@morganmcmillian
It was consistent in that capitalized the first letter of every single word throughout.
You Mean That Everything Was Written Like That? That’s not even title capitalization. That must be horrible.
There hasn’t been a lot of discussion this weekend, so I think it is safe to say that the proposal can start now.
Proposal: Apply Sentence Case Capitalization throughout the Whole English UI
Yes, I agree: Capitalize only the first letter of interface texts, regardless of their type, with the exception of lower-cased timeagos and normally-capitalized proper nouns.
First letter of interface text = "Invite your friends"
Lower-cased timeagos = "a month ago"
Capitalized proper nouns = “in Montreal”
No, I disagree: Diaspora should adopt another capitalization style.
Outcome: 64% of voters agreed to apply sentence case capitalization throughout the whole English UI. Changes can thus be committed on GitHub.
Votes:
Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.
@gp What’s your Diaspora handle?
@rich1 None, I closed my accourt recently… I’m leaving the Diaspora project but still find important to contribute to the capitalization and emoji issues. Was that to contact me?
@gp
Was that to contact me?
No, it was not.
What was your old Diaspora handle before you recently closed your account?
@cantonic I was under the impression that we, as the Diaspora community, are the UI task force. Who are these people and is there an open forum for what they are discussing, that we can contribute to? (and, if they have qualms about the current proposal, why haven’t they voiced them?)
GP: I’m leaving the Diaspora project but still find important to contribute to the capitalization and emoji issues.
This makes absolutely no sense to me.
/me joins the club
@goob Don’t worry, it only matters to me.
@cantonic Still waiting for that “new UI task force”…
@rich1 Why did you ask for my former Diaspora handle?
@jameskiesel there is a discussion here on loomio: https://www.loomio.org/d/OEbGDlq1/create-a-ui-task-force which I referred to. None of them qualms about the proposal. I just mentioned them, because I agree with the post’s idea and I supposed that there is a team for ui stuff (I am new in the community).
But my point was actually not about the UI task force or about excluding the diaspora community from design questions and I am sorry if my post made this impression. Putting all my thoughts on this topic into 250 chars is a bit of a problem for me, so let me try it again with more words 
There are several discussions here about UI changes, branding and some approaches towards a unified design, but it looks to me like they are all discussed and decided on separately, although they are all interdependent since every style change, even minor ones like capitalisation, has an influence on the overall look and feel of the application. Therefore I think it is important to create a complete style guide first which covers all design rules the community agrees/agreed on. Generally this process can be split in two major parts:
1. your Identity
People often define this by asking questions like “What is diaspora?”, but often forget to ask the (imo) much more important and powerful question “WHY is diaspora?”.
Look at joindiaspora.com’s landing page: full of information of what it is and no word about why it exist, what the vision is. There is just a small written statement over the donate button stating that there is a vision, but nothing more.
2. your actual style rules to communicate your identity in the best possible way where you define how to communicate your identity to the world in the most sufficient way.
part 1 should be always present in everyones mind when making suggestions or decisions, but if it isn’t pointed out enough or even unclear/undefined, it will most possibly lead to decisions based on personal preferences and you end up with “zombie rules” in your guidelines and the overall picture blurs.
I couldn’t find a clear definition of diaspora’s identity. There are several discussion about “Brandin” which all refer to “how to style something”. there is a repo https://github.com/pablocubico/diaspora-identity which also doesn’t put stress on the identity, but on the design actually (or I didn’t find it maybe).
Therefore i suggest:
This way you have a dedicated style guide which sums up all rules in an easy to understand format and by pointing out the “WHY” wherever possible you make the community make decisions towards a common goal. Also it makes contribution easier for everybody, especially for new contributors.
making decisions on things like capitalisation at this point is like designing a book cover without having a story written.
Ok, i just realised how much I wrote and that this might have been posted in an own discussion
@GP Let’s do it
PS: when talking about Style Guides we should consider using Styleguide Driven Development practices. This separates UI development and backend development and puts them in separate repos which allows UX designers without rails/ruby skills to contribute to Diaspora.
Cool, thanks for clarifying that.
That thread you reference hasn’t had any activity in 4 months, so that task force seems a bit Godot at the moment.
I’m sorta of the view that this kind of proposal is a step in the right direction towards getting people to engage with any UI problems, and that holding it up for a overarching design vision to appear from somewhere, somehow, will just leave us with bad capitalization for some time to come.
@cantonic I just don’t see the relation between “identity” and capitalization. Capitalization isn’t about identity at all, it’s about correctness, consistency and readability. For example, I don’t see how WRITING EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE LIKE RIGHT NOW WOULD MAKE DIASPORA LOOK HIP AND COOL. It’d just make the users’ eyes hurt and make the UI look immature. In fact, good design is design that one doesn’t even notice.
From what I understand from my experience with diaspora* is that this project has first worked on “making things work” (and still is AFAIK), then works on the design. It would probably need too much effort to redesign diaspora* from the ground up to make it all new, different and flat-design-bandwagon styled. And there are not enough designers for that to happen. Therefore, it is better to just take what’s already established, port it to Bootstrap and fix the most obvious bugs first (like capitalization). Then the design can be tweaked into something more modern and full of identity.
In other words, what diaspora* needs right now is more tweakers, not more thinkers. However, as said, I think your proposal is irrelevant to the current case: capitalization has nothing to do with identity, and should be solved in the short term as @jamesej explained.
@jameskiesel Yes, unfortunately backend developers (including myself) tend to treat UI like the smaller cousin of backend development and OS software is mostly consumed by other developers, UI doesn’t get much attention. I see unit tests all over the place in projects, testing the sh** out models and barely see some view tests. The importance of user experience relates to the user group the software is addressed to. Yesterday I watched the first announcement video of diaspora from 2010 with four enthusiastic developers trying to raise funds in order to “give every single person in this world the opportunity” to have their own social network. If that’s still the target group then UX is important, but it feels to me like it shifted to developers, at least for some community members.
in the previous proposal when it was mainly about changing the log out button’s capitalisation i voted with “Agree”. I voted with “Blocked” when this has been expanded to the whole english UI. Since I am new I have no clue how much time fixing the capitalisation for the whole UI would take and I thought that the time could be invested in working on the style guide and covering it there. If we go with my suggestions and invite the community to make different suggestions for a style guide you might have to go over it again and all the work you done would be for nothing 
@GP The third paragraph of the wiki page for Corporate Identity (CI) describes pretty well what it is.
In general, this amounts to a corporate title, logo (logotype and/or logogram) and supporting devices commonly assembled within a set of guidelines. These guidelines govern how the identity is applied and confirm approved colour palettes, typefaces, page layouts and other such.
This discussion is about typefaces and its letter cases, so it has to do with identity since the concept of CI consists of Corporate design, communication, and behaviour.
every style aspect, event the font size, has influence on how the identity is perceived by others and it doesn’t need a wiki for this as this is just logical and applies not only to corporates but also for human: if you dress different, people perceive you different.
The capitalisation is NOT a bug like you say, but a style question and each company has a different style rule for handling letter case. Apple’s Style Guide has plenty of rules on when to use title-case and when to use sentence-case. An excerpt:
capitalization Two styles of capitalization are commonly used at Apple:
• Sentence-style capitalization: This line provides an example of sentence-style capitalization.
• Title-style capitalization: This Line Provides an Example of Title-Style Capitalization.
So you see, this is not a bug, but a design question which someone cannot make a reasonable decision on because of the missing specification of the identity.
You are just following you own personal taste and therefore just a waste of time.
Just writing everything in uppercase indeed wouldn’t make diaspora hip and cooler, but who said that diaspora should look hip and cooler? That’s again your personal taste which influences the brands design and therefore in my eyes not worth spending time on. Google uses uppercase in their Style Guides for Components’ buttons and the “Compose” button in your gmail account also use uppercase and it doesn’t look immature at all (which is again your personal taste) when you have an overall concept and know why you want to use uppercases. They use uppercase in buttons and orange colours in order to draw attention to main functionalities so a user doesn’t have to search long. That’s what I mean by making reasonable decision. Throughout the whole discussion I cannot read any valid reasons beside personal tastes and even declarations about title case being “a bug”.
Google also show that the switch between title case and sentence case and they do it with reason.
Their Design Guides begin with the sentence…
At Google we say, “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” We embrace that principle in our design by seeking to build experiences that surprise and enlighten our users in equal measure.
And that’s the point: it is not about your taste, my taste or any others taste here, but about the taste of the targeted user group which (surprise surprise) needs to be defined first.
In other words, what diaspora* needs right now is more tweakers, not more thinkers.
I prefer thinking when attending discussions.
I don’t think that a vague possibility that the work could be overwritten in the future is a good reason to not do the work now (In fact, it’s kinda an inevitability).
@jameskiesel gotcha. I am not in the position to rate priorities
inDeed!
@Asher
The name diaspora* is currently styled as all lower case
Yeah, that’s half the problem though, it’s styled differently everywhere you look.
Seen the homepage of https://joindiaspora.com lately? It’s styled DIASPORA* in huge capital letters.
And yes, I know that’s a pod and not the foundation site etc, etc, but it’s just one of many mixed up and confusing examples that you will find
