Forem: Andy Zhao (he/him)

Changelog: Updated Mod Tooling

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 20:00:43 +0000

Over the past few months, we've been working especially hard on improving our community moderation tools. These upgrades have largely been driven through sessions with our existing community mods, many of whom generously offered their time to participate in feedback sessions with @lisasy! Having talked directly with these mods, we’re excited to show off some of the new changes based on their feedback.

As a first note, this post is most relevant to our amazing community moderators. These are trusted members of the DEV Community who have heightened privileges to help us keep the platform safe and constructive. More information about our community mod program is available here.

Before this change, finding and using the community mod actions wasn’t all that intuitive. You had to click the small “MODERATE POST” button alongside the article title. Now, moderators will have a more seamless experience, as they can open up the actions panel directly while reading a post:

DEV community moderators are able to::

Slightly boost the visibility of a post with the thumbsup reaction
Slightly lower the visibility of a post with the thumbsdown reaction
Flag rule-breaking users and content directly to DEV Staff
Adjust the tag(s) of the post (if they're a tag moderator)
Add an experience level to the post (to help with feed relevancy)

Most of these actions were already available to moderators, but the whole experience should now be a whole lot more seamless. The thumbsup and thumbsdown rating adjustments are relatively gentle — no single positive or negative reaction will determine a post’s ultimate success. It’s simply a way for trusted users to help ensure that high-quality content on DEV has a better chance at being visible across the platform, while reducing the likelihood that low-quality content ends up in the feed.

One important thing to note is that this change will not rollout site-wide all at once. So, if you're a moderator, you might not see the button for all posts.

Personally, I'm excited to continue working with the mods, and to build tools that make their life easier. They do an amazing job, and it’s largely thankless work. They help ensure that DEV remains an inclusive and positive space, and I really want to make sure they have a great experience as they help support all of us.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Happy coding!

Big shout out to my teammates @msarit, @jacobherrington, and @lisasy for working on this together!

New Feature: Response Templates!

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 19:06:16 +0000

I'm excited to announce a new feature we've been working on: response templates!

This feature was first requested by our community moderators. They explained that they were regularly finding themselves running into situations where they would need to reply with a similar type of comment. For instance: welcoming a new member, explaining the usage of a tag, describing how a site mechanic works, or providing any other type of similar constructive feedback. We’re even providing a special option that allows trusted moderators to reply as Sloan, our community mascot.

However, using response templates isn’t just for moderators. All community members can take advantage of the feature to help save time when posting comments. Hopefully this new functionality helps you save time if you find yourself frequently sharing similar tips, posting a list of resources, etc.

To set your response templates, you can visit your settings page.

How exactly do you use a response template? In a comment form, you'll see a new "document" button. Click that, and it will show your response templates available to use:

Once you click insert, it will paste the template into the comment form. If you have something written already, it will ask you if you want to overwrite it.

Next up, we'll be adding this feature to help support our tag moderators as they make tag adjustments.

As always, we're open to suggestions on how to make improvements here. Please feel free to open an issue if you have any comments or questions, or leave a comment on this post.

Happy coding! ❤️

What's your audio player?

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 20:04:25 +0000

When I switched from Windows to Mac to learn code, I missed using the audio player I had. It was a small app called Billy (https://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html), and it was this freeware audio player that honestly didn't do much other than the basics.

Anyway, now that I'm on a Mac I use something called Vox (https://vox.rocks/), but am curious what you all use!

Changelog: Hidden Comments

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 18:56:01 +0000

About a month ago, we released blocking tools for user safety. That functionality was part of an ongoing priority to provide community members with the tools they need to deal with a variety of situations. Today, we're rolling out the ability for authors to hide specific comments on their posts.

When hiding a comment, the comment as well as any children comments will be removed from view in the article's comments section. A hidden comment (and any of its children replies) has not been deleted — it will still be visible in the comment's permalink. Once a comment has been hidden, there will be a visible notice at the bottom of the post.

That notice looks like this:

To hide a comment, authors can click the dropdown of any comment in your post to hide it:

Given the above example, Clouds' reply comment and all replies will be hidden from the comments section.

We want to give authors the agency to manage the discussions happening on their own posts. After all, it is their post, and our community members shouldn't feel concerned that an incendiary comment may tarnish or derail their contributions. We hope this feature will help avoid situations where a comment thread becomes too heated, and will help allow authors to simply hide comments about typos or minor inaccuracies that have been fixed. This tool supplements the regular and consistent efforts of our community moderators, and of course its use is also governed by our Code of Conduct and Terms of Service.

As always, we're open to suggestions on how to improve this feature. If you have a feature request or suggestion that will help us improve community safety, please feel free to open an issue.

Happy coding. ❤️

Changelog: Block Tools For User Safety

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 16:37:40 +0000

As part of our ongoing commitment to community safety, we've rolled out the ability to block other community members. This is a tool designed to be used as a complement alongside the efforts of our community of moderators and existing anti-abuse systems. Our hope is that this feature doesn’t have to be used too often, but it is critical to provide tools which offer individuals immediate recourse against abuse and harassment.

So, what does blocking someone do?

Blocking someone means that:

They will not appear in your feed
You will not see their comments
You will not receive any notifications on their activity
They will not be able to comment on your posts
They will not be able to message you through DEV Connect

We also have a mute feature coming in the future, which will only hide in-feed content but will not block comments, etc. So, if you are not seeking to wholly block a user, and just want to see less of their content, please wait for that mute feature.

As this is our first implementation of the feature, we're open to additional suggestions on how to continue improving it. We will be refining this functionality in coordination with the community. Please open an issue if you have any suggestions or encounter a bug.

On a personal note, I am glad to have had the opportunity to work on this feature. As a DEV core team member and participant of the community, most of my time with DEV has been working on support and anti-abuse. I think we've implemented some great features and practices in responding to abuse reports thus far. However, we can’t rest on our laurels; providing everyone with additional anti-abuse tools is an incredibly important step in ensuring that everyone feels safe here in the community as we grow. We have more safety features coming down the pipeline in active development.

Happy coding. ❤️

Ruby IRB with Syntax Highlighting (and more!) in Ruby 2.7

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 16:35:13 +0000

Very excited to find out that Ruby 2.7 will introduce improvements to irb, Ruby's native REPL console. Some improvements are:

syntax highlighting!!!
multiline mode
auto-indentation
and more!

More details in this blog post I read it from:
https://blog.saeloun.com/2019/09/23/new-irb-features.html

I'm a big fan of this even though I use pry as my default Ruby REPL, mostly because it lets me use the main features I like from pry in irb.

How do you keep good posture while sitting?

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 14:10:58 +0000

I tend to slouch a lot when I sit for long periods at a time. There are several reasons for this, but the main reason I think is that I don't sit in a chair with a back in it.

Anyway, what are some ways that help you keep good posture while sitting?

Installing a New Node Version and Migrating npm Global Packages

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 19:56:35 +0000

So I recently had to install a new Node version because we (dev.to) upgraded it. Or at least I think that's the reason -- I just do what the command line tells me to do.

I knew that I was already using nvm or Node Version Manager. It works pretty great and similar to rbenv, the Ruby version manager I use. Looking at nvm's readme, all I had to do was:

figure out the version of Node I needed
run the install command

So, I looked at Node's available versions on their home page, and I went for the latest LTS (long term support) version -- 10.16.0. I probably could've went for the latest at the time, 12.8.1, but since I was running version 8.11.3 I thought it was safer to go up only two major version upgrades. It probably doesn't matter that much though.

Then I ran the install command:

nvm install 10.16.0

# I would put the output but I installed this like 3 weeks ago :(

...it completed, great! Nothing seemed to go wrong, and there didn't seem to be anything else to do.

I ran yarn on my local dev.to repo, but it failed:

:yarn
yarn install v1.16.0

# [1/4] 🔍  Resolving packages...
# [2/4] 🚚  Fetching packages...
# error execa@2.0.3: The engine "node" is incompatible with this module.
# Expected version "^8.12.0 || >=9.7.0". Got "8.11.3"
# error Found incompatible module.
# Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/install
# for documentation about this command.

Hmm guess I was still on my old version. Reading nvm's readme again, I had to actually start using the new Node version I installed:

nvm use 10.16.0
# Now using node v10.16.0 (npm v6.9.0)

Okay great! That seems to work. I ran yarn, and it worked successfully!

Fast forward to some weekend later, I was working on a Gatsby side project, and I try to start the development server:

gatsby dev
#-bash: gatsby: command not found

Hmm, well I figured this would probably have to do with my new Node version. I found a command to reinstall the packages from a previous version:

nvm reinstall-packages 8.11.3
# Reinstalling global packages from v8.11.3...
# No installed global packages found...
# Linking global packages from v8.11.3...
# No linked global packages found...

Strange, not sure why that happened. Let's take a look at what versions I have installed:

nvm list
#         v8.11.3
# ->     v10.16.0
#          system
# default -> node (-> v10.16.0)
# node -> stable (-> v10.16.0) (default)
# stable -> 10.16 (-> v10.16.0) (default)
# iojs -> N/A (default)
# lts/* -> lts/dubnium (-> v10.16.0)
# lts/argon -> v4.9.1 (-> N/A)
# lts/boron -> v6.17.1 (-> N/A)
# lts/carbon -> v8.16.0 (-> N/A)
# lts/dubnium -> v10.16.0

Oh hm, I wonder if my packages were installed from the system version instead of 8.11.3. I ran the reinstall command again, except for system:

nvm reinstall-packages system
# some successful output

Great! Let's try gatsby develop again. Nope, didn't work. Still getting command not found. Well, I have two options: either use the version with my global packages installed every time I need to use a global package, or figure out the issue.

Actually, there's a third option: do the first option until I get sick and tired of it over for four weeks and then finally figure out what's wrong. As a generally lazy person, I went for that and here I am writing this post.

Ahem ANYWAY, I had a general sense that it was because some npm and nvm linkage was not correct. This was confirmed (probably) by the fact that running gatsby develop would fail and return command not found, as well as:

which npm
# /Users/andyzhao/.nvm/versions/node/v8.11.3/bin/npm

Well, when I first tried to fix it, I sunk many hours searching, but to no avail. This time, I found an answer from Stack Overflow that helped me:

May 10 '14

trying to install global packages into C:\Program Files (x86)\nodejs\ gave me Run as Administrator issues, because npm was trying to install into
C:\Program Files (x86)\nodejs\node_modules\

to resolve this, change global install directory to C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\npm:

in C:\Users\{username}\, create .npmrc file with contents:

prefix = "C:\\Users\\{username}\\AppData\\Roaming\\npm"

reference

npm install -g…

Open Full Answer

Specifically, the command npm config ls -l gave me some clues that I needed:

npm config ls -l
# ; cli configs
# long = true
# metrics-registry = "https://registry.npmjs.org/"
# scope = ""
# user-agent = "npm/6.9.0 node/v10.16.0 darwin x64"
# 
# ; userconfig /Users/andyzhao/.npmrc
# prefix = "/Users/andyzhao/.nvm/versions/node/v8.11.3"
# ...whole lots of other stuff
# globalconfig = "/Users/andyzhao/.nvm/versions/node/v8.11.3/etc/npmrc"
# ...etc.

So my globalconfig was set to Node v8.11.3, and not my current version v10.16.0. Seeing that my prefix was also 8.11.3, I decided to open up my userconfig file .npmrc and find out if there was something I could change from there.

# .npmrc

prefix=/Users/andyzhao/.nvm/versions/node/v8.11.3

Ah ha! That must be it! Right? I dunno, but worth trying! I updated it to v10.16.0, restarted Terminal, and ran nvm reinstall-packages system. npm proceeded to run and install everything, and I saw that gatsby-cli was installed. Restarted Terminal again to be sure, and ran gatsby develop. Success!!!

Phew, what a trip! Figuring this out definitely took longer than I wanted, but I'm glad I managed to get it. While I definitely did just switch versions over and over again for 3 weeks before doing anything, I think it's always helpful to take a break from a problem and come back with fresh eyes. Here's hoping no one else has to figure out nvm and npm installation issues. ✌️

Why do programmers like the winter?

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 13:40:31 +0000

Because it's code!

dev.to Repo Recap from the Past Week

Andy Zhao (he/him) — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 01:38:54 +0000

Welcome back to another Repo Recap, where we cover last week's contributions to dev.to's repository the iOS repo, and the Android repo. This edition is covering June 22 to June 28.

Main Repo

Features

We've added comment context for notifications and comment pages! This is the first step to providing more useful notifications. PR by @ben:

Add comment context for notifications and comment pages #3262

benhalpern posted on Jun 22, 2019

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Add more context to notifications and single comment page.

Forem: Andy Zhao (he/him)

Changelog: Updated Mod Tooling

New Feature: Response Templates!

What's your audio player?

Changelog: Hidden Comments

Changelog: Block Tools For User Safety

Ruby IRB with Syntax Highlighting (and more!) in Ruby 2.7

How do you keep good posture while sitting?

Installing a New Node Version and Migrating npm Global Packages

Why do programmers like the winter?

dev.to Repo Recap from the Past Week

Main Repo

Features

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Description

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Description

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Description

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Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

Added to documentation?

[optional] What gif best describes this PR or how it makes you feel?

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Description

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Mobile & Desktop Screenshots/Recordings (if there are UI changes)

Added to documentation?

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Description

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Bug Fixes / Other Contributions

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