Nectarine

Yeah this has been well discussed on oneliner, maybe it should be 5 or 6, and not 3, blah blah.
Anyway. From a user-experience perspective I would like to point out something. Suppose that I write a long complicated message, and try to post it, and it gets rejected due to 3-message rule: then it's all gone. And perhaps I had written a really good important message.
So you should consider popping up a message SEPARATELY saying "this can't be posted", without destroying the user's hard work of typing, and what they wrote.
Thanks for consideration. Responses from people in the UX industry please. I'm sick of hearing "it isn't an issue because it doesn't affect me".

Yeah, I think you're raising a really important point, mirrorbird — not just about the arbitrary limit, but about how it's enforced.

The 3-message rule might have its reasons (spam prevention, moderation load, etc), but from a UX standpoint, silently rejecting a message and discarding the text is rough. Especially for a platform like the oneliner where people sometimes write weird, poetic, or thoughtful things — losing that to an invisible throttle is frustrating and demotivating.

A better pattern would be to display the limit clearly and inline, and if someone hits it, preserve the typed message and just show a clear, separate notice: “You’ve reached the 3-message limit. Wait a bit or delete an earlier one.” That way no effort is lost, and the user has a choice.

Also agree that “it’s fine because it doesn’t affect me” is a dead-end argument. We should care about the worst-case scenarios before they drive people away.

Maybe the current limit is a placeholder, but the UX could still show more care — especially for a community-driven space like this one.

I think that's a decent idea to keep the message when the limit is hit. We're seeing if we can make it work in the playground, but no promises. The site code is old and clunky.

Hello,

It feels like we (I mean... a developer) will spend time to improve on something that should not even exist. I would have love official communication about this new "feature" (and this communication should have been done on this forum or the Nectarine news page.)
Because, until now, I still did not hear the official reason of introducing such "feature". It would have helped me to better accept it, if, at least, I have a bit of background.
Anyway, yes, it is really sad and bad UX to lose the message when jailed by this limit.

The throttling discourages spontaneity and creativity. The oneliner thrives on quick, playful banter and creative wordplay. A strict 3-message limit stifles that natural flow, especially for those who use line breaks or build up layered jokes. Sometimes ideas can’t fit into three messages. Being forced to wait mid-thought breaks up the rhythm of communication, leaving conversations awkward or incomplete.
Ironically, the limit targets the most active contributors—the very people helping keep the oneliner lively and fun. Instead of supporting their energy, it punishes it.

There’s been no official reasoning presented for the limit. Without transparency, users are left guessing—and resenting what feels arbitrary.
Developers are now stuck maintaining a brittle feature in old code, just to enforce a rule with questionable value. That time could be better spent improving features people want.
Good moderation tools empower users, they don’t punish by default. This rule feels more like a slap on the wrist than a safeguard, especially in the absence of any user feedback mechanism.

The oneliner is a core part of what makes Nectarine unique. Making it less fun, more rigid, and harder to use may slowly bleed out its energy—at a time when online communities already face attrition.

If there has to be a limit, at least make it even - we nerds have always worked with numbers like 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024... ;D

It was discussed on the Nectarine Discord server, though it has been acknowledged that it likely should've been posted to the site first for feedback, given the size of the impact.

As to reasoning, well, it's been obvious for a while that sometimes the oneliner fills up with messages from the same user, making it difficult for others to get a word in edgewise or contribute to the conversation. When those are arbitrary occasional comments about songs being played when nobody else is around to say anything, I think that's fine. However, when they become monologues that fill the oneliner even when other people are around, we get feedback about that.

We're never going to please everyone, but we'd like the site to be as welcoming to all as we can. If people would like to have longer conversations, there are better platforms for it like the forums here, Discord or Matrix (see the sidebar), and even IRC. (There's no official Nectarine IRC channel, at least not anymore, but it may still exist on IRCNet and EFNET, iirc.)

Some of those platforms will let you directly reply to other's messages, use emojis, and easily search chat history, things this site doesn't offer or can't easily do. (Emoji support requires an entire site overhaul to use a more recent version of Python.)

I don't mind that people use the oneliner for chats, and I (personally) don't want to see it go away, but on some level it is very much a product of the "shoutbox" era (where adding new messages reloaded the page) with a mix of "hey, we can now do the dynamic stuff of our dreams with JavaScript," even though the implementation of that is quite ugly.

The site's event system is very much built on old tech and I'm sure people have all noticed the now playing box doesn't always update when it should and so on. So there's only so much we can do unless the site is given an overhaul.

A change for this was pushed to prod, and there'll be a follow-up soon to tweak the behavior to make it harder to accidentally post repeated messages when the limit is reached.

Update is here : I can't post my message and text is kept.
But I don't know why I can't push the submit button.

SadPanda

I am preferring oneliner, because:
- I log on Nectarine to req songs, so, no need to log somewhere else to talk with other people listening to Nectarine ;
- there are my preferred smileys in the oneliner:
- oneliner support special BBCODE
- I have always done this way

The reply comes via the message system, so if you'll need to enable notifications if you turned them off. There's currently no other logic for errors.


We added some of those smilies to the Discord, iirc.

If you're referring to the 3D bb-code, no, other platforms don't have that, but most people would get annoyed at it I think from over-usage.

I want to make it clear people are still free to use the oneliner, it's not closing. Just that we do need to address some of the issues people bring up in regards to the site chat so it's more equitable for everyone who wants to be able to say stuff.

One idea could be to open up a personal chat clicking on the name, forwarding to personal messages (which is, well, clumsy) or alternatively, a link to other service (like discord) of user's preference. Not a mandatory setting, but preferred for those who chat a lot eachother.

Another idea, a new forum posting into a "hot" issue could reveal a forum link on oneliner. A oneliner post button perhaps telling, there's a new message in forum

Just few ideas that might work. Any thoughts?

Keeping the oneliner the oneliner. Specifically the oneliner is the social part of necta, i don't see it a good idea to restrict it yet more but perhaps giving those choices instead.

Just my 5 cents

This might sound like I'm pointing fingers towards people, but I really wanna get this out: Sad that because of a handful of people, the innocent ones have to suffer along. IMO, this situation could've been avoided if the moderation system had been different.

I wanted to mention something LittleWhite already said, but I think what had to be said was said already


In my more than 5 years of being on necta, I've never felt weird or repulsed towards any monologue that happened in the oneliner, We're all people with different minds and values. While for someone it looks like useless ramble, for that exact dude writing up a monologue it could be important. We're supposed to tolerate each other, aren't we? No doubt I don't mean it when someone rambles about politics and religion: stuff that people try to escape from while arriving at the internet to hang out, but when it's just some random train of thoughts, why not?

I for that matter respect, that people aren't so enthusiastic about moving chats somewhere else, when the oneliner has been on necta since the day it started (I think. Correct me, if I'm wrong). It would've been a different story, if the OneLiner wouldn't have been the core part of Nectarine in the first place.

TL;DR - In my opinion, the moderation has to be reformed in some way to better accustom what is good for the userbase in general.

The 3-message limit is not a punishment. It's something that ought to have been built in from the start. Pouet has a 1-message limit for its oneliner. SceneSat has no oneliner at all, and all their chat takes place on platforms that actually support chat! It must be amazing. Meanwhile, a 3-message limit on oneliner encourages chit-chat and general participation while preventing a variety of forms of abuse.

Oneliner is a little shout-out/greets box attached to our web pages. It's not a real chat interface. It only holds 10 messages at a time, cannot properly display links or images, has a nearly unusable history mechanism, and is almost impossible to moderate. I'm sure it was very cool when it was first implemented in 2003, but it was never intended as a chat hub. Most Nectas were active on IRC back then. Some still are. IRC has its advantages and uses, but it is also somewhat obsolete IMO. Meanwhile, oneliner has given Nectarine a reputation as seedy and unwelcoming, and since users leave or decline to join, the situation does not improve. Some of our users seem to think this is a good thing - who wants newcomers? Better to have an exclusive little club, right?

Discord has a fabulous UI, and a lot of sceners are on it, but it's proprietary. IRC is decentralised and open, but has a primitive UI. Matrix is the best of both worlds, but most people seem to prioritise convenience over virtually anything else when it comes to internet services, and getting onto Matrix is a little less convenient than getting onto Discord, plus a lot of people are already on Discord because they were involved in other communities. In any case, oneliner as a "chat box" is seriously obsolete in comparison to even fairly basic web-based chat platforms or protocols. I think it makes much more sense to continue to use the oneliner for what it is (the clue is in the name!) and have chats that don't fit into its constraints on a real chat platform. Rebuilding oneliner such that it can support even a handful of modern features would be a large amount of work for very questionable gain.

I don't really see anyone "suffering", aside from how people invariably complain whenever anything is changed on the site. If someone is posting a lot of messages in a row, with no response, then who are they talking to, exactly? Some people have suggested a "cooldown period" to "unlock" a person's messaging. We did consider that. But, again, if someone has posted a lot of messages in a row, and there is no reply, then how will posting more messages make it more of a conversation? On real chat platforms, long sequences of messages are not a problem because you can scroll or pageup to read through or around it, block users whose entries you are not interested in either temporarily or permanently, etc, but that is not the situation here.

Someone commented "social problems should have social solutions". I used to think that too, and indeed until very recently I used to argue that case to other staff. But on this site that approach has been a total failure (I don't want to get into that right now) and I have had to admit it. So technical solutions are required.

You mark a point there. Still, if I want to discuss with someone, because I have seen an interesting topic, sometime I will not be able to explain my idea in only three messages.
Why chatting on Nectarine? Because, some people are not on the Discord/Matrix channel, because I come more often here (to check the queue or do a request) than on other platform and while checking the queue/requesting a song, I see a message or I say hello.

About the history, I rarely use it (only if I wrote something and I check if someone reacted to it because I needed to leave after writing). I even feel like we should not have a history :D. The feature is not compliant with 2025 standards, but it is still doing what it should do... display the history for people who need it. Same as the oneliner. Even in times when IRC (or MSN/ICQ :D) was used, the oneliner was implemented and even at that time, you could say that IRC is far better than the oneliner. As said before, oneliner is nice, since you are sharing your with other listeners.

On our Matrix/Discord, I feel totally connected to the radio when I read it. You all feel strangers there :P.

I don't feel I have ever asked the oneliner to be a real chat. It is a nice place to interact with other listeners. If a topic interest me, I talk during 10 minutes there. If I need to have some context, I check the last page of the history. If I missed something, I don't care, no need to lurk in the history to catch up and check who says what... it is an oneliner


I regret to hear that. And if you think that the three limit is the solution, the only solution, I can only trust the team :up:. Consider my messages as a nice discussion, without any kind of anger or any bad thoughts.
In other words, I respect the situation, and my only complaint was about the introduction of this limitation with no info about it (and mainly because we were losing the message when it is blocked). Those problems are now fixed, I am fine and will try to not bother anymore about this topic :).