Perfect Feet pool, and other moderated collections

rantuyetmai said:
Hmm... that gives me an idea actually. How's about we have a "Pool" button right below the current "Add to pool"? If we click this button, all the pools this image belongs to will appear, no need to have the cumbersome boxes anymore.

There was a previous discussion about removing the big ugly box where somebody made a mock-up image of a similar idea, with a distinct "Pools" list appearing immediately under the "Tags" list and including left/right arrows. The main objection, as I recall, was that you wouldn't be able to leave your cursor in one place and just click to read through a pool in order.

Which is my (and, I would guess, quite a few others') main objection to the current system. If "series" boxes were always above "collection" boxes like S1eth said, that problem would be solved except for the very rare case of a post that is in two "series" pools. Having to press "Page Down" once for those few posts that are in an inordinate number of pools is annoying, but not what I would consider a major hassle.

S1eth said:
To avoid the navigation problem, this could be used for collections only.

This can work. The current grey box is not obnoxious and very helpful when it indicates a series. But when there are >=2 boxes cluster above an image, it is ugly (yes, THAT ugly).

It's a much better separation to put collection pools into the sidebar, because those pools are a type of tagging - albeit subjective. I'd like to ask for the << >> button still though, like this:

<< The Perfect Feet >> 560

Pool titles can be a bit long to be squeezing into the sidebar, though...

I had actually thought of that before, but a complication arises with my lack of recent experience in html. Use the pool numbers with alttext of the pool name (not sure if this can be done because last time I coded was 10 years ago.)

For long titles, it's okay to put "..." after a certain length of their name:

<< Slightly naughty expressions... >> 19

People will know which pool it is just like they can recognize the pool from the drop-down box, for those who are unfamiliar with the pool they'll click on it and read the description anyway.

Yes, series should be definitely prioritised over collections, that's one of the ideas behind separating them. Also it should be series that get the first(*) <link rel="next/prev">. It's especially annoying in Touhou series, which are like over half of what we have, since current boxes are arranged alphabetically and Touhou is always behind the collection titles.

As for grouping, yes, definitely. It could be arranged somewhat like this (warning, horrible hacks assuming specific rendering of the forum markup ahead):

Series: << Touhou - Mystic Something or Other >>

This post belongs to: << Perfect Feet >> | << Artist helper: anatomy >>

plus appropriate spacing and aligment of course. This way you always have a maximum of two(**) boxes, which is not that bad, and usually just one. Additionally the collections box could be rendered lighter and less prominent, to reduce its UI impact.

(*) Or whichever is to be treated by browsers as the highest priority one.
(**) Okay, not counting posts which somehow manage to end up in two or more series AND a collection. But that's an edge case not really worth designing for.

Do collections need next/prev buttons even though they aren't ordered?
Series would benefit from additional "first" |< and "last" >| links.

I'd say they do, since you might still reasonably want to browse one, even though they don't have a natural order and any arbitrary ordering will do. Which'd suggest they should be limited to "most recently added", which is the most useful, and have no specific controls for manipulating the order, just like favourites.

I'm not particularly fond of the big grey box myself. I can see leaving the single series title and navigation on top (though I'd style it to be narrower and less of a space hog). I'd rather see collections enumerated either below the image or in the sidebar (think of how Wikipedia does categories or other languages).

It's only a big gray box because it hasn't been fixed yet. I've been using a CSS hack by someone-or-other lately that replaces it with a small floating translucent box at the top right of the browser pane (onHover it becomes opaque and you can click the relevant things).

Especially important to me is that it's floating, so when I'm reading karaagetarou's comics or or similarly tall stuff, I don't have to scroll back to the top or hit "home" to be able to move on.

Leave the links to the next and previous-- those are useful for browsing the pool. I don't really want to try remembering which was the last image I clicked on as that's annoying.

But the idea of splitting into Series and Collections is absolutely good. Likewise, I like the private anonymous pools idea; it'd be great for keeping track of small sets of images that have a feature I may want to tag/pool once I find a few more examples.

For the time being...Well, we've seen what happens when you open them up ("overpopulation", disagreements about the contents, seemingly innocuous changes leading to sharp quality drop) and what happens when you leave them closed (spamming the gatekeeper, disappearance of the gatekeeper, disagreements about the contents). Yeah, I'm just not seeing an optimal solution that works with what we have now. Code may well be required.