Sometimes... I think UI means 'User Interference'...

I didn't even know that "SoFurry" still was active, I wasn't on their website for ages now. And I concur, a good GUI should be important, and I don't understand non-descriptive filename, either.

Although I don't mind the webp format, it's more efficient than jpeg (just don't try to recode jpeg into it) and by now well-supported by my "unimportant, useless nerd OS", so I should expect no less from the world-class OS everyone uses, rrrright?

I tried adding WebP support to my oekaki a long time ago, and was pulling my hair out dealing with the 3 completely incompatible container formats. You have to read in the whole file and do lots of bit shifting just to find out what the image dimensions are. It's a mess, and I just gave up. I really, really hate WebP.

Also, I've found that WebP isn't actually any better than JPEG. The way it works is to filter the image before compression, which is kind of cheating (you can do exactly the same thing with regular JPEGs by using the JPEGli encoder). That's why if you re-save a WebP over and over, the image turns into a blurry mess, while JPEG will only deteriorate if you edit the data before resaving it. From a technical perspective, WebP is awful, which is why it hasn't caught on, and WebP 2.0 will be a failure, too.

yeah, i cancelled my account during the Beta. I know a few others that have as well.
I miss Yiffstar, which then became SoFurry. I went there for stories and now they want to be like some sort of phone app image archive.

You'd think that https://www.w3.org/wiki/The_principles_of_unobtrusive_JavaScript is some sort of lost tome of forbidden knowledge or something these days, not that anything else fails gracefully anymore either.

What's really annoying is when a site loads the text and images on a page - and then blanks the entire page because the browser doesn't support some new obscure scripting thing that isn't really important for anything anyways!

I use PaleMoon most of the time, so I'm well aware of frameworks not doing things the right way and leaving me to stare at a blank page. I mean, web developers have never really cared about supporting anything but the most popular browser, but I swear that graceful degradation is at an all-time low.

I started doing web development back in 1996, so... I've seen a lot of crap over the decades. It's sad that even after 30 years, now that the web is extremely mature, things still don't work because people just don't want them to.

Used to use Waterfox (which renamed to Waterfox Classic after a while) for a while (and yes, did use the Polly polyfilling extension with Waterfox Classic, which helped *some*, but eventually just not enough), currently using Firefox 115esr, may be switching to r3dfox in the near future though, I'll have to see how some things go...

Though yes, am aware of the existence of PaleMoon. (And Basilisk, and the several branches of MyPal, and SeaMonkey, and I guess I should also acknowledge the existences of Supermium and maybe Thorium...)

The problem with "updates" is when you have it and dev made of woke bloat they don't actually do anything but take off, cause problems picking fights, and virtue signaling. Then they all want to justify their existence so you always end up with deliberately sabotaged bad design so called updates so they can spend the next 3 quarters "fixing it" which is why good leaders keep a record of failures and fire often. It sucks for people that actually mean well but it stops bloat from ruining everything. Webp is a perfect example of such a forced failure that got corporated up via forced compliance. Along with the new windows and Ai hallucinated slop python coding it's what you're gonna see from here on out. And you can't say humans did any better. They are being dumped en masse for a good reason. Franky ai makes better product than humans who are intentionally screwing up. It's a sad choice between broken with a few unintentional flaws or broken with a ton of obvious flaws out there to make more work and still low key using ai. This is why I ditched the it/dev scene looooong ago. The happy hippie Activision/Maxis/Westwood days of code monkey culture are gone gone gone. Chased out by the woke reddit mods, pink haired retards that can't actually code or do anything but play candy crush all day but they are nepo diversity hires so you can't get rid of them and corpo everything as service crap heads. I honestly cry when I think of how things used to be.

You have made up a fantasy as an excuse to hate people. It's very sad that you're so bigoted as to try and shove your hatred into every conversation, especially using wild accusations that have zero basis in reality.

Funny... I actually worked in the field for years during the last of the golden age of game development. Did you??? I saw everything happen with my own eyes and I know who caused the problems that ultimately destroyed everything and led to doors being locked. And you're frankly one of those who would have locked outside minus 18k wondering "wa hoppin?" And history has been repeating itself since. So you can still find yourself locked out in the future. Cas lemme tell you buddy that's how capitalism works! Its preys on people especially those stupid enough to give the system the benefit of the doubt. Corporate culture is everything wrong with life. Someday you'll realize that when it comes after you while claiming to be your all inclusive family.

You made up this whole weird fantasy about me so you could rant about totally unrelated things. Seek help.

I think they remade the site from scratch only with volunteer work. Sorry to hear it doesn't work in your browser. That sucks. =<

Actually, it just occurred to me that they're looking for more web developers to help them out.
Sounds like you have a lot of lost knowledge you could put into practice if you're willing to be part of their team.
I'm sure it would be a huge time commitment and a pain. But it might feel more satisfying in the long run to make a difference for the site.

From the sound of things, it would be a case of needing to take everything they currently have and throw it out and start over, and they wouldn't want to do that since they literally just got done making it.

second time they've done this. In 2010 they did the same with SF 1.0 after years of work with no user feedback allowed and a two week downtime the site went live and it was hated. Toumal refused to admit he messed up and after 6 months of people leaving he said I'm making another new site to replace the this new site. 6 months and the new site was fit for the scrap pile. 2 years after SF 1.0 went live it was retired for SF 2.0 but the damage was done. A lot of those who left never came back. Not learned from this he's done the same again with SFX and with the mixed reviews SF 1.0 got he's ignored all the bad. They spent longer making SF 1.0 then it was live.

Honestly it sounds like it's one of those sites that might as well not even exist as far as anyone who isn't already using it is concerned.

It does seem like, for all the talk of furries being IT nerds, there's not a one among them who's capable of putting together and running a functioning website. Or at least zero overlap between the ones who could and the ones who want to.

Toumal's management of SF drove off the only real IT people he had. I think he has a few people that know only the most basic coding and one person who is young enough to be Toumal's son that is semi skilled at coding but still not up to this task at hand. SF became a toxic place due to how it was ran making decent IT people didn't want to touch it. The only people he could get to be mods were rejects from other sites that couldn't get on their staff. FA is far older then SF yet not only still works but funds itself and has 4 times as many people as SF. IB is older then SF 2.0 and that site funds itself and has twice as many people as SF. YS which was the first site predates FA and IB so that should mean they have more people today but they have the least. Toumal had a great base but threw it away and tried to copy FA with SF 1.0 which failed. If the people wanted FA then the real thing was waiting for them not some cheap copy. What was once the best furry site on the net 24 years ago is now ranked last. SF doesn't even make the top 3 spots.

I said to a friend I don't think SF is long for this world as the redesign is the worst. At this rate it doesn't have another reincarnation left in it and I think even Toumal might just let SF die next time so even if it doesn't break down on it's own it won't last as there won't be enough people there to warrant it.
Toumal is already paying for the upkeep of the site out of his own pocket and struggling to the point they lost their last host because he couldn't afford to pay it anymore.

I've tried to get involved with many projects over the years, including FA and Weasyl. I as so done with all that political shit. Some of these people have egos a mile high and are absolutely insufferable.

These days I mostly work on emulators and legacy tools. I don't care about web technology anymore.

Alright then. Just feels like you could do constructive stuff there.

They wouldn't listen. They think they know it all and will keep doing the wrong thing until people walk out like they did in 2010. I once many years ago asked the late Dragoneer if this was anyway to run a site and I was shocked when I got a reply given how busy he was and he said Toumal is a decent guy but this is no way to manage a site.
The only person who is even slightly competent on the SF team is the co owner who is half the age of Toumal and codes as a hobby. The rest of the staff know only the most basic coding and their skills are out of date. If you don't see things from their point of view or do things their way then they aren't interested. The whole site is held together with bad decisions, half thought out ideas and what change Toumal finds under the couch that month. Everyone on the staff at SF were rejected from admin roles on other sites either due to lack of knowledge or toxic attitude.
SF is a paper tiger, the tech they use and jargon sounds impressive on paper but doesn't work as is poorly implemented and every shortcut known to man will be used. That paper tiger just folds.

The site had real coders on it but Toumal drove them all off with his half thought out ideas and poorly implemented design changes. No decent web guy would touch him or the site. Even the few decent ones that stumble into SF don't hang around on the staff for long. Toumal is a real diva and his bad calls will have you overworked and hated. Best to keep your fingerprints off the train wreak that is SF. I know. Toumal comes off as nice but it is a front.

I'm not reading all of that, buddy. ^^;; I just know it's entirely volunteer labor keeping it afloat at this point.

So are other sites, the bulk of site staff if any don't get paid unless you're on one of the big boys like twitter or facebook and that becomes a job. These "volunteers" are the people who many were rejected from admin posts on other sites and when you see their poor performance and even poorer behaviour on the site you can see why other sites turned them down. Volunteer or not you still have to do the job right.
You don't get a pass for treating people like something you stepped in just because you don't get paid for your time.

Sofurry's business model is so bad the site haemorrhages money far greater than any other site to the point Toumal is struggling to pay the bills. Other sites either make enough to keep the lights on or lose so little it is only small shortfall.
If trolling was stopped like it is on other sites and they stopped trying to reinvent the wheel then the site wouldn't be so dead or have such a poor name.
Both FA and IB came after their first site yet both sites have over taken them.

No other site jerks it's members around as bad as SF.

I've wondered how Sofurry fares against competitor sites like FA, but it seems so quiet and I'm turned off by the new UI...
I appreciate how FA is old and new at the same time, even the current layout isn't full of modern bloat.

Ah shit, guess my one backup site ain't my backup site anymore. UI trends are just marketing buzzbabble encroaching on functional design, and whoever invented WEBP really ought to have their gonads smashed between two bricks every time it's forced on someone. And this site is definitely going to fold under the weight of extreme bandwidth hogging before long due to the uniformly clueless community uploading 300Kb JPEGs as 3Mb PNGs without comprehending terms like "gradient" or "vector graphic." Man, the Internet should have been left in the hands of nerds, not commandeered by football jocks. Honestly? That probably applies to the world in general as well. Enough with all this 'bellyfeel' bullshit steering the ship.

The web WAS created by nerds. They just had piss poor priorities and wanted to throw together all this cool stuff as quickly as possible to try to impress everyone.

HTML was just a rebadge of a markup system originally designed for government documents, because that made it faster to implement. The guy who created Javascript regularly brags about how it was created in 10 days (which is obviously more important that making sure it is good). I remember the early browsers that allowed any cookie to be read by any web site, because nobody even remotely considered the need for security.

It's always been a mess. Nerds are usually really bad at designing anything and rarely listen to feedback from end users.

I remember the first time I looked into jQuery because we were using it at work, and thinking "Wait, why isn't JavaScript just like this to begin with? What possible reason could it have for being so much more complicated, and yet robust enough that someone can write a better version of it in it?" Being made in 10 days explains a lot. I'm guessing the developer was running on pure caffeine by the end of it, if not the entire time.

Well, what I mean is that I think the nerds' #1 mistake was handing the reins over to marketing specialists with decades of experience making people want to buy shiny new things without looking under the hood. And now we have "vibe coders," who very well may never have even interacted with an actual nerd/expert in their entire lifespan.

I'd be willing to bet almost anything that there's not a single actual programmer among them, and that they're using some kind of off-the-shelf toolkit. It's the Unreal Engine problem of what people want to be able to make having grown too complex for any one person to produce, so they start looking into premade frameworks, but then the most popular ones end up being horribly built.

I have come to believe recently that the HTML standards themselves are part of the problem. Somewhere during the way-too-long gap between HTML 4 and 5, web developers got so used to hacking together barely-functional workarounds for missing features that it became part of the culture and HTML 5 was built with the assumption that it would stay that way and the best thing to do would be to make everything as vague and open-ended as possible. Two good examples of this are forms and media players. <audio> and <video> tags don't allow for any simple customization via CSS; instead you have to either build the whole thing yourself out of JavaScript or stick with the default. Text entry fields like the one I'm typing in now are no more advanced than they were in the '90s, despite the obvious desire to support some kind of formatting, so every WYSIWYG text editor is a bespoke JavaScript nightmare.

They have their own front-end processor, and they are using some of the latest features which aren't available in all browsers. There's no fallbacks, so if your browser doesn't have the latest and greatest, things don't work at all.

Aside from the bad visual design, they are relying on data attributes and Javascript to handle links, which is entirely wrong. Hyperlinks are supposed to be, you know, hyperlinks.

Just par for the course for modern web developers. They know what they are doing, they just... don't care.

I stopped using SoFurry a long time ago since it was very dead.

There is literally only ONE artist I watch on that site. I have no idea why he posts there exclusively.

Same with mine but I support them elsewhere that's not dead/dying/allowing AI.

I haven't been to sofurry in quite a while. Sounds like I chose right. I hope FA stays how it is UI wise.

Site is a joke, bad admin and the whole UI is like a bad copy of DA. Who thinks a bad UI, no chat, messy PM's, no shouts, no voting and no journals from a six month downtime is good idea.