LW Update 2018-7-14 – Styling Rework, CommentsItem, Performance

Performance Updates

  • Implemented server side rendering for the frontpage, and for post pages. Now, most relevant content should load quite quickly (so you can begin reading), and then the bulk of the web-app will load a few seconds later.

  • Cleaned up some extraneous code that adding to our overall load times (in particular for LaTeX heavy posts)

  • Temporarily disabled some hover-over tooltips on the CommentsItem, which was slowing down rendering of pages with lots of comments.

Legacy RSS Feeds

  • If you were subscribed to old LW via RSS, your subscription should work again (pointing to the All Posts feed). This currently includes all posts including spam, but in the near future should be limited to posts with N karma (probably 10), which should resolve that.

(Thanks to use jimrandomh who helped out a bunch with performance and RSS updates)

Nested Frontpage Comments

  • Open Source contributor ForrestWeiswolf submitted a PR that allows comments on the frontpage to be properly nested, while still allowing you to click-to-see-parent. This should make the Recent Discussion section a bit easier to parse.

  • Relatedly, on a Post item on the frontpage, if you click the comments icon, you will now see the most recent 5 comments, properly nested, with the ability to show additional parents. This should make the “show recent comments” button much more useful.

Notifications

  • Fixed a bug where if you had never clicked the notification bell, it wouldn’t light up when you got notifications.

Moderator Sidebar

  • Various small tweaks to make this more useful to the sunshine squad.

AlignmentForum

  • There is now a subforum of LessWrong available at AlignmentForum.org, currently in Open Beta. More details here.

  • AlignmentForum posts on LessWrong will now display a second type of karma (roughly representing “karma by technical alignment researchers.”)

Styling Rework

  • Since the AlignmentForum and some other upcoming projects require custom themes for LessWrong, and our existing stylesheets were a bit messy, we took the opportunity to refactor much of our styling code. We are now moving towards JSS, which a) consolidates theming decisions into a single file, which b) has full JS programmability.

Code Blocks

  • Code blocks in posts now display properly.

Thanks to new contributors berekuk, compwron and adrusi, who contributed several bugfixes, including code blocks properly displaying on posts.

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