stet/keith question or whoever is in charge of code these days

From looking at the logs, most ppl click "Bookmark" then choose another of their bookmarks to read. So the thinking here is that it jumps you back to your bookmarks to save you scrolling or w/e.

It's taking a bit of getting used to, I admit. Can we give it a couple of days?

yeah i was a bit thrown by that, but i can see getting used to it

yo whatever update you guys just did about 10 minutes ago... when i click "bookmark" on a post it jumps me back to the top of the page now... anyway to change it back?

― ⚓ (gr8080), dinsdag 31 januari 2012 22:56 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Haha nooooooooooo I just came here to *praise* the mods for that!! I love it!

Saves a helluvalot of pressing on page up/home to go to the next bookmarked thread!

haha ok.

i was totally unaware until you changed it, but i guess my pattern is get to last post/post i want to stop on -> click bookmark -> read last post -> click permalink (so last post is now at top of page) -> pick from remaining bookmarks

so i guess you're saving me some clicks, i just need to re-train myself

From looking at the logs, most ppl click "Bookmark" then choose another of their bookmarks to read. So the thinking here is that it jumps you back to your bookmarks to save you scrolling or w/e.

From SNA, I open a bookmarked thread in a new tab, click 'Bookmark' in that thread, then open a new bookmarked thread from my SNA tab. So I do what the logs indicate, but not in the way it looks in the logs.

Ha, this is brilliant, and 2 hours ago would've saved me the trouble of looking up how to do Page Up/Home on a MacBook Pro (not before I accidentally managed to shut it down by pressing some combo of Apple key and what looked like it might be a Page Up button).

Thanks!

I don't like it, personally. But I do *tend* to read the last post before clicking the button, so I guess I can live with it if I have to. I usually click to SNA rather than other bookmarks.

so i guess you're saving me some clicks, i just need to re-train myself

― ⚓ (gr8080), dinsdag 31 januari 2012 23:04 (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This goes for me too, my fingers on my laptop - both hands - are still going to shift(left) + pgUp/Home (right). I *want* to get used to this.

Ahh the simple joys in life... Stet <3

I should point out that I don't care either way – my post was an explanation of what I do, not a complaint about the change.

yeah i think i'll like this as soon as i get used to it

enjoy the idea of stet pouring over the ilx logs for user behavior insights

how the hell did following this link from the Flag Post thread change my style sheet???

it logged you out, maybe?

its kinda jarring, tbqh a radical approach, i salute yr courage

sleeve are you logged into ilxor.com or www.ilxor.com?

"Flag Post"? Wait I only just noticed this.

FPing someone for that.

I hate this change :'( Can we maybe have the choice to use it or not?

yeah not feeling it.

another thing: if i bookmark something and then select that same bookmark once it jumps to the top of the page (like say i walked away from my computer for a while), it will take me to the OLD bookmark from that page

mostly i just dont like jumping back to the top of the page in general

really enjoying this now tbh

we should all should give it a few days imho

it is p unusual and appy tho, just my pro opinion

it's not so bad that i'd quit ilx over it (i'd probably chew the tips off my fingers before i quit ilx) but i do find it deeply unpleasant and would prefer the option to turn it off

i really like the way bookmarking works now tbh

ditto

The new bookmarking thing works for me. Didn't even know I wanted it.

agree with mordy

Im kinda amazed how many ppl use bookmarks this religiously. Ive nevre even given them a thought.

i get so bogged down with my unread bookmarks i rarely look at SNA :(

I tend to rely on my browser's turning a viste3d link pink/the "new posts" unfilled dot. So when the site gets rebooted and they all clear, Im completely lost haha.

i get so bogged down with my unread bookmarks i rarely look at SNA :(

One of a few reasons why I changed my name!

There was a while where pplains wasn't on 77 yet, and I'd log in as Pleasant Plains to check in. Fuck, those bookmarks stacked up fast.

Check out the blue cursor on the side to give you an idea of how far up it goes.

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/392/screenshot20120201at820.png

poll

yah after some p intense experiences w/stacked up bookmarks im careful abt unfollowing threads im not actively reading, only have 5 outstanding now

need to go back and bookmark "an erotic thriller" again tho'.

i have to clear bookmarks compulsively tbh

dont need to bookmark it... im living it

sux for you... most intercourse involves penetration you know.

i was lazy, but there really should have been a comma before those last two words.

hah

Im kinda amazed how many ppl use bookmarks this religiously. Ive nevre even given them a thought.

I could not use ilx without bookmarks, seriously

I used to be one of you, then I found help

use bookmarks y'all

the bookmarkers gag has already been done rite

argh even as I am reading about it, I'm automatically clicking 'bookmark' and it is annoying me!

this is still totally frustrating

you'll love it eventually!!!

ok, it's pissing me off too. back it goes. maybe into preferences ville

Nooooooooooo Stet! ;_;

haha

^ I managed to fix my issue on Firefox by deleting all the ILX cookies I think.

I have a question prompted by a recent exchange on the Israel Apartheid thread...

Clicking on some old usernames reveals that

User does not exist in the database.

What rule governs this? I found that an old username of mine similarly no longer exists but I don't remember doing anything to delete my details back then. Just curious...

I would assume that when the db was rebuilt to import all the old posts into the current version of ILX, the old username / user / email associations got borked somehow. Especially since now those things are tied together when previously they were a free-for-all. NB I’m four beers and a bottle of riesling deep tonight and had nothing to do with the refactoring that created modern ilxor.com.

I think that's what happened, there was the sandbox for a while and then

ILX2 NEW USERNAME TRANSLATOR COMPENDIUM

Hey all, is there still an opportunity to look at and contribute to the site code? I wanted to take a look at the “submit post” logic and see if there was a simple/straightforward way to guard against accidental multi posts.

Keith is working on a pretty massive revamp right now - plan is to get it on the sandbox soon for prodding. I’m sure he’d welcome help tho!

I can’t promise 100% that I can contribute but I’d like to see if there is something I can do

Keith if there are any markup changes I may need to rework my CSS stylesheet - will there be a sandbox for testing?

Chews, it's a serious revamp—like totally different, so existing stylesheets are not going to work at all, sorry about that, but it's not possible. We'll have to feel our way with that one.

Hey Dan, I thought you might like to know it's written in ML!

Ooh I don’t know ML at all, interesting

I was guessing you would, given we did our degrees at the same time, but there you go! F# technically, but that's basically ML.

Yeah I went the LISP -> Pascal -> C/C++ route in school, probably could have branched off into other languages but spent all that time singing instead

Ha right... Yes, Lisp would be its obvious predecessor (its inventor worked with John McCarthy), but strongly-typed. (Largely) immutable, invented type inference, algebraic data types / discriminated unions and other stuff. OCaml and Haskell came from it. Most of these things are slowly squeezing their way into mainstream languages, but I never would have expected it would have taken 35 years for that to happen (plus they're fairly awful implementations, given the inability to look at the whole, rather than just trying to tack something on the side).

Chews, it's a serious revamp—like totally different,

Ah, cool! The current markup is quite idiosyncratic as I discovered while making the stylesheet and it would be good to see if I can simplify!

If you need a reviewing eye on the new HTML structure I’d be happy to take a look.

it's written in ML!

awesome! Standard ML was my favorite in my school days

Me too, although it was hammered in quite strongly, as it was the guys who invented it.

I’ve heard of it but I know very little, are you rolling your own custom architecture for this or using a framework?

No framework. The history of frameworks is littered with "This is amazing, you should all use this" shortly followed by "That's a load of old garbage, how do we get rid of it?". I can never wrap my head around how people can be bothered to learn some of these things, they're so complicated, and the usual outcome is simply that you can do what you already could do, but in the style of someone else. This conversation came up 20 years ago when I did the last one, and I can say that in general my views on frameworks haven't changed since then—it's just they're mostly Javascript frameworks and not Java ones now.

Fair enough. Especially if you are the sole/main maintainer and creating quite standard flows that sounds like a great call.

I actually find the idea of frameworks in general interesting, in that you have to conclude that the producers of 'underlying' frameworks, like the web platform, or the JDK/.NET stuff etc. think to themselves "let's just do 3/4 of the job and leave the chunk that you need for building applications for bunch of other people to do later". When you think about it that way, it's pretty odd they even exist, because obviously these guys don't think that. What regularly seems more likely to me is that whilst some frameworks have some express purpose (e.g. React and virtual DOM), most are simply a reshaping of existing APIs to fit the aesthetic of the creator. The creator obviously thinks it's 'better' and 'more productive', when in actual fact it's simply because they have a solid mental model of the whole thing, because they made it. Some of them are then good at selling that idea to others, because it's compelling: "use this, and it'll make your life easier". Anyway, call me cynical.

In theory it makes it easier to hire people and quicker to get them up to speed if you're using a framework that's common, they can get straight in to learning the app specific code instead of the unique & fun way you've devised to wire in environment variables or whatever. Obviously not a concern for personal projects & labours of love! But I work on a large 20+ year old application, the old founder and lead developer hated frameworks - MVCs, ORMs, front ends, etc - and that really is coming back to bite us now.

The theory is sound—essentially, "you already know how to do some of it", but in your case, which I think is more typical, would it have been an improvement if it were written in Wicket, Cocoon, Apache Turbine, JSF or Tapestry? ORM is something kind of different—and even worse!

My point is that your 20+ year old codebase would've used a framework from 20+ years ago, and the likelihood of your new hires knowing that is close to zero (probably actually zero), so you'd be no better off.

react is over a decade old... idk, part of my thinking is that using a framework might have constrained things in a way that made the application easier to understand and easier to refactor but that could be "grass is always greener" wishful thinking.

You’re getting CLOD to do it!

with close supervision from two devs experienced with the codebase!

also before clod came along we wasted two years and god knows how much cash with a ceo who was convinced that the codebase was irredeemable and started a project to rewrite from scratch, using expensive contractors! but for various reasons that was abandoned and he's been pushed out, hooray.

cto not ceo.

Yes, the massive rewrite. I've seen a few of those. I did succeed in getting one done, but that was done by changing it bit by bit until it was no longer the old one, rather than the start from scratch approach, which I've never seen work.

React has been going for longer than most frameworks, but obviously in that timeframe you've had Angular (1!), Vue, Next etc. Maybe React will be the one framework that breaks the pattern that all other frameworks have followed and is viewed really positively in twenty years' time.

start from scratch approach, which I've never seen work

Haha, oh yeah, I forgot about that!

What I'm hearing here is that we're in the hands of a religious lunatic (complimentary)

Hey Dan, I thought you might like to know it's written in ML!

― Keith, Thursday, June 11, 2026 8:40 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

thats awesome that youre doing it in the unfashionable lang of your choice, as it should be

Maybe React will be the one framework that breaks the pattern that all other frameworks have followed and is viewed really positively in twenty years' time.

― Keith, Friday, June 12, 2026 6:07 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

no reason to use react anyway ilx isnt interactive like that

Thanks, it's been very interesting. Not least because at the beginning (when it was really just an experiment) I thought I'd run into all the brick walls that you usually do when you go off the beaten track, but the interesting thing is that it didn't happen. If you missed it, it's largely F#, so it's not like it's Standard ML—F# being a descendent of Standard ML via Ocaml. Doing it in Standard ML would have been somewhat crazy as (I assume) you'd have very limited libraries etc. With F# being a .NET language, you get the whole framework and e.g. the Kestrel runtime and I ran in to pretty much no roadblocks, so I just kept on doing it, and now I would struggle to imagine doing it any other way, because it's much better.

I actually started out writing a book on this subject, to try and write something engaging and motivational and avoided the details of e.g. lambda calculus, category theory etc. which most writing seems to dive straight into—stuff that's likely to put off 99% of readers. However, I decided some time back that if I'm going to do that, I had better have some experience of writing a significant application in this way, so it all got sidetracked into doing this.

So yeah I don't want to be having a go at React primarily because the thing that it was initially trying to solve is something that came straight out of ML in the 1970s, i.e. immutability and that the UI is a function of the state, so I think it at least has a real tangible reason for its existence, beyond just reframing existing APIs as many 'frameworks' do. Ironically, given that, I'm not using it, despite there being a lot of interactivity, but the reason for that is because I think to do a nice UI, the UI being a direct function of state is too simplistic... In reality, you want to transition from state A to state B, and I believe React has some bolt-ons in that space, but I'm just not willing to learn the mountains of stuff that it would involve when I know I could do it anyway. Stuff like Elm (another ML) has also explored this area, I believe, which would be much more in line with what I've done.

With F# being a .NET language, you get the whole framework and e.g. the Kestrel runtime and I ran in to pretty much no roadblocks, so I just kept on doing it, and now I would struggle to imagine doing it any other way, because it's much better.

thats cool idk anything about .net and so forth but it does sound like everything kinda just worked out which obvs isnt how things usually go lol

Well it worked out programming-wise at least, and yeah that's usually a lot harder if you're off the mainstream! I'm sure lots of people will still think it's shit 🤪.