New Design Announcement - Discussion and Suggestions

All holidays are pretty much relics of the past and now are nothing like what they once were anyways. Only religious people give a shit about something like Easter for its original purpose, everyone else just treats it like a whatever secular holiday formed out of its own thing. In general they are just an excuse now to have a day off of work and to promote disgusting levels of capitalism where people buy meaningless specially branded “holiday” items which most will throw out the next day. They are a waste of time and resources and most sane people can see that, but people can celebrate whatever they want as that is what personal freedom is about.
 
The cause for the friction here is likely due to the April Fool’s stuff being forced on to people who do not wish to celebrate it. There should always be a way to opt out of such things for those people as well as everyone else as something like forcibly changing the color scheme heavily and annihilating contrast does impact site functionality for all who just want to use it like normal, even if they did get a good laugh out of it initially.

@LemonDrop  

You mean the pagan fertility festival, Eostre, right?
 
I mean, if a serious Christian thinks eggs and bunnies have anything to do with Jesus’s resurrection, I’ve got a bridge to sell ’em. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@Exhumed Legume  
Well I am not sure if that was the origin of it or what, but the Christian holiday is based on the day they believe Jesus was resurrected, and that is what is celebrated on that day (not as much the bunnies and stuff). Same can be said for something like Christmas, the whole Santa thing is definitely another holiday tradition sorta mushed into it whereas the religious celebration portion of it is more about Jesus’s birth. I’m not a holiday expert so I have no idea how all those things somehow came together, but yeah it just shows how arbitrary it is and how people can really think whatever they want when celebrating something. Here on Derpi people celebrate the anniversary of MLP and the site’s creation after all, all that matters if it’s important to you or not.

@LemonDrop  
Well, basically, church holidays were mixed with European pagan celebrations to make the faith easier to sell to the natives.
 
Thus, Eostre became Easter, the various winter solstice festivals became Christmas, Samhain became Hallowe’en etc.  
And, in my country, midsummer became a memorial day of John the Baptist.
 
 
But we’re veering dangerously off topic. :P

@Exhumed Legume  
Isnt eostre just the name for April rather then the various festivals that happened during that period?
 
And that in itself being from one single source, a christian monk-saint. And he only used it as a means to declare what date Easter should fall on, using Eostre as a justification?

@Twilestia  

Not exactly – name of a goddess and the (spring equinox) festival in her honor.  
April was apparently named “Eostre’s month” by Anglo-Saxon pagans.

@Exhumed Legume
 
Always good to learn something new i guess. And man did this topic go off topic.
 
But it IS a april fools topic i suppose…

@LemonDrop  

 
Thanks for summarizing my experience of this event. It started as funny to me as well, until the headaches and nausea began to make themselves felt (no, I’m not exaggerating, but I wish I was).

@LemonDrop & @Ereiam
 
It gave me nausea to use the site, too.
 
It was also “forced” on me, too.
 
I also had absolutely no way to turn it off short of scripting something for my own browser.
 
And I am pretty sure it caused more inconvenience for me than for you. For example, I had to give up probably 90% of the stuff I do when I volunteer here because I simply could not find the buttons I needed and my muscle memory wasn’t getting me through some of the more complex tasks. So I was not just having trouble enjoying the free images that others share here, or the community here, I also was unable to do the very things I had volunteered to help do here.
 
I personally don’t like April Fools day. My family didn’t celebrate it. It’s not really a part of my life, except when other people are celebrating it.
 
It’s like Christmas.
 
Or Easter.
 
Those are also “forced” on me. And they make my life significantly more inconvenient than any problems a website being unusable for a day and a half has ever caused me.
 
But it is a part of the society that I live in, so I know it happens and when it happens I participate in a sociable way.
 
Whining about it for weeks afterwards certainly isn’t sociable. Or, it’s a kind of sociable, but it’s not the kind of sociable that I want to be.
 
But that’s probably because I don’t have to personally be satisfied by everything everyone else enjoys to be able to enjoy it with them.
 
I don’t have to have a personal stake or have my personal preferences acknowledged and respected by people having fun doing something I don’t enjoy to be able to allow them to enjoy it, even if it inconveniences me.
 
I can watch the superbowl with others, even though I have no interest in it. I might periodically poke fun at the intensity that some of my friends show toward the game, but I don’t whine about the problems the Super Bowl caused for me for weeks afterwards.
 
I don’t go to Super Bowl sites and turn their social media threads celebrating the Super Bowl into ongoing examinations of how disrespectful fans of the Super Bowl are, or how the Super Bowl didn’t give me a way to “opt out” of the traffic or the advertisements or the other interruptions in my life that it caused. I don’t gather together with people who ALSO were inconvenienced by the Super Bowl to hold hands and commiserate about how the Super Bowl and the people who enjoy it didn’t show any consideration for my personal needs.
 
Instead, I get drinks with my mates and cheer with them when the local team wins the ball tournament even though I find the tournament itself incomprehensibly and offensively boring.
 
And even though I don’t own any ball tournament swag, I don’t turn their celebration into a discussion of how unfair it is that some people don’t enjoy ball tournament.
 
It’s like St. Patrick’s day. I’m legitimately Irish. But the holiday is a pain in the ass in just about every possible way.
 
But I don’t go to my local and sneer at people drinking green beer and wearing “Kiss Me I’m Irish” hats.
 
Because that seems to me a pretty asshole thing to do when others are having fun.
 
Admittedly - VERY admittedly - of those events last way the fuck longer than I like.
 
Christmas I believe would be a lot more fun and tons more sacred for everyone involved if it lasted 3 days. Add a week for the commercial aspects. Then you’ve got 3 holy days spread out around the Solstice so everyone’s religion’s own personal interpretation of “the day” gets respected and they can do what they want with all the joy and splendor the day entails.
 
But, that’s not how society treats those days. And it really only means that I don’t get to listen to the music I like, or my favorite radio station, or go to my usual stores without being inundated by the reminder that I am a non-Christian living in a Christian majority society, without any option to “opt out” of their holidays.
 
So, in all honesty, if I had an option to turn off the April Fools event so that I could continue clicking the buttons I normally click here for that day and a half of the event, then I wouldn’t turn it off.
 
Because that would be like turning off Christmas. Or turning off Easter. Or turning off the Super Bowl.
 
It meant I could not participate in the site in the way I usually enjoy, so I found a new way to enjoy this community and this site, and I simply didn’t try to do the things that made me physically ill to try to do. Like work on reports or aliasing or helping artists.
 
For me, I don’t understand why people are so selfish that they can’t just let other people enjoy things that they like, even if they have no “hooks” into the thing that their friends are enjoying. Let everyone have fun, participate in the fun to the best of their ability, or just go do something else for awhile and come back later when the thing is over so you can do whatever the normal is with your friends.
 
Perhaps it’s because I don’t consider other people enjoying something I don’t understand as any kind of statement about me.
 
It’s not personal.
 
It’s like a fan run convention where everyone putting it together tries their hardest to do something that will be fun for everyone, and the least I can do is either try to participate in it and have fun, even if my personal tastes or my physical needs aren’t being “respected” by the event.
 
MiniCon has a dance? Sure, that sounds fine. I wish they’d do something else but … you know what? As long as people are having fun that means there’s more fun for everyone. And I am not being handcuffed and forced to go to it.
 
I can opt out.
 
But maybe I’m ok with people doing things that I don’t enjoy, and can enjoy people enjoying what they enjoy even though I don’t enjoy it, because it’s social. I recognize it’s not personal.
 
But that’s just my take on it.
 
So, even though I really found the site damned near impossible to use for the most part, so much so that I felt physically ill when I tried to do some things, I found it funny, and enjoyed it.
 
It’s not like I need this site to get to work in the morning. So I just opted out of the parts of this site that I found unpleasant to use.
 
I mean - be fair.
 
If people break their backs and sacrifice weeks putting something together for my entertainment, at no cost to me and really only a day and a half of no more inconvenience than “Oh, well, ok, I’ll wait until later this week to do that thing”, then I try to enjoy it with a becoming grace.
 
Because a few people really broke their backs to put this together and … let’s be fair … the site didn’t absolutely completely fucking die. It kept working! After a complete and utter rewrite of the site just a few months ago, a few talented and devoted volunteers managed to put together an actual full blown holy shit they pulled it off and the site didn’t completely break April Fools event!
 
That’s pretty damned impressive. Even if the result made me physically ill, I am deeply thankful that they went to that effort for this event.
 
And so I do not continue to bitch about it happening 10 days later.
 
But, you know, whatever.
 
You do you.
 

 
Just please try to do it with a becoming grace.

@Derpy Whooves  
For IRL things you can take control of your own life and choose if you want to participate or not, that’s what freedom is, no one is forcing you to do these things. In fact as you say I could indeed stop using Derpi for a day and not have to deal with it, that is my choice as well.
 
The difference is while IRL celebration is typically something on the side, browsing Derpi is more of a main activity and should not be disrupted in that way without any option to disable it. This is why big companies and their websites do not change on April fools in major ways really as they know their users depend on their services to accomplish something and do not want to cause issues with that core experience. In general this is why any sort of “surprise functionality” has been slowly fading in software as a whole, users just do not want to be suddenly surprised with new behavior in something they have grown accustom to using for no purpose other than to celebrate something (as in not new functionality for a purpose like an update), especially if it impacts the primary usage of a thing.
 
I’m not saying the work the developers did on the site was bad or their efforts are not to be appreciated, I’m just saying it can be improved by making it easy to disable. Trust me, it’s not that hard, I’m a professional™. Removing all the other themes except the April fools one so that you can’t switch off of it is an intentional design choice to annoy people, it did not have to be this way. As an example in another piece of software, VLC does a subtle holiday thing by changing its icon to the VLC logo with a Santa hat on during Christmas. They of course understand users may not like the Santa hat logo though and provide an option to disable such theming.
 
It should be evident based on the feedback from users here that they do wish for this sort of thing to be optional, I do not know why you continue to act like it’s their fault for giving a shit and having a preference for something and that they should just ignore it or whatever you huge block of text is trying to convey.

@Derpy Whooves  
Once again, LemonDrop said everything for me.
 
I did enjoy the event, and for the first half-hour, I didn’t have anything to say against it. Even after I felt the averse side effects and reported them accordingly, I tried nonetheless to keep in the spirit of things (or not get too much in its way, I guess), but for obvious reasons, I could only do so sporadically.
 
However, I take offense when you equate our well-founded criticism to us trying to ruin it for everyone with complaining.  
Really, I might be repeating myself, but giving the option to opt out to those who wished so would’ve been a more constructive approach than telling them to suck it up or leave. Having done so in the first place would’ve greatly reduced the amount of complaining. And while it’d have been a shame that some users chose to miss out, I’m sure there would’ve been enough people willing to partake in the fun left to ensure the work put in this event wasn’t seen as a complete waste of time. Instead, you get a bunch of frustrated users and you balk at the perceived ingratitude.
 
Honestly, if you’re gonna take negative feedback like that, then you can claim all you want in your long-winded rant that it was worth it, the very fact that you felt necessary to dump it in the first place is making me doubt it.  
Also, if you don’t like to hear people bitching long after the fact anymore, there’s a simple solution to that: just lock this thread already. Or don’t. That’s also your choice, I guess.

@LemonDrop  

 
Show me the button that allows me to buy groceries in November and December without having to be confronted by people insisting I participate in their holidays when I just want to go to the bank. Or show me the button that allows me to “opt out” of the Super Bowl when I buy gasoline. Show me the button that allows me to go to the grocery store today in a majority Christian country.
 
You can’t?
 
Huh … I guess you don’t consider buying gas for my car, or groceries for my home, or paying debts or depositing pay checks a “main activity”, like browsing a fan website for free.
 

 
This is not a big company.
 
Why do you think this is a big company?
 

 
The core of this site is open source. If you’re a professional, and it’s “not that hard”, then why haven’t you coded that capacity for the core app yet ?
 

 
You are mischaracterizing the intentions of the people who created this event.
 
If you’re just here to personally attack others, to accuse the volunteers of this site of having no intention other than to annoy people, then I don’t think there’s anything to add.

@Ereiam  
Ok.

 
I think the goal of a lot of people here, honestly, is just to hear someone say “We’ll consider adding an opt-out next year.” le shrug

@Derpy Whooves  
Show me the button that allows me to buy groceries in November and December without having to be confronted by people insisting I participate in their holidays when I just want to go to the bank  
“I had a bad time before, so everyone should have a bad time forever” isn’t a very good argument when there exists the real capacity to change things so that nobody has to have a bad time again. This is why people jeer at boomers in the US who argue against forgiving student loan debt because they had to pay that debt, so everyone should have to pay it as well in perpetuity, and nevermind that Congress could pass a law wiping out most of it.

@TexasUberAlles  
Take it to tartarus.

Jesus fuck, this is still going???

@Officer Hotpants
 
IT WILL NEVER END

@Officer Hotpants  
@QuasarNova  
I mean, the April Fools’ thread from two years ago is still going…

@Exhumed Legume  
Yeah, but that one kept going in happiness (so far as I’m aware).

no guyz u don t understand cartoon horses r srs bsns

@Officer Hotpants  
This

@nerfherder  

 
It’s already over, but these users decide to to bring it back up for some reason.

@LemonDrop  
Why

The theme was silly. :P :3