hey gang. just wanna pop in here and try and get some thoughts going on the next release of the site. There's 3 things that i want to be the main focus of the next release which are:

✅ - done 🚧 - in progress

1. dark mode ✅

2. view own/other users posts ✅

3. search

dark mode is well underway. i've done a lot of cleanup work to move all the colors to variables and am just about finishing up with that. the next step is to write some code to set both a cookie for your theme preference and also save it to your account settings, so it will be remembered across devices.

if anyone has any thoughts about the color scheme of the site - for example, if there's any portions of the site that are particularly hard to read, i'd love to know! please post it here.

as for search, this is going to be a bigger effort. the API can already handle filtering posts by a specific username, so it shouldn't be too much of a lift to get a page where you can view your own posts or any other users. searching, on the other hand, is going to require new code on both the front-end and back-end. like dark mode, i'd like to solicit some early feedback: what is important to you when searching? what kinds of filters do you like and what are absolutely imperative to have? any kind of feedback is welcome on this!

for all of these features, i don't really have a great ETA. dark mode is definitely going to come first and i will most likely push it out into it's own release, since there's a couple other bugs i'd like to get out as well. searching and viewing users posts is going to come later.

anyway, please let me know all your ideas. any feedback is good feedback!

RE Search: Standard boolean search that works is really all I ask. Even Google lately likes to ignore the '-' operator when searching and I hate that.

RE Darkmode: No real input here as most sites I think look like trash in dark mode, the contrast is either an 11 or -1, cannot seem to find a nice semblance between. I do like the current color theme since its somewhat dark with the grays/greys but still easy to read.

Edit: Ignore below, I see how it works now. And, any thought in being able to unsub from something in our bookmarks or has that already been implemented and I missed the memo?

You are too good to us! But yeah a dark mode would be interesting to see. There is currently a nice balance but any alternative is more than welcome.

just want to give an update here - viewing your own/other users posts is definitely next up, but i'm going to have to take some time to update the color palette for both light and dark modes. i got some feedback that some things aren't as readable as they should be, and i'm trying to strike the balance between choosing colors i like while still being accessible and compliant. dark mode is probably going to see some changes to it's greys and blacks, while light mode is most likely going to see some changes around it's link colors and it's greys.

sorry about the delay folks. i really want to get the color palette of the site right and doing that requires some iteration.

in the meantime, i spent this weekend coding up a "forum stats" feature and immdiately after started posting some ads around adjacent websites. hopefully, it's been cool to see the site stats growing in real-time. And if you're new here, welcome to the site!!

PS: i'm also going to change the line spacing because it feels way too wide and it's annoying me. thoughts?

Keep up the great work! It's pretty cool loading the forum and seeing it evolve, bit by bit, in real-time. Really exudes that "Rome wasn't built in a day" / "10,000-mile journey"-vibe. Is B-A-S-E-D.

While I understand the benefits of creating your own search funtionality, in the meantime you could integrate something like a DuckDuckGo search without much hassle, I bet!

Something I thought was cool on old Invision Power Board and vBulletin forums was the "forum shop" mods where you could buy semi-useless digital extras with the points you got from posting or receiving likes. I think being able to apply colors or fancy text effects would be cool. And speaking of titles and text effects, how about integrating a Unicode character selection for the text inputs around here? :O

those search-engine search bars on sites always felt yucky to me. i think at the very least, i could get a search for post content working relatively quickly and maybe add a few advanced searching options like toggling a "in title" checkbox or something.

upgrades are definitely something that have crossed my mind. i think it would be the best approach to monetize the site - that way, it doesn't feel like low-effort (and i'm not a huge fan of sites that ask for support with nothing really in return). I think that's still a little low on the list because i'd still like every new feature to be free and we still need to build up a userbase before i really need people to support the site in a financial way.

and smilies are definitely planned. i'm not sure when but definitely up there on the list.

Yooooo, deez colors are sick!!

thanks! i modeled the colors after the basement blog - that theme was one of the default schemes, but it works really damn well and has really nice contrast. plus, when i eventually pay for a custom domain, there will be a bit more cohesion between this site and that one.

time to get back to feature work and buying some more adspace for the site 😬

hello just here to say that yes i am aware that viewing certain users' posts takes fucking forever. working on figuring out the root cause now. this page should not take 10+ seconds to load.

e: i think it's only people who have 100s of posts. for example, my post page takes too long: /users/orchids/posts

edit2: okay this should be fixed now. optimizing SQL is damn hard and i'm sick of having to use my brain.

So the business I work for used MYOB EXO/CRM, the back bone of that thing is SQL. Routinely we have the entire organization grind to a stop because folks are running reports to figure out what individual sales people are selling what. This may just be a characteristic of deep analysis of SQL databases. That or just as likely, the folks at MYOB just don't try THAT hard. ;)

that's actually really interesting to hear, and I feel like the previous SQL I had before I fixed it probably had similar issues with whatever is going on there.

The issue with getting all of a user's posts is that I want to return their active offense with it (if they're banned or on probation), and that requires a subquery to essentially look over a lot of the offenses table and find their most recent one, but also the fact that the offense is tied to a post_id, and not an actual user_id made me have to write expensive JOIN statements to link offense to the post and then finally to the user.

Overall, I did the hacky thing which was add a user_id column in the offense table even though post_id already existed. It's kinda redundant information, but it made the query 100x faster without having to do the extra JOIN.

This seems like an appropriate use of basement.community; now forwarding to basementcommunity.bearblog.dev!

love

spent a lot of time thinking about this comment, so i got something cooking up to be released in the next day or so

There should be a reaction feature, even if its a simple "like" that would be good enough.

i mentioned this in another thread, but this essentially is never going to happen

You could always make a totally nonsensical reaction feature give people that dopamine rush from mashing a button, that ultimately means nothing

Literally just add a button that counts how many times its been pressed that lives on the homepage lol

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this we have now! both dark mode is now the default, with cool mode and light mode as secondary options