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themotte / rDrama

This code runs https://www.themotte.org. Forked from https://github.com/Aevann1/rDrama
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Move or get rid of the Install The Webapp popup #671

Open zorbathut opened 1 year ago

zorbathut commented 1 year ago

When accessing the site on mobile, there is an "Install the Motte webapp!" nagware banner with a tiny close button neatly covering up the top right controls, including the notification bell that would tell me about any post responses. Do we really need that, and does it need to be in that location for any non-dark-pattern reasons?

At the very least it shouldn't be covering things up; anyone have a solid feeling on whether it actually encourages people to bookmark the site? (we don't have analytics for this or anything)

TLSM commented 1 year ago

Upstream's solution to this after time-of-fork was to fix some outstanding bugs in the logic that persisted time of last tooltip dismissal to session and would not show it if the user had dismissed it. Getting session data into the routes/templates circa May 2022 was… unreliable, let's say. Their approach resolves the issue by having it actually respect the user dismissal, though it may still be off-putting to first-time visitors unfamiliar with the site.

Not particularly against removing the tooltip altogether: it's a few dozen lines at the bottom of templates/home.html and optionally some extraneous support code in the backend for the dismissal timestamp persistence.

Upstream's overt justification for the pushy tooltip was that approximately 60% of the site traffic was mobile, and those users were constantly asking if there was an app, no matter how many times staff answered the question. I personally infer the pushiness also hoped to boost engagement numbers. Insofar as Motte users are more likely to know that pinning a webpage to mobile homescreen is an option, it's unclear to me these justifications are relevant to us.

zorbathut commented 1 year ago

On the other hand, I do generally think that attracting users is a good thing, and if we do think it'll help, well, a small amount of help can be a huge long-term bonus.

Any idea how hard it would be to get the session data to consistently get added properly? I assume there was some architectural issue making it a pain.

justcool393 commented 1 year ago

i am happy, for one, to kill it with fire