Site Development Notification and Feedback Thread

This thread is for feedback on recent and planned changes to the site. We give you descriptions, screenshots, and site updates; you tell us what’s wrong with them.  
Suggestions for things we aren’t currently doing or about to do go here  
Bug reports go here
 
Ground rules (break these and you will be rapidly banned):  

Obviously, the hot topic is the metabar. It’s now spaced-out and uploader is left-aligned. The plan is to have artist credit on the left and uploader on the right, and spacing out seemed the appropriate way to go.  
There’s been a lot of feedback on it being not great on wide monitors.  
The main thing I want to know is whether just going back to left-aligned will be good enough not only for the now, but for when we have both artist credit and uploader credit (on opposite sides). Furthermore, ideas on what to do for the centered layout would be appreciated.
 
Additionally, the lack of “VS” and “DS” on the short-filename buttons has been a topic of discussion. The plan is to make a client-side setting for View and Download that determines which filenames to use, so there would only be the two buttons.

Thank you for making this thread. I think this is goimg to help a lot in the future.

@Princess Luna  
I think the info in the metabar sitting on the left in left-aligned view would be ok.
 
I’d think the same could apply to Uploader as well. So if there’s an artist, the uploader is pushed away. but if there’s no artist, such as screencaps or the like, The area on the left isn’t just empty space.

Why space out the metabar at the top? Now, instead of having all info in one relatively clustered space, I have to go out looking for these things that are on the other side of the screen. I rarely have to do that with anything else.
 
As for the centred layout, I believe that it should be the same as the left aligned one, but it’s just, y’know, in the centre.
 
I believe that “VS” and “DS” should be re-added to their respective buttons until this “feature” of yours is finished.
 
I do think that going left aligned for everything is a good idea. It will be the closest we will get to the old layout.
 
I know that these changes were done with good intentions, but the way it’s been done has caused a big kerfuffle, and some of the newer changes, such as changing the buttons, changing the spacing, and such, appear to be tangential to the original change, which was moving the uploader around. Why do they also now suddenly need to be changed? I don’t find that they do.
 
What exactly is it that makes it so hard to revert changes, and go back to what the layout was some three days ago? What hidden backend stuff has changed?

So what’s planned to be the default, and is it going to be obvious that there’s a setting to change the feature to the desired one?

@Princess Luna
 
@Zeb  
Not only do I recommend this, I think it’ll naturally resolve the issues of adding the artist credit if the content is allowed to flow inline and break almost anywhere it needs to.
 
As for the VS/DS buttons, I’m on board 100%. I just want to know: If the browser width changes dynamically (eg. switches to mobile layout from desktop layout), will this force all filenames to be short, or will it retain the user’s selected behavior and give long filenames on mobile? There’s an argument to be made for either one, and I think I could live with either one.
 
On the topic of artist credit, I think (if space permits) it should say at least something all the time: “Art by X,” “Art by multiple artists,” “Edit by X,” “Image uncredited.” Additionally, ’twould be cool to have it display the verified artist icon if an associated user is found on one of the artist tags.

@WingbeatPony  
It will not force it. Desktop just gets some words next to the buttons.
 
I think it will say “Art by” and then the first alphabetical username (or artist tag if no user links), with “et al.” if there’s more. We’ll see how it goes developing it.
 
 
Now, as far as metabar, this is what’s going up soon:  
 
The centered layout will for the time being get some side margins so that it’s just like this, but, you know, centered (no more full-width bars and uploader way off to the side).

@Princess Luna  
By “words next to the buttons” are you referring to hover text?

No, “View” and “Download”. Mobile just has the iocns.

@Princess Luna  
Hmm, I’m not really seeing what’s different about that, it still looks like sections of buttons and info spread across the full width of the metabar. Was that the right screencap, or did you change something subtle? If you did, the odd spacing overshadows it.

@WingbeatPony  
It’s kind of hard to see with dark theme screencap on dark theme post, but the metabar isn’t full-width, it’s the width necessary to not wrap when all numbers are maxed out, any extra width used to space out.

@Princess Luna  
Ah, now I see it. I think I’d like to see what that looks like at narrower widths, then, eg. mobile and limited display. I feel like you’ve made an assumption about horizontal space, since this metabar is still wider than the comment section.
 
I predict that there will be two major complaints: First, that the width is a bit awkward on large monitors because it doesn’t align to anything nearby (the closest element being the full-width title bar) and yet is not as narrow as it could be if it were fit to the contents (because of the additional space that’s still between parts of the metabar). Second, that things are still spaced and grouped like that; it makes for interrupted reading and puts links in awkward positions.
 
In short, I would rather have everything in the metabar huddled together in a full-width bar, and aligned either left or center depending on the overall page layout. The grouping and spacing of information is clunky and hasn’t provided any benefit that I have seen, aside from keeping related information together when line wrapping. The problem is, too much information is being kept together in that manner, and it’s resulted in some pretty ugly breaks.

@Princess Luna  
I think the meta bars being only partway across would look very awkward. Especially right next to the full screen top bars.
 
Only other thought is to have much less forced space between the groups of icons.

@WingbeatPony  
To further clarify what I mean about it being wider than the comment section: That width is a good target to design for minimum width in desktop layout, as it is just on the verge of switching to the mobile layout and is where things are going to look the most cramped. It also happens to be about the width of 1024px displays and is kinda why that width is a target to begin with.

@Zeb  
It does look awkward on a regular screen. The end of it doesn’t align to anything, it’s just kind of there.
 
Better yet, don’t have forced space between the groups of icons. They’re unnecessarily spaced out now, and just make it more of a pain to get to the buttons.

We can’t make it comment-width without taking stuff away at present, but of course we plan to take some stuff away. I’d considered taking away the words next to icons entirely as well, but people seem to want them (on desktop, at least).
 
For now, the next planned change is to get artist credit up.

Wait, then, will you give us a heads up as to when you make changes to the site BEFORE implementing the changes on the site?

Stopping in the middle of the page is really really awkward. I agree with Evan. Lets not force the large spaces between the groups, it doesn’t really add anything. And honestly, since you cant predict the width of any image. It’d probably be better to take the bar all the way across, even if the UI elements end sooner.

@GyroTech  
I agree, everything is left aligned in the page except that.

Before deciding that we need to rejigger the whole UI just for the artist to be at the top, could we maybe trial the old style, and just add the artist in? Might get suggestions that will take this all in a more positive direction.

@GyroTech  
Well, the problem is this isn’t the only thing they’ve been working on (right now, I can see the last thing in the changelog is a minor revision to handling font faces from one of the other devs) and there’s no good way to roll back this feature without rolling back all those changes, too. Plus, it isn’t just like rewinding a clock; all sorts of processes and cached stuff on the site means backing up a step can cause weirdness. If this had been done as a branch or done locally on a testing server, then yeah a second take would be pretty easy. But the minute those changes got pushed to the live site it got complicated.

Would you consider moving the image size information back down to the row below? I’m not sure how much it will clash with the planned future changes, but currently the bottom row feels severely underutilized. Moving the file information there also serves to group information unique to each image (image score, upload date.. etc.) closer together.

@WingbeatPony  
I mean…a git rebase might require a bit of manual merging, but I cant imagine it being that extensive? Obviously not everyone is working on the same exact part at once.

@Marker  
What do you mean by “bottom row?” The metabar at the top of the page collapses into a single line on a wide enough monitor, and it’s generally agreed that the description should just be the description now.