Site Development Notification and Feedback Thread

Background Pony #1057
@byte[]
Would love it if they could all fetch/scrape and automatically keep whichever file has the best properties.
Background Pony #823D
wget
I did not say I use wget. But not having the ability to directly download an image, or link them to somewhere (eg in a post) isn’t great.
And I also don’t get why would the object storage mess up this feature. In html it is possible to assign a filename to any arbitrary url without javascript. And some object storage services can expose custom uris (filenames) too IIRC.
CDN caching
Yes you can take advantage of it. Cloudflare supports url rewriting, then caching the new uri.
Also who cares if the CDN has to pull the same image 3 times for 3 different urls? It will cache all 3.
egress-free
It is now. Until they decide that enough people are locked into their ecosystem.
And also, do you really think that for 10$ a month is reasonable for 1TB of data plus unlimited egress? I sure don’t. They are operating at a loss to lure in more users. Why does S3 or azure blob storage costs 2 times as much plus charges for egress?
who will pay for the upfront cost of that?
Where did the money gone from patreon/etc?
Yes owing your own hardware definitely costs a lot upfront. Yes its definitely needs work to put it together/manage it. More than the cloud for sure. And it will get obsolete/have to upgrade etc. It definitely can’t have two times the performance suddenly when needed. Colocation is not free.
But you know what you are not paying for? Cloud services. And also owning your own hardware does not mean you can’t use cloud services if you have scalability problems. You can just as well treat your own hardware as “another vm in the cloud” as any other vm in the cloud.
And in 5 years you would pay more in cloud services than the machine(s) anyway, so upgrading/throwing away is basically “free”.
Been there, done that.
And don’t forget to factor in that one more dependency on external services is one more thing what can break.
byte[]
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Verified Pegasus - Show us your gorgeous wings!
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
An Artist Who Rocks - 100+ images under their artist tag
Artist -

Philomena Contributor
In html it is possible to assign a filename to any arbitrary url without javascript
Only if the download is not cross-origin, for fucking braindead reasons
Cloudflare supports url rewriting
Doesn’t support changing response headers, which is the important bit
Until they decide that enough people are locked into their ecosystem.
3-2-1 rule
[…] do you really think that for 10$ a month is reasonable for 1TB of data plus unlimited egress? I sure don’t. They are operating at a loss to lure in more users. Why does S3 or azure blob storage costs 2 times as much plus charges for egress?
Do you understand how ISP billing works? Like at a datacenter level? If you are buying terabits per second, you don’t pay for stock (bits transferred in a given time period), you pay either for committed links or on a rolling 95th percentile basis of usage.
The fact that AWS and Azure and GCP are overcharging the crap out of their customers is pretty obvious because if you get an OVH box in Virginia (and they are a much smaller company), you can egress 1Gbps continuously for as little as $80, which would literally cost you tens of thousands of dollars on AWS.
Not to mention that Cloudflare doesn’t have to pay for most of their bandwidth, since they peer something like 80% of their traffic, and peering is free for the parties involved. Amazon has lots of peers too, but bandwidth is fundamentally a part of their pricing model, in a way that it never was for Cloudflare.
Scaleway’s offering has been the same for basically as long as it’s existed, so there is always that as a fallback if R2 does not prove cost-effective.
But you know what you are not paying for? Cloud services.
Yes, this is the unfortunate reality. In general, I would prefer to never have scaling problems too, and not have to deal with terrible failure modes like network partitions, but there are just not many cost-effective ways for a site like this to deal with the amount of load it users put it under and the price those users are willing to pay, so the cost savings have to come from using bulk-provisioned services. Object storage is one of those that just makes more sense with an increasing number of files because it gives you flexibility in choosing everything else to your needs.
Background Pony #9FAB
@byte[]
When Object Storage is deleted due to ToS, how long the site will be down, or there’s an automatic fallback?
Moonlight Bloom
Silly Pony - Celebrated the 13th anniversary of MLP:FIM, and 40 years of MLP!
Shimmering Smile - Celebrated the 10th anniversary of Equestria Girls!
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.
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Artist -

As a desktop user…there’s honestly nothing much I’d like to see in a redesign. And I mean that in the literal sense; the site’s design (on desktop) seems pretty much fine to me, it doesn’t need a massive overhaul.
I suppose my biggest complaint currently (if you could even call it much of a complaint) is that the site UI can feel a little cluttered, so maybe just reorganizing where buttons are/better grouping similar buttons/hiding some stuff in a drop-down or expand/minimize section. I know the bottom half of the top bar (“Images”, “Activity”, “Forums”, etc.) isn’t used a whole lot at least by me, so maybe those could be hidden in a drop-down menu on the upper part of the top bar (similar to the account drop-down, or heck, even part of it for all I care), and just expand the upper portion’s size to fill in the gap left by the removal of the lower portion.
Anything else would be more-less functional additions that don’t actually impact the design. Two things in particular would be image titles & live formatting preview on comments.
One thing I would not like to see, though:
For the love of Celestia, pleast do not make the UI all rounded! (A.K.A. what the Openbooru design did on a partial level.) Every site and their mother does that styling these days, and I’m sick of it. I’ve always liked the fact that Derpibooru has avoided that trend and kept the UI very rectangular with hard corners. This includes rounded profile pictures; just keep them square, it won’t kill you, I promise.
Finally, the last suggestion I’ll make is to please leave a permanent way to revert to the old/current UI for anyone who can’t stand the new one. Or at the very least please revert/change things that get a bunch of negative outcry.
I’ll be sure to make further posts as I think of things I want to see or do not want to see. I might even try to use Inspect Element to do mock-up screenshots of what I’d want to see.
Princess Celestia
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

Administrator
Devops
Finally, the last suggestion I’ll make is to please leave a permanent way to revert to the old/current UI for anyone who can’t stand the new one. Or at the very least please revert/change things that get a bunch of negative outcry.
Fully reverting will be impossible as that’d require us to maintain 2 sets of templates and a lot more themes than what we necessarily need to. However, if we ever add controversial things (such as occasional rounded corners) - we’d probably add customization options to disable them.
For the love of Celestia, pleast do not make the UI all rounded!
We won’t. It’ll remain very square-bordered, however I have been experimenting with rounding borders of certain elements, such as those that feel “detached” from the main structure. We’ll see how we’ll proceed.
Ciaran
ラ・ゼッタ - For supporting the site
Silly Pony - Celebrated the 13th anniversary of MLP:FIM, and 40 years of MLP!
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).
Crystal Roseluck - Had their OC in the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Flower Trio - Helped others get their OC into the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
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
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab

Senior Moderator
友情は魔法だ
@Princess Celestia
• The ability to approve images on the image themselves (use case: open image, watch it if it’s a video, click ‘Approve’ without having to go back to the queue)
• The ability to get to the Profile from a DNP Request panel (use case: currently we have to open the artist tag then go to the profile)
• The ability to send a PM to the profile requesting a DNP from the DNP request panel (use case: currently we have to open the artist tag to go to the profile)
cheezedoodle
Roll for Initiative - For Patreon supporters
A Lovely Nightmare Night - Celebrated the 12th anniversary of MLP:FIM!
The Power of Love - Given to a publicly verified artist with an image under their artist’s tag that has reached 1000 upvotes
Princess of Love - Extra special version for those who participated in the Canterlot Wedding 10th anniversary event by contributing art.
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Thread Starter - OC Tag Description Requests
Friendship, Art, and Magic (2020) - Took part in the 2020 Community Collab
The Magic of Friendship Grows - For helping others attend the 2020 Community Collab
Dream Come True! - Participated in the MLP 9th Anniversary Event
Silver Bit -

Moderator
TagZombie: AC15, Atk +8
I’d like for the tag box to include more autocomplete suggestions. Doesn’t feel like it pulls any/many with under 100 images.
Background Pony #1057
What would you like to see in a complete UI redesign of the site? There’s one in the works, so suggestions are welcome.
At least on desktop, I would want it to be broadly identical.
I’ve made some personal tweaks via userstyle/Stylus browser extension:
  • Search field in top nav bar expands to utilize empty space: .header__search { flex-grow: 1; margin-right: 2em; } .header__input--search { width: 100%; max-width: 100%; }
  • Top nav and image list pagination/current search string are position:sticky to the top of the window, but the dropdown menu bar is not. Also, when viewing an image, the image is layered in front of the sticky nav bar (ie. the space available for viewing an image remains the full window).
  • The current search string is moved below the results pagination so the pagination is always in the same location, not moved over depending on the search length. The search string font is slightly smaller to keep that bar of the UI from being too much taller.
…and a couple I consider bug fixes:
  • I’ve made the quick tag links and various others not overlap (link to bug report post) and also a bit taller for ease of clicking: .quick-tag-table__tab a[data-click-addtag], .profile-top__options a, .footercol a { line-height: 1.4; }
  • I’ve made the drop-down menus accept clicks on the arrow icon: span[data-click-preventdefault="true"] { pointer-events: none; }
Here are a few true UI suggestions:
  • A way to have the “Search terms” etc. shortcuts usable with the top nav search field. They’re currently available only with the search box at the bottom of the page. Maybe the ? (search syntax help link) would become an on-hover menu with these?
  • Everywhere there’s pagination, have it present both above and below the content. Some places on the site, this is already the case (forums, threads, image search, DNP list) and some places it is only in one or the other (tag page, comment search, forum post search).
  • Aside from where I mentioned above that I moved the search string down so the pagination would always be in the same position, I’d extend that philosophy to everything else: have controls’ positions always be constant, not moved depending on arbitrary content. Another example is in the forum post pagination area where “Search Posts” moves left or right (or even line-wrapped down) depending on the thread title’s length, or where certain information (like post date and reply count) and the Subscribe button are also moved or line-wrapped depending how many pages the thread has.
  • This might be controversial but when viewing the first page, I’d also reserve/pad the space where «First ‹Prev would be, so that the pagination numbers are always in the same position regardless of which page you’re actually viewing.
  • On the reverse search and the upload pages, when you fetch an image, all the rest of the form moves downward because the thumbnail(s) appear - perhaps that space could be reserved so there’s no jump? It might have to be a scrollable area because the quantity of fetched images is unknown and may require multiple rows.
Several things I could suggest are not so much UI redesigns, but instead the UI portion of more general feature additions:
  • I’d love to be able to change, or at least individually enable/disable the site’s keyboard shortcuts. (Does that count as UI? It’s UX at least.)
  • An option to show an image’s original filename - which can be helpful for tracking down a source if the uploader didn’t include it - could be nice. I currently am using a Tampermonkey script to make an API request to achieve this.
  • I’d like an option to display actual date-times instead of “X ago” (I realize that the date-time is available as a hover tooltip, currently)
  • It seems to me that since the “first seen at” date is gaining greater importance on the site, the date that’s displayed when viewing an image should be the “first seen at” instead of the upload date like it currently does. Actually, why not have it say both: First uploaded [whenever] by [whoever]; updated on [whenever] by [whoever]
  • I think “Edit” and maybe “Alternate version” might be worth having a thumbnail overlay for, like “WebM” does. (This is another one I currently have CSS for, but as an outline, not an overlay)
  • It’d be handy to have a way to assign a name to sections of a complex spoiler filter, so if that portion of the filter applies, you’ll see that name in place of “(Complex Filter)” on the thumbnail.
  • I use “Scale large images down before downloading”, and yet, the image is often still displayed at less than 1:1 pixel scale. This is fine - it’s good to have the whole image visible at once - but it’d be nice for the next stage when you click the image to be to see the already-downloaded file at 1:1 before moving on to load the full size file. (I’d hacked this in with a delayed CSS :hover but it’s annoying that way.)
  • I would love to be able to “spoiler” based on thumbnail file size for the sake of my slow internet, but this isn’t possible currently because thumbnail file size is not a searchable value, and also because “complex” spoiler filters still actually load the thumbnail (link to bug report post) and it might not even work anyway because size.gt: doesn’t seem to work in complex spoilers.
  • Present tags’ (short) descriptions and possibly their implications in the autocomplete dropdown of the tagging interface; color them based on their category. (Bold because I think this is very important.)

OH
MY GOD
I love that reaction so much XD never mind the original context
PUBLIQclopAccountant
Magnificent Metadata Maniac - #1 Assistant
Solar Guardian - Refused to surrender in the face of the Lunar rebellion and showed utmost loyalty to the Solar Empire (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Magical Inkwell - Wrote MLP fanfiction consisting of at least around 1.5k words, and has a verified link to the platform of their choice

IRL 🎠 stallion
I presume that any improvements to tagging behavior are out-of-scope when it comes to UI overhaul. If I’m wrong about that, I’ll bring them up here. If I’m correct in that assumption, then I won’t.
How many of the features in the Comment Enhancements userscript are practical to implement as official site features?
Princess Celestia
The End wasn't The End - Found a new home after the great exodus of 2012

Administrator
Devops
@PUBLIQclopAccountant
The scope of UI redesign is changing the layout, presentation or appearance of things, but not the behavior.
Also, to put everyone at ease, the vast majority of actual layout changes will be focused on mobile. The layout will remain largely the same on desktop, with only minor incidental changes. What will change on desktop would be appearance, things may be moved a few pixels here and there, because we’ll be moving to using rem as our primary measurement unit instead of px, and ensuring that all spacing is incredibly consistent.
Since all CSS of the site will be rewritten from scratch, obviously desktop will change as well, but the idea is that everything remains in the same place where it is now, and the flow of site use remains the same for desktop users.
Background Pony #1057
@TexasUberAlles
pony servers dream of electric tiny ewes

  • Aside from where I mentioned above that I moved the search string down so the pagination would always be in the same position, I’d extend that philosophy to everything else: have controls’ positions always be constant, not moved depending on arbitrary content. Another example is in the forum post pagination area where “Search Posts” moves left or right (or even line-wrapped down) depending on the thread title’s length, or where certain information (like post date and reply count) and the Subscribe button are also moved or line-wrapped depending how many pages the thread has.
FWIW: I did this for the forums, no claims about it being the best or most efficient way to do so, but it’s an example of what I mean - not that this would apply after a complete rewrite; I offer it as an example. Screenshot and CSS
  • On the reverse search and the upload pages, when you fetch an image, all the rest of the form moves downward because the thumbnail(s) appear - perhaps that space could be reserved so there’s no jump? It might have to be a scrollable area because the quantity of fetched images is unknown and may require multiple rows.
byte[]
Solar Supporter - Fought against the New Lunar Republic rebellion on the side of the Solar Deity (April Fools 2023).
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Verified Pegasus - Show us your gorgeous wings!
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
An Artist Who Rocks - 100+ images under their artist tag
Artist -

Philomena Contributor
@cdpaliden
The faster autocompletion was implemented first, which contained the association bits (the hard part). However it’s not clear when I’ll have time to finish this.
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