Alicornutopia

@Shoal <33333 I may just encounter more bugs than you. Or hold myself to ridiculous standards, that as well.

- Because I'd upgraded the gallery edit icon stuff to use the Rails internals for the cute checkboxes, it had swapped back to internal ordering. I yelled at it, it now behaves.
- There was a bug where setting an alias then switching to a character without an alias did not unset the alias id, as suspected. (It would not have updated anything, as also suspected, because I wrote good validations, but it would have been confusing for anyone who encountered it.) This is fixed.
- Same character is now an option only if the character has aliases (or if the character is the only one in its template/lack of template, to prevent a crash Throne found.)
- For characters with aliases, you can replace instances with any alias (default), no alias, or any from the list.

And now bed, zzz. Let me know how things work.

Do template nicknames count as aliases by default, or do I have to set them as aliases separately?

Separately, and also part of why I think the "nickname" field ought to be deprecated.

There's a line item to integrate them; nicknames just predated aliases.

Edit: This is longer than I expected and I've been adding more to it. Feel free to read none or any or all of it as you please, comment on bits you care about or don't, whatever. A lot of these are issues that people seem to agree something needs to be done about, but I don't think we have exact ideas for a lot of them and that impacts our ability to do anything about them.

(I'm trying to make my way through issues in our tracker, so it doesn't get continue to get unwieldy. A lot of these I don't have strong opinions on or ideas of how to achieve them, so it'd be appreciated if people could respond and help me get them out of the way. :P)

(Relevant to issue #83) I plan to make posts with unread replies, on the Tags Owed page, have a bold subject. Does anybody have a problem with this? In other post lists it's used for unopened threads, but that's not really relevant here.

(Issue #131) Where should I put the "jump to unread" link? Maybe in the post paginator as an image of some kind, with appropriate hover text…?

(Issue #123) When you go to preview a reply, should the site prompt you for whether to save a draft? Should it just assume you want one? Should it silently make a draft only if you have no draft / if you have a draft autogenerated by preview, and not otherwise? (There's not, as far as I know, any way to currently unmake a draft, so this could seem weird if you don't reply to a thread for ages.)

(Issue #90) For the "add existing icons" page, are the main features desired just: (1) keyword displayed as text, (2) expandos so it's less slow loading the page? Anything else?

(Issue #86) I don't personally care about older browsers. If other people do, please mention them so we can consider supporting them? I assume we're supporting at least Chrome 50+, Firefox 50+, possibly Microsoft Edge and maybe some versions of Safari? Plus Android stock browser, Chrome on Android, Firefox on Android, Safari on iOS…?

(Issue #79) Should we prioritize a UI revamp for the characters icon/list view? If we make more than three view modes, we may need to decouple the galleries & characters option in account settings. Opinions? Do people care for the current "icon view" setup, with all characters in one group, or should we just split that by template and leave it at that? Should this wait until we have a proper filters/sort view set up?

(Issue #78) Does anybody want to help with documentation for a help menu? Topics could include what glowfic is, how to read, links to various introductiony places ("Particularly Good Threads"), how to use the Constellation interface…?

I use Opera on Android, both phone and tablet. I also use an old version of Chromium, but that’s temporary. I do not post from Android (or at all, but if I did post it wouldn’t be from Android).

I feel like it is a bad idea to have bold on a thread title signify different things in different places. Maybe the little "jump to unread" icon could be a different colour when there are no unread posts...?

#83: I feel the same way as Kappa re bold only meaning one thing, but would prefer to keep it reserved for unopened threads. Why can't posts with unread replies on the Tags Owed page just display a First Unread button there like they would everywhere else?

#131: My inclination is to put it in the post-navheader element (where the Previous Post button is right now)

#78: Just want to throw in my 2 cents that the "how to use the interface" stuff should be kept as separate as possible from the "what is glowfic" stuff. Distinguish between platform and content!

I realized there was an important part missing from my earlier comment.

Thank you!

Some general design thoughts/feedback on my use case, which may or may not correspond to other people's:

When I read glowfic, there are basically four modes I want to look for threads in.


(1) Threads which (a) I am currently interested in and (b) have new posts.
(This is what I most often want when I go to read glowfic.)

(2) All the threads which I am currently interested in, whether they have new posts or not.
(This is what I want when I'm writing up a glowfic reading report, or if I feel like rereading something, or if someone asks for thread recs, or if people are talking about something that happened in a thread and I want to go back and remind myself about it.)

(3) New threads which I have not yet looked at, and may or may not be interested in.
(This is what I want when someone's mentioned there's a new thread and I want to go check it out, or if I'm bored and wondering if there's anything new that might be good, or if I want to check if Alicorn and Lintamande have started another sandbox.)

(4) Threads which I have looked at but am still deciding if I'm interested in, and have new posts.
(This is what I want when I'm trying something by a new author or in a new setting. I open it, read the first couple of posts, sometimes I favorite it, sometimes I hide it from unread, but often enough I want to wait to decide either way until there's been a few more posts.)


Currently, only (2) is really supported by the platform (it's the "favorites" page.)

For (1), the "favorites" page works pretty well, but since it's my primary mode of viewing it would be nice to have something tailored a little better to it. Ideally, it would show only my favorited threads with new posts in them, and instead of ranking by recency it would rank by number of unread posts.

For (3), the "recent threads" page is OK-but-not-great (sometimes I don't get around to looking at a thread for quite a while, and it's a pain to sift through those anyway). Using "unread" and looking for bolded titles is similarly OK-but-not-great. (For one thing, the bold/plain contrast on Starry Dark isn't all that prominent, to my eyes at least.)

(4) is just a complete pain to do with the Constellation. The best approach I have is to go to "unread" and sift through looking for threads that aren't among my favorited ones; but there's no easy way to distinguish those visually, and certainly no option to view just those.


I don't know that there's a good way to provide interface for any of these uses, let alone all. But there's my data on how I'm actually using what we have, for whatever it's worth.

(<33333)