Pixelation 2.0

[eishiya]

A feature to create a PDF from a thread (with all images embedded) would be nice to have as well to save local backups of threads for offline reading

Interesting idea.  Is offline reading something you do a lot?

Not at the moment but I like the feeling of safety that comes with having local backups of stuff for times without internet access. The feature to create a PDF might not be necessary though as long as there will be a way to display all posts in a thread simultaneously without having to advance through pages(of n posts per page) or through some automatic load-more-posts-as-you-scroll mechanism. In that case a browsers builtin SavePage mechanism could be used to save a thread.

I think a minimal "reader view" or "print-friendly" view would be a good and more multi-purpose solution to this. This would be good for people on older mobile devices, people who just prefer to read with minimal clutter, and for saving as a PDF via the browser. The bulk of the work would be creating an alternate stylesheet for this, and providing a way to switch (not all browsers provide that ability, and most users don't even know how to do it in the browser).

[MysteryMeat]

As I said in the other thread, I very much don't like that first draft in the op. As long as it's not Twitter-lookin' I'll be fine, but please don't do that.

One thing you might consider in addition to the jobs and critique boards are informational reserves, or a wiki for commonly (and uncommonly) used terminology. For example, I used to think dithering was the same as aliasing.

[Zizka]

I think it'd be great to have some reward for people who give criticism, some kind of recognition which should be a bit more visible so to speak.

Could there be a way to archive as a glossary? For example, walking animations. Have an index where you get informative posts about walking animations. The search function can work, sure. This being said, some posts are more informative than others.

[eishiya]

@Zizka: The tags would serve as a glossary. For some posts being "more informative", the karma/kudo/thanks system should have that covered, I guess it should be possible to sort search results by their karma.
I think sorting by karma should only be available for (tag?) searches though, not for general browsing, so that the forums don't become a popularity contest the way most other sites are.

[Vinik]

Ah, this is awesome and spot on regarding every concern mentioned here

I suppose you got that "catalog" art grid thing on the third viewing option from the imageboard experience, that was exactly what I would suggest to steal if there was only one feature to take from imageboards. I am thinking that the catalog view tab could benefit from showing the thread title and details by mouse hovering, keeping it as clean as possible as a gallery when not hovering. Great stuff.

[Ai]

How to handle images is the most complicated thing to solve.  There are several options and each has different tradeoffs:

- first-class images attached to the bottom (or maybe top depending on the design) to the forum post

- arbitrary inline images uploaded and embedded into the post content

- Half and half; first class image attachments and inline uploaded images

- Half and half; first class image attachments, and allow for inline external links if needed

I want to say I got this idea from github, but I don't think that's quite right.. maybe MediaWiki/Wikipedia? anyway..

Footnote-style referencing of image attachments.
So the images you upload are shown with a number next to them, and you can embed that with something like

Code: [Select]

[img#1]. If referencing images from a specific reply is necessary, then this syntax could be extended to eg

Code: [Select]

[img#5.1]. It might also be useful to provide thumbnail embedding

Code: [Select]

[thumb#1] as this cooperates better with a body of text, particularly when you really only need to see *which* image is being referenced, rather than specific details of the image. Clicking on a thumbnail could pop it out (turn it into the regular fullsize image) and then you would be able to zoom it as usual.

IMO this solves a few problems:

* References can be more direct, which helps beyond the point of about 3 images IME.
* Images can be grouped at the bottom of the post but still used wherever in your post.
* Simplifies the 'thumbnail selection' problem slightly, at least for prototyping (just enter a number, graphical selector not required)

I agree with eishiya that we should probably disallow embedding of external images, to protect from thread-rot.

My timing for writing this was not great, so I'll just say that generally I like this new design, for now.

[hANshOTtH3RD]

Firstly let me say sorry, i realize this is ~1-3/4 years old, but i'm sort of curious if this site overhaul is still happening? ...the site doesn't look any different than how i remembered it? apologies for butting in, but after reading this and the preceding thread i couldn't resist giving my 2 cents.

my main concern is that a major site overhaul could possibly(+probably) make it a lot more difficult for people on older hardware to access the site(where as new computers will still load a basic SMF forum). I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of people doing pixel art on older spec machines, and also with special/custom-software-setups(probably also out of date) on older hardware & OS. I'm concerned you would be cutting out a sizable portion of the user-base. Perhaps I am just biased because I am sort of one of those people myself(I know it's a "security risk", but life doesn't leave me enough time to keep everything updated, and new and always backed up). I'm really concerned any site overhaul could seriously change this place, and not necessarily for the better.

That said, maybe I do agree with the assessment that traffic here has been kind of depressed more recently; and there are certain things it would be nice to fix around here, which I think if fixed would make the whole place more attractive to users. For one the News/Activities/Featured list at the top under the banner never changes, and some of those threads are 4-5 year old. Perhaps it would be a good place to start by occasionally updating the featured threads. other than that I don't think the site needs much change(maybe more activities). perhaps someone could build an associated wiki or blog that could run in its own subdomain, along side the same SMF forum; kind of like other sites do:

https://www.sfml-dev.org/index.php
 
https://www.tigsource.com

(I suppose instead of a blog you could make a gallery)

...actually there are a number of possible improvements which i think could be made without replacing SMF, like pretty url's or post/topic thumbnails.

you mentioned user appreciation: perhaps you could add a leaderboard based on most posts+replies(+options like month, year, all-time), though from my experience on reddit and stackexchange, it's my opinion that adding karma and rep doesn't necessarily improve things. As for personalization: I like how pixelation already allows others to view all posts by a given user, I'm not sure adding a follow button would really change much(also it might fracture the community)...perhaps better profile pages would be nice as mentioned.

About sharing: it might be good to look into "facebook og(open graph)" and "twitter cards", although I sort of disagree with adding like-buttons and such(just puts me off)...also about offline reading, I'm pretty sure SMF supports xml/rss-feeds, so that's another shark down.

IMPORTANT: activities & challenges are a good way to attract interest, you should have more of those(but not too many; every week is too much) ...and more time for submissions(72 hours is asking a lot from an amateur) I don't really understand why the hex corpse is on pause; if maintenance is an issue couldn't submissions and deadlines be structured in a way to minimize this? I really like how the collab's here are conducted properly(no peaking), I think it leads to more creativity from the participants.

...anyway, a few more sub-boards would be nice maybe(idk)?...search does need improvement i guess...and it might be good to do something about all the old threads with dead link images...this is all coming from someone who doesn't use Discord(just fyi).

So apologies for the long rant, I'm just concerned the site is going to change, and I won't be able to use it the same way anymore... i know, how selfish of me

[MysteryMeat]

Firstly let me say sorry, i realize this is ~1-3/4 years old, but i'm sort of curious if this site overhaul is still happening? ...the site doesn't look any different than how i remembered it? apologies for butting in, but after reading this and the preceding thread i couldn't resist giving my 2 cents.

pretty sure its dead, bro. After the big moderation schism over that stupidity in the discord server the website's been on life support, whereas before it was only struggling in rehab.

[hANshOTtH3RD]

Well I don't really use discord, so sadly i don't know anything about that... Like I said though, i really don't think the site needs much changing to draw in more users. perhaps it would be nice if you could see a preview of each board on the main page, like this but under each board, and showing only posts for each specific board(perhaps also make the lists collapsible). I think this would make cruising the site for new stuff just a little easier.

...also, caching images would be good to fix all the dead links.

...and a better(& restful) search function would be nice(perhaps incorporating #tags, speaking of which, how do I tag things? where is this explained?).

...and don't let me forget! seams small, but i find it makes a big difference, is Having All Images Be Zoomable. there are some images in different posts, including some official thread-starters, that are not zoomable. how do we critique(or inspect) if we cannot zoom? i made a little widget to help with this btw.

[eishiya]

how do I tag things? where is this explained?

I think tagging is something only moderators can do, it's only used to archive good threads.