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FA ideas
15 years ago
General
before FA started to aggressively block programs which interact with it, such as FAGet and other harvesters (maybe not a properly constructed wget string, though....), I was thinking of some ideas to solve my problem of not really being up to speed on the FA stuff. Most of it had to do with doing what FA should essentially be doing already, which is to make all inbox data into streams which are appended on a regular basis (and also cleared on a regular basis).
Pixiv chooses to filter out a user's watched artists and displays them in a custom browse context, rather than keeping everyone's submissions in an inbox, which may be a bit heavier on the initial load (I couldn't say for sure) per user, but on a server-wide basis would have to push far less often per submission because there is no push to every user's inbox on each submission. That's the server's rationale for implementing it -- the personal rationale here is that I've got 15000 submissions in my inbox and there's no way I'll be able to view them all in a timely manner so long as I have more important things I've gotta do; contractual obligations and such. Same probably goes with most people.
My solution to that originally was to write an app which logged into FA and constantly nuked the submissions, while assembling them into a sorta custom feed on the client side and gave me pop-up notifies at an interval I set if I wanted, or just manually click to open a feed if I didn't. Part of the problem with this was that on FA's old login system, your session would expire if another client was found to be logged in as you, which apparently was done on purpose, if not for the reason of stopping 3rd party apps, at least as a happy side effect of their (formerly?) poor attempts to secure the site.
What FA really needs, if it can't completely adjust the tagging system to supplant the entire inbox, is to create mini RSS feeds for users which periodically prune themselves. In this manner, users can actually ignore content which is of no interest to them such as journals, and use their RSS readers to subscribe to content that is.
If FA were to completely rewrite the inbox and browse system, it should be made consistent with an advanced tagging system, which would probably simplify the whole thing. The DA paradigm, while cool when it first came out, is way too inconsistent to be easy to maintain and add new features to. When ArtPlz was in development, we took a tag philosophy early on, albeit with some strong moderator-influenced "category" tags, since back then no one was sure that such a system could really work site-wide and still be as organized as a DA-style one. Sites like e621, wildcritters and danbooru/gelbooru have proven that tag systems with a good community can practically maintain themselves.
Pixiv takes it a step further. Combining the advanced tagging seen in danbooru-like systems, they allow artists to set properties of submissions to allow for how much others can contribute child posts and tags to their submission. Any number of special properties can be added to a submission via tags or meta tags, making new features easy to implement and that such a system is forwards-compatible.
Pixiv added "manga" support later on, which was easily compatible with the existing system. One's "Watch list" is replaced with a custom browsing context which simply filters out all submissions by artist tag (with only the artists you watch tagged in the search query, automatically), again, totally compatible with the existing paradigm of tag-based browsing, with no crazy inbox stuff necessary for the bulk of the work server-side. Again, Pixiv took it a step further with regards to favorites, as when making favorites, the user can add their own personal tags to filter them out when using the browser in a favorites context. This is great for watchers who would like to organize or search their favorites, especially those who have a lot of them.
In many cases, as FA grows, the system which we currently have will continue to show its age, and the limitations will become more apparent over time. With no API to interface with the site (and worse, active discouragement of any client interface outside the browser whatsoever), working around these limitations will be restricted to the existing developer staff, while the rest of the users will simply have to suffer in waiting.
I once again will hope that FA will reconsider opening up 3rd party client interfacing with the site in the near future.
Pixiv chooses to filter out a user's watched artists and displays them in a custom browse context, rather than keeping everyone's submissions in an inbox, which may be a bit heavier on the initial load (I couldn't say for sure) per user, but on a server-wide basis would have to push far less often per submission because there is no push to every user's inbox on each submission. That's the server's rationale for implementing it -- the personal rationale here is that I've got 15000 submissions in my inbox and there's no way I'll be able to view them all in a timely manner so long as I have more important things I've gotta do; contractual obligations and such. Same probably goes with most people.
My solution to that originally was to write an app which logged into FA and constantly nuked the submissions, while assembling them into a sorta custom feed on the client side and gave me pop-up notifies at an interval I set if I wanted, or just manually click to open a feed if I didn't. Part of the problem with this was that on FA's old login system, your session would expire if another client was found to be logged in as you, which apparently was done on purpose, if not for the reason of stopping 3rd party apps, at least as a happy side effect of their (formerly?) poor attempts to secure the site.
What FA really needs, if it can't completely adjust the tagging system to supplant the entire inbox, is to create mini RSS feeds for users which periodically prune themselves. In this manner, users can actually ignore content which is of no interest to them such as journals, and use their RSS readers to subscribe to content that is.
If FA were to completely rewrite the inbox and browse system, it should be made consistent with an advanced tagging system, which would probably simplify the whole thing. The DA paradigm, while cool when it first came out, is way too inconsistent to be easy to maintain and add new features to. When ArtPlz was in development, we took a tag philosophy early on, albeit with some strong moderator-influenced "category" tags, since back then no one was sure that such a system could really work site-wide and still be as organized as a DA-style one. Sites like e621, wildcritters and danbooru/gelbooru have proven that tag systems with a good community can practically maintain themselves.
Pixiv takes it a step further. Combining the advanced tagging seen in danbooru-like systems, they allow artists to set properties of submissions to allow for how much others can contribute child posts and tags to their submission. Any number of special properties can be added to a submission via tags or meta tags, making new features easy to implement and that such a system is forwards-compatible.
Pixiv added "manga" support later on, which was easily compatible with the existing system. One's "Watch list" is replaced with a custom browsing context which simply filters out all submissions by artist tag (with only the artists you watch tagged in the search query, automatically), again, totally compatible with the existing paradigm of tag-based browsing, with no crazy inbox stuff necessary for the bulk of the work server-side. Again, Pixiv took it a step further with regards to favorites, as when making favorites, the user can add their own personal tags to filter them out when using the browser in a favorites context. This is great for watchers who would like to organize or search their favorites, especially those who have a lot of them.
In many cases, as FA grows, the system which we currently have will continue to show its age, and the limitations will become more apparent over time. With no API to interface with the site (and worse, active discouragement of any client interface outside the browser whatsoever), working around these limitations will be restricted to the existing developer staff, while the rest of the users will simply have to suffer in waiting.
I once again will hope that FA will reconsider opening up 3rd party client interfacing with the site in the near future.
Also personally, I wouldn't want to see people given the ability to del/hide individual comments (I was always against that when people used to suggest it), but closing a submission to all comments sounds perfectly acceptable
Of course you can just poke an FA admin and they'd delete it, but I find in the past, and from other friends experiences, they take their time in doing it.
That's just my point of view, though. From a 'participate in a community' standpoint I can understand it; if it were one's own site, that's a different thing since they can take whatever attitude they want. Same with LJ to an extent, since it's typically a public-private journal...
Just like the search system!
I do wish they would allow you to be signed in from more than one PC at once once like DA tho. I use a personal lappy at work and I keep needing to log into it every time I access at work and then later when I get home.
makes sense now, why the programmer didn't respond.
You had me at "RSS feed", a simple RSS feed, no matter how simplistic, would b a great addition. I use a few RSS feeds to keep track of sites and i love it.
But when u said "mini RSS feed", you instantly made me think of twitter, cause that's pretty much what twitter feels like. A system where u could insert your twitter account name and get updates via twitter would b cool too, once on twitter using a client like yoono you could probably filter what u want from it.
A few of the people i follow on twitter have blip.tv auto-tweet their uploads to their followers automatically, it'd b something like that.
Just rambling.
... but even if I don't know the technicalities of it all, there's a lot they could be doing better, you're right.