Forums » Smalltalk » features you caught into embarrassingly late?

title says it all; what's a feature you caught onto a bit late that maybe shouldve been more obvious for you?

mine was the way that clicking your username brought you to your own profile. i went through the 'edit your profile' link in Your Stuff for ages before i realized.

being able to hide notifications from your feed after you've already read them. by now I've been aware of this for a while, but it really did take a long time for me to notice.

the new way you can do columns, which is super cool and neat but i was so used to doing it manually that i didnt think to even try it... so convenient and easy ahghghrjghdjfg

There were a few...

• Clicking the 'RP Repository' logo to get to my notification page.
• Clicking the 'Reply' under a guestbook message to chain the reply to the comment being replied to.
• Being able to edit journal entries and the entry dates, and the ability to turn off dates altogether

Those are only a few. Some I learned by chance on my own, some friends told me about, and some ... I learned by reading the help threads!

thats how i "grew up" so to speak doing them here so i still, so stubbornly, hang onto traditional columns

Be cautious with that. It's only intended for limited use, and if you hide enough of them, the oldest ones will start slipping out of the "hide" list and reappearing if they haven't aged-out yet. At least, that's how it worked early on when it was introduced, and it made my feed real funky. I think it's supposed to be a pretty big limit, though.

Oh, is there supposed to be a limit at all??
It makes sense that there might be limitations for them, but I'm curious if that was just an early bug.

The limit may have changed (limits are pretty important to keep a database running smoothly and reduce the risk of bugs and misuse), but it's something I only ran into because of some quirky circumstances that lead to another feature getting added in (or rather, expanded) because I (and a few others) were getting buried in notifications at such a crazy rate that our notifications were just totally collapsing. (I laugh largely because it was kind of our own fault.)

You'd have to ask Kim what the limit is. The feature to hide notifications was added mostly just to get really annoying ones out of the way or better keep desired ones from being buried, not to clear the notifications list altogether, but I think it still had a pretty high limit.

An aside: any time you dive into using a new feature, don't just watch for direct bugs. Watch for bugs in how it interacts with other features, too.

This topic is fascinating for me to read.

Off the top of my head, it's like 1000 hidden at any one time. The feature was really intended to remove things that one found uncomfortable and didn't want to see every time they went to their homepage, rather than dismissing everything that had been seen for "inbox zero." So generally, 1000 is well well well above what anyone would need to hide for uncomfortable content over the course of 1-2 months; if you're hiding more than a handful of things, it's probably time to block someone.

honestly I just like having an empty notifications page. I like getting notifications, so it's not a matter of changing my settings or blocking anyone. it's just like, "ok, cool, read that, don't need it here anymore." I think it's because anything my brain deems as "clutter" just gets overwhelming for me.
ETA: also makes it easier for me to keep track of things. if something's on my notifications page that means it's either new, or I've seen it but haven't had time to address it yet (like a post I plan to read and/or reply to.)

Uhh there's a few obvious things that I've annoyed the staff about in private because sometimes my eyesight gets the better of me...

The one genuinely potato-brain thing, though, is that I joined the site in June last year, and so, every time I came here for like a year, I kept thinking "Huh, they changed the logo?" It was not until June 1st that it finally clicked, the site logo does the skittles thing everywhere else does during Pride Month. Even now, mentally, I still see the rainbow logo and for a split second wonder if the pure white banner is a site glitch.

I'm very forgetful and often need to pin things in Discord chats, write things down IRL, or just keep notes on my PC for future reference else I end up asking the same question 3 times, so I apologize in advance if I ever actually report this as a site glitch. It'd be pretty funny (and embarrassing) to future-me if someone links me back to this reply, haha.

Oh, btw, I do want to be clear that I've definitely been late to finding some functions, and have even forgotten about functions I'd previously used, buuuuut have a terrible memory and may not be able to remember any of them. Oh! Actually! It took me years to realize that the dates on public posts are clickable and are the easiest way to retrieve the direct url to a given post.

On the other side of things, I once managed to to send in a bug report for a feature that hadn't actually been announced quite yet at the time. That was interesting, and I was oblivious because there are so many features that I'm just not super familiar with!
Don't worry, it took me awhile to really get comfortable with reporting things, I still report things that don't need to be sometimes (but often those still have user-friendliness value, which is likely part of why Kim just mentioned finding this topic facinating; having a feature isn't much good if no one can figure out how to use it!), and I imagine some of my reports probably just some weird looks or something. But Kim always pushes how much she wants all them bug reports, and she seems to do better with the prioritizing and time management thing than most people do, so... I feel okay worrying a little less about it just wasting her time. ^^

I've always done the "is this a bug or a user error" on the help forum to about a dozen "report it to admin" lolll

and i'll do it again!!!!!!!


but one time my cat did manage to walk across my laptop in a way that she started to file a report on some random profile i was on before i came back to my computer

Reported User:

xxxxx

Reason for Report:

fdgd-4popfgdpfk;l;l;l;l;kl lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll fd;gdfl;glglggggggggggggggggggggg

Mod Team:

"friggin' folklore on their nonsense again"

Hahaha! Don't worry that absolutely wouldn't be our next thought

When I see those and the person seems either reluctant or slow to send a bug report themself, or I'm just not sure if they got around to it, I'll often send a bug report that's basically just linking to that thread. That way it at least ends up on the right list.

Edit: Think I initially misread, but got no reason to change what I said. Report your potential bugs or I'll steal the credit!

I second this -- the person(s) who actually puts it into the bug report bin are the one(s) who get the accolade, even if they linked to a forum topic.

Yeah the point I’m making is I make a point to make sure I’m understanding the website right because that’s the difference between something the community can help with, something that can be suggested to be implemented, or something that is actually a bug