search feedback thread

Posted 1 year, 6 months ago (Edited 1 year, 6 months ago) by admin

Feedback thread for the Front/Browse/Search page updates — the corresponding announcement and changelist is here!

🎯 Goals —

Reduce congestion in the character trade listings and search pages that was previously caused by a bunch of ads/non-characters being submitted to the site
Improve visibility on the top page for characters that are currently being pushed off by non-characters
Make it easier to find what you’re looking for when searching for characters/codes/resources/services/etc

📋 Seeking feedback for —

I wasn’t sure whether people would prefer having each character type separated out into a separate listing rather than everything just being types of character?
- I opted to just add an optional filter since this seems more flexible in terms of search and customization (people seem to just be creating everything as a “Character” profile currently anyway, and a lot of the features are going to be the same), but let me know if this doesn’t feel good, or if anyone has suggestions regarding how to better structure the listings.
- My original idea for the front page was to allow people to add an arbitrary number of blocks (eg. if you want to add a Popular Characters, Popular HTML/CSS, Popular Resources blocks separately), but the UI for the control panel started getting very long and confusing so I just scrapped the idea. I’ll probably be fiddling with this to see if there’s a way to do this that isn’t overwhelming for the average user.
Character categories:
- These are currently “Character”, “HTML/CSS”, “Resource”, “Service/Ad” based on what we most commonly receive reports for, but this can be expanded or updated if we feel that this is missing anything or is too broad.
General UI/UX feedback:
- If there’s anything confusing or if you have suggestions for how to improve any areas of the front/browse/search pages.
Extra features:
- Are you someone who regularly uses the trade listings or front pages and feel like there are changes or extra features that could be added to make life easier for you?? Have ideas for how to help make the listings less frustrating and more accessible?? Let me know!!
Performance issues:
- Is the site super laggy for you now??? If not site-wide, please do point out the specific pages that you’re having issues with.
Anything else related!! If you have any feedback for an unrelated feature, it may be better to submit a HelpDesk ticket rather than replying to this specific thread.

If you’re uncomfortable leaving feedback in public, please don’t hesitate to open a ticket via the HelpDesk.

Thanks as always!

StormyStarlight

@fri-tz (sorry, unsure if you'd like to be pinged!)

that's a good point!! i use worlds the same way (the four i'm the founder of are all for personal projects) and now that you mention it i would also appreciate more control over what features are available, i.e. forums, which i don't use in any of mine. that also brings to mind another related issue i've encountered with worlds, that being their limited privacy options—as of now the only options are "public" (everyone can see it and submit join requests) and "private" (nobody but the founder & members can see it, must be invited to join). being able to set worlds to "logged-in users only" or "public for viewing but invite-only" would really help! i used to have my worlds set to public, but multiple occasions of strangers submitting join requests to my personal worlds made me uncomfortable and forced me to set them to private. i think being able to set public/logged-in only worlds to "invite only" would really help reduce the "forced community aspect" feeling worlds currently have and help them feel more exclusive/personal to the founder for those who want to use them for personal projects.

("only authorized users" and "only certain lists" options would be great too, though i'm not sure how that would work once a world has any more than one member. one of my personal worlds i'm working on with two close friends, so if i set the world to authorized only, should all 3 of our lists of authorized users be able to see it, or just mine? is it different depending on whether the other members are mods/admins? i feel like that could get messy quickly. maybe you would need to manually set a list of authorized-to-view users within the settings of the world itself?)

TheEliBlog

I feel like there needs to be some clarification about tagging ocs with codes with the HMTL/Codes filter as a lot of people are assuming the category is for all characters with codes rather not for coders to showcase their resources to make it easier for people to find and browse through! Your coded character profile should not be tagged as such especially if you didn’t make the code. But oh man is the character browsing section so much more clear and linear now it feels good to look at it and actually use it.

SATANICPIGEON

TheEliBlog Everytime I report those profiles the admin changes the category on it super quick so unfortunately I think that's the way to go. It's frustrating tho

Harrie

Seeing a lot of people submitting characters as HTML/CSS. I assume the misunderstanding to be that their profile uses HTML/CSS, so they misunderstand and submit it under there.

I suggest a rephrase of the explanation from:

HTML/CSS resources, or other profile templates.

To something more like:

HTML/CSS templates and resources to aid in the creation of profiles, literatures, and other posts.

I believe the part that's specifically confusing people is "or other profile templates". As they're using a template they think this is the right category. I think a rephrase to emphasise these are resources to aid in the creation of profiles and posts will help, as well as making the usage examples a little broader will make it clearer it's not for submitting character profiles themselves.

Megan

i would love to have an option to add music to our profiles or allows them to be heard as an ad selling area. lets bring back myspace lol

nightlustrous

Harrie - Gonna +1 this suggestion! Renaming the categories will help greatly with confusion.

Megan - There are ways to add music to profiles using HTML; there are several templates available that allow you to do so!

nightlustrous

Adding onto the "Other" category suggestion again, with a more specific concept this time.

I'm noticing a lot of "Resource"-listed characters are not actual resources.

art examples
wishlists & design preferences
TOS listings & DNI entries
comics
outfits

This is another great example of things that would benefit greatly from an extra listing category, along with the reasons I've already mentioned.

worldbuilding
stories, universes, & AUs
tag directories
concepts, ideas, & name lists
other fandom-related content (events, headcanons, etc.)

Harrie

Being that this is a thread for search/browse/front page feedback... I think it would be nice if literatures and worlds were more accessible. I think these are both great features that are currently hampered by the difficulty in finding them.

Literatures already have a very basic browse page at the moment, with a listing of the currently most popular literatures, and a feed of the most recently submitted lits.

It would be great if this could be expanded into a full search mirroring the character search we currently have—search by owner/designer username » search by author, the addition of tags to search by tags the same way we do characters, and for premium users keyword search which would target the title and the blurb.

The already existing literature browsing could also be added to the current or turned into some new front page blocks with a recent and most popular literature feed. Perhaps even similar feeds could be added for images?

As for worlds, there isnt any way to browse them at all currently despite them being listed under the browse menu section. Even a popular and recent feed would help a great deal in making them more discoverable, but again a full search with tags would be the most useful.

The literatures and worlds features have the potential to be really great features—if literatures could be browsed then I'm sure many people would be more inclined to use the feature, and if worlds could be browsed it would be easier to discover ones you'd like to join.

lopnyan

qwq sorry if someone else said this, but it looks like theres a little oversight, i have this art example character that i turned into an ad, but the sub-galleries under the ad are still listed as characters

admin

Some recent updates:

Have added two new trade listings:
- Trade has been split into Trade (character) & Trade (art)
- Contest/Game has been split into DTA/WTA/Game & Raffle/F2E
Tossed together a quick Worlds browse since I like the idea of giving them the option for more visibility (founders can now add their world to the world browse listing via the Manage World page); the reason I never did prior to this is because all the criteria for sorting seem a little unintuitive. The current listing options are likely to change if anyone has feedback here, but I've provisionally started this off with:
- Recent activity: this is updated whenever the world listing status changes, or when a new member/character is added, or on latest forum activity
- Most members & most new members in the last 24 hours
- Most characters & most new characters in the last 24 hours
Bug fixes:
- Default listing (via character settings) is now working again
- Fixed value "$" showing up even when value isn't set
Have tried clarifying the category descriptions a little, thanks for the feedback here; it looks like there's still confusion in the listings which hopefully should ease over time, but if anyone has feedback regarding how this could be clarified just let me know.
We've gotten a suggestion to be able to only subscribe to specific character categories when subscribing to a user which I think is a good idea but might be a little difficult for technical reasons. Will see what we can do here.

If people like the Worlds browse and it starts getting filled out, I'll likely also toss in some form of categorisation/tags or other way to search or filter through them (I'm also keeping in mind that we'd like to add similar features for Literatures also, thanks for the feedback here ^^).

I'm still not 100% on the "Other" listing, but I definitely understand the demand for it arising from wanting a place to keep general character information that doesn't fall under a character profile or resource/service. At this stage I'm worried that adding a miscellaneous listing might be a bandaid that'll lead to more people using character profiles as general art galleries instead of as character profiles, which I'd like to avoid if possible.

I think the suggestions made to work more on Worlds, Literatures, and other features make long-term sense, especially as these features are a little neglected currently and need some maintenance and usability improvements. I'm going to try working on features that might work as an alternative to the suggested "Other" listing, such as making Worlds & Literatures more accomodating (both in terms of basic features like galleries/image uploads, and more visibility via search/browse), and also the ability to add general pages/galleries to user profiles, which some people have been asking for as a more visible way to attach pages like commissions or TOS to their profile.

There are some infrastructural changes that I'd like to make first (I've been wanting to move our image-processing workload into a new server, which will likely have to happen before we add any new image-related features), so these may be more long-term goals, but I'm hoping people will be willing to try this out moving forward first and see how it goes.

Thanks all as always for your continued help & patience ^^

Antimoany

not entirely related to browse functionality, but while you're working on worlds:

can you make it possible for me to actually go to my own world that i created in one click?

currently i have to click on my own username, then in the sidebar on profile, worlds, then the world i created.

what i want is to be able to pin my world to the drop-down that appears when i hover my username, so i can go straight there.

frankly, better yet, a separate "my worlds" drop-down that shows all worlds i'm currently a member of - with a division line between worlds i created and worlds i'm simply in.