Site Development Notification and Feedback Thread

reversalmushroom
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).

You're gay.
Is it possible to do “or” searches? As in, put in 2 tags, but instead of pulling up things that have both, it pulls up results that have maybe just 1 of both tags? So if I could somehow search 2 different tags, but have them smooshed together into 1 result with 1 convenient link?
reversalmushroom
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).

You're gay.
Yeah, I just put both of those in and got no results. Could you please post a link of a search using either of those methods?
 
EDIT: Sorry, I got confused because I put in the parenthesis which causes it not to work. But yay, thanks!
reversalmushroom
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).

You're gay.
Could y’all please make it so videos don’t start muted? That’s just an extra click one has to make every time they watch a video. Or maybe the volume gets saved somewhere so everyone can have their own personal default?
Background Pony #10E7
Thanks for integrating default site theme with system-wide theme. I don’t want ponies linked to my email address, but I like viewing everything in dark mode, so getting auto-dark theme here is a big help.
Panko Pai
A Really Hyper Artist - 500+ images under their artist tag
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.
Ten years of changes - Celebrated the 10th anniversary of MLP:FiM!
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2020) - Took part in the 2020 Community Collab
A Really Classy Artist - 250+ images under their artist tag
Dream Come True! - Participated in the MLP 9th Anniversary Event
Best Artist - Providing quality, Derpibooru-exclusive artwork

Shy gamer stallion
Noticed the change where Derpi changes its theme depending on which system default theme is set.  
At first, yaaay.  
At another, I liked the default light theme being an indicator I’ve been logged out.
Background Pony #6C85
Not gonna lie not too fond of the new page finder being just First, Previous, Next and Last
 
Takes away the convenience of being able to jump back a few pages if ya recall a image a few pages back
𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐫
Silly Pony - Celebrated the 13th anniversary of MLP:FIM, and 40 years of MLP!
Thread Starter - Started a thread with over 100 pages
Shimmering Smile - Celebrated the 10th anniversary of Equestria Girls!
Lunar Guardian - Earned a place among the ranks of the most loyal New Lunar Republic soldiers (April Fools 2023).
Flower Trio - Helped others get their OC into the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Roseluck - Had their OC in the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
King Sombra - Celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Crystal Empire!
A Lovely Nightmare Night - Celebrated the 12th anniversary of MLP:FIM!
Princess of Love - Extra special version for those who participated in the Canterlot Wedding 10th anniversary event by contributing art.
Tree of Harmony - Drew someone's OC for the 2022 Community Collab

seventh layer of hair
As much as I vehemently hate the new layout of the page buttons here, I want to wish back the removed randomizer and the hide buttons beside the page numbers for us mobile users.
𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐫
Silly Pony - Celebrated the 13th anniversary of MLP:FIM, and 40 years of MLP!
Thread Starter - Started a thread with over 100 pages
Shimmering Smile - Celebrated the 10th anniversary of Equestria Girls!
Lunar Guardian - Earned a place among the ranks of the most loyal New Lunar Republic soldiers (April Fools 2023).
Flower Trio - Helped others get their OC into the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Roseluck - Had their OC in the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
King Sombra - Celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Crystal Empire!
A Lovely Nightmare Night - Celebrated the 12th anniversary of MLP:FIM!
Princess of Love - Extra special version for those who participated in the Canterlot Wedding 10th anniversary event by contributing art.
Tree of Harmony - Drew someone's OC for the 2022 Community Collab

seventh layer of hair
Please re add back the feature “Started by ‘x’” for mobile users. It’s kinda hard for me to identify who started a thread whom.
Background Pony #260D
Can there please be a notification if an image you’ve uploaded got deleted?
Princess Celestia
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

Administrator
Devops
I think it’s a good time as any to revive this thread to share some of my current plans with you (both of which are in various stages of completion). I’ve been doing on and off development of two major user-facing projects in the past few months, namely The Redesign and switching the site from Textile to Markdown.
 
The Redesign
 
This word is sometimes gravely dreaded by users of any site, after all, things are changing from what you are used to and love, and becoming new and alien, possibly even worse for some? Now, many of you will probably have the same question right about now:
 
But Celestia, the site is already so good, why change anything?  
Yes, the current design works and it does its job really well. However, back when it was first made, we haven’t really put much thought into things like accessibility, colorblind people, how the site looks on phones beyond the very basics, and so on.
 
The way our current theme system is designed, in order to create a new theme with a couple of minor color changes, we’d need to copy over the whole CSS of the site into a new .css file, and then serve that. Such an approach leads to very long compile times during deploys and holds us back from implementing more color variations. The way to fix it is to switch to CSS3 variables, which would not only make it easy for us to make more color variations, but would also make it much easier for authors of user styles to make variations of the site theme which we have not thought of.
 
However, even such a seemingly minor backend change requires us to essentially rewrite the whole CSS and change the architecture of it. Since we’ll be doing that, I decided to also take this opportunity to fix other issues with current design.
 
A major one is accessibility. Some color contrasts on the site are very hard to read to vision-impaired people, as well as some colorblind people. We intend to increase the contrasts of colors a little bit to ensure important things can be distinguished between each other to such people, or those who use particularly bad monitors with poor contrast/gamma settings.
 
Another major point is the mobile/phone design of the site. Yes, we have one (if you are on desktop, you can even see it by making your browser window as narrow as it can go). No, it’s not very good. I myself use mobile extensively, and often run into pages where certain things decide to leave the boundaries of the screen. Other times I fat-finger a button and have to go back a page and try again just because not much thought was put into mobile convenience. And I won’t even mention that staff tools have no mobile design whatsoever and are really a complete disaster, meaning to do a staff action on the go in case of emergency puts me at risk of fatfingering something and possibly doing nasty things.
 
All of these things are intended to be fixed by the redesign. The plan so far is something like:  
-> Desktop layout remains very similar to how it is now  
-> -> Certain things may still change on Desktop layout, but the general usage pattern should remain the same  
-> Mobile layout gets a complete overhaul  
-> Colors on both layouts will change for accessibility  
-> More themes will be introduced, with much more extensive customization options  
-> -> Such as “dark/light/black” variants of each color scheme  
-> -> “black” variant would make the background black, hopefully saving battery on OLED devices  
-> In general, our CSS will use more modern technologies and modern approach, reducing our reliance on Javascript, and giving us a chance to build a more robust style using 2021 standards, instead of 2015.
 
Before anything changes, there will be 1-2 months of public beta testing of the new design so we can gather feedback and make all appropriate changes.
 
 
Markdown
 
Now let’s talk about the second project in the works right now. Conversion of the site from Textile to Markdown. For those of you who don’t know, both of them are text processing engines. Textile is currently being used on the site so you can make text in your posts bold, italic, and such. There’s nothing really wrong with it, but it’s quite slow and outdated, and by modern standards it’s quite clunky and awkward to use.
 
So we decided to switch to Markdown. Markdown is currently the most popular text processing technology, and it is used in many shapes and forms all over the internet. To name a few examples of websites/services using it, I’d name Discord, GitHub, Telegram, and Slack.
 
In fact, you probably have already used Markdown in the past, even if you never realized it was Markdown. Ever needed to type **text here** to make text bold? Or perhaps you’ve noticed that typing *text here* makes it italic instead of bold? Well, that was Markdown.
 
To go into technicalities, the “flavor” of Markdown which we intend to use is GFM (Github-Flavored Markdown), a subset of Commonmark specification. Some of the features will be omitted for security and usability reasons (you won’t be able to use raw HTML in your posts), and we’ll add some of our own features (such as spoilering, subscript, >>123, to name a few).
 
All of the current posts will be converted from Textile to Markdown once the feature is fully implemented. We’ll slowly run a conversion in the background, and if you try to edit a comment/post/anything that was made using Textile, it’ll be converted on-demand for you, so you can edit the Markdown version of it instead. Nothing should break, but something probably inevitably will, with my luck.
 
 
So, that’s good and all, but are there any ETAs?
 
For the redesign, the ETA is “when it’s done”. It will probably take me a couple of more months of work until I get it all polished up and ready for deployment. If I had to give a percentage of its current completion, I’d say it’s about 40% done.
 
For Markdown conversion, the ETA is 1 month, maximum. It likely won’t take me too long to get it implemented, and I’ll keep everyone updated here and on Discord.
 
 
Is there anywhere where I can view the current code of both changes?
 
Yes, there is!
 
You can check out the current state and code for the redesign here  
And if you wish to view the code for the Markdown conversion, you can do so here
 
 
Wish to know more and possibly get more insight into development, or maybe even talk to me in a more casual way?
 
You can head over to our Discord server and check the #philomena-dev and #site-and-tag-discussion channels, as this is where I typically share anything related to these changes.
 
 
I hope this was informative to some of you. If you have any questions or feedback about the direction of the changes, please don’t hesitate to reply to this post.
NamelessNP
Glim Glam - Derpi Supporter
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
My Little Pony - 1992 Edition
Wallet After Summer Sale -
Ruby -
Perfect Pony Plot Provider - Uploader of 10+ images with 350 upvotes or more (Questionable/Explicit)
Equality - In our state, we do not stand out.
Bronze Supporter - Bronze Patron
Not a Llama - Happy April Fools Day!

Starlight and Sunny Fan
Being mobile friendly is fine, just don’t let it ruin the desktop experience like so many other sites that do that
Interested in advertising on Derpibooru? Click here for information!
Ponies Online! - April 13-14

Help fund the $15 daily operational cost of Derpibooru - support us financially!

Syntax quick reference: **bold** *italic* ||hide text|| `code` __underline__ ~~strike~~ ^sup^ %sub%

Detailed syntax guide