ono

I have good news for you:

https://www.polygon.com/24074441/gigantic-game-relaunch-rampage-edition-steam-release-date

Mercurial has comparable features (though maybe not obvious to someone accustomed to git) without the usability problems that still plague git nearly two decades later. Hg's interface was made with humans in mind. Git's was made to cut you.

(And it has cut so very many people that it's consistently among the most popular topics in Q&A forums, and has even inspired comics.)

Thankfully, git's early cross-platform shortcomings were eventually fixed, so that's at least some progress. I hope its UI and docs eventually get some love, too.

I wish Mercurial had won.

The interface is the best I know of, a lot like pre-Microsoft github. Especially important to me is that It doesn't intercept my browser's built-in shortcuts like github now does, or require javascript or bury things under submenus like gitlab does.

The promise of federation is appealing, too.

I plan to use it for new public projects, and might even move my old ones over.

That's most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn't prevent it.

My guess: The kids who used Discord for gaming grew up, and just went with the familiar thing when starting new communities and projects.

Also, Discord did heavy marketing early on, until it carved out a network effect. So here we are.

On the bright side:

Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I've seen.

Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.

• Terrible format for archiving knowledge
• Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
• Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
• Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
• Prevents indexing by web search engines
• Antithetical to interoperability
• Privacy-hostile

A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.

disallow list of known bad email providers.

Imagine giving someone your phone number, and having them say you have to get a different one because they don't like some of the digits in it.

I have seen this nonsense more times than I care to remember. Please don't build systems this way.

If you're trying to do bot detection or the like, use a different approach. Blacklisting email addresses based on domain or any other pattern does a poor job of it and creates an awful user experience.

(And if it prevents people from using spam-fighting tools like forwarding services, then it's directly user-hostile, and makes the world a worse place.)

Checking MX in your application means you needlessly fail on transient outages, like when a DNS server is rebooting or a net link hiccups. When it happens, the error flag your app puts on the user's email address is likely to confuse or frustrate them, will definitely waste their time, and may drive them away and/or generate support calls.

Also, MX records are not required. Edit to clarify: So checking MX in your application means you fail 100% of the time on some perfectly valid email domains. Good luck to the users and support staff who have to troubleshoot that, because there's nothing wrong with the email address or domain; the problem is your application doing something it should not.

Better to just hand the verification message off to your mail server, which knows how to handle these things. You can flag the address if your outgoing mail server refuses to accept it.

By the way, please don’t write regex to try to validate email addresses. Seriously.

Amen.

There are libraries for that; some of them are even good.

Spoiler alert: Few of them are good, and those few are so simple that you might as well not use a library.

The only way to correctly validate an email address is to send a message to it, and verify that it arrived.