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Community Interaction

AlienCommons provides lightweight community interaction in addition to formal columns. Community features should support technical exchange without overshadowing columns as the platform's core content.

Work Interactions

Users can interact with formal columns by:

  • Liking or disliking
  • Bookmarking
  • Commenting and replying
  • Following authors
  • Reporting

Community Posts

Signed-in users may publish community posts. Similar to YouTube community posts, they support lighter and more immediate updates instead of the complete discussion expected from formal columns.

  • Short and medium-length content is allowed.
  • The length limit is tentatively around 500 words and remains undecided.
  • Images may be attached.
  • Likes, dislikes, comments, replies, and reports are supported.
  • Bookmarking is not supported.
  • There is currently no site-wide community feed.
  • A user's community posts are viewed through a dedicated tab on that user's profile.

Comments

Columns and community posts share the same comment system.

  • Comments and replies both support likes, dislikes, and reports.
  • Replies may be nested in the data model.
  • The interface displays a consistent two-level structure similar to Bilibili.
  • Further replies to second-level comments use @username instead of additional visual indentation.
  • A column author or community-post author may pin one comment.
  • Users may edit or delete their own comments.
  • Edited comments display an edited indicator.
  • Comments display their publication time.

User Profiles

A user profile displays:

  • Avatar
  • Username
  • Biography
  • Registration time
  • Published columns
  • Collections
  • Community posts
  • Follower count
  • Following count

Users may follow, block, and report other users.

Bookmarks and Privacy

  • Every user may create bookmark folders.
  • Bookmark folders may contain formal columns from different authors.
  • Bookmark folders cannot be nested.
  • A bookmark folder may be public or private when created, and its visibility may be changed later.
  • Users choose whether their like and dislike history is public. It is private by default.