Great ideas! Personally I think the spacing is ideal.

Just wondering, would there be any way to allow switching between a chronological (linear) view of a thread and a nested one? Though forums with nested views seem to have gone a bit out of fashion for some reason, they do make it easier to choose whether to bypass or follow tangent discussions. People will have different views on what is considered off-topic. Some want all subsequent posts to be direct answers to the original post and maybe even that the original poster to in some sense "owns" the thread while others want threads to evolve totally organically as casual conversations between friends with whatever associations pop up. (Most are likely somewhere in between these views.) So while I think it would be impossible to make a policy that everybody thought was totally perfect, I was wondering if allowing replies to mid-thread posts but making it easy to hide branches of no personal interest might accommodate for a wider spectrum of tangent discussions tolerance / desire? Nested views also make it easier to navigate long threads and follow the specific tangents one do find interesting.

I can’t find the private messages (and I can’t even remember what it’s called, but it’s not that) when I’m viewing PT in browser (Safari) on my cellphone. I bc a see it from my laptop when using Firefox.

Any suggestions?

Pallas I'll add an entry in the tips & tricks thread for finding Private Messages.

    Maybe this is just me, but I like seeing the original poster associated with the thread title, not just the last person to respond. Not a high priority, but it would be nice!

      Ok, this may be a controversial one, but I do believe the forum would greatly benefit from a two-way ignore feature. I remember the multiple wars of words I had with a certain unpopular member in PW, which always unleashed the worst in me and resulted in near bans because I would hurl obscenities at that member. Fortunately it all stopped lately when I came up with a signature that said

      "I kindly ask [name of that member] to refrain from replying to and commenting on my posts and threads. Of course if you find my writing so interesting that you cannot resist then I cannot stop you, but please try your best, thank you."

      Shortly afterwards that user reported my signature to the mods 🤣 because he felt publicly insulted by it and I got a message from none other than our @Gombessa urging me to remove the signature and encouraging me to reach an agreement with that other user to basically ignore each other for good, and it worked! (Thank you @Gombessa ! You deserve a better forum than that cesspool!)
      After that I was able to post whatever I wanted without the apprehension that that member would come in and ruin the discussions. I guess it's a controversial proposition because it could be seen as a figurative restraining order of sorts, but it is evidently effective. So an easy way would be to have the option to request a mod to establish a two-way ignore with an other member, and the mods decide whether to do it or not. I think it's just logical that when we want to ignore somebody we also wish that they ignore us as well. So please consider this, thanks!

        Rubens wondering if the mods even have the ability to set ignore on behalf of a user account? I'd be surprised if they did.

            twocats I know. If they can't do it directly they can reach out to both parties and ask for a mutual ignore. After all that's what actually happened in my case and I think it worked out beautifully. They could even prepare a template that they would just copy and paste whenever a request is placed.

              Pallas I flat out requested the ability to block a user, as is possible on other platforms. You don't see anything they do. They don't see anything you do. I don''t see this as at all controversial or requiring permission from anyone else.

              There are unfortunately bad actors out there who might seek to abuse such a system. Consider:

              I hate user Bob. I unilaterally set a 2-way ignore so I don't see what he says, and Bob cannot see what I say. Then I go off starting threads about how much of a jerk he is, or lying about things he has said, or just throw passive-aggressive snipes at him.

              Bob may not see any of it, or he may see partial responses from people manually quoting me, and be utterly confused and caught on the back foot about what is going on. But in any case, he is harmed because he doesn't have the opportunity to see what is being said about him in "hidden" posts he cannot control, and has no opportunity to defend himself. He also cannot control the fact that I have selectively hidden my public content, about him, from him. Months later, he later views the forum from a logged-out state, or does a Google search and sees threads where I am constantly spewing falsehoods about him. How would he feel?

              I selectively take off the 2-way ignore and see he's now aware of my games. So I decide to make his life even more miserable. I take off the 2-way ignore, and shoot off to him the most foul PM putting him on blast. Then I immediately re-instate the 2-way ignore, so that he is unable to respond to me (I won't see it).

              The mutual agreement method @Rubens mentions worked because he and the other member treated the situation like reasonable human beings, and mutually agreed to give each other space. Admittedly, that is the best case scenario 🙂

                  Then maybe we could do it that way. Once a mod has reached out to two members for such an agreement, any breach of it would be grounds for a warning.

                  It's also important to define what would constitute a breach of the mutual ignore agreement. From the top if my head I'm thinking:

                  1. Any direct reply, of course
                  2. Any mention of the other user
                    And here come the more controversial ones because I'm in controversy mode today:
                  3. Any participation in a thread started by the other user
                  4. Any rebuttal of an idea/opinion expressed by the other user! Yes that's a big one! But think about it. You write a post stating something. The other user comes in a says that that statement is wrong or is a misconception, but without directly replying to you or mentioning you. Still counts, sorry. And yes, I understand that it could be frustrating, but it's a small sacrifice IMO.

                  Pallas if each person is still closely watching the other

                  I don't think you would need to closely watch each other. If that person attacks what you wrote you will immediately see it, even if you were not watching out for it beforehand. What do you think?

                    @navindra is there any plug-in or option to make a post's edit history publicly visible? Because I can easily see someone abusing the current system by saying something worthy of moderation and then going back and editing it and being like "why are you upset?" (knew a guy who would do that).

                    I'd say it's worth trying a new system. And if it's really so unmanageable then we revert to the old system. The bar isn't very high to begin with.

                    Pallas My request for a block button is because it's the best way for me to reclaim my time.

                    Is the Ignore feature that Navindra already added sufficient? On mobile if I go to a user's profile and click on the top right, the Ignore option shows up.

                    Regarding all the stuff you said about yourself, I think it's admirable that you realize this and have strategies to avoid bringing out that side of you.

                    Pallas I would feel embarrassed for everyone to see my edit history

                    I'm also on another modern forum and there you get free edits for 5 minutes, and then after that the timestamp shows an orange "edited" that you can click on and then after a day or two it turns grey. And honestly people hardly notice it unless they're actively looking for something.

                        Pallas I'm completely willing to go without a block button and just - I don't know - ask people for help or whatever "together" people do

                        Oh, that's a shame about the Ignore not working like a Block! But I have a feeling that people will look out for you here and try to protect this space from that kind of negative behavior 🙂

                          Pallas

                          The world needs all sorts of heads.
                          Everyone has different talents.

                            David-G This exemplifies a basic design problem with Piano Tell (and with PianoClack). It is often hard to know which thread you are looking at. This never happened with PW, because every post there contains the thread title. Aside from Josephine's observation, I have noticed that not infrequently I find myself "lost" here, in the sense of not knowing what thread I am in.

                            So @Navindra if at all possible, you should do something about this. I don't mean put the title in every post - but there might be somewhere in a non-scrolling part of the page where you can put the title? Maybe at the top?

                            I mentioned somewhere else that PW's structure is actually excellent - the paging system. If they were to have an upgrade with the same structure, minus the intrusive ads etc, with proper direct file-uploading and handling features (eg. music and pics and web-linking like youtube linking), then that would be very formidable. It would take down flarum for sure, unless flarum has an option to have paging ... eg. page 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. And also incorporate the 'reply links' that allow users to jump to the source being replied to.