Q&A on Non-Moderation Matters (Mechanics, How-To, etc.)

I was seeing some strange stuff yesterday - a post, for example with a like count of 3 and obviously four likes (none of them mine). The count went to 4 when I refreshed the whole page though

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By chance, are you scrolling on a smart phone? It’s pretty easy to accidently brush your finger on a red heart and turn it back into a white heart without even realizing.

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I’ve seen stuff like that on my own posts, too. I don’t mind that, but am bummed when I gave someone a like but they don’t get it.

ETA: @Jesse13927 - usually on a tablet. But it’s happened on things I’ve “liked” from my computer, too. I think. I’ll pay better attention.

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it’s amazing what can accidentally happen on the touch interface - I posted the other day that I found pages of bookmarks even though I have never bookmarked a post

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Since you bring it up…does anyone use the bookmark function?

I am not quite sure why that function exists…

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I bookmarked a post to see if I could use the bookmark to refer back to it, but now I don’t know where to find my bookmarks. Maybe I need to switch to a touch interface.

ETA: Just found it when clicking on my avatar in the upper right, my bookmark is still there. I might use it one day.

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I use it to bookmark things I don’t have time for but want to come back to later. Usually videos. But there was this one cake on a cooking thread I bookmarked to remind myself of an aspirational Buche de Noel which I will be trying this year! Saw it in summer and would’ve lost it without the reminder.

@OhHai - if you click on your avatar icon in the upper right corner you’ll see the bookmark icon (along with the heart, badges, etc.) and if you click that you see all your bookmarks. I need to clean mine up.

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I do, to follow up on posts that include articles or videos of interest that I’m not able to read or view while scrolling through comments. :woman_shrugging:t4: I’ve also got a few holiday-related ones set to appear on the corresponding dates the following year. That way, I don’t have to search for them.

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I don’t think there is even a badge to covet!

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:thinking: I need to find a bakery! :yum:

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I use it from time to time. There’s a post I set to remind me on the first of every month. There are others I scroll through on my phone and think “I’ll respond when I get on my desktop and can be mildly more coherent.”

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I bookmark recipes a lot, especially one belonging to @anon33932455 which has become a favorite. And @FloridaManJefe has a good guinness bread recipe

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I bookmark all the time.

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Ah, I get it now. You can bookmark posts with useful information so that you don’t have to use the search function to find them again. I’ve been using the search function like an idiot…

Thanks for all of your replies!

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image

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it really is good!

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Well it does fade down to grey as the post ages… a bright orange pencil is “hot” from a recent edit. A grey pencil is fully cooled down and thus older.

I would have definitely agreed with you in the past, until we added this about… 1 1/2 years ago I think … which moves bookmarks from the “just do it in the browser, duh” category into the “actually useful” category:

It can still be used as a typical old-school browser bookmark (that works across platforms and browsers, natch) but today it’s probably better described as the “remind me about this later” button.

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While we’re on the subject of the orange pencil, I have noticed that an orange pencil is sometimes quickly added to my posts when I use a gif from outside the built-in gif search function. Is this because the system is having to convert the gif automatically (such as resizing)?

It’s no biggy if it’s automatic, but I hate to think that a mod is having to do anything manually just for a gif.

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Oh, I see! But no mention of my pâté recipe! What is that, chopped liver?

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The usual reason for a system (not a moderator) edit on images is when an image is hotlinked from a remote source, like so

https://example.com/cat.gif

the system detects this and mirrors the image locally so that if the remote site, example.com in this case, goes offline forever, the image will still exist and not create a broken post. Let’s say you illustrate your point using a hotlinked remote image of a graph, but 5 years later, that site goes offline or is down or whatever. Your post made total sense at the time you created it, but for any unfortunate reader 5 years later it looks like this:

As you can see in this graph, the data supports my position!

[broken image icon]

(mic drop)

Automatically mirroring (that is, making a local copy to the local server, and editing the post so that it references the local image istead of the remote image) prevents this from happening. One of the broader goals of Discourse is to reduce “web rot”, where links and images and everything from 10 years ago decay and become unreachable, only accessible through the Internet Archive wayback machine if you are lucky, if it’s a duplicate image / text content maybe you can manage find it on some other website, or if you are unlucky, not available at all from any source.

I’d need to see a specific example to know more, but this is the typical case.

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