesday, August 4, 2026 4:52 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh okay so i do have to change the browser settings. so i just have to zoom out every time i visit ilx now.

Sorry for not liking this!

Mick, I think the browser can do that for you. I couldn't be certain but I know I did make all of these animations (or as many as I remembered) sensitive to the browser's reduced motion setting. If that doesn't work, let me know and I'll work something out.

love the polling updates, options, and visual interface! one small suggestion: after voting in a poll, it shows the poll results (and i think there’s an option to turn that off) but i think it would be good to move the results to the bottom of the thread, or at least not up at top? maybe have a clickable link to get to them. it makes sense to highlight them because they look great, but when clicking around on the thread, refreshing it, viewing multiple times, replying to others, etc, after a while it’s a little bit in the way up at the top!

Yeah I agree there's something not quite right there, but as of yet I haven't quite worked out the right answer, but I will think about it.

Thanks. It looks even more bouncy when I enable reduced motion! That might just be in my mind.

(Here's what I did, in case anyone is curious: In Firefox about:config, Add a number preference called ui.prefersReducedMotion and set its value to either 0 for full animation or to 1 to indicate a preference for reduced motion. Changes to this preference take effect immediately.)

Oh okay so i do have to change the browser settings. so i just have to zoom out every time i visit ilx now

Browsers have remembered the zoom setting on a per-site basis for about 20 years now.

Mick, okay, as I say, if that doesn't work, then I will do something about it. Just give me some time.

No rush whatsoever!

I have it on the list.

Congrats!

nice my old sandbox login worked

I don't think polls should show interim results! I feel very strongly about this! RAWWWRRRR

It's an option on the part of the person setting up the poll.

So take it up with them 🤣

As long as folk don't game the results using it then I'm happy for the ranking polls to have live results - but it's entirely up to the poll runner.

FINE

this is great btw

there’s a new sheriff in town fuckers, you can edit posts for up to 5 minutes and that means that over 80% of my typos will be corrected. i do see them after i post, it’s just difficult to stop my unstoppable flurry of fingers when i’m in post mode. love the ability to fix things for a brief period, thank you!

i think the poll options are great but would like to have the results at the bottom instead of the top, just for thread readability

That's exactly what my thinking was. The number of times you post something and then immediately see a screw up...

The trouble with at the bottom is whether to focus on poll results or the editor, and it requires mind-reading. But I don't think it's perfect the way it is... Worth continuing to think about the best answer.

it’s embarrassing you were thinking of my typo-ridden posts as you were making the feature, but i’m glad it led to this change

;)

Thanks, Lukas.

Haha.

xp yeah that makes sense! curious hearing what other people think about it too

said it in sandbox but

THANK YOU KEITH
THANK YOU STET

haven’t even touched zing and it’s cool to hear that 3.0 makes things better there too

It's 6.0. I mean I just made that up, but it's definitely 6. I mean 2 wasn't 2, it was more like 3 or 4. It's so complicated.

We'll have to poll it over there.
2?
6?
5.3?
∞?
~4?
other (please explain)

Ha

it’s ilx xp

either that or ilx 77

why not just skip versions to 77, that’s way higher

I make this the dawning of the sixth era but stupid zing ate my explanation in an xpost beef so it’s lost to the ages

"but this amp goes to 77" xp

this is a really bad roll-out of whatever the fuck this is, which i'm not even sure of yet. it feels dictatorial. keith i appreciate all your work but i don't appreciate policing feedback about it. you don't get to tell people how to respond to what is looking like a pretty drastic change.

1. did we need this? if so, who decided that?

2. when is the switch-over going to happen?

yes i appreciate the coding aspect of ilx, the work and the expertise. but this is also a community, and a small, aging one at this point. i'm worried that some big switch-over is going to lead to even more users leaving. i feel like that aspect should be of foremost importance here and is being treated with contempt.

map, appreciate you but i think this is kind of a really overly harsh attitude, unless i’m missing something basic? “treated with contempt”? i’m just surprised because that doesn’t sound like you!

like, the whole post is very much not in character, it’s weird! “small, aging” community? well, ok, but neither one of those should be derogatory in the first place

you don't get to tell people how to respond

specifically, and sorry not trying to create drama just seeking clarification for real, but what is this referring to? i loaded the whole thread and re-read it and i didn’t see anything that jumped out, but also i 85% have covid brain fog and maybe i missed something

well i may be getting something wrong here. my apologies if so. it's only been a few hours since we found out there is a big change coming. i'm assuming that's what it is. a big change in how ilx looks and feels. i haven't felt out all the details yet because it's only been a few hours. but if like brimstead is saying we can embed more stuff in posts then yeah that's bad.

ultimately though here's the thing. when someone makes a bunch of decisions that are very consequential to other people in a community without involving them as part of the decision-making process, that is treating the people in that community with contempt.

xp

zach i was suggesting with "small aging" community that a big change can lead to more fracturing if people don't like it. for the "you don't get to tell people how to respond" part i was responding to comments from keith that were spelling out what kind of feedback he would and wouldn't entertain.

there should be as many ilx(e)s as there are wokes

i was responding to comments from keith that were spelling out what kind of feedback he would and wouldn't entertain.

no worries! i missed it, that’s what i mean! i’ll look again

Constructive, polite feedback is welcome. Not the other kind.

― Keith,

like…is it this?

because i read this, and didn’t think of this as out of bounds

anyway, i don’t care, not trying to be one of those people, it doesn’t matter.

and i do understand how certain parts of this would fundamentally change the experience, and how as longstanding ilxors we might feel like we deserve to be more involved in the process

i think that’s legit but also have heavy sympathy toward people doing incredibly laborious projects for free, and as a person who personally _hates to delegate_, because i’d rather do it myself in many cases, and also because opening things up to a feedback forum of hundreds of people is in and of itself a laborious process, like just on its own, no matter what the topic

so, i kinda get just making a bunch of changes based upon years of ilxor feedback in places like Ideas for ILX and then having people test it, weigh in and make changes, have a discussion, etc.

if the criticism is that there can’t be a discussion because meandering/impolite feedback is not welcome, then i don’t know! but again, i think i just be misunderstanding you for real map

Depends on your browser. It's usually something like Zoom in / Zoom out.

― Keith, Wednesday, 5 August 2026 09:52 (one hour ago)

this isn't the most effective solution because it changes more than the font size, as zooming out also makes the column containing the posts smaller (although shrinking the top of the page is good because that takes up a strangely large amount of space by default)

I know that folks are asleep or getting there, and i posted and explored some options re: look and feel... I don't mind how threads *themselves* appear, but I am super worried about the landing page— the two columns thing is really busy, and I truly think there should be an option that...well, that mimics ILX as it is now, partic for the landing page. i also wonder if this busy-ness will be amped up further by bookmarks. and how will threads be moved over?

also my god can we turn the emojis thing off or have an option to do so.

talk about a toxic social media feature that ILX never needed and doesn't need now.

i'm sorry for saying i didn't like it and not offering any constructive feedback. it will please the court to know that i won't post or read this site probably at all once the change rolls over. no hard feelings, it's just really unpleasant to read/look at (again, sorry for unconstructive feedback). <3

like, let's imagine an alternate dimension. where people with coding skills also have some basic familiarity with community building and support skills as well. where it's acknowledged that the coding part takes a back seat to the human part. in this alternate dimension i'm imagining a bunch of threads talking about needs and wants, where even if some people disagree at least there is some sort of attempt at consensus-building.

now, snapping back to our dimension. we find out that a huge change in ilx is in the works because of ... what looks to me like a small inner circle leak or something. and now we're all supposed to be grateful? come on ya'll. i'm a kinder person than i used to be but that doesn't mean i'm not going to call out bullshit. there is a way to bring people along. and after all these years we're still just kinda forcing changes on people because ... reasons i'm unclear on.

xp sure, i mean "constructive, polite" is very vague. but it also suggests to me a feeling of "this has already been decided" and that saying "none at all, no thanks" isn't "constructive."

now if this is just .. a project that is not being intended for eventual adoption as the official ilx then i take back my words, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

admit that if the emojis stay and aren't able to be hidden, i will also leave. this isn't reddit, that's why i'm here.

xp

fair enough

i don’t see things the way you do on this, but thank you for explaining!

is there a Site New Answers and i've missed it?

i think it's "recent activity"

keith's criticism caveat is probably for the best because its keeping me from making fun of the new design in an unfunny manner in internet post form

and now i will finally shut the fuck up

I am super worried about the landing page— the two columns thing is really busy, and I truly think there should be an option that...well, that mimics ILX as it is now, partic for the landing page.

i agree with this, it goes along with everything just being too big in general, but it's really inefficient at displaying the list of threads in each board like this - i can only see the ~6 most recently updated threads by default here, compared to ~30 on current ilx. idk that the new 'new threads' column really adds anything except making things busier - that could be a good option to have but idk that the best way is to display them side by side like this?

^ ^ ^

yeah, the "new questions" link works perfectly well, don't see why it needs to be a huge part of the site landing page.

xp

i guess i’m more optimistic that the things that are being criticized (not being able to hide the emojis) can be addressed, and that was the purpose of the sandbox. i think a deeper more important thing is that, even if the emojis can be hidden, the presence of them will prompt reference/meaning to them that will be a part of the conversation whether you see them or not (maybe?, that’s my guess). anyway. but it's don’t see introducing them in a sandbox as a dominating act of programming will, i think it’s just in here in the sandbox and now instead of arguing about it on “many threads” you could just try it out.

i’m trying to imagine the feedback of “many threads”, especially of aging decrepit losers dying out and if one more goes to the door than the whole damn house will fall down on itself until there’s just one ai bot blurting out “im’ sorry. im’ sorry. im’ sorry” to itself with a self-awarded thumbs up emoji and a hidden link to a google promo. it sounds fucking horrible. i think i’d just make the damn thing, like they did, because it’s really complicated and accomplishing a gigantic ass project on a zero dollar budget is often not best served by having the community design a user interface lol

that's all well and good but...some of us like this interface. and for some of us, it's why we have stuck around so long. you're going to lose people who are here partly because of the simplicity and feel of ilx as it is.

i'm not at all opposed to redesigning the site but we seem to be losing a lot of the minimalism that makes ilx so easy to use

i think it's "recent activity"

ah ty

i too would prefer *not* to have that 'new threads' third column (or perhaps just the option to remove it). v. busy

yes i use old.css

that said i think the concept of leaving the site because of a redesign is kind of extreme....i assumed that the people who were still here had some level of esteem for the community itself

the extra column doesn't work bc at least on my browser there's a ton of margin space on either side so it's really squished in there

^^^ and even when i zoom in

i don't even want to look at it. i find it pretty dispiriting. the truth is i'll probably get over it and stick around. but it could have been so much better, you know? it could have felt like my input was valued, along with the input of everybody else who posts here. instead we get the same fucking "we're deciding that this is going to happen and you're going to deal with it but at least you get some nominal feedback that may or may not change some features after the fact" approach that is so alienating about every other social media platform or organization (i.e. work) we all have to be a part of every day.

i agree with table and brimstead about the additional "features". the absolute greatness of ilx lies in what it hasn't adopted from other message boards with more "features".

also, this place is a sanctuary because it isn't updated. we have to update every fucking computer, phone, app, whatever it is we have, what feels like weekly these days and it is always a bewildering, unnecessary-from-a-user-pov pain in the ass. not ilx! it is consistent. it looks the same and it looks great. people are generally comfortable with it. no one is clamoring for emojis. or any other new features. maybe a few people who have requested things over the years? like 5-6? but oh my god what ever the fuck happened to if it isn't broke don't fix it?!?!?!

i think the redesign could be a clear improvement over the current site (although there's little wrong with the current site, the only feature i've ever really wanted is a 'quote post' button) but currently it's going backwards in a lot of ways so i hope that won't just be shrugged off

like, the new search doesn't seem to have an option to search post bodies, only thread titles & users? that's a big downgrade

or is that just because i'm not logged in yet idk

that's because you're not logged in

i'm testing the search now and i will say it is absolutely screaming fast (maybe that's just the volume of posts on sandbox but it's impressive still)

again, it wpuld not be some melodramatic flouncing on my part, it's just like, the site will be less convenient for me to use, difficult to read, etc, i just don't think i'll put the effort in

I only ever interact with this joint via Zing on iPhone now so if that’s OK I’ll be OK

OTOH I don’t come to the site to read my own posts, with the exception of the one I made a few years back about Octonauts, still proud of that one

brimstead, why?

why would it be difficult to read, for you? for real, i believe you, and i think probably there are others who would find it more difficult! personally, it’s fine, but because i grew up in the fukken “show-me-state” which is full of the worst “we must always stay the same and never change unless someone, probably the federal government, makes us do it, goddamn it” kind of people, i reacted against that and actually really like change!

i also think, probably, that if you thought about whatever made is less convenient to use and more difficult to read could be addressed, maybe that would help?

as in, if you’re feeling bummed about a certain change, it’s likely others are too! so just say something!

i’m not in the inner circle or anything duh, i would demand payment in shitcoin if so, but i am appreciative of people putting in enormous amounts of effort for free while people threaten to leave because they’re so pissed

the site will be less convenient for me to use, difficult to read, etc,

this was my experience with checking it out for a few minutes earlier today. it was difficult to read. hard to understand what i was looking at. another unnecessary update with another unnecessary learning curve.

anyway i've said all i have to say about my broader objections to a top-down "redesign" (like it's a corporate or government product or something). i know they're coming from a place of frustration so they probably aren't contributing much but i had to register my feelings about it. i wonder if anyone else has similar feelings?

for the record, i'm against any and all ways in which the "redesign" is different from the current design. i trust users like ufo to really get into the weeds with it as it seems like they have a good grasp of the spirit of this place.

i assumed that the people who were still here had some level of esteem for the community itself

I do, but i also think it's obvious that if one changes the environment in which a community resides, that this changes how the community interacts, and thus changes the community.

before I see this, I’d like to register a pre-emptive vote for no emojis other than lol and otm, and for no embeds other than images

otmmmmmmm xpost

i trust users like ufo to really get into the weeds with it as it seems like they have a good grasp of the spirit of this place.

also sic tbqh

I really love the minimalism of the look of ilx, I will miss it sorely if it changes

i assumed that the people who were still here had some level of esteem for the community itself

I do, but i also think it's obvious that if one changes the environment in which a community resides, that this changes how the community interacts, and thus changes the community.

― out of the cradle endlessly party rocking (the table is the table), Tuesday, August 4, 2026 10:39 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sure it would just make sense to me to see this play out vs. saying "i'm out" preemptively

but why take the gamble in the first place?

sure--i do think a reasonable question is what drove the decision to rewrite the site and is there anything we're getting as far as stability, security, or avoiding dated, end-of-life software that could be risky or hard to maintain?

1. Emoji's do not belong on ILX.

2. Turning off emoji's isn't going to cut it when the conversation turns to the presence or absence of emojis that one can't see.

a cool thing about involving community in design decisions is that word can get out that your place is a true community, which attracts other people who value true community.

sure--i do think a reasonable question is what drove the decision to rewrite the site and is there anything we're getting as far as stability, security, or avoiding dated, end-of-life software that could be risky or hard to maintain?

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 3:46 AM (fifty-two seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

totally. necessary updates because of a changing technical landscape are a different thing.

i work in enterprise-level software and infrastructure, and a lot of what drives modernization initiatives is not obvious to customers or users, i just wouldn't know if that's the case with something like ilx

and like maybe i'm just not clued in to how much updating needs to happen to keep a place like ilx floating along in the current internet. maybe there were required updates and keith or whoever got inspired and thought "why not try these other things that i think are a good idea." i get that this is probably just an innocent thing. ilx has always been someone's hobby and kind of a "spare time" "when i have time" kind of thing.

xp gotcha

re: emojis

for those just reading who won’t go to the sandbox, this refers not to in-text emojis like :) eggplant emoji etc but instead to “reactions” to individual posts that one can make, sort of facebook style where there are several non-negative reactions and it keeps track of how many there are,

oooo yeah those have definitely got to go. the main other thing i agree with that a few people have pointed out so far is that the two-column deal is cluttered and confusing and should probably just go away imo.

for the record, i'm against any and all ways in which the "redesign" is different from the current design.

i don’t think you mean this, so i’ll ask - what makes this different than “any changes are not allowed”?

ilx has a strong track record of being opposed to those reactions. since i work in an environment where not thumbs-upping every single MS teams message could possibly be construed as rude, i really don't want to see this stuff ported to ilx.

if you agree with someone, put in the effort to make a post. that's always been the way here.

i work in an environment where not thumbs-upping every single MS teams message could possibly be construed as rude, i really don't want to see this stuff ported to ilx.

i agree with this. truly i would anticipate some bitter, BITTER ilx arguments just coming from certain posts having lots of reactions while some having none at all

there are also social media people who “like” absolutely everything, no matter what, and some people who never like anything, no matter what

this leads to BITTER confusion lol

it's fucking wild to me that very senior people at my company use the heart emoji on teams but we all do it now

Just think. We could have a thread called "Most Liked Posts" updated every week. You wouldn't have to look at another goddam Excelsior thread again.

it could be delivered in a podcast

deliver the best ilx post + my son’s birthday news

some other things that aren't deal-breakers for me but i'd rather not have

changing "site new answers" to "recent activity". objectively clearer, sure, but there are old threads that refer to sna and we lose that context.

all the stat-ification. the tabs at the bottom of the threads. we don't need "top posters" do we? is that something we already have, that's buried somewhere?

i am seeing some things that are nice. "you have read up to here". "mute user" is nice to have (sad but true).

i get that this is probably just an innocent thing. ilx has always been someone's hobby and kind of a "spare time" "when i have time" kind of thing.

map i’m sorry to pick on you 2nite and it’s really just more like i’m like wtf, but i would be SO FUCKING PISSED if someone said this about my work

like what the fuck? why would you say that, it’s mean

Looking forward to the avatar gifs too. This is the one I'm going to be using.

https://i.ibb.co/hFQ4FsW7/vince-motor.gif

it’s like dreamlike in a disorienting way, in this dream map was so dismissive to people about running a goddamn huge fucking messageboard in their spare time as a hobby, instead of what?

anyway, will wake up soon, wtf

relax folks I've been through a number of forum design changes in my day it'll feel weird for a week or two but you'll get used to it

like what the fuck? why would you say that, it’s mean

whoa yeah we're not on the same wavelength tonight for whatever reason but it's cool. iirc the people who have put in the work over the years have always said the same thing themselves! that it isn't anyone's full-time job but a passion project more or less that necessarily has to take a back seat to life.

i don't have much of a view on emoji reactions - i don't think they really add anything, but i don't think they're likely to be a big problem either - i feel like the culture of this place isn't likely to go crazy with them anyway

i think they work a bit better in a real-time chat than on a message board. like, discord servers i'm in don't tend to use them that much but there's situations where they're a little funny and that's fine, but message-boards are slower anyway so it doesn't fit the same way?

You can make a poll where the users have to rank options ... These are then scored with two different methodologies (Dowdall; Condorcet)

*squeals like a toddler* (or maybe a psephologist)

Also delighted by the promised editing window. My endless trail of typos is a *huge* issue for me and brain with acquired language processing deficits.

^same

i feel like the culture of this place isn't likely to go crazy with them anyway

i don't know about that. i can see them being popular. depending on how they're used i could see them being a deterrent to me posting as much. i think people kinda go lizard brain when they see posts with a bunch of likes. it adds another layer of self-consciousness to posting. how many likes am i going to get when i post, none at all? i should post something that will get likes. etc. it really changes the substance of communication. similar to what call all destroyer is saying about them. and am i seeing a "yawn" emoji? i thought we left the mean era behind.

so far i guess i'd say the reactions are the only thing that cross a line for me. the rest i can probably put up with.

what strikes me as most valuable about ilx is the archival nature of it. threads are 25 years old and unaltered. not much else on the internet gives you that along with current usability. now all those old posts are going to be allowed reactions? that just feels wrong to me. i don't agree with changing the substance of communication here 25 years down the line.

whither 77 (which does not exist in the sandbox)?

i.e. will everything currently there remain . . . vaguely off-limits?

Editing will be a godsend for me.

Adding emojis smells too much like a social media move - like the time Twitter decided to change stars to hearts and their ridiculous reasons for doing so. This is ILX, not social media.

I like the stats at the bottom. If I enter a Depeche Mode thread with twenty years of posts and the majority of them are by Ned, I know that it'll be worth my time scrolling back.

It's 6.0. I mean I just made that up, but it's definitely 6. I mean 2 wasn't 2, it was more like 3 or 4. It's so complicated.

― Keith

we gotta keep the FAQ for the history: https://ilxor.com/faq.html

whither 77 (which does not exist in the sandbox)?

― mookieproof, Tuesday, August 4, 2026 10:56 PM (eighteen minutes ago)

i.e. will everything currently there remain . . . vaguely off-limits?

― mookieproof, Tuesday, August 4, 2026 10:57 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

yes -- nothing from ILX is being moved to the Sandbox. the plan is for the new code to get heavy road testing, feedback elicited believe it or not, then implementation on ILX somewhere down the line. Private borads remain private, Dutch borads remain Dutch, etc.

Dutch borads remain Dutch, etc.

real ones who follow De Subjectivisten would have known 3.0 was coming

I’m down with editing. Emojis and reactions are a hard no from me.

Also much love to z_tbd, but my guy—you are not an old ilx poster. Get off our lawn, etc.

oh no

loool damn

at least let me check yr mail

i hate to tell you but i’ve been here over 21 goddamn years lol shoot

oh no we cannot have emojis

that is the reddest line possible

ugh this is painful but these are two different things.

there are not emojis in the new thing. like, emoji support (the thing with all the “emoji and the flags and the eggplant and, of course, the cactus :) :) is not thing in there.

but “reactions” are in there, like you can click on a post and add a “thumbs up” or “:-o” or several different things. similar to facebook/slack etc.

which is a legit big move and i’d expect discussion on that. but different from “emojis” and making the distinction since not everyone reading this will be in the sandbox

suggested compromise: keep reactions, but the only reactions you can choose are eggplant or cactus

I have fond memories of the sandbox in the Great ILX Server Shakeup of. . . 2007ish? I can’t bear an ilx sandbox with “reactions,” much less a Nu ILX with “reactions.”

But I also remember a time when there were plenty of women on ilx so I understand irrelevance.

if you feel the need to post an emoji/emoticon, then, well, you can totally do so

it should not be a part of the system

yeah, agree

I’m not an old head but yeah emoji reactions are gross, like using Outlook instead of a real email client.
Another forum I’ve been a member of for nearly 2 decades recently added emojis, it’s such a dismissive reaction to a post I reckon.

ugh this is painful but these are two different things.

Sorry. I'll be clear: No "reaction glyphs" please.

Wonderful new feature: being able to star a specific post.

otm

it doesn't accept my password but I'm sure it's correct (can't register either, username already exists)

a dazzling new feature is the option to reset your password

there are not emojis in the new thing. like, emoji support (the thing with all the “emoji and the flags and the eggplant and, of course, the cactus :) :) is not thing in there.

🍆 🏴‍☠️🎌🇹🇻🫡🏜️🌵

Map, brimstead, table and everyone else negative about this otm. Sorry this isn’t “constructive” enough for you Keith (maybe you shouldn’t have been so weird about asking your deeply unlikeable pal to post this thread, followed up with multiple comments as though that was obvious to people who aren’t in this fabled inner circle and then just casually foisting these changes on us?)

Map, mute user and mute thread are very good functions that exist on zing and which i use readily. Lmao also at quincie‘s comment about women on ilx.

As a zing user, most of the changes on the website generally go right by me. I think the emoji reacts are a horrible idea (who asked for this? Oh that’s right, nobody, there wasn’t a single thread on the subject on here), the design is too much when the simple interface of ilx is very much in its favour in these days of having to brush away various intrusive bits of code on pretty much any website I visit, visually it’s unappealing to me (this is the least important as it’s highly subjective).

Let me know when/if you need the server money, will generally always support ilx to keep running and would be more than happy to dip the hand in to contribute to zing and its maintenance etc but not a fan of this, sorry not sorry.

Also I laughed very much at cad’s comment about the heart emoji on teams. We all do this at my workplace too and it’s gone from deeply strange to almost expected in a very short space of time.

Deeply unlikeable? I always thought we got on perfectly well.

Honestly, there was no need to get personal like that.

I'm on holiday and not posting much so haven't had a chance to read this thread carefully or play w/ new board yet but will add my voice to the anti-react chorus, map otm about it activating a lizard brain response. Encourages cliquishness, pile ons, etc. As I said on some other thread I like that when I post to ILX I have no way of knowing what other posters not replying to me think of my posts, the thought everyone might be thinking "god what a cunt" keeps my worst impulses in check.

Whereas my username literally means “God you’re a cunt” and you see how good I am at keeping my worst impulses in check

I do think it's kinda strange that this just lands and the first discussion has no context for anyone and no previous discussions or reasoning for why this happening on which comments can be based.

CAD otm to say this feels like the way a big org would do something, ie for reasons unrelated to what people who use the existing tool need. I think there is a really clear onus on someone, and I genuinely have no idea who, that's how weird this is, to say why this is happening or give a background to it and any discussions that have happened to lead to it.

Maybe I'm wrong to suspect that 99% of us have no idea who would have the power to make a decision like this - but I do think that's prob the case? And that is a problem.

I haven't engaged with the design yet because the context is more important at this stage. I can't comment on a design when I don't know what problems it's supposed to be fixing and when it's unclear whether those come from the community.

Personally, I'm not annoyed about it but I understand if others are. I think it is kinda naive to think this wouldn't be something people care about, and doubly naive to 'launch' the discussion with someone posting 'hey look at this' in a goofy manner.

Like, seriously, talk about teeing up a bad reaction.

Above all I think someone who is driving this needs explain all the context and history for it, sooner rather than later, itt. Or start a new one.

sorry to add, maybe there are loads of really good and important reasons why this is happening, and lots of difficult work has been done, but people need explanations of that if so.

Above all I think someone who is driving this needs explain all the context and history for it, sooner rather than later, itt. Or start a new one.

Heh, never knew the origin of your username. Such info definitely needs to be on any new landing page.

localgarda otm

today someone told me that a distinctive brutalist 1970s public housing complex in my city was going to be knocked down and replaced with twice as much public housing, which my best brain tells me may ultimately be a good thing but i still feel sad about losing the building and what it represents

which is also a little bit the way i feel about losing this lovely and still wholly functional ILX interface that is a bit dated but i kind of appreciate that about it

The approach to stuff like this is usually my bag, but my life has got really busy and I was becoming the blocker on Keith getting real feedback and testing the new code which wasn't great. I'm going to be tied up a lot today too but let me give it a go:

Why change?
You might have noticed last year that AI bot traffic brought the site down multiple times. I managed to recover it and putting it behind Cloudflare helped mitigate the problem, but it's still there (and I don't love sending all our traffic via Cloudflare). But the old site simply can't cope with that level of non-human shaped traffic, because it's optimised to handle a smaller set of recent and frequent threads, not a load of bots trying to load the whole thing multiple times a second. (A second consideration is security - AI is getting really good at finding holes in things, and the old stack is hard to update and keep secure). So we needed to change.

I also personally wanted to upgrade: we were reaching the architectural limits (and my ability) to transform the old code -- there were things I've wanted to do for a long time in both Zing and the site that were painful/impossible to do -- and some things that were just out-of-date, like the search engine.

What's happening right now?
Keith - much like he did when the PHP site died - had both willingness and ability to rescue us by creating an all-new version of the code that in theory solves a lot of architectural problems with the old code, better handles the AI situation, modernises the stack and leaves us in a broadly better starting point. He also took the chance to revisit some of his older ways of thinking about UI and design and the site based on everything he's learned in the past 20 years.

He's now got a version of that code that does all that. And we've put it on the sandbox -- https://sandbox.ilxor.com/ -- for people to test out and give feedback on.

When is this going to be on the real ILX?
We don't have a date or anything yet. Before we migrate, I'll start a big thread and make lots of noise so people know what's happening and can get ready.

(lol I got two errors trying to post this. thank you for your service, old code)

that is very helpful. i think if we’re starting from a point of knowing that the site needs to be upgraded, we can focus on specific features and have some constructive discussions about whether the community wants or needs them.

agreed. thanks stet.

yes agreed!

yeah thanks, gives a lot more sense of it.

Can I ask how adamant anti-emoji folks view longstanding ilx uses of exotic ascii characters e.g.

☺ ♩♪♫♬۞۞ΞΞƷ Φ ۩‼Austin's gallery of MUSIC MEMES and other music-related internet ephemera‼۩ Φ ƸΞΞ۞۞♬♫♪♩ ☺

?

Or is that okay because they're nerd-cute, not Facebook-cute?

💩

I'm a woman on ilx. i need more time to digest and explore the features before I tell you I hate it lol comment... will try and catch up in the next few days

if you feel the need to post an emoji/emoticon, then, well, you can totally do so

it should not be a part of the system

― mookieproof, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 2:13 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

or otm the post like a real ilxor.

The two column landing page is kind of interesting and I think I could get used to/come to like it.

Stet, your summary of the state and purpose of these changes is very helpful, thank you. Thanks to Keith for taking on this project even if I have strong feelings about certain changes.

The new favicon reminds me of Home Depot.

xps not anti emojis. Anti react buttons.

'otm' should be the only available reaction

Haha, as a very occasional ilxor, until map posted last night I fully assumed there had been some sort of discussion elsewhere and consensus preceding this announcement.

I did the reduced motion thing for you, Mick, although I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for—it's basically removing the animations. If that's still an issue, let me know.

Have user accounts on the sandbox carried over from a previous sandbox iteration? It let me reset a password to log in rather than needing to register as a new user.

Yes, the sandbox has been there the whole time.

Thanks. I remembered sandboxing in previous times so thought I'd give it a try before cluttering things up with a new account.

Will have a poke about and let the initial dust settle then give some thoughts and opinions.

Thank you, Keith. I'm not seeing any change at the moment? but I will have more time to poke at it later. (I guess what I have in mind is a settings option to have those datelines and menus permanently visible below each post [as they are on the current site] rather than show/hide-able.)

stet's explanation makes sense.

Issues I have come across over the past year have been - often when i post from my phone, it will go to a page suggesting something will go wrong and in trying to refresh or check whether it sent, either it doesn't or it will double my posts. i've seen plenty of people send duplicate posts, so i presume it's a similar problem. I also can't use the Remove Bookmark From Thread at the bottom of a thread and have to go into the bookmark tab. I just go on the website on my phone and don't use zing, which i'll give another go when this new version comes out. Hopefully this bug will be looked at but it looks like you guys have bigger issues.

Signing in and posting in the new sandbox seems easy enough so far. I'm not so attached with the current look, even messing around with the few options like font choice. This ilx has Preferences > I Want To Change The Way the Site Looks... with a few different skins. Will the new version have something similar?

Good luck keith and stet and anyone else connected with keeping this place running.

changing "site new answers" to "recent activity". objectively clearer, sure, but there are old threads that refer to sna and we lose that context.

Agreed on this one - SNA has been my entry point to the site for 20+ years

all the stat-ification. the tabs at the bottom of the threads. we don't need "top posters" do we? is that something we already have, that's buried somewhere?

Do you not remember the statscock? That was big thing for a long while.

I have some gripes, mainly interface wise - mobile could do with some tweaks, I don’t think I’ve seen this site on a desktop in 15 years. One of the joys of ILX has been having all embeds, images etc. turned off and looking at them being a choice. That’s probably the main thing I’d like to preserve.

Is there somewhere to file bugs, I think I found a couple in the password reset flow, it reall y does not play nice with Apple password manager. I would like to document them properly.

I you want to just do it on the sandbox, that would be helpful thanks, Ed. I did try and make it aware of the local password setup, but then sometimes they get changed. Re: turning off images and embeds, I'm sure I can do that too—just give me time.

A hoy—thanks... There are some styles if you look in Settings->Typography. Not the same as before, but the style definitions are just short of forty times the size of the old one.

ok logged in now - search is indeed much better logged in and a lot of the settings do provide options to fix the main problems i had, though not all of them.

scrolling mode 4 + divider 2 do make things a fair bit more readable, though it'd be nice to have a wider divider (like the one on current ilx, really - thin faint line across the whole column rather than just in the middle is ideal imo)

i don't quite get why the post body column doesn't extend all the way to the right, or at least as far as the header does? this leaves a lot of space empty and also causes problems when zooming out because the column becomes even smaller when zoomed out instead of staying proportional to the header width

i'm still confused by how big everything is by default - are you designing this on a high res monitor or something? it's just much bigger than any other similar website and is a huge contrast to the size of current ilx's layout (which is very pleasant overall)

clicking on posts to be able to react to them is a pretty unintuitive ui decision, i feel like that as a feature needs to be put behind a button or something or at least some sort of indication that clicking on a post will give you options like that?

bandcamp embeds are a great addition and soundcloud probably would have been too once upon a time

there's not an option to still use bbcode is there? i completely understand if it'd be too much of a pain for it to support all the new features like tables etc. but only having wysiwyg isn't a really an upgrade

i'm still confused by how big everything is by default

can we please get an explanation on reactions? it seems like most people here don’t want them.

did the 'recently updated threads' for each board previously show who started the thread & who made the last post & when? like it does on current ilx? that is important info that should be kept around

I made a thread for bugs etc. here:

https://sandbox.ilxor.com/thread/15/47

can we please get an explanation on reactions? it seems like most people here don’t want them.

― out of the cradle endlessly party rocking (the table is the table), Wednesday, August 5, 2026 6:17 AM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Literally going to keep posting this until it's addressed. Most people here don't want them. Please either make them able to be disabled/hidden or get rid of them, or at least address them in the conversation that's happening.

They look fucking awful. (Just logged into the sandbox site for the first time in years).

Thankfully we can assume our criticisms will be heard. Even though this thread was just dumped on here by a non-admin with no consultation, but never mind!

Glad it works for you.
I do want to take in feedback, but over the course of months (under the assumption it's polite and constructive
-I will be ignoring/doubling down on the rest). People tend to have knee-jerk reactions to change. The new threads thing serves a purpose, and there is no other way to see new threads.
Options can be useful too, but they need to be sparing, or the settings page becomes unusable/too complicated,
so there needs to be judgement here, and that can come in time. Right now, only a few people have even seen this, so now is not the time to be making a whole load of changes.
Keith
Yesterday at 4.37PM

Table - Keith's explanation upthread was to reduce low-content 'lol' or 'otm' posts by giving people the option to react instead. I haven't played around with the sandbox yet (going in very soon) but instinctively I am also on Team No Reacts. I dislike the idea of the social media-ification of ILX and also don't mind 'lol' or 'otm' posts.

there are definitely some ilxors who only know how to express their dissatisfaction by bullying, abusing, and berating others. they are part of the fabric of this board so i think we should try to look beyond their cruelness and parse out their legitimate concerns. not being cheeky here.

I'm very much opposed to reactions, and frankly think it would be a huge mistake

I did the password reset thing, and the "create a new user" thing, various emails have arrived swiftly, but the one saying "OK, log in now" seems not to be happening.

Personally, I am very much someone who dislikes change, and yes I still use old.css, so it's going to take a while for me to work out what I like and what I don't about the new structure that isn't just "oh god it's new and I hate it" - but my first thought about that is to give it some time and testing rather than outright stating "oh god it's new and I hate it". Especially as, I don't know if people have noticed, but it HASN'T been forced on you from above... it's on the sandbox, for you to test, and to provide feedback.

It also wasn't a secret that it was being worked on - stet and Keith have spoken about it on threads that relate to both suggestions for new features and the site's ability to handle bot attacks etc. I'm not sure that we needed a banner to state that something was in the works until this stage of the process, unless all of the people complaining literally wanted to be involved in coding it? This is the announcement and testing stage! Here it is!

Table - Keith's explanation upthread was to reduce low-content 'lol' or 'otm' posts by giving people the option to react instead. I haven't played around with the sandbox yet (going in very soon) but instinctively I am also on Team No Reacts. I dislike the idea of the social media-ification of ILX and also don't mind 'lol' or 'otm' posts.

i would find it mildly amusing if the only two available reactions were just 'lol' and 'otm' instead of any of the emotes but i don't think they're solving any sort of real problem

We need an emoji for 'nabisco otm'

I got the emails, so that's OK

I echo the dislike of the emoji reacts.

Checking it out, and as someone that works in software I'm sympathetic to developers because all users hate change, and I'm also a user that hates change. I use keith.css and I'm sure I could get used to the new format, but to me the current version is perfect and classic. Seems like the username column to the left takes up a bunch of space unnecessarily? I kind of like reading a post before seeing who wrote it, but recognize that the new version could be an improvement if the name column was smaller and less obtrusive.

Count me in on "no reacts", I feel very strongly about that. A low-effort 'lol' or 'otm' is still much higher effort than a react anyway.

a few posts mentioning it in out of the way tech support threads isn't exactly a clear heads-up, i had no idea. i think people feel it would have come across much better if there'd just been a thread at some earlier point going 'we're working on a big upgrade to the forum software [for the previously stated reason], what sort of new features would be most important?' just to gauge the mood and get an idea of what the community was & wasn't interested in? you'd still get people demanding absolutely no change of course but it's easier to bring people with you if there's more engagement earlier on

i don't think it's a huge deal unless you do all just rush ahead with it but suddenly asking for feedback on a lot of big changes made for unclear reasons is going to catch people off-guard

there are definitely some ilxors who only know how to express their dissatisfaction by bullying, abusing, and berating others. they are part of the fabric of this board so i think we should try to look beyond their cruelness and parse out their legitimate concerns. not being cheeky here.

Lmao @ “berating” and “bullying” as though I was the only person to say, yeah it’s a bit fucking shit to just drop this in here and ignore peoples comments on the subject until stet eventually showed up to clarify. (Thanks for that stet, btw, would still have hated many of the proposed changes but at least we wouldn’t have needed many posts to get to what was going on). Suggest you make use of the mute tool, crüt, it’s a genuinely good zing feature and will benefit everyone as much as it does me. Regards

it's going to take a while for me to work out what I like and what I don't about the new structure that isn't just "oh god it's new and I hate it"

This is where I am right now too; there's a lot going on with the new site—it all seems too busy to me but that could change after some adjusting.

I'm also not into the reactions, but one thing I definitively know that I will never like and could possibly drive me away is the poster stats (top posters, posts per day). I can't think of any reason to track and display this information and find it viscerally unpleasant in a way I'm not sure how to articulate.

xp i am agreeing with you!

i don't think it's a huge deal unless you do all just rush ahead with it but suddenly asking for feedback on a lot of big changes made for unclear reasons is going to catch people off-guard

Particularly when one of our suddenly chatty admins is talking about doubling down and ignoring feedback. And as someone who does very much interact with the zing threads (again, hugely valuable tool for interacting with the site) and who makes suggestions and tests changes when they come through the app, I’m certainly not in a position of “no change ever!” Would have been nice to have the suggestions collated and discussed as a community before the sandbox. Doesn’t seem like it’s reinventing the wheel for a user-driven website. Oh there I go, berating again.

Just catching up (am away so only looking now and then..)

First of all: classic old style ILX clusetrfuck. Well done everybody

I suppose my first reaction on seeing the thread is how this was to do with the issues around cloudfare, and I've seen Keith posting about recoding the site, but was surprised at seeing all these features.

Hope the cloudfare stuff does go away as a minimum.

Look forward to having a look in the next week or so..(maybe sooner) xps

reminder that what Keith said was:

Constructive, polite feedback is welcome. Not the other kind.

I am saying not-constructive, not-polite feedback should also be taken into consideration.

emil.y, i don't think that's a sufficient explanation.

as i said in my initial post, i actually quite liked playing around with how threads looked when i was actually in them. i simply don't love the landing page— it looks much too busy— and i loathe the emoji reactions, as do (it seems) most of us here.

curtis, i don't exist here to bully or harass people. i've been a part of this board for 20 years, give or take a few, and while i can be polemical and insane, the only reason i am harping about this issue is because i care about this board, and i care about many of you, and i also care about the way into the future— emoji reactions are *not* it.

to go into an explanation:
the emoji reaction is a degradation of discourse, and this is one of the last places on the internet where i feel like we're not 100% in pure toxic hell territory all the time in this regard. it reduces actual thinking to :shock-face: or :angry-face: or whatever. this is not what i think most of us are here for, but when the buttons exist, they cannot be ignored. lol and otm reacts are part of what makes the place special— you can't just heart emoji or smile emoji or dart hitting target emoji. you have to put in some minimal effort to actually type out three letters and hit submit. it requires agency. emojis are lazy, reductive, and could act as a limit in what this board is about, which is conversation.

people have an emotional attachment to ilx as it is, so emotional knee-jerk reactions are valuable information

Also very against reacts, text size and stats! Otherwise.... it's fine? Edits are good! Saved posts great. Embeds..... not sure.

Agree with poster stats staying zapped for good. It never added anything and I assume it was a legacy from its earliest days xp

Table otm

the emoji reaction is a degradation of discourse, and this is one of the last places on the internet where i feel like we're not 100% in pure toxic hell territory all the time in this regard. it reduces actual thinking to :shock-face: or :angry-face: or whatever. this is not what i think most of us are here for, but when the buttons exist, they cannot be ignored.

otm. as i said in the sandbox thread, a major ilx update shouldn't aim to change the way we communicate with each other on here.

also if there's a like option i will start liking everyone's posts instead of staying in lurk mode and people will get sick of me.

I think the reacts will have a Reddit style unintended consequences, the rating of posts as a sort of popularity contest has a corrosive effect, especially as ILX as it currently stands is one of the last vestiges of the "old Internet" where the words and thoughts can stand on their own merits

also, this seems to be, in my opinion, a solution looking for a problem. I like the lol and otm posts and it's not like there is some incredible volume of them that bogs down threads

fwiw I tried to register but it says I already have a login but I don't know what it is lol

two inputs of various use here

- sandbox password always tries to overwrite my real ilx password on all browsers and i am lazy and it keeps me from using sandbox more

- while we are at it, ten fps should be enough to see some hot ban action at this stage cmon you know it makes sense

I like the function of "top posters" but I take issue with the language: we don't need to facilitating some embaressing sense of competition with the word "top". Just call that tab "posters" and it's fine!

Agree with fp changes

being a top poster would cause a reflexive embarrassment in me impossible to erase

^^ just talking about thread specific "top poster" stats. Cool with that. The landing page total collection serves no function except to gameify the site which goes in the same box as reacts: evil new-net creations

please no post ratings or likes. it leads to discourse becoming a competition

the sandbox has been there the whole time.

But when there was only one set of footprints, that was when Keith was carrying you.

Or maybe

The real sandbox was the friends we made along the way

Like, I do think theres a potential function in knowing who is active in a thread. It works as the inverse of the also good mute user/mute-thread addition

Tried to login, no luck; tried to re-register, no luck.

fwiw I tried to register but it says I already have a login but I don't know what it is lol

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, 5 August 2026 15:23 (nineteen minutes ago)

If it says you already have a login then it'll be connected to the email you were trying to sign up with, so you can request a password reset, it'll be sent to your email. That's what I had to do, had no idea what my old Sandbox password was.

Like many here, I am very happy with the absence of reacts on current ilx; it's one of the things that drew me to the site and has kept me here. Fur me, reacts create a sense of competition, self-criticism, and compulsive checking that is everywhere else on the internet and blissfully absent here. I come to ilx in part because it doesn't feel like the internet of 2026. Updates that make it more navigable or w/ever are one thing, but I would be wary of anything that will change the dynamic of the community here.

For me, that is.

Which is why I would be very happy with the ability to edit posts right after you send them!

i was honestly surprised that my email was the same and still worked, i just needed to change my pass. the last time i remember being in the sandbox was 2007, a literal lifetime ago

imagine doing some tossed off sarcastic remark on a football thread or whatever and you get a like reaction from somebody you've never heard of

chilling

xps aha thx emil.y

Yeah, I mean, I think the consensus is clear on reacts, it's just not something the community wants, not even with an option to hide it. I also don't think opinions will change with time on this, whereas I think a lot of the other changes will just take a bit of getting used to. Hopefully Keith will take this into account!

xps to the reacts discussion

Got a new password of the sandbox...assume that's separate from my ILX password.

"for," not "of"--why I need editing.

I seem to be one of the only posters strongly against an edit function. Not allowing folks to take back things both makes folks (at least me) think before posting and also keeps threads from ceasing to make sense when an edit renders subsequent posts incomprehensible.

one thing I definitively know that I will never like and could possibly drive me away is the poster stats (top posters, posts per day). I can't think of any reason to track and display this information and find it viscerally unpleasant in a way I'm not sure how to articulate.

this doesn't bother me very much, but maybe because we used to have the Statscock in ILX 1.0. statscock

it's fucking wild to me that very senior people at my company use the heart emoji on teams but we all do it now

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 3:03 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I got addicted in the 2020 era Slack with all the custom emojis that were ilx jokes! Then I joined a Teams office in 2023 and they were looking for someone to bring some positive energy to Teams as a communication tool for my multi-site workplace where there were info gaps. Now we all use them (and I'm one of the worst offenders for finding a thinly related reax). My colleagues are relatively young, maybe that's a factor? I'm one of the olds here. Absolutely adore Teams as the closest thing to mIRC days tbh.

Just took a quick glimpse at the sandbox but thank you to keith and stet for taking this on.

I seem to be one of the only posters strongly against an edit function. Not allowing folks to take back things both makes folks (at least me) think before posting and also keeps threads from ceasing to make sense when an edit renders subsequent posts incomprehensible.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, 5 August 2026 16:05 (two minutes ago)

I feel like the five-minute window gets around the 'making subsequent posts incomprehensible' part? Unless it's an incredibly active thread. But even then there's edit history so you should be able to see what it said first and work it out from there.

NB I haven't tested this function out so I'm just going from what other people have said about it, I might be totally wrong on how it works.

No to edit function

And no to ten fps. I am happy with my once a year one week ban thank you.

Someone did say it upthread but a quote function might be nice.

But really just getting it to be less creaky as the thing to focus on first before any further changes..

Will join the chorus in being opposed to emoji or any other kind of passive reaction to posts (e.g., likes, upvotes/downvotes, etc.)

it's fucking wild to me that very senior people at my company use the heart emoji on teams but we all do it now

It was startling the first few times I saw people use the heart emoji in Teams. Definitely felt like a generational thing where younger people used it unthinkingly while the rest of us middle-aged folks were thumbs-upping everything instead.

this doesn't bother me very much, but maybe because we used to have the Statscock in ILX 1.0. statscock

― jaymc, Wednesday, 5 August 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Never liked how I was in the top 20 at one point iirc (like to think I am hallucinating this btw)

I don't think I need an edit function so much as a two-step posting function where a prompt asks, "Have you checked your post for typos?" But that's just me.

I'll play around in the sandbox but tbh my baseline is that I like ilx as is, its minimalist clunkiness is a respite from most web-based interactions. (Yes I realize this makes me a NIMBY conservative suspicious of newfangled things.)

I like that I can have it on screen at work and it doesn't telegraph through color or design that it's NOT work.

xp yeah I'm aware of that though I never saw it in action. I don't really want to have a debate about it, but I can't think of any value that posting stats adds to the board.

Like, I do think theres a potential function in knowing who is active in a thread. It works as the inverse of the also good mute user/mute-thread addition

― H.P, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 10:38 AM (thirty minutes ago)

Genuine question: why not just open/read the thread? There's only like 75 active posters max at this point. And "inverse" is otm: muting is a silent, user-side solution to an obvious problem; posting user statistics that can be seen by anyone with a log-in is a highly visible non-solution to nothing. It just seems like surveillance for the sake of surveillance.

Maybe I'm over-sensitive because I recently received my first-ever ilx-hate-mail from (a long-term poster turned) lurker I've never once interacted with on the board, but I guess I'm just against anything that's designed to draw attention to specific users for no reason and to make normal use of the board into public information.

Will random ilx stuff like DUMPLINGS!! move over? Even if i've been here for like 20 years and still don't know what DUMPLINGS!! is a replacement for, I quite enjoy small stuff like that.

I think most people know the difference between a fix-my-typo edit and something like backpedaling an indefensible position or recalling an insult.

92% of my posts are low-effort pun-driven drive-by quips, but approximately 37% of them get ruined by a stupid typo or, worse, autocorrect substituting the "right" word in place of a joke coinage. Fixing that quickly and quietly prevents the subsequent "gah, I meant ___" post.

With respect to tipsy, a two step "are you sure" thing quickly becomes useless because the brain starts making the confirmation automatic instead of thoughtful.

Maybe I'm over-sensitive because I recently received my first-ever ilx-hate-mail from (a long-term poster turned) lurker I've never once interacted with on the board, but I guess I'm just against anything that's designed to draw attention to specific users for no reason and to make normal use of the board into public information.

I have definitely got the odd shitty ilxmail from users that have made me wonder if it’s possible to block those people in some way but webmail is an imperfect solution to an imperfect problem. That really is fucking shit, you’re one of my favourite posters and fuck that person.

DUMPLINGS!!! is a replacement for "DUMPLINGS!" iirc lol

Re edits: I want to love it (because I typo) but there have been times when deleted posts have distorted the records of what happened when few posters were around or looking and it has been very...affecting. I suspect that the harsh mistress of not being able to edit a typo is the better choice here.

I think the five minute window is reasonable

Literally I don't know what I thought was going to happen when I typed the word d u m p l i n g s into my previous post but it got the autocorrect treatment. It's a substitute for the regular word not in all caps.

five minute window would be useful for my typo-ridden ass

ridden? rife? roided? if only i could edit, i would probably make a change. palimpsests of idiocy.

DUMPLINGS!

(just testing)

agreed the five minute window is a clever solution

I don’t even know what prompted the DUMPLINGS! autoreplace, but I wouldn’t change it for any amount of buffy dvds

With respect to tipsy, a two step "are you sure" thing quickly becomes useless because the brain starts making the confirmation automatic instead of thoughtful.

True, I'm trying to offload my own brain work onto a bot and that would be the likely result.

My email address tied to my ILX login hasn't been functional in 16 years and I'm not actually sure how to update it. I imagine a mod could facilitate that, but now that I know about ILX hatemail maybe I don't want to.

Relatedly I'm with xyzzzz that 10 FPs should be too few to trigger a ban lol.

DUMPLINGS! was from the noize bored I'm pretty sure

I'm going to start autoreplacing DUMPLINGS! in my irl speech

thank you so much gyac! <3

fwiw all my prior ilxmail experiences were completely positive

lots of messages to read, do i have to re-register somewere?

I think the reacts will have a Reddit style unintended consequences, the rating of posts as a sort of popularity contest has a corrosive effect, especially as ILX as it currently stands is one of the last vestiges of the "old Internet" where the words and thoughts can stand on their own merits

this is really well-stated (OTM, even)

I feel like the five-minute window gets around the 'making subsequent posts incomprehensible' part? Unless it's an incredibly active thread. But even then there's edit history so you should be able to see what it said first and work it out from there.

NB I haven't tested this function out so I'm just going from what other people have said about it, I might be totally wrong on how it works.

― emil.y, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 11:09 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is a good point and I think a log should help parse any significant change.

Another vote against reacts. one-liner response like "lol", "otm" etc don't bother me. In fact I'd miss it if one-line "otm" responses got replaced.

If people were posting a lot of single-emoji responses I could see it, but not only are they not doing that, people hardly use emoji here at all.

I like that I can have it on screen at work and it doesn't telegraph through color or design that it's NOT work.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Wednesday, 5 August 2026 15:20 (one hour ago)

Exactly this, although I slightly ruined it by using ILX in a presentation -- I was working in the UX team, our own website was an absolute breakfast, and I used ILX to demonstrate "it's okay to make simple thing that does exactly what it needs to and that's it"

Anyway, co-sign on not adding reactions.

Tried to register but I'm told that my username already exists.

If it says you already have a login then it'll be connected to the email you were trying to sign up with, so you can request a password reset, it'll be sent to your email. That's what I had to do, had no idea what my old Sandbox password was.

― emil.y, Wednesday, 5 August 2026 15:44 (two hours ago)

Probably going to have to c&p this quite a lot today (it's a fast-moving thread so not bitching about people not seeing this, just gonna repost when needed).

Anyway, snoball, that's probably the issue. If you were on it with an old email address you can't access then you might just have to use a new username.

Thanks. Old sandbox password, got it. Luckily for me I wrote it down.

The reactions thing doesn't even seem controversial. Has anybody spoke in favor of them?

My wish list would be to allow us to customize the font size, background color, move username to bottom (so it looks more like it does now), get rid of reactions, and definitely opt out of embeds.

I'm surprised nobody has suggested voting on some of the more contentious features!

I prefer treating ILX as a gestalt entity where the usernames change so much you don't really know who anybody is and are just replying to statements

That's been my goal this quarter century. Uh er wait.

(so I guess I'm requesting the ability to hide usernames and just see comments)

The new favicon reminds me of Home Depot.

― peace, man, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 7:51 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink]

Came here to post that too. But otherwise looking very fine.

I perversely like the idea of ILX as just this string of unnamed comments that will often look like a webpage at war with itself.

Exactly this, although I slightly ruined it by using ILX in a presentation -- I was working in the UX team, our own website was an absolute breakfast, and I used ILX to demonstrate "it's okay to make simple thing that does exactly what it needs to and that's it"

Would have gone down better if the top thread wasn't the same room as a baby one.

“And see here I click on the thread “ORNALDO BLOOMPS FOR PRESIDETN” and it comes up! so simple”!

I think the reacts will have a Reddit style unintended consequences, the rating of posts as a sort of popularity contest has a corrosive effect, especially as ILX as it currently stands is one of the last vestiges of the "old Internet" where the words and thoughts can stand on their own merits

also, this seems to be, in my opinion, a solution looking for a problem. I like the lol and otm posts and it's not like there is some incredible volume of them that bogs down threads

otm

No to edit function

otm

brimstead, why?

why would it be difficult to read, for you? for real, i believe you, and i think probably there are others who would find it more difficult! personally, it’s fine, but because i grew up in the fukken “show-me-state” which is full of the worst “we must always stay the same and never change unless someone, probably the federal government, makes us do it, goddamn it” kind of people, i reacted against that and actually really like change!

i also think, probably, that if you thought about whatever made is less convenient to use and more difficult to read could be addressed, maybe that would help?

― z_tbd, Tuesday, August 4, 2026 7:31 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it's hard to read, it's just bad design, it's not that deep dude

Catching up on this thread. Have not registered on the sandbox yet, because I'm not sure if I'd be "committing" my email and username going forward. But after taking a very preliminary look, let me just reiterate three points made by others, and with which I very strongly agree:

* Absolute huge thanks to stet and Keith for stepping up to rebuild the code in response to the AI threat, and for using that as an opportunity to implement things that have been frequently suggested and asked for over the years, like post-edit window, easier quoting or posts, better search, etc. This is important work for the survival of the site/community, mixed with quality-of-life improvements that we'll all soon be shocked to remember weren't always there.

* At the same time, absolute agreement that anything changing the way the site actually works as a discussion forum should come out of a conversation with the community. Starting with "what would you like to see?" is always going to go better than "here's something I thought was cool," even if that includes a request for feedback after the fact. This site is a huge part of our lives, after all! We love this place. I love this place, anyway. Just want to really emphasize that a participatory design process may be slower, but it yields better results (in the design, in the trust between designer and user).

So for example, I think that things like the visual page layout, the way quotes/replies work, and the reactions (its own bullet, see below) *do* change the way discussion works. Like, putting the poster's name next to the post makes it a lot easier to scroll through the posts without registering who's saying what. It also reduces the sense of a full-stop pause after reading one post before starting the next. Reading a thread is like reading the log of a fast-paced chatroom, not like a message board. So those are substantive changes, not cosmetic ones. Do we want them, even if the white space and the text size get finessed? I personally don't. What's broken about the way we do it right now?

Since feedback is now being solicited, I'm very happy to give what I hope will be received as a polite, constructive, "no, thank you, please revert." But for the future, I really really encourage having the conversation with the community *first*.

* Any kind of click-to-react system, especially one that displays numbers of reactions, is absolutely antithetical to the spirit of the site. I mean that really seriously. It's not ILX if it has that stuff. It destroys discourse, it's the opposite of conversation, it screws up your brain, and it undoes the ease of explaining to friends that there's this great site that's retained what was special about message boards and wisely steered clear of all that stuff. We don't want it, nobody's *ever* asked for it except weird rando drive-bys, and if you scour the entire Ideas For ILX thread, I think you'll find it only comes up in the form of parody, mocking bad changes other sites have made. We're not Twitter, we're not Reddit, we're not Instagram. We like it that way. Please please please please listen to the overwhelming consensus here and accept that this was a neat thing for you to figure out, code- and design-wise, but not a feature that belongs on this website.

I agree with all of that. I love ILX as it is and am opposed to changing anything fundamental about it.

I like reactions, as a way to acknowledge someone's post even if you haven't got anything to add. But if I didn't use them I really wouldn't care they were there. Live and let live.

Another thing is that because it takes more effort to type "lol" or "otm" than to hit a react button when you do get one of those you feel like you've really earned it.

Would anyone consider it excessively transparent or negative if number of flags were noted on posts?

I immediately like the new look of sandbox ILX layoutwise but yeah, what makes ILX great is the absence of non-text nonsense like reactions, likes, emojis, awards.

well put dr casino, agree with all of that.

Would anyone consider it excessively transparent or negative if number of flags were noted on posts?

― Halfway there but for you, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 2:03 PM (twenty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

That seems like a negative to me. It could lead to a snowball effect on flagged posts. It's better imo if FPs are independent.

in this new version, will users also be banned for participating in music discussion in earnest?

they’ll be banned faster and more efficiently

I'm with Doctor Casino and The Yellow Kid and others, I like ILX the way it is, and don't see the design and features in its present incarnation as "flaws" to be "fixed" but rather as features which enable interactions and discourse that are superior to other options around the internet.

At the very least, major design/interface changes should be developed in tandem with the community here and/or polled

💈

Reactions aren’t a hill I’m willing to die on. I thought they were funny as a thought experiment and I really only ever planned to use them on my own posts; this is the type of thing I was getting at in the sandbox thread when I said that the existence of the feature doesn’t mean we need to use it or use it the way it’s used everywhere else.

I really love the simplicity and breadth of the embedding but think it should still be controlled by an “embeds on/off” flag the way it’s done here. If that is too complicated for the various embedding implementations currently supported, we should maybe review how widely we want to embed external links on the site.

well put dr casino, agree with all of that.

― shaking babies (map), Wednesday, August 5, 2026 1:05 PM

^ I also like it when when posters "sign on" to a post such as the one above. [smiley face] x 7 just ain't the same.

i think a potentially good question to ask here is what design features are fundamental / essential / "essence of ilx" things which would change the basic experience/quality of the borad if changed (example below), vs uh, "non-essence of ilx" design features which can be modified or adapted by the user and are more like personal preferences (examples below)

as an example of Essence of ilx features, the reactions are a big change and i am 100% with the overwhelming consensus here that we do not want that.

as an example of non-essence features, those are like text size, some UI elements (like if the username should be next to every post or just appear when someone new posts, for readability - that already has an option in the sandbox to modify / turn on or off).

there are also some things that are inbetween - like, adding the ability to add more embeds (bandcamp, google maps, etc). given the debates over the years about twitter / youtube / bsky / etc embeds, i'm sure there might be a lot of disagreement about how to proceed!

Any kind of click-to-react system, especially one that displays numbers of reactions, is absolutely antithetical to the spirit of the site. I mean that really seriously. It's not ILX if it has that stuff. It destroys discourse, it's the opposite of conversation, it screws up your brain, and it undoes the ease of explaining to friends that there's this great site that's retained what was special about message boards and wisely steered clear of all that stuff.

👍

a big big change (i think) in the sandbox has to do with notifications and "live" threads ("chats"), which makes the borad feel a bit more like slack (which personally - i do not like much. i like the asynchronicity of posting, coming back later, seeing what's changed, etc, rather than the instant notification, which my adhd brain processes as something that needs to be instantly "fixed". i am an inbox zero person, it's exhausting.

BUT - there are options to turn those things on and off! BUT, the very fact that they're available means that some people will use it, and their experience of the borad might be very different.

anyway, this is all very fresh and i know people need time to process and try it out in the sandbox, but curious what others think

* At the same time, absolute agreement that anything changing the way the site actually works as a discussion forum should come out of a conversation with the community. Starting with "what would you like to see?" is always going to go better than "here's something I thought was cool," even if that includes a request for feedback after the fact. This site is a huge part of our lives, after all! We love this place. I love this place, anyway. Just want to really emphasize that a participatory design process may be slower, but it yields better results (in the design, in the trust between designer and user).

i disagree with this. making a sandbox version prior to eliciting feedback is perfectly reasonable and likely an efficient way to proceed. as a consumer, it's easier to give comments when faced with an actual thing than to speculate on what a message board should look like tabula rasa. and i imagine that for a producer, it would be harder for stet/keith to build the resulting "dog designed by committee" message board than that approach would take, vs just making the first draft themselves and then incorporating our feedback later

like most of you i think the current design is way too maximalist and busy, but that's ok if we can come to a consensus to eliminate the worst features and trim it down to something more minimal

I agree with that. I think reasonable people can disagree on the best way to do it. What I 100% dislike is people who feel resentful for this free thing and seem to assume the very worst about the intentions of others as a starting point, like a pre-judgment before even learning more about the situation. It’s hard for me to see the heavy criticism because I think, similar things to flopson, if I were doing this I’d also make a working version so that people could have something real to test it on and react to. And I can see how others would disagree with the post but I would fucking flip my lid if people were making shitty assumptions about my motives and accusing me of having contempt for a community I just did a bunch of free work for. 100% no on the whole “assume the worst of each other as a starting point and double down on resentment” strategy

100% no on the whole “assume the worst of each other as a starting point and double down on resentment” strategy

agreed, where's that goddamn thumbs-up button

z_tbd otm

making a sandbox version prior to eliciting feedback is perfectly reasonable and likely an efficient way to proceed.

there is truth to this and i get it. having tried both approaches, sometimes involving everyone before something exists is .. at the very least not the quickest way to do it. and there are people who would rather dive into something that has already been made and go from there, as seen in this thread. i still come back to the fact that there are really substantive changes in this. when there are really substantive changes my gut is that it's best to ask people about them before doing them. it could have been clear from the beginning that people are very serious about not wanting reactions, saving whoever the work of adding them in. or maybe they were part of some package or something and leaving them out was harder idk.

What I 100% dislike is people who feel resentful for this free thing and seem to assume the very worst about the intentions of others as a starting point, like a pre-judgment before even learning more about the situation

look zach i hear you. i understand we don't see eye to eye on this. i'll just point out that you're the one painting motives and characterizing attitudes of others in this thread. my criticisms were and are entirely based upon actions.

feel resentful for this free thing an

this kind of comment really gets my goat. it's very self-righteous.

there is one person in this thread policing what others are allowed to say and how they are allowed to say it, and that is yourself. kindly requesting a little self-reflection before you go in on it again or address me obliquely. i understand how you feel about it; frankly you can deal.

frankly you can deal too, and since you're usually a voice of reason and calm i was just surprised.

this is a really bad roll-out of whatever the fuck this is, which i'm not even sure of yet. it feels dictatorial. keith i appreciate all your work but i don't appreciate policing feedback about it. you don't get to tell people how to respond to what is looking like a pretty drastic change.

1. did we need this? if so, who decided that?

2. when is the switch-over going to happen?

yes i appreciate the coding aspect of ilx, the work and the expertise. but this is also a community, and a small, aging one at this point. i'm worried that some big switch-over is going to lead to even more users leaving. i feel like that aspect should be of foremost importance here and is being treated with contempt.

really bad roll-out, dictatorial, accusation of keith policing feedback (which is now switched to me, because you just said i'm the one person in this thread, policing), and that the idea of user feedback is being treated with contempt.

this kind of comment really gets my goat. it's very self-righteous.

yeah i thought the same - just reading your first initial reaction in this thread really got my goat.

"whatever the fuck this is"

just whatever, i would be so goddamnned pissed if someone said this to me

maybe you should get over yourself a little bit then dude

it is okay for someone to not like how something like this was handled.

it's also ok for someone to be a little upset about it.

thanks so much map

Very much opposed to reactions too--except for the one or two posters who sometimes tell me to fuck off, maybe you can come up with a fuck-off emoji that they can use.

it's called healthy and passionate disagreement. people here are pretty good about pointing out if i cross a line from that into mischaracterization or ad hom or arguing in bad faith, which i don't think i did.

xp sarcasm! always a clear-eyed kind of response.

i don't know what else to say map! you said something that angered me on behalf of other people, i couldn't believe you were being such a dick, and now i'm the one who sucks and is self-righteous and i fucking suck, and i don't know what you want. i'm at work! i've spent too much time on this already!

RE: it being a bad roll-out, honestly I have no idea why Pfunkboy was nominated to be the threadstarter of this announcement and it does seem to me to be a bit of a weird way to announce it. If not Keith or stet, I'd expect me or WmC to be in the loop and letting people know about it. Maybe it was meant to seem less like a dictat from above and more a peer sharing news? Or maybe he just doesn't mind being yelled at?

On the other hand, I definitely feel like people are missing that this is the community feedback part that they're yelling about not having. The warning that change is coming? Right here. The being open to comments and suggestions? Right now. Also note that Keith didn't say he wouldn't listen to criticism at all, but rather that initial criticism is always hostile so you should come back to him after you've actually used the thing for a bit.

at the very least not the quickest way to do it

We've lived with the current version for how many years now? What is the rush?

Speaking for myself, I can say that I'm immensely grateful to the people who steward the technical components of this website, and have often chimed in offering to pitch in financially in order to spread the burden somewhat. More broadly when it comes to community of ILX, I consider it a privilege to be here and do try to check myself in terms of adhering to implicit community standards, trying not to be rude or spiteful, trying to contribute to discussions where I feel I can add perspective or recommendations rather than just passively consuming or reacting, etc. etc. I think most people here do, and it's why I like being here.

Having said all that, I also have experiences on both sides of a familial or friend-group interaction where one person puts a lot of time/energy/love into a gift or an experience only to realize, after the fact, that their efforts don't align with the expectations or needs of the receiver(s). We can acknowledge the loving efforts of Keith and stet and others while still voicing the concern that the proposed changes, and the way they are being rolled out, do not sufficiently correspond to the needs and desires of many in this community. Maybe this is glib but if anything, the passionate and sometimes negative reactions itt attest to the fact that people love this place enough to hold strong feelings about it, and ultimately that seems to me like a good thing. And also like of course people are going to be emphatic, they want their voices to be heard

great work, keith/stet. no serious notes. slight downvote on the possibility of reactions. no preference re emojis. my thoughts are somewhere near DJP's. here's a question, and it's probably a non-starter:

is there a way that our login IDs (the identifiable user bits inside the parentheses) can be redacted for AI/web scrapers/people who aren't logged in, so that only the display names - the bits OUTSIDE the parentheses - are visible to people who are not site members? due to my public/professional responsibilities, i need to bounce between three different alt accounts/pseudonyms. if there were a little less public-facing info, it might help me reduce the alt-ing.

look zach. i'm sorry. honestly. i'm saying stuff i don't really mean.

i'm sorry i said that stuff in the way i said it. it was pretty abrasive. in my defense, there are huge potential changes to a community i love on the table, implemented in a test version i'm seeing right now.

i've been on the receiving end of this before at work, because people (like my boss) decide to make big changes that impact other people without involving them or even telling them. it always leads to a fair number of people feeling upset and resentful, and when people continue to act in this way (doing things without involving the people who are affected by their decisions) it gives them a certain reputation, certainly not one characterized by leadership qualities. i would hope that more people who are in charge of or taking on these kinds of projects understand and make room for this kind of dynamic. you can defuse a lot of it with some simple communication up-front.

it's ok map, in the long term this is no big deal. and also i often say things i don't mean when i'm feeling heated and then i wish the other person with have space in their heart for forgiveness - so many people don't have any space at all for that, for various reasons, and i'm glad that you can forgive me because i can certainly forgive you.

i suppose i don't share the suspicion of our very small ilx team (stet/keith the mods). i can see things they do that are imperfect, and of course it's ok to criticize. but since i am a very sensitive person myself, when i feel like the criticisms start to slip in accusations and assumptions, it sometimes "activates" me and makes me angry. but that's an explanation and not an excuse, and i know how to step back and take a breather rather than trying to protect or defend or "act".

i also agree with this: "the passionate and sometimes negative reactions itt attest to the fact that people love this place enough to hold strong feelings about it, and ultimately that seems to me like a good thing. And also like of course people are going to be emphatic, they want their voices to be heard"

gosh i'm already missing so much in this thread, but mr. episcopio's post above is lovely and i agree with it very much.

i'm taking a break but first i gotta say something i haven't said yet, which is the hours of care, expert and creative building keith and stet have put into this site over the years is very much appreciated by me, it is a crucial part of what we have here and it has fostered very profound substance in my life and so many others.

@ flopson & z_tbd: I do understand the point that it can be easier to brainstorm when there's already a draft on the table for everyone to look at. No doubt! But there can be a phase before the draft, where the (hardworking, 100% volunteer) designers just ask "what features would you all most like to see?" Then they try to make a draft that incorporates those. That (a) helps build a relationship of trust, and (b) means that the draft will also be a lot closer to making the group happy, so less time and energy will be used up as the community tries to talk the designer out of things they never would have asked for in the first place.

To be fair, my take on this is informed by the very different contexts of commercial websites and architecture/urban planning - both rife with cases where "user/community feedback," if solicited at all, often comes so late in the process that it's obvious it will be thrown straight in the circular file.

I don't think that's what's happened here, at all! But since we live in a world where that happens all the time, it's understandable that people might be a little keyed up. And that's the context for my suggesting that stet and Keith might find it both helpful and satisfying to adopt more of a participatory-design framework going forward, over a "rough draft first, feedback second" model.

put another way, i am still burned by the disastrous Flickr redesign of 2013 and will never really trust again

I do think the way Zing has been continually and incrementally improved has been fantastic and makes me hopeful for the next iteration of ILX

that makes sense doctor casino! and this is where i think i'm at, too:

"I don't think that's what's happened here, at all! But since we live in a world where that happens all the time, it's understandable that people might be a little keyed up."

Big thank you to emil.y for this!!!

this is the community feedback part that they're yelling about not having. The warning that change is coming? Right here. The being open to comments and suggestions? Right now. Also note that Keith didn't say he wouldn't listen to criticism at all, but rather that initial criticism is always hostile so you should come back to him after you've actually used the thing for a bit.

Reposting bc it's now in the fold:

The approach to stuff like this is usually my bag, but my life has got really busy and I was becoming the blocker on Keith getting real feedback and testing the new code which wasn't great. I'm going to be tied up a lot today too but let me give it a go:

Why change?
You might have noticed last year that AI bot traffic brought the site down multiple times. I managed to recover it and putting it behind Cloudflare helped mitigate the problem, but it's still there (and I don't love sending all our traffic via Cloudflare). But the old site simply can't cope with that level of non-human shaped traffic, because it's optimised to handle a smaller set of recent and frequent threads, not a load of bots trying to load the whole thing multiple times a second. (A second consideration is security - AI is getting really good at finding holes in things, and the old stack is hard to update and keep secure). So we needed to change.

I also personally wanted to upgrade: we were reaching the architectural limits (and my ability) to transform the old code -- there were things I've wanted to do for a long time in both Zing and the site that were painful/impossible to do -- and some things that were just out-of-date, like the search engine.

What's happening right now?
Keith - much like he did when the PHP site died - had both willingness and ability to rescue us by creating an all-new version of the code that in theory solves a lot of architectural problems with the old code, better handles the AI situation, modernises the stack and leaves us in a broadly better starting point. He also took the chance to revisit some of his older ways of thinking about UI and design and the site based on everything he's learned in the past 20 years.

He's now got a version of that code that does all that. And we've put it on the sandbox -- https://sandbox.ilxor.com/ -- for people to test out and give feedback on.

When is this going to be on the real ILX?
We don't have a date or anything yet. Before we migrate, I'll start a big thread and make lots of noise so people know what's happening and can get ready.

(lol I got two errors trying to post this. thank you for your service, old code)

― stet, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 10:00 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

put another way, i am still burned by the disastrous Flickr redesign of 2013 and will never really trust again

lol my wife is a photographer and she is still mad about this.

xp thanks for reposting that

Played around a bit and just some quick feedback

Def on board with others re: reacts. It will Reddify things a bit and have some unintended consequences. I feel it will change the culture a bit and not necessarily in a good way!

I love being able to edit posts - I fuck up a LOT. Like 1/3 of my posts have a followup explaining a misspelling or poor/redundant word choices. Having the edit history be publicly available is a nice compromise for transparency. Also not a deal breaker, at least this is status quo.

Most importantly (so far) there doesn't seem to be a setting to avoid embedding images/links like there currently is on the main site:

Show Images (and other embedded media, like videos and Tweets)

This is a must for me, hopefully not too crazy to add!

I think Doctor Casino is right. Yes, there is an explanation of why this is happening itt, but it comes after a decision has already been made.

The idea that that's adequate or that we should comment on designs which were borne out of a decision made by two or three people without anyone else involved is quite weird.

I accept that people are busy and working on a volunteer basis but ten lines to explain why this is happening halfway through this thread and days or weeks after the design has started is a legitimate problem for a community.

Even now, the situation is 'this is happening' and the input the community is left with is 'so comment on some designs'.

It's like saying we're redeveloping your house and moving it, you have no input into that but we really need you to let us know what taps we should get in the bathrooms, or what colours the curtains should be.

Those points are irrelevant if the existential stuff isn't dug into deeper, and that's more overarching than anyone's individual opinion about this or that thing we're being encouraged to skip that to discuss.

It’s straightforward to add and I will be doing that. The issue I have is that historically people don’t tell me what they like, just what they don’t like, so I have literally no idea anyone was using that setting, and same with a few others people have mentioned. Some I had forgotten building in the first place!

Emily, I asked pfunkboy to do it, because when you put something live like this, however confident you might me, it’s always possible that a huge pile of people jumping on it at once will just make it collapse, so a drip feed is much better to be able to see how it’s reacting. It is of course, hard to tell people about that in advance. Once I had worked out all was behaving as expected, we opened it wider.

LG otm

It's like saying we're redeveloping your house and moving it, you have no input into that but we really need you to let us know what taps we should get in the bathrooms, or what colours the curtains should be.

Seems to me it’s more like saying that your favourite pub needs structural work doing and as part of that work we’re refurbishing.

I don’t think it makes any sense to consult the community of pub users on the foundations. The look and feel of the place, sure.

I'll definitely dig in deeper the next couple weeks and promise to post positive feedback too!!!

Regardless, thanks for your effort on this, Keith. I appreciate you!

a community can't give proper input on the details if denied input on the decision to redesign. for a number of reasons many of which are as much in favour of whoever is doing the redesign as anything else. in order for people to comment usefully the goals for this would need to be set out in a more granular way, and then a discussion could be had that isn't people with tiny amounts of knowledge/power responding to the details of a plan that's already been made.

whatever the reasons, the constraints or opportunities of the move/redesign are not clear to anyone here. nor are the alternatives.

xpost

and sorry, i accept that that's because people are volunteering to try to solve a problem, but that is also part of the conversation that is needed.

well-said lg.

I am not sure ilx needs the kind of “existential” conversation you seem to be advocating, but there’s literally nothing stopping you from starting it. I’d advocate that being on a different thread to this one, as you say, the conversations about design and the more “existential” stuff are separate.

i have started it. and i've already made the point that it needs to happen before anyone should discuss designs or be asked to. feel free to read back if you'd rather not continue to ignore that.

and i never said they're separate, you did. they are linked and that's why one has to happen before the other.

I have read this thread and I’ve tried not to ignore anything, though I may have missed something of course. I don’t agree that a conversation about ownership or decision-making structures or processes is required before people can talk about design.

Design is the move to a new site. The decision made which nobody had any part of is the biggest design decision in any of this. Commenting on minutiae after that is tacitly accepting that the community doesn't have a say in the larger decisions or a need to understand them.

I won't be commenting on any of the new designs as a result as a huge amount of worthwhile discussion/decisions have been made without us. I would suggest if people want to talk about the design of another board, do it there.

But tbh I actually think it's reasonable to ask for this to be rewound and a proper discussion to be had, and I've made my point and am fairly sure plenty of people agree with me, the ones who aren't patronising/trolling anyway.

Same, Tim. I think it’s odd to say “i have started it. and i've already made the point that it needs to happen before anyone should discuss designs or be asked to” like it’s a fact

And I actually expect that discussion to happen and it to be valuable so I don't really need some bad faith back and forth.

xpost

I think it’s odd to say “i have started it. and i've already made the point that it needs to happen before anyone should discuss designs or be asked to” like it’s a fact

tim said that the discussion should be separate. i said it needs to happen before we discuss more minor design. not like it's a fact, like it's an opinion.

This board has been through several designs, and has remained the same board. I see this as another iteration of that, not a new site.

how many people would have to disagree with you for you to think it merited discussion?

I would be very interested to read people ‘s views on ilx governance, I’m not saying it doesn’t merit discussion.

I'm not too fussed about this, but I will say that the OP a) does not mention the reasons for the changes, b) emphasizes that the work has been going for a long time already, and c) points out how cool the new features are. So, even though it is opening up a discussion and seeking feedback, the tone is very much "this is coming and you should be excited about it." I think it is understandable that people bristled at that.

your post wasn't about governance, nor was my response

xpost

Ah i thought you were responding to my previous post, LG. I don’t really have an answer to your “how many” question, it’s just what I think (as of now). How many people would have to disagree with you for you to change your mind?

the answer is 6

that was supposed to be funny, sorry. but yes, there is no answer to that

the reason i ask you is because you appear determined that no further discussion should be had about decisions already made. i think those decisions need to be reexamined. again, how many people who think that would we need before you'd consider not disregarding their pov?

fwiw, to answer your question - even if every single person on the board agreed with every decision made so far on this (which they don't) it would still be bad that we have got to where we are without checking that.

for all i know, if/when we have that discussion, there will be 100 different views to mine with the extra context. as it stands it's not a case of changing my mind. i lack the info and context. i think everyone does.

xpost

remind me again, what is the big decision that’s already been made, without community feedback? to update the site in general? did you see stet’s summary post (which in orbit helpfully reposted earlier)? i think it gives a fine explanation of the technical reason that big changes to the code and underlying structure had to be made.

was the big decision the “reactions” and our near universal-dislike of them? but…i’m baffled by the anger because to me that seems clearly like a test, something that is in literally a sandbox and which people are giving feedback on.

i could elaborate but i want to make sure i understand where you’re coming from, like what are the decisions that have already been made?

i think the post helped but still doesn't give enough context. if someone has been redesigning ilx for 18 months then presumably there are some goals or purposes to that. you might imagine it would have been discussed or mentioned here. the justification to me so far seems more technical than based in how we experience the site day to day. in 18 months presumably many, many decisions have been made. even if the 18 months isn't correct it is clear from looking at the redesign that a lot of decisions have been made.

why do you think this is happening? fairly sure if we did a ballot of everyone itt we'd get 100 diff answers.

if we can't even say what the purpose of this is, and i mean like the granular purpose of a new design, the problems we are trying to solve with how people experience the board on a day to day basis, versus say an identical design, and how we identified those problems and who was involved, then nobody should comment on the designs, imo, because to do so accepts that that's how this board is run.

and i'm not angry, or at least i wasn't particularly so until a series of borderline disingenuous interpretations of the simple idea that this is a community and people should be involved in how it changes.

the reason i ask you is because you appear determined that no further discussion should be had about decisions already made.

I never said anything like that.

oh, on the topic of editing, i saw this response from keith in a sandbox thread where i asked if editing would leave a trail (like wikipedia or whatever) that everyone can see:

"Editing posts does leave a history, and you can see that history on a post that’s been edited”

i think that’s important info because it addresses some of the primary criticisms of allowing editing a post, ie, the rewriting of history, deleting something one shouldn’t have said in the first place (something i did a couple years ago on slack, because slack allows for editing of posts and i didn’t understand the level of lasting anger and resentment it would cause), and people in a thread referencing a post that’s since been changed.

are there any other criticisms of allowing the edit post (with a 5 minute window of editing after a post, currently) other than that? i suppose there could be desire to leave the typos in and preserve things as they are?

z by specific decision, do you mean a specific deployment date? the title thread says "New ILX 3.0 coming", i think the "decision" to overhaul the interface to this (imo) inelegant thing on the sandbox is what is being referred to.

Modernizing the internal structure of the code to allow modifications that can more effectively fend off bots doing data scraping and DOS attacks seems like a decision that can only be applauded, so long as the new code retains the general look & feel of the message board we all love. ILX has a proud heritage of simple straightforward functionality. I'll have to go over and look at the new 3.0 in its sandbox incarnation, just to make sure I don't see gratuitous feature creep or eye candy. Otherwise, I'm all for a stronger chassis underneath the vehicle.

i mean several people have been reposting stet's post but do any of them actually know how that connects to a decision to redesign the site? whatever one's view, isn't it legit to ask 'should we redesign the site as part of making the necessary repairs to ilx technical issues'?

tell me if i'm wrong and one the tech issue causes the need for the redesign, but i feel like nobody commenting here actually even knows, besides i assume stet and/or keith? it is strange to argue when my pov here is 'i don't actually know why we are redesigning the site and i don't think anyone does'.

whatever one thinks about that question it seems it should be the starting point for discussion, as brimstead kinda hints at there also.

z by specific decision, do you mean a specific deployment date? the title thread says "New ILX 3.0 coming", i think the "decision" to overhaul the interface to this (imo) inelegant thing on the sandbox is what is being referred to.

hey brimstead, sorry i keep looking but i’m not sure what “specific decision” you’re referencing, i don’t think i said that? but i might be missing it sorry! but which post are you talking about?

i was asking local garda, though, about what the “big decision” he was referring to was - "remind me again, what is the big decision that’s already been made, without community feedback” - maybe you’re thinking of that?

anyway, sorry, this is confusing even to me lol sorry

Right, as Aimless sort of alludes to I’m surprised that a backend overhaul necessarily needs to involve a drastic overhaul of the frontend. Idk though, I did study this stuff but not very well.

sorry z i dont know what im doing <3

yeah that's where i'm coming from also

xpost

I mean, obviously you don’t have to redo the whole look and feel of the site because you are redoing the baseline architecture.

even now there's not one single post setting out 'here are all the new features, here's why we thought they're a good idea' and just having that would go a long way

BUT, as a tech person, if you are redoing the architecture of the site anyway and touching things like how search works, taking a swing at updating the front end that sits on top of that architecture is usually worth your time.

This was rolled out to the sandbox to test durability and to get feedback on some ideas about the front end. I think the robust back and forth we are seeing here is exactly what should be happening. I also don’t think that anything currently on the sandbox should be assumed to be set in stone look/feel/functionality-wise.

ah, gotcha local garda, now i see what you mean. hmm. i guess…i just think about stuff like the Ideas for ILX thread, and all the many exchanges in there over time, and how they actually listened and worked on a lot of those and now have a working, functional sandbox version of them that we can take or not (like, the reactions. am i the only one that is completely confident that they WON’T be in there soon, due to the obvious consensus against them? like…i’m not worried about that at ALL. maybe that’s just naive! but i do actually start from a level of trust with the people doing all the work. i see them as listening and engaging with the community ever since i’ve been on ilx.

i guess i already said my piece on this upthread

i think that’s legit but also have heavy sympathy toward people doing incredibly laborious projects for free, and as a person who personally _hates to delegate_, because i’d rather do it myself in many cases, and also because opening things up to a feedback forum of hundreds of people is in and of itself a laborious process, like just on its own, no matter what the topic

so, i kinda get just making a bunch of changes based upon years of ilxor feedback in places like Ideas for ILX and then having people test it, weigh in and make changes, have a discussion, etc.

That said, various things like usernames being a minimum of 4 characters initially and the collapsing breadcrumbs hiding the board name on mobile browsers are absolutely things that could have been talked about beforehand, also whether reactions were necessary, how many embeds are too many, whether they should be hidden or not, etc. It’s much easier to do that if you have a formal tech organization with product owners and QA, which we don’t have.

I get why people got very agitated by this but I think it’s worth asking “why” rather than “how dare you” if you want this to have any semblance of collaboration going forward

xpost to your previous post, i'm not sure about that, djp, i think in our situation with v few people to work on the site and a diminishing community it might be wise to do as little as possible to the design without certainty it's what people want. i think a lot of changes on the sandbox which can't actually be isolated and commented on could also still make it worse when it comes to using it day to day. if you test stuff like this people will say 'i like this' or 'i don't like it' but those things are not always the actual needs or failings, just the bits that can be articulated.

i also just think like, idk what the community needs for the future of the site are, and while i do think a big discussion about that is core to this, and not separate, i wonder if a decent assumption is that we are p tiny these days, and we could lose more people by making unnecessary changes.

xpost z_tbd, i hear you. to be clear i am not even criticising the designs, i get that it must be a pita to have to do unpaid work for the site. tbh that's why my strategy would be don't do stuff unless it seems really demanded. all i'll say on the current design is it looks like it does more than people might have asked for.

I think the robust back and forth we are seeing here is exactly what should be happening.

hard agree

I also don’t think that anything currently on the sandbox should be assumed to be set in stone look/feel/functionality-wise.

hard agree

i think it’s reasonable for people to see things in different ways but do not really like the conspiratorial angle or the resentment, it just seems out of proportion and puts way too much emphasis on the tone of pfunkboy’s original post and the 12 hours it took for stet to provide a simple summary of why the site needed to be upgraded, and it requires too many assumptions about the supposed malign intentions of the people doing the work

I get why people got very agitated by this but I think it’s worth asking “why” rather than “how dare you” if you want this to have any semblance of collaboration going forward

one more djp otm

i think a lot of changes on the sandbox which can't actually be isolated and commented on could also still make it worse when it comes to using it day to day.

Which changes do you mean here?

“the conspiratorial angle or the resentment,”

and sorry, those are provocative words, didn’t mean to be like that, and fwiw localgarda that’s definitely not “aimed” at you, more in reference to some of the kneejerk reactions last night.

whatever one thinks about that question it seems it should be the starting point for discussion, as brimstead kinda hints at there also.

I think one part of your question is essentially "did the rewrite of the code also mean the design had to change?" and the answer is "yes" for a variety of reasons — to pick just one example, things like our (beloved to me) non-nested everything-on-a-page thing just don't work with the combination of constant bot traffic and limited server resources. So the new code has dynamic pagination to keep the feel but avoid the bot damage, for instance. There's also the truth that the old design was 20 years old and some of things like how the CSS is structured is just not how you'd do it when starting over, and it's just wrong to build a new thing badly.

i have lots more to say but I'm also thinking about how best to say it and this is an xpost nightmare at this point

i get that it must be a pita to have to do unpaid work for the site. tbh that's why my strategy would be don't do stuff unless it seems really demanded. all i'll say on the current design is it looks like it does more than people might have asked for.

I don't want to speak for keith or his motivations, but they've never struck me as "do the absolute bare minimum amount of work to keep the site exactly as it was when I wrote code in a mad dash because the old server had died". Nor have they seemed to be "i'll take dictation from the users on precisely what they want and only do that".

thanks stet, appreciate that first comment, that's the stuff i find hard to understand personally.

i'll be honest i don't really get the second one about keith/motivations. i guess the point i'm making is it seems like making a rod for own back to introduce a lot of change and ask people about it when it's unclear what's necessary and what's a nice to have.

to djp:

Which changes do you mean here?

just like visual characteristics, fonts, the cumulative effect of any/all changes. i think that's harder to measure. the fact we can't really go that deep is why i think just keep it v similar to what we have.

i basically think we should be starting with the smallest possible change and seeing what the community wants, then building on from that. i can see tho that there are some parts where the code is demanding a design change.

i don't know how extensive that change needs to be. i guess as a user of the board the design feels really stable and i wonder if a lot of people feel it's basically fine as is?

i don't know how possible more incremental change is or if the code stuff means we can't do it that way.

i guess the point i'm making is it seems like making a rod for own back to introduce a lot of change and ask people about it when it's unclear what's necessary and what's a nice to have.

I think the late-night point I'm trying to make is that this is really keith's call to make, since it's his back.

ILX is done by volunteers and there's a lot goes with that, as anyone whose ever worked in charities will tell you — volunteers aren't just "staff who don't get paid", they have their own motivations and reasons for doing stuff. My own for running this place aren't always clear to me (beyond the obvious that I fundamentally like it, care about the community, and think it should exist as an increasingly rare place on a cursed internet) so I'm not going to try and project others onto them

i basically think we should be starting with the smallest possible change and seeing what the community wants, then building on from that.

with all respect, just saying i disagree - there are many ways to do a big project that involves a community, and what you describe is one of them, but personally i wouldn’t want to do a tiny change and then solicit community feedback on every single thing - that sounds like a nightmare for the people who actually have to do that! there’s also this built-in assumption that because this is a community that each of our opinions should be considered before a change happens. but…even in a small-ish active community (let’s say 100 people), that is really difficult thing to actually pull off. but, one can try, and i think the way this is happening is one of those ways! in other words, i do see this as soliciting community feedback, with the benefit of providing something real we can react to as it’s being built. the drawback is that it isn’t the smallest possible change followed by pausing and asking everyone what they think. but i think the advantage is that the process will take a few months rather than 52 years

but i think the advantage is that the process will take a few months rather than 52 years

…and i get that one of your criticisms is that maybe “the process” shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and that was the key discussion that should have happened first. but again, when i read stet’s summary of why it needed to happen, that answered any questions i had. and even before they posted that, i just trusted that they had a good reason, because…that’s the character of ilx? i dunno

Perhaps I'm overlooking something in the settings (and maybe repeating something ufo said early on) but is there no way page features could expand to utilise more space horizontally and thereby reduce vertical bloat? It's terribly old-fashioned now to luxuriate in the un-cramped-ness of a conventional monitor, but I feel not unlike I'm still using a phone when the total information displayed on a sizeable display is reduced this drastically. (eg. typical dimensions in my browser with all else being satisfactory: https://postimg.cc/1nmwD6w8 )

Anyway, thanks for the toil behind the scenes! This is probably my only real concern. (Aside from agreeing that post reaction emoji thingies seem unnecessary, at best.)

I don't want to speak for keith or his motivations, but they've never struck me as "do the absolute bare minimum amount of work to keep the site exactly as it was when I wrote code in a mad dash because the old server had died". Nor have they seemed to be "i'll take dictation from the users on precisely what they want and only do that".

― stet, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 8:33 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you're making an important point here. i think one of the things people are reacting to is that the code in the sandbox is a long, long way past MVP. there are a ton of extremely niche features in there i'm going to assume were done because the person doing the work thought they would be some combination of useful/interesting/challenging to implement. so when a lot of people react to the existence of a feature that they feel has never been requested, they're also feeling like a lot of decisions have been made and they're swimming against the tide trying to make changes to a finished product.

there are a ton of extremely niche features in there i'm going to assume were done because the person doing the work thought they would be some combination of useful/interesting/challenging to implement

agree. and would add the word “potentially” to useful. like, adding a feature (in a sandbox) because you think there’s a chance that people might find it useful. i would do that, if i knew how to code and make features and shit. i would totally add something in there if i thought even 10% of people would like it, because maybe 60% of people would like it, or absolutely everyone would. sometimes it’s ok to add things that you don’t think will make it to the end. anyway, yes, all this sounds right.

so when a lot of people react to the existence of a feature that they feel has never been requested, they're also feeling like a lot of decisions have been made and they're swimming against the tide trying to make changes to a finished product

it’s hard because my position starts from a place of trust, and i understand that reasonable people can disagree on whether trust should be expected or earned. my therapist says earned. but i think people feeling like a finished decision has already been made on like…_anything_ with the UI or how things work is starting from a position of zero trust. and again, lots of people do that for all their reasons, but i also don’t think it should be the default way of looking at things, and also it runs counter to the idea of actual community

anyway, sorry, i think what i’m saying is a side-show and distracting to what should be the main discussion, i guess, but i’m just interested in trust and where it comes from and this is a really interesting example of it, all of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX1W7T0ySSo

here’s a fun UI thing that will be very easy to come to consensus on via community discussion:

https://i.ibb.co/dJHMMJVd/Screenshot-2026-08-05-at-8-38-18-PM.png

when you see this symbol, do you think the sound is currently on, or off?

Thank you stet and Keith!

I absolutely need a Edit button. I'm sorry for being a fuck up but I just make mistakes/typos. I should be able to catch them before posting, especially after being on here for years, but I just don't. I love this chsnge for just that feature.

Its 2026 so I'm good with a update. I think this community is over 200 strong with some old posters checking in from time to time. This place is so important to so many of us that of course this update is emotional.

Going to love these poll options.

Only took a look and will register and take a look around soon.

I love this chsnge for just that feature.

Yeah it really is necessary lol

having to just live with your typos and imperfections (and shitty posts) is an important part of this place imo

God have I lived with them lol

But cool! I mean, I think that’s legit

having to just live with your typos and imperfections (and shitty posts) is an important part of this place imo

otm. type better or deal

But why, I get it's 2000 code or whatever. Now we can finally give out some basic functions to an outdated model.

call all destroyer otm

I'm most haunted by the sheer magnitude of incorrect image URLs and mangled bbcode marring every poll rollout I've undertaken. (The consequences almost invariably being hideously apparent within 5 seconds lol.)

just going to post this here for folks who haven't registered in the sandbox yet

https://i.postimg.cc/TYXmhWdJ/Screenshot-2026-08-05-at-10-33-01-PM.png

i mean, listen, i have tried to take a measured tone in my posts above, and to post from a place of gratitude, compassion, etc. but i also believe that honesty is a core component of love and like ... i'm struggling to accept that this is how ILX is going to look going forward, to the point that i'm pretty sure i'm just going to stop visiting this place if this is what it's going to look like from now on

lol

i want to note that i voted for brazil nut, and it was _because_ upon loading the poll page i saw the ongoing results and saw brazil nuts were last, and thus threw it a first place vote. very interesting to allow the option to change a vote up until the last second. could lead to an epic parliamentarian battles

And I made two mistakes in the Oingo Boingo poll. It's not charming, annoyed that I'm such a idiot.

I was Team Almond. Interesting that the 'divisive' walnut performed better in Condorcet showdowns. And also "Voter(s) most like you: Alba". Bless. If anything, I fear I'm more likely to initiate arbitrary polls now lol. (XP)

look we all made mistakes in the oingo boingo poll

Catterdrale, worth noting that while the bubbles are hideous, the poll display option can be changed in settings. Bar chart seems the current closest approximation to ILX 2.0 poll results.

I don't want to speak for keith or his motivations, but they've never struck me as "do the absolute bare minimum amount of work to keep the site exactly as it was when I wrote code in a mad dash because the old server had died". Nor have they seemed to be "i'll take dictation from the users on precisely what they want and only do that".

― stet, Wednesday, August 5, 2026 8:33 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you're making an important point here. i think one of the things people are reacting to is that the code in the sandbox is a long, long way past MVP. there are a ton of extremely niche features in there i'm going to assume were done because the person doing the work thought they would be some combination of useful/interesting/challenging to implement. so when a lot of people react to the existence of a feature that they feel has never been requested, they're also feeling like a lot of decisions have been made and they're swimming against the tide trying to make changes to a finished product.

Otfm.

I must also express some confusion at the idea that users on this site are expected to put up with this pretty close to finished product because it’s volunteer work. This is a site formed entirely of user-generated content. Yes, it needs a functional infrastructure to work on. Nobody disputes that. But the site, ultimately, is nothing without its users. Starting from a basis of “this is what I, who barely use the site as a commenter as is” (Keith has posted more this week than the last three years) and just blithely going with “constructive feedback only thx” while getting someone else to post about your very advanced work? Yeah this whole thing is a mess from start to finish. And regardless of my own respect for stet, I am not obliged to simply assume the best of someone I barely know and have never interacted with who didn’t feel like creating his own post to approach the community like adults in the age of enshittification.

I also know that LG is approaching this from a user- focused perspective of this kind of thing being his (literal) bread and butter and coming to this not only from that perspective but also from that of being a very long term user of this site, and I’m saddened to see his words picked apart and dismissed. (Since we’re discussing assuming the best and all.)

And finally, as so many people have been at pains to remind me, I joined in 2011. I am hardly tied to an older version of the site or how things used to be, in fact that kind of entropy drives me crazy on here usually. Just think it’s inappropriate to start and proceed from this approach, as someone (sorry I’m not scrolling back to check who) mentioned upthread, this smacks of a top down work change from someone who’s not really involved on a day to day basis. It’s unfortunate because one can assume good intentions but impact matters too.

It’s also 5.50 am here and I’m awake for no real good reason so this is definitely ungenerous but it is, regardless, how I feel on the matter, so.

I've been using this site since it started. I've had several different IDs, used to post a little bit but do so very rarely now. Nevertheless, I read posts on the site literally every day. I've never liked the design of it and to me this is huge improvement.

People say they love that there are no emojis or 'likes'. People say they love that you can't edit or delete posts. Personally, I hate that those things are absent.

In my case, I often read posts that I strongly agree with or enjoy in some way, but I don't feel I have anything to add in a post, so I don't see what's wrong with having a 'like' facility. I know that leads to competitive behaviour on social media sites but I don't think it would here.

I've also never liked that you cannot edit posts. Again, people say they love that, but I don't. If people are happy to submit posts with loads of typos, fine, and they would be free not to edit them. But I would like to be able to remove typos from my own posts. A five-minute window seems a little short. (If you had already started editing a post, but failed to submit the edit within five minutes, would the edit submission fail?) I agree that a Wikipedia-style edit history trail would prevent people from getting away with changing or excising significant things.

Other than that, I haven't explored to a great extent yet. No doubt there are lots of things to iron out, but the overall look of it is much better. I also like the way new posts get inserted while you're still on the page. I've always found the XP and XPs thing tedious to read.

I can't login or register? Unless I use another email address maybe?

- doesn't accept the password I use in my browser and on my phone/Flagging
- "forgot password" -> says my email address wasn't found
- register with a new username: nope, because my email address/login ID already exists (so does it exist or not?)

Stan this might not be the problem but the sandbox email box is case sensitive - I had the same issue until I re-typed my email as all lower case.

I've been using this site since it started. I've had several different IDs, used to post a little bit but do so very rarely now.

so what you're saying is that you are not actually a contributor to this site at all and you'd like it to be somewhat different so you could consume it more easily

fuck you. and honestly i think you should be banned

I tried registering yesterday, it told me an e-mail was forthcoming, still hasn't arrived - is that a normal waiting time or should I try again?

Mine came immediately but went to spam

Man maybe we need an old.ilxor.com

I still use old.reddit.com. I'd bail if it went down finally, so I can understand the reticence here. Hope no matter what we figure out a way to keep as many people around as possible

so what you're saying is that you are not actually a contributor to this site at all and you'd like it to be somewhat different so you could consume it more easily

fuck you. and honestly i think you should be banned

I said that I rarely post, not that I never post. But in any case, why should I be banned for that and just having an opinion on this new design? What a ridiculous thing to say.

Will this new design keep the box that allows me to type what I want? ;-)

xp that's fair. but nor should anyone give weight to your opinions

I think one part of your question is essentially "did the rewrite of the code also mean the design had to change?" and the answer is "yes" for a variety of reasons — to pick just one example, things like our (beloved to me) non-nested everything-on-a-page thing just don't work with the combination of constant bot traffic and limited server resources. So the new code has dynamic pagination to keep the feel but avoid the bot damage, for instance. There's also the truth that the old design was 20 years old and some of things like how the CSS is structured is just not how you'd do it when starting over, and it's just wrong to build a new thing badly.

i have lots more to say but I'm also thinking about how best to say it and this is an xpost nightmare at this point

― stet, Thursday, 6 August 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Pretty clarifying, set.

I think you might need to keep typing (sorry).

So what design changes are the ones that had to be made, which affects the look and feel of the site?

Sounds like we need to rip it up and start from there (pun intended)

Why don’t we look up some of the people looking for Guess Papers or Hair Dye Advice and see what they think because that would be waaaay more valid than asking a lurker. Jfc this might be the most ILX thread ever, no wonder Keith got somebody else to start it.

That's a good point actually, are there any modifications we can make to ilx 6.0 to make the guess papers googlere come back?

basically think we should be starting with the smallest possible change and seeing what the community wants, then building on from that.

The history of this place shows that if we entertained this even a little, this would never get done. At all. This place is worse than a local council when it comes to consensus.

Anyway.
- reacts unneccesary
- emojis fine inline, no issue from me
- edit function I'd like even if its just "you get one go/10 min window to do this and it leaves a record of the change"
- I can't deal with the 2-column front page, it doesn't make logical sense to me. Particularly vertical sections. Can they not be tabs, or sections with a few preview post headers laid out horizontally, or something? We read left-to-right so the side by side sections baffles my brain.
- fonts, font size etc is just sauce, the eyes will adjust, it just takes time.

And also: fuck you. and honestly i think you should be banned
Christ dude you can be a real dickhead sometimes. Pull it in.

(sorry that last aimed at Mookie in case all the posts inbetween dont make that clear)

you're making an important point here. i think one of the things people are reacting to is that the code in the sandbox is a long, long way past MVP. there are a ton of extremely niche features in there i'm going to assume were done because the person doing the work thought they would be some combination of useful/interesting/challenging to implement. so when a lot of people react to the existence of a feature that they feel has never been requested, they're also feeling like a lot of decisions have been made and they're swimming against the tide trying to make changes to a finished product.

yep, exactly this. and i know stet mentioned upthread that some of the way the code for the current board is written isn't the right or best way to do it anymore, but i think there's also a way of designing it that meets good practice. if we start with something way past mvp and ask people what they like or don't like too far down the line, loads of features or pieces of design that nobody wants or needs will be baked into what we go ahead with.

this is what i mean when i say there are parts to the current redesign that i don't believe a process like this of asking 'what do you like/dislike' can unpick. like if something is already designed past minimum viable product before you show it to people, if lots of decisions have been made in that design, you are limiting the opportunity for it to be really driven by those people. they are involved too late. they can only give feedback on what's there, not suggest what they want/need on a broader level as a design.

also, since we have never asked people in advance do they want or need any unwanted features or characteristics of the redesign, some will be there in five, ten, twenty years time. like we are being asked to comment on a thing that's already too much a thing. you can never put features/characteristics back inside the box if you go beyond what people need or want, because you don't know why you put them there in the first place. that's why an mvp version makes a lot more sense. like sure, people can say 'we don't want reaction emojis' and that goes, but actually big stuff like that which people have to chase down guarantees more subtle and granular stuff which nobody wanted will be built.

again - i am not saying we do this in the most purist way possible, or a purist way at all. i've already said mvp is the way, however possible. i think some fresh start thread could be useful to give past context and try to see what people want/need generally. not least because it's prob less than what has been done? i also agree with ufo's idea that a list of what's been done and why would help a lot, and xpost agree with xyzzz also.

lastly i think we should be wary of like 'oh it's inevitable that people are gonna feel sad for the old western railway ilx design' - we're not a private company or trying to meet sales figures or something. we've already seen at least one person say they might not post anymore if the design changed radically along these lines.

i said already i think a reasonable assumption for a community concern around this is 'we are already p small, we could lose more people' - maybe there's more to it or there are other issues like this, idk but i think there needs to be some kind of reset thread where that can be explored.

the only reason i think that should happen separately to this thread is because i think it should have preceded it in first place. i am p uncomfortable with this thread's original purpose because i think any discussion of specifics of the design, again, accepts that it is fine that it's not an mvp. we shouldn't do that on principle or for a good result, imo.

and i think it would be generally healthy for us to have that discussion tbh anyway because other stuff would come out.

"basically think we should be starting with the smallest possible change and seeing what the community wants, then building on from that."

The history of this place shows that if we entertained this even a little, this would never get done. At all. This place is worse than a local council when it comes to consensus.

entertained what? how would starting with the smallest possible change require community input?

and if we're so bad at agreeing things then why is 'tell us what you like from this large set of assumed redesigns' a better approach

The history of this place shows that if we entertained this even a little, this would never get done. At all. This place is worse than a local council when it comes to consensus.

The point of doing this is that even if you’d asked you don’t need to adopt all suggestions. People feel heard. You don’t end up with do-you-even-go-here shite like usernames needing to be a minimum of four characters. People can argue the case beforehand and get it out of their systems.

Again, simply just shaking my head at the idea that the users on a user content generated site are a simple inconvenience.

Jfc this might be the most ILX thread ever, no wonder Keith got somebody else to start it.

― Madchen, Thursday, 6 August 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Might've been less of a clusterfuck if we didn't have that opener...

@Tim : thanks! that was it - email address had to be all lower case.

if this is what passes for a clusterfuck these days we've really grown as a community.

Yeah lol true. But let's give it time.

---

This board has been through several designs, and has remained the same board. I see this as another iteration of that, not a new site.

― Tim, Wednesday, 5 August 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Possibly, all this made think of was about was who made the decision to bring in the poll function and what was the governance process here lol

That's not gonna go anywhere...nevertheless, can we look at getting rid of it? Never thought it added much

I must also express some confusion at the idea that users on this site are expected to put up with this pretty close to finished product because it's volunteer work.

I'm not saying that (and I don’t think Keith is either btw), I'm saying "Volunteers aren't employees and that means we shouldn't treat them as if they were".

Keith has asked for feedback, he hasn't done it in the way LG would prefer so LG won't even look at the site because he thinks the site should be redeveloped in a different way which is not currently an option to us so ... stalemate?

But how are we going to decide which Ritter Sport is best?

We can live with a discussion where we express our love for Ritter sport in words (and words only)

Keith has asked for feedback, he hasn't done it in the way LG would prefer so LG won't even look at the site because he thinks the site should be redeveloped in a different way which is not currently an option to us so ... stalemate?

Singling out LG does not sit well with me as he’s certainly not the only one with the opinion this was badly handled. Not a single soul, myself included, has suggested that volunteers are employees or should be treated as same. I have said before I’d be willing to chip in for Zing financially (a product of volunteer labour), certainly the servers ofc, reworking the code so that it’s more robust for the challenges of the internet of 2026 is naturally in the same bucket. I would guarantee most regular users would feel the same on that. The gripes people have are on the user-facing side. There’s also the awkward fact that most of the internet runs on volunteer labour through moderators and site admins for non-commercial sites. Not saying that makes it right, just saying it’s how it is. Ilx in terms of sites I’ve used seems alone in users actually being willing to contribute towards that.

Just asking for a crumb of acknowledgment that a top down redesign of a site that runs on user generated content without asking said users beforehand what’s important to us might have been mishandled. Just a crumb!

I'm sure that a majority of current users will enjoy repolling every music artist who's ever lived and I guess as long as i can turn off ilm i might still hang in here maybe

don't think it's a solo run from me tbf so not fair to paint it as such, and it's not about the way i personally think it should be done, it's just about beginning from a point that allows people to know what is a mandatory change and what isn't.

i can't control what anyone else does or what happens from here so it's not a stalemate really. i clearly can't control any of that, nor can most of us, so if people want to continue to go ahead as has happened then have at it.

i just think that will ultimately be a bad idea. it would be worth someone owning that decision and the decisions made so far though, if that's the route that... whoever is deciding on this chooses to go down.

xpost

I said I wasn't keen on 'reactions' but I guess I just made an exception: gave kinder a thumbs-up for saying much the same thing I said about empty space above, but a couple of hours earlier (and more eloquently) than I did, in the sandbox.

And also: fuck you. and honestly i think you should be banned
Christ dude you can be a real dickhead sometimes. Pull it in.

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Thursday, August 6, 2026 3:47 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

(sorry that last aimed at Mookie in case all the posts inbetween dont make that clear)

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Thursday, August 6, 2026 3:47 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

that may have been a bit over the top, sorry. but i still don't think we need to make the site easier for lurkers to read your endless complaints

if there'd just been a thread going 'we need to do a big upgrade, i'm going to do a redesign for technical reasons, what new features do you want, what do you want to keep the same? do you want a reactions feature?' then a lot of this could have been sorted out earlier before so much work was done, like establishing that most people seem to hate the idea of the reactions feature before anyone went to the trouble of implementing it. there'd be pushback against the entire concept of a redesign course but it'd give a better starting point because you would at least get some idea of what people like & dislike about the current design & what new features people are actually interested in. i don't think anyone's demanding that consensus needed to be slowly established on every single point of change across the entire process, just it really would have helped if there'd been some attempt at bringing the community on board with the process earlier than this

like there's stuff i'd have suggested if i'd known a big redesign was coming - a quote post button that works like basically any other message board software's does is the one thing i'd really like, and the new 'reply' button is kinda that, but not exactly?

did i bother suggesting that before? no, because i had no reason to expect there was going to be any change, given that i don't think this board has had any notable new features in the 12 years i've been here and the idiosyncrasies are just part of the charm at this point

Otm

i think one of the things people are reacting to is that the code in the sandbox is a long, long way past MVP.

Watch Party: For holding YouTube watch parties at a specified time; embed a YouTube video and watch it whilst chatting about it.

Has this ever happened on ilxor.com? Even during COVID?

(I'm just happy to have learned that MVP can stand for something other than "Most Valuable Player".)

This is very impractical but I suggest folks on a computer try shrinking the window down to the size of a phone and see what the site layout looks like there (or just look at it on your phone’s browser, lol). A little settings tweaking will make the site look very similar to the old style of the site and I think it would be a good baseline to scale up to regular browser size. (I’ll go through my settings and post them when I’m more awake.)

I don't think I explained myself well with the consensus comment, I was just thinking in the sense that if we had to make 1 small change at a time and wait for everyone to be ok with it, that seemed impractical timewise. I might have not understood what was meant by that, which is cool.

I'm fine either/or with all this! This place means a lot to a lot of us and its a bit sad that this inflames people into aggro, but understandable I guess.

if there'd just been a thread going 'we need to do a big upgrade, i'm going to do a redesign for technical reasons, what new features do you want, what do you want to keep the same? do you want a reactions feature?' then a lot of this could have been sorted out earlier before so much work was done, like establishing that most people seem to hate the idea of the reactions feature before anyone went to the trouble of implementing it. there'd be pushback against the entire concept of a redesign course but it'd give a better starting point because you would at least get some idea of what people like & dislike about the current design & what new features people are actually interested in.

This is nicely said, ufo.

Hilariously I am going thru exactly this with my job at the moment - a massive, entire-platform reboot of a major system I've used for over 10 years, and we also weren't consulted much til it was already well underway. So I totally get everyone's feelings on this.

Yeah I bet they dismissed the need for user input from your workplace too because they said something sarky about consensus.

Has this ever happened on ilxor.com? Even during COVID?

There have been occasions when artists have released new music videos and a group of people pop in to ILM to discuss them immediately afterward. I've definitely been to a few artist-promoted livestreams or music video debuts on YouTube. And for those, I'm honestly more interested in the new content than the million-mile-an-hour chat nonsense. But among a smaller group of ilxors, I could see it being really cool!

Yeah I bet they dismissed the need for user input from your workplace too because they said something sarky about consensus.

I guess I need to clarify again all I meant was if we reduced this to trying one tiny change at a time, we'd be at it for months/years. Perhaps something of an exaggeration. I am not dismissing the need for consensus at all. Was specific to that use case. I'll leave it at that, as like I said I've tried the site out, I've said what I don't like, if any other massive changes happen I'll have a look, otherwise, 'sall good for me.

I'm putting my feedback in list form. This is not comprehensive - just a few things that have jumped out for me over the past day. Might come back with more, in time.

Likes

• New poll fun
• Watch Party feature
• Mute/Unmute User (Ooo! Who should I mute first?)
• Saved posts
• Post editing
• New formatting options (R.I.P. bbcode - you were a good code)

• Recent Activity should be named Site New Answers
• New Threads/Recent Activity would be easier to read on separate pages
• Reactions - like most, not in favor. Seems out of character with the culture.
• Report – the new “Reason” box would mark a huge change in the FP system. I’m not saying this is bad, but as a former mod, I’m just thinking about having to deal with it on the backend. Like, not only do you have the headache of looking at every meanspirited/offensive post that has been flagged, but then the users doing the flagging get a chance to offer a free-text explanation to the mods. It’s just that sometimes, the users who are doing the flagging are being assholes themselves. This could give them another avenue to express their assholery, but specifically towards the mods, who are already beleaguered.
• Favicon looks very similar to the Home Depot favicon, so if I’m browsing ilx while comparing prices on bandsaws, I might get confused. :)

Likes

• Bookmark refreshy

Not looking forward to endless re-polling of every poll that has already been polled.

Me neither but I at least understand that people will be thrilled with that. I don't think reactions will be anything but a negative

Keith has asked for feedback, he hasn't done it in the way LG would prefer so LG won't even look at the site because he thinks the site should be redeveloped in a different way which is not currently an option to us so ... stalemate?

I mean it's stalemate between a user who condescends to speak for the group, and the guy who creates the site, so, no.

LG keeps saying "you should ask the people what they want" but - have you tried doing that? have you tried asking 200 people to make suggestions, when these suggestions will be a massive, unbalanced combination of loud and quiet, rude and considerate, realistic and batshit, useful and pointless, and the only *possible* outcome is the site builders going "fuck this shit, I'll make what I think is good and let people try it out".

Tim's point about this place not being LG's house (or anyone's house) but a local pub is OTM. If my local pub installed a 100" TV with 24/7 MMA bouts I'd probably stop going there too. But no-one's doing it in your front room. This is a place you come for - whatever you come here for. It's not *yours*.

A couple of people have said they'll not use the site in its new guise and, while I think that's a pretty extreme reaction that ignores quite how quickly we become used to things looking different, then fine, absolutely their prerogative.

Also - lol and otm *are* reacts. And IMO emojis are infinitely preferable to one-line sarcasm, bantz, insults etc. So dull.

Perhaps I'm overlooking something in the settings (and maybe repeating something ufo said early on) but is there no way page features could expand to utilise more space horizontally and thereby reduce vertical bloat? It's terribly old-fashioned now to luxuriate in the un-cramped-ness of a conventional monitor, but I feel not unlike I'm still using a phone when the total information displayed on a sizeable display is reduced this drastically. (eg. typical dimensions in my browser with all else being satisfactory: https://postimg.cc/1nmwD6w8 )

Anyway, thanks for the toil behind the scenes! This is probably my only real concern. (Aside from agreeing that post reaction emoji thingies seem unnecessary, at best.)

― Nag! Nag! Nag!, Thursday, 6 August 2026 02:19 (ten hours ago)

Yeah, I agree with this. One of my least favourite things about modern internet design is how everything looks like it's made for phones. I have plenty of space on my screen, can I please use it?

I have a practical question: is there much point in continuing to discuss features itt? It's annoying sharing a piece of feedback and then having to come up with the best rhetorical device to make it really land, or having to acknowledge ancient historical precedents, or think through analogies about pubs.

Is there some sort of plan or loose philosophical approach being taken for how to deal with the feedback that is being given? Some people upthread were certain reactions would be nixed, but now we've had a few people posting in favour of them. What's next?

to put it another way: how will final decisions about the non-functional aspects of the new design be made?

it must be a pita to have to do unpaid work for the site

At least they get to eat the pita

Not looking forward to endless re-polling of every poll that has already been polled.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Thursday, 6 August 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Me neither but I at least understand that people will be thrilled with that. I don't think reactions will be anything but a negative

― 99 gram lychee (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 6 August 2026 bookmarkflaglink

Just saying we disable the function.

All our polling crimes are still in the archives.

I have a practical question: is there much point in continuing to discuss features itt?

afaik any changes will take time to implement but feedback is still welcome in the meantime.

what would be so bad about getting a bunch of miscellaneous, incompatible feedback before the first draft? sure it's a lot to sift through, but it would help you realize "oh some of these ideas are extremely polarizing, while others seem to have broad support with the worst response being 'i wouldn't use that but it seems harmless.'" and along the way you'd be building trust in the process. again i think of the "Ideas for ILX" thread. i believe that Keith took in a lot of good ideas from that thread, but then you have things like the reactions which not one user has ever asked for, except in jest.

to return to my urban history reference, some of the posts itt are sounding basically like Robert Moses. i would really really encourage you to think of participatory processes as worth it in themselves. that is, participatory from the get-go, not at a late-arriving "feedback welcome" round. of COURSE it's slower, of COURSE you won't get the clean, cohesive vision you would have put together, because the whole premise is recognizing that it's not about you, it's about the community.

LG keeps saying "you should ask the people what they want" but - have you tried doing that? have you tried asking 200 people to make suggestions, when these suggestions will be a massive, unbalanced combination of loud and quiet, rude and considerate, realistic and batshit, useful and pointless, and the only *possible* outcome is the site builders going "fuck this shit, I'll make what I think is good and let people try it out".

does this site even have 200 regular users? if it was impossible to listen to the community that actually uses this website then what would even be the point of asking for feedback at all? if suggestions are asked for at an earlier point then they can be incorporated earlier and the backlash at least partially mitigated. that didn't happen so whatever, i just want to try to get things improved as much as possible, but it'd be nice if people in charge thought about any of that 'community management' stuff in the future rather than haphazardly doing whatever and then getting annoyed when people are annoyed in response

afaik any changes will take time to implement but feedback is still welcome in the meantime.

― c u (crüt), Thursday, August 6, 2026 8:51 AM (three minutes ago)

Maybe I'm being demanding, but I would like to hear from someone who has decision-making power over implementing the new site about how they plan to deliberate among conflicting feedback.

LG keeps saying "you should ask the people what they want" but - have you tried doing that?

Hi Mark, nice of you to drop by for the first time in what, a decade?

If this was asked for and communicated properly then you would've had a mostly fine and proper conversation.

I was also under the impression that LG does in fact do that full time

the worst part of reacts will be when two posters are arguing and then there will be insults thrown around and you'll get a bunch of rubberneckers doing passive aggressive thumbs up on the insults

Then folks will start discussing the competing reactions so even if you had them muted you would have to read about that dick-measuring contest.

I mean it's stalemate between a user who condescends to speak for the group, and the guy who creates the site, so, no.

Quite literally not a point LG ever made, so I’m not sure why (apart from rampant bad faith) people are so stuck on this point?

LG keeps saying "you should ask the people what they want" but - have you tried doing that? have you tried asking 200 people to make suggestions, when these suggestions will be a massive, unbalanced combination of loud and quiet, rude and considerate, realistic and batshit, useful and pointless, and the only *possible* outcome is the site builders going "fuck this shit, I'll make what I think is good and let people try it out".

I am ONCE AGAIN FUCKING ASKING why the notion that a site built on user-created content should not ask for feedback on the user facing side of the site seems to be reaching for the fucking stars? Nobody is obliged to take feedback on board, let alone consider it, but as I said above (and gosh I must be killfiled by half the fucking site, oh well!) doing so lets people feel heard, which apparently doesn’t matter to half of you, it avoids obviously dumb mistakes like DJP’s literal username not being considered permissible on the new site (!) and prevents time wasted coding stuff like reactions.

I mean, you can certainly try the top down approach. It’s going very well so far.

By the way, we had a thread for changes to the FP system and I don’t recall anyone whining about 200 active users being tooooooo many. We have threads for Zing where those of us who use Zing offer feedback and suggestions and that goes fine. The notion that something as intrinsic as the site’s own infrastructure is unnecessary to poll is a deeply odd one, and I’ll continue to repeat this until someone actually acknowledges or better still refutes the point with something more acceptable than “don’t want to.”

I was also under the impression that LG does in fact do that full time

Correct, a point I made upthread which seems to have been skipped over by multiple people in their urge to paint him as some sort of weird authoritarian? Honestly, LG is one of my favourite people but I also love disagreeing with and arguing with him, the fact I’m having to agree with and defend him so much because people insist on the most reductive and bad faith examples of his posts is genuinely quite distressing to me.

LG keeps saying "you should ask the people what they want" but - have you tried doing that? have you tried asking 200 people to make suggestions, when these suggestions will be a massive, unbalanced combination of loud and quiet, rude and considerate, realistic and batshit, useful and pointless, and the only *possible* outcome is the site builders going "fuck this shit, I'll make what I think is good and let people try it out".

i mean this thread is asking people what they want. you're not reading closely if you haven't seen the distinction that:

- option 1 is set some context and parameters and then ask people what they want, empowering them with that knowledge.
- option 2 is design stuff beyond knowing what people want and ask them what they want afterwards based on that assumed design.

given that option 2 would often cause absolute madness ime in a big org or community, then i think this thread is pretty calm and shows we have the cohesion for option 1. why not trust each other?

maybe it's now too late idk.

fwiw i am happy to help to try to learn the context and design an explanation of it apart from the fact that it seems a bit hifalutin to act like that's not something most people could do.

off top of my head i think some broader info under headings like these would be good:

1. what designs must change for technical reasons
2. what designs we can no longer have for technical reasons
3. things we think would be nice that tie in to stuff we're working on anyway
4. things we think would be nice more generally

but idk, i can understand if people just think that's too time consuming even if i think it might ultimately be quicker. i keep thinking we are a few hundred posts in here tho and most of us don't really know what design changes the tech changes dictate we must do or which are more optional?

i would really really encourage you to think of participatory processes as worth it in themselves. that is, participatory from the get-go, not at a late-arriving "feedback welcome" round. of COURSE it's slower, of COURSE you won't get the clean, cohesive vision you would have put together, because the whole premise is recognizing that it's not about you, it's about the community.

testify! this is what i meant when i said i think the discussion of wider context could be positive more generally. when was the last time we talked about the board in this way?

the only bit i disagree with is i think sometimes doing stuff this way is faster in the end because it generates energy and enthusiasm.

Tim's point about this place not being LG's house

gtf with this btw - the entire point of my argument is we broaden this and involve everyone, i have not made one comment about my own specific opinions of the designs because i think that is more important.

I don't want reactions in the redesign, but I do kind of want them in this thread so I can affix OTMs to the recent posts by LG and ufo.

Hi Julio, I hope you are well.

gyac, we've not met - hi - but aren't you also just saying "don't want to" when asked to consider the new options (and over days/weeks rather than hours)?

_LG keeps saying "you should ask the people what they want" but - have you tried doing that? _

Hi Mark, nice of you to drop by for the first time in what, a decade?

Fourteen years lmao, we are truly blessed
https://i.postimg.cc/d3VKdTb6/IMG-8938.jpg

xp (prob unnecessary now but oh well) lol, but yes LG is an all-around great and has been relentlessly otm throughout this thread. I get that ILX doesn't have the resources to do a proper user-driven consultation process, but we could still benefit from LG's experience handling this exact kind of process imo

_LG keeps saying "you should ask the people what they want" but - have you tried doing that? _

Hi Mark, nice of you to drop by for the first time in what, a decade?

Fourteen years lmao, we are truly blessed
https://i.postimg.cc/d3VKdTb6/IMG-8938.jpg

gyac, we've not met - hi - but aren't you also just saying "don't want to" when asked to consider the new options (and over days/weeks rather than hours)?

….No?
Maybe if you posted more than once every fourteen years you would have seen my comments on zing and various ilx suggestion threads participating in ideas and feedback for the site on developments before they happened?

xp (prob unnecessary now but oh well) lol, but yes LG is an all-around great and has been relentlessly otm throughout this thread. I get that ILX doesn't have the resources to do a proper user-driven consultation process, but we could still benefit from LG's experience handling this exact kind of process imo

Don’t think we need to go that far, we could simply…ask…like we do for changes to the FP system and trivial stuff like changes to the faqs etc? Ofc this hearkens back to ufo’s earlier point about “well I would have made some suggestions if I knew any changes were in the works” but apparently the ilx equivalent of the remote planning permission office the Vogons file their plans to demolish the earth in is considered adequate notice? Idk lads.

Yeah I think I spent enough time here in ancient times not to feel too much of a fraud, thanks though.

I am sure your ideas were considered, why do you think they weren't?

Was not expecting a cameo itt from the resulting paste guy

sidenote but i'm honestly laughing at a few people telling the group of us who are trying to say, small voice, 'i guess this board belongs to all of us a little, doesn't it?' that IT'S NOT YOURS

xp to gyac: I really just meant I think LG's perspective and experience here are super valuable and aren't coming out of "resentment" or whatever nonsense was being posted yesterday

Oh is that me, jaymc! Hah I was discussing that on the weekend. Some things never change.

(I don't remember you thinking I was a cunt back then but I guess you were discreet, I appreciate that)

Yeah I think I spent enough time here in ancient times not to feel too much of a fraud, thanks though.

Again the appeal to seniority remains one of the most bewildering and IMO worthless parts of old ilx, literally why would I care that you used to post here and now you don’t? I literally care more about the opinion of each and every regular, even the ones I don’t like, than someone who deigns to drop in after a 14 year absence to shit on others.

xp to gyac: I really just meant I think LG's perspective and experience here are super valuable and aren't coming out of "resentment" or whatever nonsense was being posted yesterday

Oh yeah I get that I really just mean everyone who’s like HOW YOU CAN YOU POSSIBLY CONSULT ILX’S MILLION ACTIVE USERS TOO HARD that we literally do this by, idk, starting a fucking thread. It couldn’t be easier, and yet!

xp Mark C: Just a bit of fun, let's be cool

gyac - that's completely fair.

gyac, LG, ufo all otm

good to see you, Mark.

I have not been able to check the sandbox out, but I would also like to add my vote for "no reacts please"

the ilx equivalent of the remote planning permission office the Vogons file their plans to demolish the earth

This is an even worse metaphor than Ronan's one about how this is like someone telling you they're going to redevelop your house and move it.

the pub is no better - does this place feel like the pub to you?

Hi Curtis (is it, sorry if I've got that wrong)!

Actually gyac and Julio are OTM about me sticking my oar in - it's not my business any more So I'll bow out. I've been friends with stet for 20 years and keith for 30 and regardless of anything else, they are *absolutely* sincere about their desire to make this site as great as it possibly can be.

...unless you think the proposed changes are going to destroy ILx, if you do then I apologise for that comment.

xp it feels more like a pub than it feels like my house, yeah.

I mean when I mentioned the pub I was trying to engage with your metaphor, it's probably not one I'd have come up with on my own.

i have not questioned that at all. and tbh not sure why multiple people have singled me out when at least half the people itt seem to agree. i won't dwell on it though.

xpost to mark

argh also sorry for real name

I'm about to roll out a system redesign in my work life and I'm in the middle between the devs and the middle and end users, so I might just be feeling casual about some aspects of this convo. I've BEEN collecting people's feedback for 3 years, surveying and doing focus groups, and being the trouble-shooting and problem-solving lead on all of the issues, and we redesigned with all of that as context, within the bounds of what the system architecture will permit (it's Scalesforce, so...). I am not NOW going to re-design foundational parts because someone who only sees 30% of the overall picture says it doesn't fit the way one person does things. To some degree they'll have to adapt.

I appreciate that ilx is different and not a top-down authority kind of place, and respect the pushback that is saying this. But collecting feedback can be a full-time job as those of us who do it know. I feel very flexibile about whatever happens somewhere in the middle of the perfect and the good. Kudos to everyone making good faith efforts and not being peevish or vitriolic.

(thumbs up react)

significant xposts

I've been holding my tongue on this because it's kind of half-baked, but I do think some of the new features feel like they are catering more to non-posting lurkers / infrequent drive-by posters than regulars. The new poll options, the real-time vote counting, and splashy results visualization and the emoji reacts seem to me to be appealing to people who are less invested in posting/responding and tend to engage in more passive forms of participation like silently voting in polls (which I've done too, I'm not saying it's a sin).

Somewhat relatedly: my harshest take on the new site is it feels like it was designed by someone really into statistics & data visualization and maybe less into discussion. I'm not saying this is defensibly rational but it is a huge turn-off to me and the more I look at the sandbox, the more I feel like map and Cattedrale: this isn't a board I would have gotten invested in as much.

For example, if you visit a concluded poll thread (e.g., the nuts one) you can see under the results graph:
--Results (Dowdall)
--Results (Condorcet)
--Insights
--Who Voted for What?

And you get a bunch more statistics talk under each tab, such as:

Points of Interest

Category Results
Consensus index1 38%—there is noticeable disagreement
Broadly popular2 The peanut
Divisive5 The brazil nut; The cashew nut; The pecan nut; The walnut

1
The mean standard deviation across the ballots normalised as a percentage. 100% meaning complete agreement to 0% meaning complete disagreement
2
Options that showed up consistently near the top of the rankings
5
Options whose rankings show significant inconsistenty

(formatting is fine on the actual site)

or

Note: the ‘remove below’ button is to remove individuals who are ‘not real fans’, i.e. people who just came in and ‘voted for the big single’. It removes all voters below the one you select. In removing them, all the stats are recalculated using only real fans votes.

I've never been anti-poll and the stats-y side of the EOY polls doesn't bother me as a one-off event, but this feels like a profound qualitative change to the board. I understand there are some or many users who will be excited about this—no shots fired, but it's no surprise that some of the more immediately active sandbox users are posters I know have at least some programming experience—but it is as gyac and others have been saying a unilateral cultural change, and I agree with LG and others that there should be some concern about further active poster attrition. The pub analogy seemed way off to me at first (is this pub BYOB?), but I suppose it makes more sense if your present-day experience of ILX consists of reading other people's posts, voting in polls, etc. but not actually posting yourself.

i mean idk what language we use but when i said house i didn't mean mine, just a shared building really. so it was a bad analogy late at night, but that is basically what the board is, right, a digital community centre? a large cult barn.

A lot of people will probably hate my previous post, but to try to put it more clearly: as with my user stats objection, I strongly dislike the prospect of ILX treating me as yet another internet user whose data is there to be extracted.

Obviously there's no profit motive at work here which helps, but the incessant creep of quantification, datafication, and statistical reasoning into our everyday lives is something I have extremely strong objections too, intellectually and emotionally.

I am ONCE AGAIN FUCKING ASKING why the notion that a site built on user-created content should not ask for feedback on the user facing side of the site seems to be reaching for the fucking stars? Nobody is obliged to take feedback on board, let alone consider it, but as I said above (and gosh I must be killfiled by half the fucking site, oh well!) doing so lets people feel heard, which apparently doesn’t matter to half of you, it avoids obviously dumb mistakes like DJP’s literal username not being considered permissible on the new site (!) and prevents time wasted coding stuff like reactions.

I don't really know how to say this other than "because I don't think Keith wants to work that way, and it's his time freely given, and if he wants to make what you think are dumb mistakes and waste time on features that may or may not meet with delight that's also his call to make".

And I'd underline again that he IS categorically asking for feedback, he just is doing it when he has a v1.0 in his hands, and has a much clearer idea in his head about what's technically possible or not, vs soliciting a ton upfront in the abstract.

I mean, if this were a work situation I'd maybe do some things more like LG is outlining, but it's not and we're not.

it's a community situation though, is it? or is it not?

just my opinion but i do not participate in the maintenance or coding of this website so, like, to me it's fine for someone who does to go ahead and do a thing and solicit feedback. i think we're having a pretty good discussion about what the essence of this place is and ways to keep that through a redesign already. sorry to be chill

Ivy OTM, expressed my view far better than the bloviating nonsense I was typing.

_the ilx equivalent of the remote planning permission office the Vogons file their plans to demolish the earth _

This is an even worse metaphor than Local Garda’s one about how this is like someone telling you they're going to redevelop your house and move it.

Edited to remove real name. I appreciate I didn’t word this the best but I am referring to the plans being filed off in the middle of nowhere and then people being told “oh yeah actually they were there all along and you had the chance to reply” in response to this stuff being buried on some obscure tech support thread. I didn’t think that was a particularly bad metaphor, but I also didn’t think I merited that kind of response from you, Tim, so.

i'm genuinely sorry to be chill btw, i am so glad people care about this place to the degree they do and i don't think they're wrong!

it's a community situation though, is it? or is it not?

Apparently that means something different to some of us. All hail the glorious Keith or whoever, how kind of him to top down redesign a site and how considerate for some of you to weigh in with some of the worst bad faith shit I’ve seen in quite some time! Particularly people I’ve met and previously liked IRL. Good luck to you.

xp That is a fair point, stet. I think what I would ask is what the goals of the new design are. We know about the obvious goal of making the site more secure and reliable through back-end fixes, and I think we would all agree that that is necessary work.

But design-wise, are we trying to preserve a community that is diminishing? Attract new users? Make the site more user-friendly? Encourage more posts? Give lurkers more of a voice? Bring the site in line with the aesthetics other forums?

I'm sure there won't be consensus among the users as to what these goals should be, but it would be helpful to know what effects you and Keith are trying to produce.

While I empathize and feel the spirit of LG and gyac’s posts, I am also a little less bothered by the processual elements of this than they are. Which is fine, because I know they are coming from the same place I am, which is a place of frustration. For me, that arrives from some aesthetic and structural changes on the sandbox that I believe will absolutely destroy the character of this site, post reacts being the main culprit. (As far as your point, Mark C, lol and otm aren’t the same, and imho your opinion doesn’t matter much since you haven’t bothered to post anything here in 14 years)

Somewhat relatedly: my harshest take on the new site is it feels like it was designed by someone really into statistics & data visualization and maybe less into discussion.

i do agree with this a little (as someone who is relatively into statistics and has very strong opinions on voting systems) but i also don't think it really matters idk because it's mostly superficial and won't have that much practical use? like it is funny and novel to have ranked choice voting for polls on a message board with all the detailed stats this new system provides (there is definitely some novelty for me in seeing condorcet ranked choice here!) but i don't think there's that much middle ground between 'which is your favourite album by this artist' (supported by the existing polling system) and 'rank your 25 favourite songs by this artist with 20 albums' (still very understandably not supported by the new ranked choice polling system) so i don't really expect people to find that much use for it beyond it having some novelty early on idk, we're not trying to elect our favourite cure album to high office or anything

which is why i'm completely fine with it as an extra option, it's funny (and kinda interesting) to have, provides a little bit of novelty, but doesn't seem likely to cause big issues

Ivy OTM, expressed my view far better than the bloviating nonsense I was typing.

but we've been over this - saying simply 'it is fine to do a redesign and get opinions after' is just a direct rebuttal, with no reasoning, of the view that is is not fine to do so, for which there is a lot of reasoning itt.

ok you're right!

my post had a little personal reasoning for why i'm fine with it!

but treat it like i'm saying YOU'RE WRONG, or whatever

but idk we do not run this place like a co-op, there are a few people who work on the code and no one else. i am just trying to keep this in mind

people are entitled to their opinion but after few hundred posts it is kinda weird for someone to just reiterate something that people have explained their problems with before, which wasn't you tbf. not because they're definitively wrong just 'why do you think this' might be reasonable, especially if the actual argument is based on the one group of people wanting more engagement and discussion on what's happened so far, and the other not wanting that. again, you have stayed out of that, which is grand, i respect it.

fwiw i feel p chill about it also. adding in my pov here isn't because i'm furious or something. i am kinda bemused people acting like this thread is some scary clusterfuck even with mark c emerging from the abandoned toolshed like mr withers.

but i do think if where we end up is 'well this is happening and you don't get to be involved earlier because someone decided to do this redesign' that is p sad and will ultimately have worse repercussions for the future of the board, and what it is, than any of the proposed designs.

Having looked around the sandbox more, I feel like a lot of the new bells and whistles, technically cool though they are, take away from the essential simplicity of ilx. Take for instance the current array of options for customizing how and when you see poll results - idk if the current plan is to leave that customizable or if eventually it will be standardized. But personally it would weird me out to know that even if I'm voting blind, which is my preference, others are seeing the results before they vote and I could too with the click of a button. That's just one thing, and by itself it's nbd, but the more fussy little unnecessary features like that pop up, the more imo it contributes to a general sense of this being a different kind of board from ilx, where there are basically two things you can do and that's fine.

That said, reacts are still really my main bugbear; everything else I think I would learn to live with.

i don't think this process has been ideal and it's obviously too late to start over and achieve some more ideal process, but to get it back on track to some degree and bring more people on board (& improve the quality of feedback) it would be very helpful if there could be a post going through all the changes & new features, explaining what the thinking behind them is, and broadly giving some idea of how feedback is intended to be incorporated? like there may be good reasons behind some of the more initially disagreeable decisions, or maybe not, but it's much easier to provide useful feedback if we understand where you're coming from

100% agree.

I must have missed us going over this.

I think Keith and Stet have a history of making good decisions about this site. they also have a history of taking feedback seriously and evolving the site to reflect the views of the community of users. They have built up a lot of trust, for me. That, and the fact that they are doing the actual work, is enough for me to be happy with whatever process they want to run, and engage with giving feedback on what I like and don't on their terms. It's not like there isn't a consultation process.

That may lead to sub-optimal results, but I don't believe they will be ruinously sub-optimal because I think they know what they're doing, and I think ILx will survive them and continue to evolve. That's why I think it's fine.

But personally it would weird me out to know that even if I'm voting blind, which is my preference, others are seeing the results before they vote and I could too with the click of a button.

i think it would be good to maintain the current poll system including 'no results until the poll ends' (which is still an option for the poll creator) as the default when creating a poll

xp to ufo: fwiw my primary objections are more to things like that Insights tab, Who Voted for What?, and the posting stats. I don't have an objection to introducing the option of ranked polls, e.g.; it's the analytics side of things, the way my usage of the board is rendered into data (it also feels like a very minor privacy encroachment). For me it makes the board feel less like the old-skool message board that numerous posters have identified as a key reason for staying here, and makes it more like a social media site. I'm sure there are practical runarounds available to some of this (e.g., don't participate in poll threads), but there's a reason people in website world use the phrase "look and *feel*"—and to me the sandbox has a palpable different feel from ILX that isn't exclusively due to typography or divider styles or layout.

more fwiw: I don't expect people to agree with me on this, it's very much coming out my own personal experience, academic research, etc. and I don't know how I would go about persuading people to take my view even if that was desirable.

This thread is hard though. We keep being told feedback is welcome, but then there's the standard ILX climate of debating everything and defending one's positions, which don't go super well together.