Hacker News Reader

Comment by usrlocal1023 | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on the launch. Site looks nice and fast as well.

Just some comments.

1. At the moment you are forced to login if you want to change site theme or font size. It would be nice if you could without logging in. I am fine it with the settings persisting as long as I don't clear the cookies.

2. Are there any plans to support prefers-color-scheme so you don't have to manually set the color to dark?

3. Also, the links to news article aren't direct. Goes via https://newsandrumors.com/nar/go/<random-id-here>. Is it possible to opt out of this?

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Thank you!

1) Are you sure you cannot change the font and and site theme without logging in? I just tested it and it works fine for me in private and incognito modes.

I purposely designed it so a lot of the settings are available via the quick action bar for non-logged in users.

If you have no-script active or have disabled javascript, then the only option would be to login to change them via the Settings page.

Otherwise, you should be able to toggle those easily via the quick action bar above the search results.

2) Definitely. I probably should have already done that.

3) I am still thinking on this. My plan was to soon remove it for upgraded accounts. There is no user-specific tracking, but by anonymously tracking clicks in general it helps with ranking and generating "popular" search results order.

Most users have JS enabled, you could just track clicks making an Ajax get call with a click listener on all links before navigating if you don’t want to use something like GA.

To track clicks without redirects and JavaScript use the 'ping' attribute: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_ping.asp

Didn’t know about that. Does not look like it has Safari or IE support

I can't reach settings page or anything similar either.

Whenever the cog is clicked browser goes to "/start" and a page with "Enter your email" is shown.

Clicking Cancel or Continue without filling email takes me to page before.

The Settings page requires that you login, which only requires an email address.

The quick action bar on the search results page also has a smaller cog icon and other icons on it that will allow you to change several settings without logging in, but you must have javascript enabled to access them.

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