SoylentNews

Is there a reason why Hot Comments sidebox sometimes drops to fewer than five comments?

Lately I'm seeing it happen more often. Today, it's just two.

Is it a SQL query bug? Or are there just not enough "hot" comments to fill it?

TL;DR: It's not your community unless it's your domain and server.

This is an expanded and amended text which I posted on the orange site, where it quickly began to gain upvotes, but was then flagged to death.

Chapter 1

My partner and I started a community on reddit more than 10 years ago. Nothing illegal or untoward, it's just a subreddit about a city and everything related to it.

We have had some issues with abusive commenting like many other places, but we've kept a good handle on it, with a combination of automoderator and manual moderation.

We had to add other mods over time, especially during election season and through covid and the riots, to keep up with the volume. These two events brought much more trolling and abuse.

Some of the new mods have been helpful and respectful, and others have just given me nothing but abuse and criticism. Perhaps it was a mistake to keep them on, but they were good at their work otherwise.

Well, after a snafu (my fault, admittedly) reddit has now taken away my permissions as mod, effectively removing me from my own community that I started.

What was my mistake? I didn't post something illegal, nor anything abusive. I merely removed other mods, temporarily, and added an auto-moderator rule which warned users when their posts were reported.

This was reported to the admins through ZenDesk, and suddenly I'm caught in the middle of a "power struggle", I guess, to gain control of this subreddit.

Just a note to anyone wanting to start a community on this platform, you can spend years growing it (to 250K+ at this point) and then one day it can just be taken away from you with no recourse.

We are now waiting on a "decision" from the admin team, and I don't know what to expect as the outcome, but it seems that even if you are not breaking any of the rules, you can suddenly discover that you've been removed from the community you started and maintained for years.

===

Chapter 2

I noticed that one of the newest mods was approving spam and clickbait articles, so I asked my partner, who was still a mod with permissions, to remove them.

After that, Reddit removed both of our accounts from moderators altogether. I am no longer a moderator of my own community that I started, nurtured, and grew for 12 years.

Reddit uses the wording "my subreddits" and "start your own subreddit", but the reality is that unless these are no more your own than "your own" rented apartment or "your own" locker at the gym. They can be taken away from you at any moment at the whim of the administration.

I don't visit there often, but I do now and then.

I tried to log in recently, and was taken to a "change your password" form.

Seems that I can't browse any of the rest of the site until I change my password.

However, after failing to change it a couple of times due to a mis-filled form, it now won't let me change it because I've submitte too many forms.

Anyone else having this issue?

I'm pretty far along in my ultra-compatible, ultra-accessible web forum. When I was just starting out, I was naive and innocent: I imagined that if I just write clean, basic HTML, there won't be much to do in terms of tweaks. I underestimated how every browser has quirks, requires testing, tweaking, and re-testing. I also underestimated just how long the long tail is outside Chrome monoculture.

I moved the goalposts a little bit, now going for JavaScript support for even the oldest browsers, like Netscape 2.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0.

Well, it's taken a couple years, but I can now claim support for basically every browser out there! A couple of features, like the modular UI, and client-side PGP-based message signing cut off around 2008 and 2012, respectively, but all the base features—reading, writing, commenting, voting, and optional user profiles—are working in everything from Mosaic to Lynx to IE3 to Netscape3 to Opera3. Yay!

I have noticed that whenever I mention no-JS browsing, someone tends to turn up (uninvited), and argue, for example, no-JS doesn't matter, or that screen-reader users *always* have JS enabled, or that fallback is nice to have, but there is no time for it, and so on.

Some websites have snarky messages that no-JS users see instead of a basic version of the app. Others make you jump through hoops of clicking an extra button or waiting for an extra redirect, as if to say, we really don't want you to do it this way; we hope you've got a really good reason for disabling JS, because we don't like it.

A paranoid could argue that all the minified, proxied, and redirected JS being served by toilet paper trust model of HTTPS makes it easier to mitm and hide backdoors, while the non-malicious theory could be simply results of rapid uncontrolled growth.

Whatever it is, I commend all the MetaFilters, SoylentNewses, Hacker Newses, and mbasics, for making the effort to give no-JS visitors a first-class experience.

I have the Hot Comments panel enabled on the home page, which displays more stuff for me to read that I otherwise would not have noticed.

Something I have been struggling to understand and would like some help with understanding is this:

Usually, there are five comments in the box, but sometimes only 3 or 4. Why does this happen? Are some comments getting filtered after five are selected using whatever criteria?