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a few reasons why weasyl is doomed to fail
11 years ago
Weasyl, as some (I mean very few) of you might know about, is a another furaffinity-clone which allows its users to post artwork and other media for free. Since a lot of people feel that FA has a terrible layout, near-useless search system, questionable moderation and strict policies (no cub) sites like Weasyl and Inkbunny have popped in to compete with some of that traffic. Inkbunny has a great layout and a fantastic search system, making it very easy to find not only exactly what you're looking for but to find similar stuff as well. Weasyl, on the other hand, relies heavily on finding what you want with a SINGLE KEYWORD.
Let's say you wanted to search for all MLP flash animations, pretty simple right? Well if you type in "my_little_pony flash animated" you're going to get every single submission tagged with "flash", "animated" OR "my_little_pony" -- you're searching for uploads that have ANY of those 3 tags, not all 3. If someone knows how to search for posts containing multiple tags please let me know. If you enter just "my_little_pony" and then use Subcategory "animation", you get nothing at all... why? Because subcategories apply only to non-multimedia, so you'd be searching for like animated .GIF files or something. And what about if you just wanted to search for the best artwork on the site, either by most views or most favorites, well you can't do that either. You just type in a single keyword and hope it lands you what you want. Maybe they expect you to use Weasyl as a 'browsing site' instead of specifically searching for what you want? But the browsing system is even more shitty because there is zero criteria: you just wade through all of the art you don't want to see until you eventually find something that might interest you. Seriously go try for yourself: https://www.weasyl.com/search
As a contributor, I also have a few issues with the site. One big thing is no option to make mass-changes. I want to move a bunch of submissions into a folder all at once, but the only way to do it is to edit each file manually, put it into the folder, re-save the thumbnail, then submit. I mean it would only take me 15 minutes, but it's still busywork I don't wanna invest time in, so I guess I'm just not gonna use the folder feature. There's no convenient way to see submission statistics, they kept the awful shout system; ultimately Weasyl just feels like a stripped version of FA. I've uploaded all of my work there because I want to give users the option to use whichever site they prefer, but personally I'd never use the site to browse art unless they made some major changes to the way you search for art.
Weasyl hasn't done a single innovative thing to differentiate itself from other sites (being able to add a banner to your page is not innovative). Seriously more people should use inkbunny, even if it is a cesspool and breeding grounds for "cubophiles". There's nothing wrong with FA, but IB is just an objectively better website due to its superior tagging and searching systems. I'm not saying anyone should leave FA -- you shouldn't -- but consider using both, unless uploading work to 1 more site is a big pain for you.
That's just my view on the matter, anyways. (PS: e621 is still the best site overall)
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Edit: Thanks to shinymew (See comment below) for showing me how to do multiple tags. It's completely unintuitive, but you have to add a + in front of each tag.
i.e.: "+flash +animation +my_little_pony" ... example here: https://www.weasyl.com/search?searc.....UTXqDtk1z7qa7n
Let's say you wanted to search for all MLP flash animations, pretty simple right? Well if you type in "my_little_pony flash animated" you're going to get every single submission tagged with "flash", "animated" OR "my_little_pony" -- you're searching for uploads that have ANY of those 3 tags, not all 3. If someone knows how to search for posts containing multiple tags please let me know. If you enter just "my_little_pony" and then use Subcategory "animation", you get nothing at all... why? Because subcategories apply only to non-multimedia, so you'd be searching for like animated .GIF files or something. And what about if you just wanted to search for the best artwork on the site, either by most views or most favorites, well you can't do that either. You just type in a single keyword and hope it lands you what you want. Maybe they expect you to use Weasyl as a 'browsing site' instead of specifically searching for what you want? But the browsing system is even more shitty because there is zero criteria: you just wade through all of the art you don't want to see until you eventually find something that might interest you. Seriously go try for yourself: https://www.weasyl.com/search
As a contributor, I also have a few issues with the site. One big thing is no option to make mass-changes. I want to move a bunch of submissions into a folder all at once, but the only way to do it is to edit each file manually, put it into the folder, re-save the thumbnail, then submit. I mean it would only take me 15 minutes, but it's still busywork I don't wanna invest time in, so I guess I'm just not gonna use the folder feature. There's no convenient way to see submission statistics, they kept the awful shout system; ultimately Weasyl just feels like a stripped version of FA. I've uploaded all of my work there because I want to give users the option to use whichever site they prefer, but personally I'd never use the site to browse art unless they made some major changes to the way you search for art.
Weasyl hasn't done a single innovative thing to differentiate itself from other sites (being able to add a banner to your page is not innovative). Seriously more people should use inkbunny, even if it is a cesspool and breeding grounds for "cubophiles". There's nothing wrong with FA, but IB is just an objectively better website due to its superior tagging and searching systems. I'm not saying anyone should leave FA -- you shouldn't -- but consider using both, unless uploading work to 1 more site is a big pain for you.
That's just my view on the matter, anyways. (PS: e621 is still the best site overall)
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Edit: Thanks to shinymew (See comment below) for showing me how to do multiple tags. It's completely unintuitive, but you have to add a + in front of each tag.
i.e.: "+flash +animation +my_little_pony" ... example here: https://www.weasyl.com/search?searc.....UTXqDtk1z7qa7n
So i send an email, inquiring about the registration process and my "In Use Email". To this day, haven't gotten a reply. Not in my spam folder, not in my inbox...nothing. I never registered for an account and they never got back to me.
.... Fuck 'em!
I remember an attempt was made with Furry Art Pile if anyone remembers that... was an ok FA substitute, eventually it died due to the owner's disinterest.
You get more views of of what you posted on SoFurry more than what weasyl gives you.
I have seen and known of that bug (yea its a bug and they still havent fixed it when it was first noticed) about selecting animation would automatically just switch to visual and consist of just animated gifs instead flash animations which apparently they seem very fine with folks using multimedia to find flash animations.
I would say Inkbunny does boast the better tagging, search and browse system than others (I would say SoFurry a far second), just it has a stigma that probably wont really go away (and funny to do as you can literally remove all of cub via blacklist and watch the site somewhat slow down)
I personally suggest going to Pixiv. Their search is amazing: Type in a common keyword in english, it returns results for pics that have that tag in japanese too. Dunno about other languages tho.
it has a good update system and such, but its mostly towards the chatroom and forums than site wide stuff and artist (the last 3 or 4 updates was literally the chatroom and RPing)
I have never been thrilled with Weasyl, they made it too complex to do things that are simple other places.
News flash, genius. When you signed up on FurAffinity they allowed cub stuff.
Well and i was like five years younger and some very smart ideas and options came with the time and the age.
Running Furry Dakimakura, I find myself having to post across lots of platforms all at once (crossposting is essential) and the fact that I have to type each. and. every. keyword. by. itself. and. I. can't. copy/paste. to. be. really. fucking. annoying.
This would be forgivable if there were so many other ways to search (Tumblr comes to mind) but as my posts live and die on those keywords, it's unforgivable.
Their folder system is also so hard to use that I just don't (would love to just throw everything into a folder based on type - Pinterest and Facebook let me do that, why doesn't Weasyl?)
So yeah, I post there because I want to let people find FD wherever they can, but that's about it.
I used to post on e621.net too, but people kept whining that 1) I was posting advertisements 2) I was posting stuff that was watermarked. Even though I had to start doing the latter purely because people on e621.net were using my promo images to make (AND SELL) shitty knock-offs of my products. So I quit doing it.
I wish the flashes had thumbnails, though. It would get me to the NOPE moment faster.
I swear they should just have your user icon and thumbs up or thumbs down next to each flash, so I know what to skip.
Also I want the ability to permanently filter out all Five Nights at Freddy's porn, forever.
amen, brother.
IT'S NIGHT TRAP WITH PUPPETS.
To search for something tagged with all three tags in your example you'd need to search for "+flash +animated +my_little_pony". (the + in front of flash can be omitted)
It makes programming sense, but that doesn't excuse it from being any less stupid because it doesn't make "what normal people would think of" sense.
also the "" aren't needed for multiple tag searching, I should have noted that in my first reply, just the +es
Which is to say, almost nothing.
Literally the most basic booru system (especially the heavily modified e621 comes to mind) is better than this.
Convenience does not compensate for community presence, the draw to FA is the huge amount of content it's pumping out. FA would need to piss off the mainstream and the vocal minority such as cub fans or SJW's to really make a hit in traffic.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't like Google+ and a bunch of other shit that Google is doing with Youtube, but how frequently do I use other sites such as Flickr, Dailymotion, Vimeo etc?
But then again I use it mostly as a way to keep up to date on tech and science and other communities and such, I don't use it for art browsing or RP, it was clearly not intended as such. However I think Google should revise their integration, although I was really impressed at how well they integrated everything they should've at least asked the user's permission(or find out if they even wanted everything to get integrated.)
But as a hub of information, and as a place to keep updated on what others that interests you find interesting, it's pretty much unparalleled in my opinion.
And anyone that complains about the G+ features should really just checkout the settings, they have very advanced privacy settings. Also I love the fact that you can immediately track down the original poster and if they remove it it gets removed everywhere, the ripples also help you identify where interest lies.
as soon as e621 gets flash/video thumbnails it will be perfect
Hopefully they won't take forever to implement something.
But when I search for "animated pony", I don't expect the first result to be "seven dollar pixel icons".
I've been looking into posting at e621 but the interface makes me want to punch things. It feels like you need to read an instruction manual before using it. Nothing is intuitive or simple. I gave up once I saw that you needed to be X days old before you could post, it's been about a week so I'll poke at it more this weekend.
Also it would be cool to be able to group tags via braces like, what I missed sometimes on e621.