Alicornutopia

I'm the one who begged for character groups originally, and the main thing I need them for is so that when I am looking at the overall list of all my characters I can see the templates sorted into groups of related templates - particularly all the paired templates, of which I have a lot (Chainsaw and Eights, Lazarus and Kolya, Ike and Val, Rayne and Kingfisher, etc etc) - so I only need them to apply to individual characters when the character doesn't have a template, and I never need one character to be able to belong to more than one group unless there's a subcategorization thing going on (I could see myself e.g. separating out the Vorkosigans from the assorted Nexus-origin templates). I'm not sure how to fit this into the same scheme as your suggestions.

Possibly allow groups to be tiered, allow templates to be hooked to (many) groups, and allow individual characters to be hooked to (many) groups? Then templates appear under groups, groups appear under groups, templates could appear multiple times but it wouldn't matter if it were structured properly, and it would be in the positions the individual wanted them in, and then characters would appear in a separate "group-specified character" 'template' thing or something.

… In text, that sounds rather complicated, but I don't think it would be too complicated overall, and the code shouldn't be too difficult either.

(Or is that not what you mean?)

...Your description has lost me a little. Concrete examples maybe?

I'm having difficulty thinking of any concrete examples that would need such a structure, but if I wanted to group together the templates of mine that are Theospectrum, for example, I could do that in a single group. If I then wanted to group together my "morally ambiguous" templates (or worse; this is a somewhat arbitrary choice here), I could do that as a separate group, so both the "Goalie" template and the "Tyler" template would appear under both "Theospectrum" and "morally ambiguous".

I could then have a sub-category "morally evil" under "morally ambiguous", and then shove Goalie into that and leave Tyler under "morally ambiguous", so you open up the "morally ambiguous" category and have the "morally evil" category under it, as well as the "Tyler" template. Then I could place Opal (an individual character) into "morally ambiguous", too.

Talor Meirhun, for example, is sort of a Tyler but I probably wouldn't classify him as such if I had more groups available, so I might not put him under a specific template, but I could still put him under "Theospectrum".
You could have a group for "Vorkosigans", a group for "Nexus-origin templates" that includes this group, I could add particular examples of certain characters to a group, you can see the individual templates or characters in a group as well as any applicable subgroups, characters and templates can appear multiple times in the categorization structure if necessary.

I think that works?

Hmm... that sounds like it would work pretty well if I understand it right.

Suggestion: Maybe the buttons in the navigation (Boards, Recently Updated, etc) could be boxes like the page numbers?
Also maybe they could be spread out evenly across the top.

In Starry mode, at least, I would prefer this not be the case. I'm not sure about other layouts, but I think it's probably neater as it is in Starry, at least for me.

(I don't know about the default layout.)

I might like it if the navigation buttons got boxed backgrounds when you hovered over them; I bet they'd be more readable that way.

Oh god so much to respond to and my internet here is so bad but I'mma give it a try.

For posterity's sake- The new Monochrome layout is apparently not in fact TImepoof's doing, I thought I'd copy/pasted straight from the doc I was sent but due to "I have literally no idea what" the correct layout is not that, it is bluer and actually entitled Milky River and will be forthcoming whenever I have the ability to put up its CSS. Sorry for misattribution!

Character groups were basically a temporary hack for Kappa's sake. As you suggested, the ultimate goal is to have a character able to belong to many (with each character or template able to have max one group that is "this is how I am displayed by default on my author's character page"). However, the more people implement the hacky one-group-only version, the more of a pain it is to eventually migrate to the correct version, so once Kappa's characters were sorted I turned it off. I wasn't planning to nest more than Group > Template > Character but I'll think about it (and upon reflection it's probably not terribly difficult technically to nest them given I'm likely to go polymorphic with it.)

To Do link should now be fixed (and I tore out some of the completed To Do items on it, though possibly I should just remove the copy entirely). Thanks!

Things can totally be imported! There's already a scraper. It is mostly complicated by the following:
- In Kappa's specific case, and possibly more, there's icon matching issues. I currently match icons by URL, but if you're uploading to me/Imgur/elsewhere, the Dreamwidth URL won't match. I can try fallback matches like "icons owned by this user with the same keyword" but it's not built or tested yet.
- On the chance the above matching for icons fails, I have not yet built "replace all instances of this icon A with this other icon B" which ideally would exist before I started imports
- In anyone not me, Alicorn or Kappa's case, I have a character scraper I can run on a Dreamwidth community name, but it matches on character screenname so people would have to check their existing Constellation characters before I ran it on their account or it'd make duplicates. It also makes an icon gallery per account and has no template information, so it's non-zero work for those who request it. Particularly since I have not yet done "add multiple characters to a template at once" the way I have icons and galleries.
- Threading is not yet a thing
- Board subsections are not yet a thing
Given that there are no threaded posts in Witchlight and Alicorn and I already have our comms imported, I might start with those once the above mentioned necessary features are built.

Per page dropdowns I have placed on the To Do list.

Mark Unread is already a thing, a manager for hidden posts is on the To Do list with the aforementioned Mark Unread hack as a workaround.

I have added sort and filter options for Unread to my To Do.

The search for things in quotes like "Aether" requiring the punctation is a failing of the Chosen javascript library I currently use to make the dropdowns pretty. I'm planning to switch to the Select2 library when I implement post tags, to support select-or-create, so I will see if Select2 has the same problem before investing in fixing it in Chosen.

Not sure about the box buttons for menus, as I mention regularly and loudly design is not my strong point, but maybe it could be an account option...? Because I don't have enough of those, haha. Which navigation buttons, Kappa?

Pretty sure the links I'm thinking of and the links Timepoof is thinking of are the same links. Making it an account option might be overkill; different layouts can presumably box or not-box them and then people can pick the layout they prefer. But for Starry, having the links be boxed on hover seems like a nice compromise, at least to me.