Site Development Notification and Feedback Thread

@byte[]  
Well, no, not in this specific instance, but the end-user sense of “it runs fine now, so performance isn’t important” is ungood in general. We’ve all played Trespasser with all its amazing features and 10FPS gameplay.

Complexity is a bigger problem than performance for that case. Every additional bit of logic we add makes maintaining things harder, and we have like 4 developers if you count them in a very generous manner.  
The new approach of “just render the textile, have some CSS slot in words about emptiness if empty” is much easier to deal with when we make changes to image pages.  
I’m unsure what people dislike about it. Is it that it stands out? If so, that is intended so that people actually write descriptions. A lot of our images come with like no context and it can be a pain to understand what’s going on. As an example, here’s something I’d been confused about for over 2 years that eventually we rerated from explicit to safe because of a better guess of the context: >>1123761 (deleted)
 
Anyways, user link normalization has been done, and the UI should be a little easier to notice and get to creating a link. Artist credit will be coming soon.

@Princess Luna  
But not everything needs a description. Often times, the image is self-explanatory. Or there’s nothing in the image that warrants a description. Take >>1694078 for example; It’s quite obvious what is going on within the image, so there’s no need to write a description.
 
What is the point in making it stand out when empty if no-one but the uploader and the mods can edit it, anyways? That’s not going to coax people in to writing them, it just wastes space. I see no reason for it to be there if there’s nothing to put there.
 
Honestly, if you want to coax people in to writing them more often, do that on the upload page, not the image page. Instead of having this piddly little box at the end that’s kind of half-forgotten, how about making it stand out more, so that people are more likely to notice it?
 
In any case, could you please give me some answers to some of my previous questions? @evan555alpha  
At this point, I just want some clarification.

@evan555alpha  
I’d actually quite appreciate info on the way that image was made or the idea behind the composition. It is at first visually confusing.  
Also, uploaders generally look at existing images before they become uploaders, and the upload page has the description form just fine.  
I’m also not seeing why it’s bad to have this little box there when it says it’s empty. Is it visually overwhelming, distracting you from the image, what?
 
Old question answers:  
Tags are constrained for view consistency. The old structure was essentially some things before tags in a narrowing box, tags having a conditional checking whether the layout is centered for whether to be narrowed, then everything after in a narrowing box. It made no sense and was a fair bit of unnecessary complexity that seemed to have no point except to let tags go off to the side of the screen, which may look good, but makes finding individual tags harder because on high width the eye tends to get lost along the row.  
I looked at the community collab btw and it took literally one extra movement of the mouse wheel with tags narrowed. I think we can stomach that on around .1% of images.
 
Buttons were combined so that the metabar could stop having two nearly-identical buttons taking up room, and so that we could make the mobile and desktop layouts more similar.
 
Post button has an icon so that it’s easier to spot with the eye. This was prompted because us moderators have another button a bit below it that was also two words with no icon. For regular users, the advantage of easily-recognizable buttons is less, but still there.
 
Metabar is still -three-four groups and probably will be unless there’s a major redesign. Note that this is what allows us to make the view/download buttons line up with the filesize/filetype/resolution information.

@Princess Luna  
Mobile and desktop looked similar enough. They’re two different systems, they can’t be the same.  
I am getting really tired of this…

@Lead Pie  
We have a fair amount of CSS devoted to changing things for mobile, but for View and Download it just removed the main buttons (so, good luck if you wanted the tags in the filename on mobile etc.). Currently, it removes the words “View” and “Download” instead, which doesn’t take away functionality.

@Princess Luna  

 
Why not have the mobile version collapse the download links into a drop down, but on desktop they are separate. So we aren’t removing functionality?

@nirvash  
That doesn’t really collapse so much as replace, you’d need a hide-desktop section for the dropdowns (not a big deal, but redundancy in view code isn’t great). It would also make the metabar wider on desktop.  
If we did make them not a dropdown on desktop, we’d probably want view view download download rather than the old view download view download, btw. Also note that width-saving measures previous to this dropdown setup left the buttons with too little information on the difference between them (you might know what the S in VS means and why it’s different than View, but that is something that can incredibly confuse new users).

@Princess Luna  

 
Are we sure that’s preferable when the spacing keeps causing other aesthetic/design problems? Visually it can look awkward and oddly spaced depending on the monitor. And design wise, forced spacing just makes it more likely to be pushed down to a second line depending on the monitor/information within the bar.
 
Example: Any image with a score over 100 has the data forced into a second row. For me, at least.  

 
Another possible fix would be to return to having the metadata bar go all the way across the screen. Because right now it stands out as a sudden shortening of the bars and data right below the Site bars.
 
Right now we have:  
Full width Site bars.  
Comment width Imagedata bars.  
The image that is of variable size.  
Then everything else comment width.
 
If it went all the way across, we’d have:
 
Full width Site bars.  
Full width Imagedata bars.  
The image to break up the visual width.  
Then everything else comment width.

Yes seriously, the nonfull width metabar clashes with how all the other site pages look with their bars. Please go back to full width already.

And before you say anything about the pony icons possibly being the reason why it wraps, let me remind you that images with two-digit scores wrap at my screen width, and apparently always have. If we’re going to try to address the issue completely, then it’s going to need a bit more clientside logic than simply mobile or not.
 
But before you stress yourself over edge cases and CSS being dumb, just remember that most of these complaints are in relation to two lines of CSS that, when removed, solve 90% of the complaints without any adverse effect.

@Princess Luna  
It is a distraction, yes. We never had this issue on the old layout.
 
Can we please go back to full width tags? The constrained ones look bad, and were fine at full width.
 
 
@Lead Pie  
This guy’s right. Stop trying to combine them. Please, please please separate the damned buttons again.
 
For the record: I said that I didn’t mind the icons. thanks for giving a bit of insight here.
 
 
@Zeb  
Zeb’s also right, but I want to add: That reasoning, that “making things line up” sounds like a dumb excuse to keep what is an objectively bad layout. Plenty of people have exclaimed their distaste for this grouping, and I have yet to see/can’t recall one instance where someone said that they actually liked it.
 
Seriously, you seem so dead set on consistency, yet the non-full-width, non-half-width metabar is the most inconsistent thing currently.
 
 
So, can we please do the following:  

On the profile page:  
>Content creator? Make a link!  
>[ Create new user link ]
 
What the heck is this? What’s the point of making it stand out so much? More importantly, how frequently people add their links for verification? It’s a huge annoying eyesore, especially giving the fact that only mods/admins can edit or remove these links - there’s no point in advertising it by turning it into a button or adding extra advertisement on top of it. It breaks the uniform design that existed prior.

@DarthBarf  
I don’t see how it’s an eyesore at all. It’s literally just a button, like any of the others on this site. The link page itself hasn’t changed any, and still makes it perfectly clear that mods have control over them once they’re verified - and they do still need to be verified.
 
The whole point is to get more artists to use this feature. I’m not seeing the problem?

@DarthBarf  
Only you can see that button and only on your own profile page. What’s the issue?

@DarthBarf  
I say it’s pretty useful. Especially for new users. I’ve had to explain enough times already how to make yourself verified, so this will make it so much easier for everyone.

@DarthBarf  
I’m very confused as to why seeing a button on your profile page for if you need another user link upsets you. Do you go to your profile page to admire the beauty of it? Is some other, more important feature being pushed out of the way by seeing it?
 
Also, in my experience, about half of artists don’t know that user links exist, let alone how to make one, and many didn’t understand how to get a second one after their first (because there was no UI clue on profile pages once they got their first). This is rather needed especially now that we’ve moved to a setup that requires multiple user links when you want multiple associated tags.

In further defense of the user link button, I don’t think consistency for consistency’s sake is all that valid an argument here, considering that the way to access and edit other things in the profile sidebar - clicking the title of the section - isn’t all that obvious. I mean, just look at the “About Me” section. Anywhere else on the site there is user-editable content, there is a button either labeled “edit,” or the pencil icon signifying the same.
 
If it were up to me, I’d do away with the title link in both the user links and about me section. The first was made redundant by the (much more intuitive and purposeful) button, the second would perhaps be better served by a pencil-icon edit button either in the title bar or in the text itself, whatever we decide on for image descriptions.
 
Though if we really want to be consistent, I’d copy the style guide from other sections on that page, and put a link after the plaintext title, the way Recent Comments has a “View all” link. So, for user links, perhaps an “Add link” link, and for About Me, an “Edit” link.

@Princess Luna  
>admiring  
Mocking your content creators is not the best course of action. I set it as bookmark for Derpi, so the unceasing flow of new art would not distract me from what I was supposed to do.

I see no issue with a ‘Create new user link’ button on your profile, it isn’t distracting.

The metabar is looking much better with everything together in unity and width equal to the page! Glory to Starlight Glimmer!

@WingbeatPony  
Unfortunately I’m pretty sure this is just a copy of some old version of the site’s code. Notice how the VS and DS buttons are still there, the icon’s missing from the Post button, etc.

Yes, thank you for reminding me just how much better the old metabar is.  
 
vs  

 
Everything’s grouped up and left-aligned, no moronic spacing between things, full length, separate buttons. It really is the better one.

Upcoming metabar and header changes, numbers maxed to show worst-case:  
 
Filter icon and more collapsing of words were added to improve the range of the limited desktop layout (800px-1150px, formerly 952px-1200px):  
 
Mobile:  

 
Artist gets badges displayed, uploader doesn’t; sadly there’s no badges on my test setup to show this properly.  
And yes, that’s space-between but with three items. I wanted to use a grid layout to make artist line up in the middle column, but that will have to wait for a later redesign as it gets very complicated very fast.

@Princess Luna  
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