Been helping moderate some many huge communities here on kbin such as m/AskKbin, m/Redditmigration and so on, trying to contribute in ways I can.
And over the course of my time here at Kbin, here are some of the features I really, really wish comes to Kbin one day.
-
Banners for magazines: Right now we moderators are only able to make new logos and use that for our communities, but unlike Reddit or Lemmy, Kbin has been lacking the ability to make a banner apart from the Logo, the banner would help a lot more with not only the customization of the magazine but the overall appeal to it. This of-course should be optional as not every community would be going for this kind of look based on it’s topic, but for the majority, this can really add more to the experience.
-
More optional applicable permissions to moderators when owners add them: Right now, when I add a moderator, they can only delete, ban and moderate posts in general, but accessing the mod panel is impossible unless you are an admin, so this means, moderators can’t help owners with community rules, description, or even attach a new logo. There should atleast be some kind of supermod option or role that I could enable for the mods, so that this remains an optional but needed feature for some (and I am one of them).
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Community Engagement: This is just, to put it lightly, lacking. For example, if someone make a really good post, everyone else is immediately ready to upvote/downvote and jump on the comments, but taking that first step of posting a good thread is just really, lacking. One of the reasons I believe for that is also because the platform feels very stale or dead in plain sight. To solve this, we could implement online status (OPTIONAL, I know not everyone will be into this), but we seriously need to figure out a way to make the site look more live and active, online status like Discord or Reddit (oh yes, reddit has this too, but this is optional and can be disabled) can really help add a more live and active feel to the community, this can in-directly encourage more engagement and the users will feel more inclined to particpate when they see others online.
Reddit also has some other features like showing “X number of people are viewing this thread”, again adding that more of a live engaging feeling to the platform.
- Wiki: I seriously hope we can get a dedicated area to put our wiki stuff similar to on Reddit, right now I have so far done this by making a thread and pinning it, but a wiki built into the sidepanel would a lot more seamless and integrated, plus people wouldn’t have to look for in multiple places and will be good to have rules, description and everything in the sidepanel.
If yall have more, add them in the comments, this is what I remember so far.
Thank you for reading!
You should be easily able to add a banner using the magazine CSS. Though that’s not being federated currently, I hope magazine CSS federation gets added in the future at least between kbin/mbin instances.
This should give you a banner above the threads section:
main > header { /* Change both of these */ height: 100px; background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png); }
While this should give you one that also extends over the sidebar:
#middle:before { width: 100%; display: block; content: ''; /* Change these two: */ height: 100px; background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png); }
Changing the
#middle
to#header
would put it above the kbin header (with the logo, the threads/microblog buttons, etc).There is an Active People section in the sidebar.
I think the issue here is that kbin simply doesn’t have a lot of users yet.
This won’t improve if you show people “0 people are viewing this thread” on every thread. Actually, it would worsen the impression that the site is dead.
what is mbin? keep seeing it but dont know what it is
A while ago, kbin’s development came to a standstill because ernest was gone for weeks and the project’s contribution guidelines are very restrictive.
Many contributors, including major ones, decided to leave the project and work on their own fork which uses more open contribution guidelines based on consensus.
They adopt all the changes ernest makes to kbin, but have their own features on top of that. I believe fedia.io, for example, runs mbin now.
I wouldn’t say restrictive, but based on previous threads and his conversations with Melroy (guy who forked Kbin and brought Mbin), Ernest has been cautiously approving contributions in a more patient manner, and along with that the brief few weeks of absence of development from Ernest’s side (and as a result, no approval on new contributions during this period of time) because he had some personal issues he had to deal with, this for some reason led some of the contributors to fire away and create a fork, I still question this move considering the pause was only briefly for a few weeks and Ernest, as always, did a great job at communicating about why things got slow during that period.
I’ve already mentioned my personal opinion in another message in this thread itself, so not going to repeat myself but that is what happened as far as I know.
Thank you so much! I will make use of this, what you can do with CSS is amazing although not so newbie friendly which I am to CSS, so a user-friendly option to add a banner similar to logo would be good still.
And regarding my suggestion about user engagement, showing how many people are viewing live actually does not work like that, it only shows the number of people viewing it live when the post is brand new/24 hours and when nobody is viewing it, it won’t say 0 but simply not be shown at all.
Again that was a mere example, just like the online status was as well, my main reason to mention those things is to possibly spark an idea of something even better that could help kbin, but not really copy what reddit already his, they were mostly just examples of what we could have similarly or just get the thinking process going on there :)
Update: unfortunately the banner CSS given did not work, here is the imgur link I was trying to add to m/cars for reference: https://imgur.com/a/SDy0s5O. The issue is that even after I followed your instructions and posted it on the CSS box from mod panel, I tried refreshing, banner just does not pop up.
Maybe if you could help me out here, i’d really appreciate that, thank you again!
That’s weird. I was testing it out with a userstyle, which worked, so I assumed it would work with custom css too. But I guess there might be some restrictions in place? Seems very restrictive though if that’s the case here. Not even the first one I gave works. I’ll see if I can find anything out.
No worries, thank you again, you trying to help me itself is appreciated.
Okay, so I’ve created a magazine and tested some stuff out.
In the first code I posted, I used the child selector (
>
) to select<header>
elements directly inside `` elements. For some reason, custom CSS doesn’t seem to support the child selector. No matter where I try to use it, the style isn’t applied.The following code worked for me on my magazine:
main header:has(h1[hidden]) { height: 300px; background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/wbZa4eI.png); background-size: 100% auto; background-position-y: -150px; }
I removed the child selector and instead used
:has(hi1[hidden])
to make sure I only get the target element. Without it, it would also replace the background of the individual thread titles.The image you’re trying to use is a bit large, so I’ve included an example usage of
background-size
andbackground-position
to change the size of the image and what part of it actually gets displayed.With
background-size
, the first value is how wide the image should be, while the latter value is how high. Percentage values are relative to the element’s size. So thewidth
andheight
properties. You can also set absolute values, like I did withheight
in pixels in this example.The big issue with this one though is that it’ll only apply to the Threads and All Content views. Other views, including Microblog and individual threads, don’t have the
<header>
element I’m looking for here.I modified it to apply to more views:
h1[hidden] { height: 300px; background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/wbZa4eI.png); background-size: 100% auto; background-position-y: -150px; display: block; color: transparent; user-select: none; }
The last two lines are there because this actually displays the name of the magazine on the banner. Since that’s kind of redundant, since it’s already in the bar at the top, I’m hiding the text and making it not selectable.
This one does work in all the views I tested except for when looking at a thread and its comments.
Though, something worth considering in case you intend to just use this code as-is: I just used pixels for simplicity. But the result might look entirely different on other screen resolutions than mine. Here’s a list of better units to use if you want it to look the same on all screens. You can use percentages, pixels, and these other units interchangeably anywhere.
About the second code I posted, for some reason
:before
, much like the child selector, doesn’t seem to work. I can very much target the#middle
and#header
elements from custom magazine CSS, but:before
doesn’t do anything.I’m not sure why this is. I see no security reason to block them, so I assume it’s not intentional. It’s a bit hard to debug
:before
specifically because I don’t know any way to get its styles without making it visible. So I have no idea if something is overwriting the style or if the selector just doesn’t work, like is the case with the child selector. I’ll have to look into this a bit more over the weekend.</header></header>I tried both the ones you mentioned, unfortunately it still does not work, is it because the image is Jpg instead of png? I also copied the image’s address and pasted it.
The CSS is still there, maybe could you check m/cars and see if you can see it? maybe this is an issue from my side?
I can see it. Maybe it’s the point I mentioned here:
Maybe the values I gave are too small for you to see on your screen?