# Thoughts on commonly requested features



## Fuzzypaws (Jul 14, 2008)

So a number of feature requests for the FA interface keep coming up repeatedly.  Just thought I'd weigh in with my moneybin of cents and make some related suggestions of my own, and group them all in one place to make it easy to keep track of.


*Comment Editing:* Ostensibly to correct typos and stuff.  I can see the point, up to a point. But there's the issue that this is the internet and it is filled with griefers and hyper-sensitive wastes of flesh, people well known for editing comments after people have already replied to them in order to change / gut the context of posts made in response.  And there are a larger than usual number of these drama whores in our fandom.  As such:


Any editing function HAS to timestamp the edited post with "So-and-so edited this post on such-and-such time."  This would probably be good to mandate even if the timespan for editing is limited.
It might be nice to have an evidence chain like on wikipedia that is created when a post is edited.  So anyone can go back and look at what it used to say and there's nothing you can do about it.  If you were a douche it's there for all to see.
Honestly, I would recommend that editing be limited to one hour after posting or until someone replies to your post, whichever comes first, at which point you can no longer edit.  But I know people will bitch and moan so I don't see that as being likely.
One way to stave off edit being so necessary is to implement a little feature called Preview.  It's been a feature of forums on the internet since the 20th century, so why isn't it a feature of FA?

*Search:* Everyone's favorite whipping boy.  Everyone wants it, including me, and honestly it shouldn't be hard to implement since sites much smaller than this one manage to have working search - even working full-text search in most cases!  So the codebase must be truly and epicly farked for search not to work.  Even so...  If what it takes to get search is to impose limitations and bar full-text searching, then let it be so.


Tags should be implemented and search should be able to find by tags, like on FAP.  _However,_ FAP's implementation leaves something to be desired and it's something we can do better on.  FAP's tag cloud is painfully literal and single-minded, and doesn't do fuzzy in the least; if you search for "paw" on FAP you _will not_ get any submissions or journals tagged with "paws" or "footpaw" or the like.  That's obviously not ideal.
Because of the griefers mentioned earlier, I'm not sure if I'd suggest allowing viewers to add tags to a journal or post's tag cloud, like on FAP.  I can see that this is especially useful for artists who might not get around to their older works (especially if they have a lot), or people who just have vanished.  But if you implement it, viewer tagging should have its own notification, so artists know what their viewers are doing and aren't surprised to look at a picture and see a bunch of tags they didn't know about. Likewise, viewer tags should be traceable so everyone knows who added them, and the mods can take action if appropriate; click on a small icon beside the tag, perhaps, or just click on the Viewer Tags heading itself to see a master list. 
Regardless of any tags or lack thereof, search should at least be able to find image titles, journal titles, and artist/author names, which is another thing FAP doesn't do.  Unless one or more words in the image title happen to also be tags, you can't search for an image by title on FAP, and once again you are hit with the lack of fuzzy searching.  
Have I mentioned being able to at least partial fuzzy searching with word fragments?  It would be nice to, for example, search for Mon and find both digimon and pokemon, or search for Griffin and in addition to finding all the posts titled or tagged with the word Griffin also find stuff by artists like RickGriffin.  (And if you're feeling particularly ambitious, you might even fuzzy search for related words like Gryphon or Griffon but I am not going to hold my breath for that - just having a search with partial word capability at all would be enough to start.)
If subscriber status is implemented, I recommend that subscribers be able to see more search results per page; likewise, they would be able to see more per page in general while browsing the site.  Perhaps if you have full-text searching as an option, only subscribers can access it, therefore reducing the load on the server; I see this as fair.  I would recommend _against_ anything like what DA does, though, where only subscribers can see anything beyond the most recent X submissions fitting the search description.  Everyone should be able to see everything possible from the search methods that are available to them.
 Being able to limit a search to within only a limited subset of the site (like your or any other specific person's gallery or favorites) would be totally awesome.  All gallery and favorite pages could come complete with a search bar that would be by default limited to that subset of the site, in addition to the master search bar at the top or bottom of the page.

*Customization:* People have repeatedly suggested being able to change the layout, formatting, CSS elements etc on each individual user page.  Freeform user modification like that is a terribly horribly monstrously bad idea.  We would end up with an unusable myspace mess, pages with white backgrounds and white text or horrible ugly flashing seizure BS everywhere.  So, no thanks.  There ARE subsets of customization that could be viable though.  


As I see it, the only workable means of implementing userpage customization is if users are able to assemble their page from a toolbox of pre-approved components.  Said components would have already been vetted by the site administration for non-suckage.  Components include things like color schemes, backgrounds, fonts, page subsections, etc.  If you do implement subscriber status, I would recommend limiting this toolbox page assembly to subscribers only, as a nice status symbol in addition to the little star / pawprint / whatever by the username.
I would like the option to have a "profile picture," an image of decent size visible on your user page to set up who you are.  Hell, Dragoneer himself suggested this in an FA suggestions page on the forums a couple years ago.  Still waiting on that.  If you do have subscriber status and toolbox customization, this would be an excellent example of the sort of toolbox component that people could add to their pages.  Even if you don't implement page customization as noted in the prior bullet point, this would still be a great feature to see by itself.
As it stands, people can upload multiple avatars to the site but can only have one global avatar set at a time.  Certainly I can see setting one avatar as your "default" avatar, which is what people would see when they go to your page and which would be the default avatar when you post submissions, journals, and comments.  However, it can't be too hard to have a setup like Livejournal where when you go to post a new submission, journal, or comment, you can choose from a drop-down of all your avatars, therefore choosing one appropriate to the situation or to your mood.  By the by, expanding the limit on the number of avatars you can have is, again, another excellent option for a subscriber feature.

*Folders:* Folders can be seen as a subset of page customization, but I think they're important enough to get their own section.  I've heard some people say that with tags, folders are not needed.  I disagree strongly with this sentiment.  Tags are useful for searching, but not so great for organizing stuff within an individual gallery.  The gallery and scraps can be overwhelmed with lots and lots of submissions over time, and also don't always feel right for stuff like submitting art that has been done for you by other people.  (One of the reasons why I haven't posted any of the art that has been done for me.)


The first and most important rule - no matter how you organize things into folders, they should still all be visible as a lump in the main gallery and scraps.  Folders should be to make it easier to find specific categories of submissions, not to force viewers to play hide-and-go-seek to find submissions.
The individual user should be able to name the folders, not have to select from a small subset of preapproved categories.  This is a no-brainer and shouldn't even have to be mentioned.
The total number of folders should be limited so that it doesn't get out of hand.
I recommend that no subfolders be allowed, generally.  In the event of a subscriber model, though, I would be amenable to subscribers being able to create subfolders one (1) layer deep at most, so that someone who does several different comics would be able to have a subfolder for each comic.
I recommend that users be able to organize their favorites into folders too.  All the strictures listed above would still apply.  That way, if you feel like it you can have a folder just for pictures of your character, or a folder for pictures of or by your friends.  And we all know furs on this site, a few high-profile ones at that, who only favorite stuff by their significant others; well, they could have a folder for their SO and still be able to fav other stuff if they wanted.
I guess journals could be foldered also, but I don't see nearly as much point to it overall.  Still, I wouldn't complain if it was implemented.

*Miscellaneous Crap:* Since not everything is big enough to get its own section!  Many of these are things I've seen other people suggest before me.  Others are things I would suggest myself or have seen implemented elsewhere.


I would have devoted a whole section to notes, including threading them etc... except I see from screenshots in Eevee's posts that to at least some extent that is already being worked on for Ferrox.  So good show, cheerio, keep it up, et cetera ad infinitum.
If tags are implemented, it would be nice to be able to watch tags in addition to watching individual artists.  That way, you could, say, watch the "paw" tag and see all posts that get submitted with that tag.  
Timestamps.  Every journal, submission, and comment NEEDS TIMESTAMPS.  A generic "1 hour ago" or "1 year ago" doesn't really help at all.  Although this becomes most egregiously an issue during kiriban brawls, it's still an utterly basic feature that we should be able to implement in the current interface right away and not have to wait for Ferrox.  What's so hard about it?
Speaking of Kiribans.  What the holy fur is up with the view tracking counters on this site?  Sometimes they'll shoot up but far more often they will just sit there and not move at all, or move far more slowly than the number of actual hits should indicate.  I have on more than one occasion seen a userpage, submission, etc counter not move at all despite coming to a page 5 or more times in the interim, and seeing other people post comments there.  
And then moving on from counters, it would be nice to be able to click on the counter tracking how many people have faved an item and see all their names, as on other sites like Deviant and FAP.
In addition to watching people and having people watch you, it would be nice to be able to go in and tag specific people as friends.  You could then tag certain journals, submissions, or pieces of personal information (like your AIM screenname, for instance) as viewable by friends only.  I'm sure the mere mention of this will now drag out the people screaming "elitist!" though.
Multiple notifications for the same person doing the same thing should not happen. For example, if someone watches you, unwatches you, then watches you again you should not keep notifications.
I saw someone suggest this and I really liked the idea - being able to prune back your Favorites by nuking all favorites of a certain category, like pictures, music, or whatever.  You could combine this with tag cloud searching and do a search within your own favorites for everything fitting a certain tag, and then nuke everything that comes up.
Although I have seen some people suggest getting rid of the banner ads, or letting subscribers get rid of them, I don't agree.  They're furry specific, it's not like we're seeing ads for erectile dysfunction medication or something.  As long as the mods vetting the ads make sure no seizure flashy ads get through then I don't have a problem with them.  Just don't do google ads or any other kind of ads, please.  And if they really bother people that much, there's always Adblock.  If in the end down the line it turns out that subscribers and donators are not providing enough money to keep the site running, and you _have_ to go to ads or we lose the site, then okay; but in that case, subscribers should not have to see them.

There's more I could say but I'm pretty sure I passed TL;DR a long time ago.  Anyway, would be interested in what people have to say about all this, especially any people involved in the development or maintenance of the site's interface and backend.


----------



## Stratelier (Jul 14, 2008)

> especially any people involved in the development or maintenance of the site's interface and backend.


Far as I know that would be Yak, and . . . yak . . . .

Er, he's the only coder I can bring to mind.


----------



## Rhainor (Jul 14, 2008)

Very nice post, and I'm not just talking about the content (finally, someone besides me used the [list] tag!).

A few points:

It has been said numerous times that custom tags _will_ be implemented in the Ferrox update, as will a Search function.  I do not believe the proposed tagging system will allow _viewers_ to add tags to submissions, only the submitting user.

I wholeheartedly agree on the point of userpage customization.  If there's one phenomenon I've noticed on the Internet, it's the tendency for people who enjoy customizing their pages (and beg for it, when they don't have it) to turn said pages into massive eyesores.

Folders.  Dear god, yes, folders.  That is all.



Stratadrake said:


> Far as I know that would be Yak, and . . . yak . . . .
> 
> Er, he's the only coder I can bring to mind.


IIRC, yak's in charge of keeping the current site up and running.  There are others (Eevee and Tsawolf, to name two; I might be forgetting some) who are working on Ferrox.


----------



## ponyguy (Jul 14, 2008)

Thanks for writing this.  It's a nice encapsulation.  Hope you don't mind if I add a few comments.
The few times I've tried the bbcode [ list ] tag, I couldn't get it to work like the html <ul> tag, so I couldn't figure it out.  I should probably revisit that.

*FOLDERS*
The way folders are implemented in the back end, tags COULD work just as well as folders, because at a code level, folders are just a name in the database, exactly like a tag.  Tags can allow pictures to belong to more than one "folder" and it's a less artificial way of organizing things (e.g. someone has a lot of wolf pictures, and they have a comic that only has a wolf character on page twelve.  With folders, they have to decide which folder to put that page in, but with tags, they can still have all the comic pages grouped together AND have all the wolf art grouped together).  Look to Flickr for an example of how that works (and also how people screw custom tags up)

Also re: comics, the previous and next tags are terrific, but I'd like to see them a little easier to access.  Most people who do comics still don't know about them.

*TIMESTAMPS*
You may not be aware of it, but if you click on the "yesterday" and "an hour ago" text, it will change all of the dates shown on your page to the exact time and date, down to the second.  IIRC you can set that up as the default in your profile.

*Favorites*
I would LOVE to be able to see a list of who picked a picture for their favorites.  This has been pooh-poohed by admins as a popularity contest, but I strongly disagree.  Tracking back people who like things that _I_ like means I can check out their other favorites and be more likely to find _more_ art that I like.  Doing a "favorites" walk is still the best way I've found to locate the art I like, and I've found artists this way that I might never have found otherwise.

*COMMENT EDITS*
Good comments.  I think this is a can of worms, and I don't think comment edits are worth much coding time.  But I agree, preview before posting would be nice.

*SEARCH*
As I understand it, the state of the code base wasn't entirely the issue, though it wasn't helping.  Search DID work at one time, but it was hammering the database server so badly, it was slowing down the entire site.  Smaller sites have a working search precisely _because_ they are smaller.

I strongly don't think viewers should be allowed to add tags.  BAD idea.  People do need to be using the custom tags, because when the database is switched over to Ferrox, they'll matter.  Hopefully when they convert the database, they'll custom-tag all of the old work with the built-in tags that people have already picked.

*CUSTOMIZATION*
Good comments.  I like the avatar idea.  I've often thought they shouldn't be global.  It's also kind of annoying when people's avatars change in my shouts every other day.  There should be a "default" though, so that if you delete an avatar that is in use in another area, it will fall back to that.  You can start to see how this touches code in a lot of areas, so it will probably be a low priority.

*SIMPLICITY*
Right now I love FA in part because it doesn't have the complexity and feature-bloat of DA.  It's clean, easy, and generally sensible.  DA has gotten so feature-rich, it has gotten a lot more difficult to navigate around it and be sure that you're seeing what you tried to see.  Features != Improvements.  A FEW crucial features would be nice to see added to FA, but I do not want to see features added just for the sake of having a lot of features.  FA has remembered that people are coming here to see the work of the creators, not the genius of the code-monkeys (*cough* F.A.P. *cough*), and any features need to integrated into the present simplicity in such a way that they don't force users to have to adapt to some obtuse way of doing things. 

Thanks for your attention.  That's about all I have to say about that.


----------



## dragon695 (Jul 14, 2008)

2 more things:
1) Clubs like Y!Gallery
2) Having Gifts/Commissions/Collaborations galleries, so that people stop uploading the same crap twice or more!!!


----------



## Arshes Nei (Jul 14, 2008)

Just a note about timestamps, you can change the preference to the time of the server. Also, from what I understand about search it was a combination of hardware limitations and having to convert the database. Even DA had their search disabled and limited for quite a number of years due to traffic and was recently enabled after a complete overhaul.


----------



## Firehazard (Jul 14, 2008)

Fuzzypaws said:


> It might be nice to have an evidence chain like on wikipedia that is created when a post is edited.  So anyone can go back and look at what it used to say and there's nothing you can do about it.  If you were a douche it's there for all to see.


This forum even has that, in fact.  (See the bottom of this post to see it in action!)  Might take some time to code, so don't be disappointed if it's missing even when Ferrox launches; it might still be in the works.



Fuzzypaws said:


> Because of the griefers mentioned earlier, I'm not sure if I'd suggest allowing viewers to add tags to a journal or post's tag cloud, like on FAP.  I can see that this is especially useful for artists who might not get around to their older works (especially if they have a lot), or people who just have vanished.  But if you implement it, viewer tagging should have its own notification, so artists know what their viewers are doing and aren't surprised to look at a picture and see a bunch of tags they didn't know about.


It's hard to know what to say about this.  The same galleries that would benefit from this the most (people who no longer come here) would be the ones most prone to vandalism because they would never show up to see what happened.  So despite the convenience, no, sorry.  (Nice thought though.)  Since the last major remodeling of the site, in 2006, required old users to reactivate their accounts to even still be registered, fans of people who stopped coming should be lucky their favorite art is still here at all after Ferrox launches.



Fuzzypaws said:


> Regardless of any tags or lack thereof, search should at least be able to find image titles, journal titles, and artist/author names, which is another thing FAP doesn't do.  Unless one or more words in the image title happen to also be tags, you can't search for an image by title on FAP, and once again you are hit with the lack of fuzzy searching.


Seconded.  And while I'm at it, I really liked the way Search used to was (yes I have been here long enough to remember the old Search!): you could search art, journals, and usernames, among other things (I forget what exactly).  In the case of usernames especially, it would be really neat if it had a Google type thing where it at least suggests similar usernames in case you misspell it, something that's especially likely to happen with all the random, obscure, and tribal-esque names furries tend to use.



Fuzzypaws said:


> As I see it, the only workable means of implementing userpage customization is if users are able to assemble their page from a toolbox of pre-approved components.  Said components would have already been vetted by the site administration for non-suckage.  Components include things like color schemes, backgrounds, fonts, page subsections, etc.


No offense, but I'm not sure I would even trust the staff's designers to make that many themes that everyone would like.  We already have people complain about professionally-designed sites looking "hideous" (see the ongoing discussion of deviantART Green).  Instead, I'm in favor of a nice variety of themes for the user to pick from for their own viewing, because then we know for sure people who pick themes _they_ like looking at will be the only ones who have to look at them.   I would, however, accept a limited thing like dA's journal-customization, but the Journal is the wrong place for it.  Read on.



Fuzzypaws said:


> I would like the option to have a "profile picture," an image of decent size visible on your user page to set up who you are.  Hell, Dragoneer himself suggested this in an FA suggestions page on the forums a couple years ago.  Still waiting on that.


Having put up with deviantIDs and journal headers/footers for over three years now, I have come to the conclusion that there needs to be a better system.  What I'm toying with right now is the idea of some kind of "user info box" on every userpage that replaces what is now the left side of the current user-info banner and the "Favorite thisses-and-thats" below the Journal, as well as incorporating a largish ID image of a standardized size, and can be custom-themed by the user.  Being only part of one page, it could be relatively tolerable even if the user has no design sense, and limiting what can actually be changed would help too.  You could customize what stats are displayed (favorite furry movie, favorite comic, favorite pizza topping, etc.), add your favorite links, and insert small banners.  Mayhaps the link to the Commission Info could even be put here instead of the tab bar where it is now.



Fuzzypaws said:


> However, it can't be too hard to have a setup like Livejournal where when you go to post a new submission, journal, or comment, you can choose from a drop-down of all your avatars, therefore choosing one appropriate to the situation or to your mood.  By the by, expanding the limit on the number of avatars you can have is, again, another excellent option for a subscriber feature.


Eeek.  And you think there are a ton of unnecessary "omg i luv ur icon lol" comments NOW... *ahem* But seriously I can't see a major downside to that, especially now that users are just changing their icons every time they turn around anyway (the one possible argument might have been that it makes it harder to tell who's who).



Fuzzypaws said:


> If tags are implemented, it would be nice to be able to watch tags in addition to watching individual artists.  That way, you could, say, watch the "paw" tag and see all posts that get submitted with that tag.


This seems like it would be a great way to clog up people's message centers in a hurry.  And really, do you really want EVERY ______-tagged picture from Adam Wan down to cantdrawworthscat782 getting shoved into your Recent Submissions window?  I think 24 hours of trying to keep up with this would be enough to convince you that this isn't as helpful as you think.  Better to just browse to the "show all art tagged as ______", bookmark it, and check back every now and then.



Arshes Nei said:


> Just a note about timestamps, you can change the preference to the time of the server. Also, from what I understand about search it was a combination of hardware limitations and having to convert the database. Even DA had their search disabled and limited for quite a number of years due to traffic and was recently enabled after a complete overhaul.


Holy cats, I forgot about that!  They did, didn't they.  And it didn't come back up for all users until the release of v5 in August '06, if I recall.  Also yeah, the timestamp thing has been available as an option for some time now, and more recently it even stopped its annoying habit of _resetting itself for no good reason_.  I would suggest that a real-time timestamp be the default from now on, though, for the sake of the n00bs out there who don't automatically assume everything can be changed.


----------



## pengolodh (Jul 14, 2008)

One thing I'd dearly love to see, is some way of filtering the list of new submissions from the watch-list, at least by username. I fell very far behind on the new submissions list (and journals too) some while back, and have never been able to catch up. With the journals list I just gave up and nuked it, but I know there is good art hiding deep in my New Submissions list. I suspect if I could deal with the list user by user, it'd be faster to work through the list.

Some way of marking a user's journal entry as interesting, so I can find it again, might be interesting, as well. Right now the only way of doing that is to not mark as read the link to the journal from the list of journal entries. If that is implemented, I don't think it needs to be viewable to other people in the way the Favorites Gallery is.





Firehazard said:


> Holy cats, I forgot about that!  They did, didn't they.  And it didn't come back up for all users until the release of v5 in August '06, if I recall.  Also yeah, the timestamp thing has been available as an option for some time now, and more recently it even stopped its annoying habit of _resetting itself for no good reason_.  I would suggest that a real-time timestamp be the default from now on, though, for the sake of the n00bs out there who don't automatically assume everything can be changed.


I only ever was told to click the timestamp to change it to exact date/time, and that always reset itself when I opened another page, whether in the same tab or not. Is there another place to change this setting?


----------



## Arshes Nei (Jul 14, 2008)

pengolodh said:


> .I only ever was told to click the timestamp to change it to exact date/time, and that always reset itself when I opened another page, whether in the same tab or not. Is there another place to change this setting?



It was part of the user control panel on the left hand side of the message center.


----------



## Eevee (Jul 15, 2008)

Gack this is a lot.  Attempting to reply to entire thread.  From the point of view of Ferrox, of course.

*Comment editing*
Planned.  Obvious way to do it is time limit or reply, whichever comes first, yes.  Edit stamps are pretty standard; no question there.
Edit logs already exist for other things.  Comments should be no different.

*Search*
It exists, it works, across submissions and journals, both title and description.  I don't know how _well_, exactly, because we don't have much data to try it on.  I'm working on a db importer script that should help a lot with this sort of thing.

Pointing out though that search is _hard_.  Yeah, it's easy to have a quick "find documents with this word" for a small site and a small dataset, but useful results from an ever-growing assortment of documents is not quite the same.

*Tagging*
Implemented.  Needs a lot of sugar imo, including special tags (mature/adult, maybe more?) and suggested tags and so forth.
I want communal tagging and I have a proposal for it.  Frankly I think tagging would be useless without it.  We'll see.

You might get partial tag matches, but I'd rather try to find ways to eliminate redundant tags.

*Fuzzy search*
You are not going to get this.  You cannot have a full-text index and partial word matching at the same time.  Matching _prefixes_ still works, but due to the way an index works at all, you aren't going to get the middle or ends of words to work.  Ever.  Almost certainly.

*Search specific gallery/watches/etc*
Not entirely sure how feasible this is.  Filter by tags?  Sure.  Full-text search?  Ehhh.

*Customization*
Kinda far from being a priority, I think.  Getting _one_ layout going is a bit more important.

*Avatars*
Implemented; you can have multiple avatars, one is the default, and you can pick one when posting.

*Folders*
Planned, not hard.  Almost certainly not going to do subfolders, as they make the implementation significantly more complex for very little gain.
Was considering allowing it for favorites, too; might as well, I suppose.

*Notes*
Are awesome, imo  B)

*View counters*
Don't exist yet.  The obvious way is not intuitive at all and doesn't work well with kiribans.  But I am a stats whore, don't worry.

*Friends*
Implemented.  You can also, yes, watch either journals or submissions or both.  Or you can friend someone and not watch any of their stuff at all, if you're a dick.

*Mass nuking favorites*
I am not entirely sure I see the appeal here.  Why do you want to prune old favorites?

*Ads*
Get us the $1000 a month for hosting and we'll talk.


*Submission relationships*
I would _like_ to support series (e.g. pages of a comic) as well as versions (sketch, lined, colored, recolored, whatever, all of the same picture), but there are a lot of weird details to work out.
We kinda support collaborations and letting someone say "I commissioned this" without uploading the work again, but again there are sticky details to work out.


*Sorting watch notifications*
Yeah, been meaning to do that.  Could be slightly tricky to get right, though, asI am tossing actual concrete notifications in favor of a dynamic stream; what we have now is buggy, hard for users to manage, and steadily clogging up the db.  There are, in fact, around fifty million submission notifications and twenty million journal notifications sitting around.  For less than a million submissions.


----------



## Fuzzypaws (Jul 15, 2008)

Pawsome sauce, Eevee.  Thanks for the in-depth reply.  ^.^

I'm looking forward to Ferrox more now.


----------



## Arrow Tibbs (Jul 15, 2008)

On notifications: It would not be such a bad idea to have the system automatically delete notifications of journals and submissions that are over, say, a week old. I think watches, comments, favorites, and notes should be left alone unless the account hasn't been accessed in something like six months.


----------



## Strawkitty (Jul 15, 2008)

Arrow Tibbs said:


> On notifications: It would not be such a bad idea to have the system automatically delete notifications of journals and submissions that are over, say, a week old. I think watches, comments, favorites, and notes should be left alone unless the account hasn't been accessed in something like six months.



Week is way too short imho for submission and journal decay. A month or two maybe? Also I tend to use journals as a quick link for some of the artists I watch in these times of searchlessness. ^^;


----------



## Fuzzypaws (Jul 15, 2008)

Strawkitty said:


> Week is way too short imho for submission and journal decay. A month or two maybe? Also I tend to use journals as a quick link for some of the artists I watch in these times of searchlessness. ^^;



If there are certain artists whose pages you check out a lot even when they are not submitting anything, well, create a bookmarks subfolder for them.  =)

But hey, it looks like friends are implemented in Ferrox.  You can always friend someone you want to be higher priority and easier to find than a regular artist you watch.


----------



## Fuzzypaws (Jul 15, 2008)

Eevee said:


> *Tagging*
> Implemented.  Needs a lot of sugar imo, including special tags (mature/adult, maybe more?) and suggested tags and so forth.
> I want communal tagging and I have a proposal for it.  Frankly I think tagging would be useless without it.  We'll see.



I like the _idea_ of communal tagging.  But you need to figure out a way to reduce the specter of tag vandalism douchebaggery.  And on what is, frankly, a porn site that might be hard to do with anything short of communal tags going into a queue to be evaluated by moderators if and when they have the time, given tags like "dick" and "ass" that can have multiple meanings when applied to an erotic image or to a person or journal.  And adding communal voting to each tag that gets added would add code and database bloat.

Probably best to filter out all the obvious swear words though.



> You might get partial tag matches, but I'd rather try to find ways to eliminate redundant tags.



I don't know that it's possible to eliminate redundant tags.  You would need either a list / dropdown of pre-approved tags, which will cause a bitchfest, as the current system with only a few specific species in the dropdown sucks... or an algorithm that automatically converts a bunch of the most common tags down to one standardized tag (paw, paws, footpaw, footpaws, foot, and feet all being converted to feet, for instance), which then runs into the problem that you have to cover a _lot_ of words in this way - before you even consider there are a lot of foreign-language submitters on FA too....  

Also, it's perfectly legitimate to have made up words as tags, like a character's name, so if you like someone's character you can do a search for all pictures tagged with that character's name.  That is _completely_ impossible to manage with any kind of preapproval, especially given the number of people on this site.



> *Fuzzy search*
> You are not going to get this.  You cannot have a full-text index and partial word matching at the same time.  Matching _prefixes_ still works, but due to the way an index works at all, you aren't going to get the middle or ends of words to work.  Ever.  Almost certainly.



Well I know you guys aren't Google and don't do this for a living so that's acceptable.    Certainly being able to prefix search on the first few letters of a tag / submission would be awesome though.



> *Customization*
> Kinda far from being a priority, I think.  Getting _one_ layout going is a bit more important.



Certainly.  It's just something to consider down the line, once you already have it up and running and are looking at upgrading it.  



> *Folders*
> Planned, not hard.  Almost certainly not going to do subfolders, as they make the implementation significantly more complex for very little gain.
> Was considering allowing it for favorites, too; might as well, I suppose.



Thanks.  



> *Mass nuking favorites*
> I am not entirely sure I see the appeal here.  Why do you want to prune old favorites?



I don't want to, personally, but there's no reason not to have the option.  There's always people who want to "start fresh."



> *Ads*
> Get us the $1000 a month for hosting and we'll talk.



This raises an interesting point.  Out of the $1100 a month monthly bill for FA, how much generally comes from donations, how much comes from ads, and how much comes from Dragoneer's own pocket?



> *Submission relationships*
> I would _like_ to support series (e.g. pages of a comic) as well as versions (sketch, lined, colored, recolored, whatever, all of the same picture), but there are a lot of weird details to work out.
> We kinda support collaborations and letting someone say "I commissioned this" without uploading the work again, but again there are sticky details to work out.



I don't see how you can go live without at least series support.  Getting the other stuff in, including collaborations, would be awesome of you too though.  



> *Sorting watch notifications*
> Yeah, been meaning to do that.  Could be slightly tricky to get right, though, asI am tossing actual concrete notifications in favor of a dynamic stream; what we have now is buggy, hard for users to manage, and steadily clogging up the db.  There are, in fact, around fifty million submission notifications and twenty million journal notifications sitting around.  For less than a million submissions.



So, essentially there will just be one notification per submission / journal entry, but it will have a fuckton of flags, one for each watcher?


----------



## Takun (Jul 15, 2008)

Rhainor said:


> Very nice post, and I'm not just talking about the content (finally, someone besides me used the [list] tag!).
> 
> A few points:
> 
> ...



Yeah...only the submitter.  *morns the loss of obscene tags on everythread*


----------



## Eevee (Jul 15, 2008)

Fuzzypaws said:


> I like the _idea_ of communal tagging.  But you need to figure out a way to reduce the specter of tag vandalism douchebaggery.


I am aware and thinking about it.  If I can't do it well I won't do it at all.  It'll suck, though.



Fuzzypaws said:


> I don't know that it's possible to eliminate redundant tags.  You would need either a list / dropdown of pre-approved tags, which will cause a bitchfest, as the current system with only a few specific species in the dropdown sucks...


I can have a list of _common_ tags to pick from without forcing people to use it.  Combine with autocomplete and it should help a lot.  I hope.



Fuzzypaws said:


> or an algorithm that automatically converts a bunch of the most common tags down to one standardized tag (paw, paws, footpaw, footpaws, foot, and feet all being converted to feet, for instance), which then runs into the problem that you have to cover a _lot_ of words in this way


Eh, not necessarily; it could just be a manual list of known duplicate tags that I add to whenever I see them.



Fuzzypaws said:


> Also, it's perfectly legitimate to have made up words as tags, like a character's name, so if you like someone's character you can do a search for all pictures tagged with that character's name.


Given that someone could name a character "anal" for all they want, I'm tempted to suggest that characters be named with a prefix, like 'char:zigzag'.



Fuzzypaws said:


> This raises an interesting point.  Out of the $1100 a month monthly bill for FA, how much generally comes from donations, how much comes from ads, and how much comes from Dragoneer's own pocket?


I have no idea, but I get the feeling a sizable chunk is still out of someone's pocket.



Fuzzypaws said:


> So, essentially there will just be one notification per submission / journal entry, but it will have a fuckton of flags, one for each watcher?


No; when you go to look at your watches, instead of looking for an existing list, it will just look through all the submissions made by all the people you're watching.


----------



## Fuzzypaws (Jul 15, 2008)

Fuzzypaws said:


> I like the _idea_ of communal tagging.  But you need to figure out a way to reduce the specter of tag vandalism douchebaggery.





Eevee said:


> I am aware and thinking about it.  If I can't do it well I won't do it at all.  It'll suck, though.



It's probably going to require a multi-pronged attack plan if you want it to work.  

Community tags need to be listed separately from the submitter's own tags, of course.
Each item that is submitted should be able to have a "block list" of tags set up that the submitter feels are inappropriate.  This block list would of course be invisible to both the search and the community.  
All submissions with the Mature supertag but not the Adult supertag would automatically inherit a global block list of tags related to sexual acts. All submissions without either the Mature or Adult supertags would inherit that list and would further inherit a separate global block list of tags related to genitalia, swear words, and insults.
Any tags added by the submitter him/herself that were on the global block list would override the global block list.  Kind of like how in Adblock, you can set some strings as safe in your block list addition to the more conventional setting of strings as to be banned.  So such a tag might be added to your item's block list with a prefix such as the asterisk * in order to indicate it as a safe tag for that item.
Submitters should have the ability to line-item veto specific community tags that have been added to their items. Once either a submitter or moderator vetos a tag in this way, it would automatically be added to the submission's individual block list to prevent it from being added to that item again, until such time as the submitter changed their mind and removed the tag from the list.
Among many other good reasons for a "report" button on each submission, viewers reporting tag vandalism would be yet another use for it.
Only the submitter him/herself can add supertags.



Eevee said:


> I can have a list of _common_ tags to pick from without forcing people to use it.  Combine with autocomplete and it should help a lot.  I hope.



Autocomplete would go a long way toward making that work.



Eevee said:


> Given that someone could name a character "anal" for all they want, I'm tempted to suggest that characters be named with a prefix, like 'char:zigzag'.



That works for me. 



> No; when you go to look at your watches, instead of looking for an existing list, it will just look through all the submissions made by all the people you're watching.



All their submissions period, starting with the most recent?  All their submissions since the last time you cleared the list and so set a timestamp flag?  Either of these seems to remove the possibility of removing individual submissions or journals from your watchlist and keeping others to go back to later when you have more time.


----------



## Eevee (Jul 15, 2008)

Fuzzypaws said:


> It's probably going to require a multi-pronged attack plan if you want it to work.
> ...


I vaguely have a plan.  Kinda wish I had a ferrox forum so I could post proposals  :V



Fuzzypaws said:


> All their submissions period, starting with the most recent?  All their submissions since the last time you cleared the list and so set a timestamp flag?


By default (well, probably), all of them starting with the first one you haven't looked at, much like an RSS reader.



Fuzzypaws said:


> Either of these seems to remove the possibility of removing individual submissions or journals from your watchlist and keeping others to go back to later when you have more time.


Creating tens of thousands of notifications when someone uploads art is not really a good solution for this.  You can go back in time in your watchstream, you can bookmark, you can put it in a temporary "look at this later" fav folder, you can open it in a new tab and get to it later, etc etc.

Of course, for all I know this is not nearly the technical panacea I think it is and I'll have to go back to notifications anyway, but from where I'm standing this makes several things a lot more consistent with no extra work; for example, when a submission is deleted or you unwatch someone, your watchstream is guaranteed to be updated instantly.


----------



## Fuzzypaws (Jul 15, 2008)

Eevee said:


> I vaguely have a plan.  Kinda wish I had a ferrox forum so I could post proposals  :V



Well hey, there's always threads like this.  =)  And I don't think my own proposal is too shabby but I'm sure it seems noobish to you.  ^^;


----------



## uncia (Jul 15, 2008)

Eevee said:


> I am aware and thinking about it.  If I can't do it well I won't do it at all.  It'll suck, though.


*g*



Eevee said:


> I can have a list of _common_ tags to pick from without forcing people to use it.  Combine with autocomplete and it should help a lot.  I hope.


*nods* 
Hierarchical (the fewer, the better) or non-hierarchical implementation for tags?
If the former, autocomplete can pull through the hierarchy neatly:
e.g. 
"lab(location/setting)"
"lab(species)(canine)(dog)"



Eevee said:


> Eh, not necessarily; it could just be a manual list of known duplicate tags that I add to whenever I see them.


Aliasing and tag synonym clusters if stored separately can be maintained separately via admin panels. 
(There shouldn't be any need for tech-side to keep arm-twisting the data into shape behind the scenes whilst there's more fun stuff to do, IMO).

Usual trick re. deciding whether to stick to singular (preferred) or plural descriptions and keeping that consistent, too.



Eevee said:


> I have no idea, but I get the feeling a sizable chunk is still out of someone's pocket.


Cerise still, afaik.



Eevee said:


> No; when you go to look at your watches, instead of looking for an existing list, it will just look through all the submissions made by all the people you're watching.


Explain further, please. At what point are item(s) for the list "selected"?


----------



## uncia (Jul 15, 2008)

(oh, and good discussion btw, thanks )



Fuzzypaws said:


> It's probably going to require a multi-pronged attack plan if you want it to work.
> 
> Community tags need to be listed separately from the submitter's own tags, of course.




Likewise admin-applied tags, IMHO. And preferably the uid of the user who applied the tag in all cases. Multiple indexing is your friend... 
(And if a troll comes along, wave goodbye to every tag they've ever applied (or created) with a few keystrokes).

Folksonomies can be a "good thing" but there needs to be an "credibility" hierarchy in place to help keep order. e.g. owner-applied tags can be over-turned by admins, admin-applied tags can be queried by owners (or over-turned if that fits better), community-applied tags can be over-turned by owners or admins. Any tag can be queried (reported) to admins.



Fuzzypaws said:


> [*]All submissions with the Mature supertag but not the Adult supertag would automatically inherit a global block list of tags related to sexual acts. All submissions without either the Mature or Adult supertags would inherit that list and would further inherit a separate global block list of tags related to genitalia, swear words, and insults.


Supertags... someone needs to sit down and decide *if* those are useful/needed and at what level(s) they're implemented in the data and user/admin interfaces. Especially with the added complication of separate "mature" and "adult" ratings...
Personally, I'd keep "maturity rating" as a separate mutex cluster (e.g. "General"/"Mature"/"Adult"; one and only one must be selected)
Not 100% sure how you're suggesting the usage here in terms of inheritance though, but it's kinda late.  The tag description table can note "maturity rating"and block usage of mature/adult tags as required: the submission per se doesn't require to "inherit" a "blocklist" and maturity rating can be the first-selected user tag/supertag on submission creation so there's no need to back-validate.



Fuzzypaws said:


> [*]Among many other good reasons for a "report" button on each submission, viewers reporting tag vandalism would be yet another use for it.


Report button at all levels (submission/user/journal/etc.) preferably and should ideally carry-through to automatic Trouble Ticket population (with an "admin note" at the appropriate level(s) if there's a separate admin notepad system, as there should be). Not rocket science by any means, but that's a separate topic I guess. 
Reporting via the fora still needs to be in place for all categories of "issue", however, to minimise the potential for admin abuse.

02c in passing, anyhow.
Cheers,
David.


----------



## RailRide (Jul 16, 2008)

Eevee said:


> ...  From the point of view of Ferrox, of course....
> 
> *Submission relationships*
> I would _like_ to support series (e.g. pages of a comic) as well as versions (sketch, lined, colored, recolored, whatever, all of the same picture), but there are a lot of weird details to work out.
> We kinda support collaborations and letting someone say "I commissioned this" without uploading the work again, but again there are sticky details to work out.



Sat back and thought about this a few minutes, at least for comics. How about:

--Submission has a second title (enabled with a checkbox during upload) that if filled in signifies that sub is part of a series. Series title becomes part of a drop-down list. (much the same as picking a 'featured submission' on the control panel.

--Submission has a series number that goes with the series title.

--Subsequent submission with series checkbox marked opens dropdown list with previous series names. Uploader picks existing name or selects 'Add New'

--System auto-assigns page number based on last entry in series. 

--Upon finalizing upload, navigation links are added to description field:
*If first in a series:* no links added
*Second in a series:* <Previous> added, <Next> added to first entry of series
*Third in series*: <Previous><First> added, second entry has <Previous> replaced with <Previous><Next>
*Fourth and subsequent in series:* <Previous><First> added, preceding entry has <Prev><First> replaced with <Previous><First><Next> 

Hope it's not too complicated. Might even be applicable to versions (but I didn't test the procedure against them)

---PCJ


----------

