New Homepage Discussion

@Clover the Clever
 
The activity button already covered everything the homepage currently does, I think it was a very good addition once I got used to it.
 
Hassle would’ve been a much better word; the first thing I felt when I opened the homepage for the first time was “What the fuck is all this halp” and that’s not a good thing, especially ‘cos it took me 4 minutes to locate the top scoring lists (might’ve been early morning’s fault). We don’t want a potential new user to think like that in their first visit.
 
Also, as others have said: More clicks for my poni
 
At last, this is an image board after all, the first thing that should pop out when opening the page are rows and rows of pictures, not a column for forums/comments/livestreams that the average user doesn’t give a shit about.
 
In conclusion, if there was something I liked about this page, it was its simplicity, and this update just isn’t for me.

@Blackie
 
I don’t think it’s confusing at all, at least in it’s current state. There’s pics on one side, text in the other. Users will gravitate to the part they care about.
 
My only concern at this point is the lack of filtering for comments. I’m sure the pics in the homepage are filtered and the comment section probably doesn’t show pictures. But I doubt it filters text. It’s not just racism and explicit content, but also spoilers.

@dt  
I think they should remove that recent comments box at the Homepage. If anyone wants to see the comments, they could go to the recent comments page.

@SeraphimDawn
 
When I click on the logo, the comments are still there. “Only a butthurt jerk would report this image.” says some BP.
 
edit: Yeah, I misread what you said.

@dt  

 
I’m not really sure what we can do to make the page less ‘busy’ without losing some of the information we’re trying to push to the fore - design-wise we like minimalism where we can - the site has always been about the user supplied content, not about making design decisions of our own (hence the simple theme/styles, single colours, etc). We’ll look at tightening it up a bit and simplifying what we can.
 
Comments on the homepage are filtered - we hide everything from the ((hidden+spoilered)~~visible) list. We don’t do text filtering because that tends to be crazy ~~ you overfilter or it’s ineffective, and we don’t want to actively piss people off with overfiltering. We might push featured image above recent comments, though.

I don’t mind the new home, but it looks a bit weird that it still shows the same amount of images but condensed in two columns, so you have to scroll down quite a bit to see them all.
 
Wouldn’t it be more logical if it only showed the latest 4 or 8 or 12 pics, with a link to the Images page on top, like all the other windows?

@Vree  
20% Cooler’s Homepage seems to be like that.

You only see two columns? I’m getting three, and my monitor isn’t all that big. 1280x1024.
 
And there is an image button already. Top left.

Perhaps it’s just me but I would like it better if the blue “image” bar went across the entire page like every other page

@Sjogre  

 
Well I have a pretty big wide screen laptop but it’s still, well, a laptop, so it may be that. Lots of other users are probably laptop users too tho’.
 
Yeah I know Images is there, but others apparently had trouble finding it. And I don’t see much purpose to the Next > and Page 1 2 3 s because you have to scroll down all the way to the bottom, then scroll back up anyway, if I wanna browse images I won’t do it like that on the homepage, I’ll just go straight to the Images one where I see them normally.

I’d want an option to switch between images or activity at landing page.

The image grid isn’t great - it should flex to fit a decent number in per page, but that involves quite a lot of work on our part. Certainly something we’ll look at doing now - I think it’d solve a lot of complaints about the new homepage, going off what people have said.

ARGH MY EYES MAKE IT STOP.
 
More seriously: the watched images being a scroll-down away is pretty great, but the rest of it is semi-useless (why on Earth would I want to know what the most recent comments are? I though you were trying to redirect conversation to the forum, anyway…)
 
I understand having the ‘recent forum activity’ stuff there – for the size of derpibooru, the forums are very under-utilised. I just don’t like the current layout.
 
I think you should cut out the livestreams and recent comments, and move the recent forum activity up to the top of the page, where the ‘Welcome to Derpibooru!’ message is now. The featured image should be moved up next to the recent forum activity. That way, you just have to scroll down, and the layout of the images remains consistent with the rest of the site.
 
If you really want to keep the livestreams (I don’t think you should, but if), then I think you should cut the list down to only those that are currently active, and put them in the same banner area as the recent forum activity and featured image.

Also, for the forum activity, the current layout is ‘user x replied to thread y in forum z’ – I don’t know if the ‘in forum z’ part is strictly necessary: if users want to read the thread, they’ll click on the link; if they want to browse the forums they’ll just click on the ‘forum’ tab. Something to consider if you do move it up to the top of the page, to save some horizontal space.

Honestly. I couldn’t care less about your forums. The new homepage sucks. People don’t come here for “the community”; the come here for horse images. No one gives a fuck about your community save those already circle jerking away. And they already know all this stuff.
 
Featured images and recent comments are also stupid. No one gives a fuck about recent comments. I mean, how asinine can you get? Featured image at least has something to do with why people come here, but I doubt most people care what you all like or what your algorithm likes. Livestreams being called out is also worthless. You already had that link. People could already get to it. Using more space for it is dumb.
 
Why must every fucking site try to become some sort of network? Not every site needs to have “a community.” Inevitably, the admins begin to think that their community is important enough to push on the people who just want to use the site. They can’t comprehend that people don’t want to be a part of their bullshit. It happens with almost every service. Look at Google desperately shoveling G+ and tricking/forcing people to sign up for it.
 
This homepage wreaks of circljerking bullshit. This is an image booru, not a facebook group. It does not need all this ancillary bullshit shoved onto the front page.
 
@Clover the Clever  
>I’m not really sure what we can do to make the page less ’busy’ without losing some of the information we’re trying to push to the fore – design-wise we like minimalism where we can
 
Um. The “information [you]’re trying to push to the fore” is the problem. No one cares about it. It’s all crap anyone who does can find already. It’s worthless and you should feel bad for thinking otherwise.
 
It’s always going to be “too busy” because you (plural you, unless you’re the sole designer) have no fucking clue when it comes what a good layout is. Here’s a hint: a good layout for an image site doesn’t include a huge box for forum links, recent comments, or the other circlejerking BS you put there.

@Kits  
You are really, really angry for someone who can trivially skip past the new design and keep using the old image gallery page just by clicking one button or adding “/images” to your bookmark. You might want to see someone about that, seriously.

@Kits  

@Kits  
You are a very sad and hateful little man.

@Kits  
Wow, you really are angry
 
We don’t need to have a community - oh, wait, we do because otherwise nobody would upload images, tag metadata etc etc and if nobody came here to view/discuss them then nobody would bother uploading anyhow. That’s kinda how the site works.
 
What we’re trying to do with all of this is cut down on the amount of shit that ends up as meta posts and “MAKE X HAPPEN” etc by moving that to the forums. That’s the whole point. The reason we added forums was because the community kept trying to use the imageboard as a forum and that meant the imageboard suffered. And still every other day we get someone posting shit on the main board that belongs in a forum. So this is us, trying to get it across to people that the forums exist and that you do get visibility. But this is something we’re doing for the community that is already on the site, not us trying to build some hypothetical G+-style community.
 
So, just to go over some other points raised so far - recent comments - we’ve moved it down for now but this may just end up going away. Same for livestreams, unless we can work it in.
 
 
@nyxabuse  
Moving stuff to the top of the page and keeping images full-width is a very decent suggestion and we’ll have a play with that.
 
 
I would just say one other thing here; Derpibooru is developed by about 2 people in their spare time. We don’t get paid, we don’t get any advertising revenue (compare and contrast with fimfiction or EqD, both of which make absolute shedloads), we have no professional designers on staff (despite our efforts) and make do with what we can. We try to involve the community as much as we can in our decisions on a regular basis (like this thread). Sometimes we get it wrong and make big changes without involving people beforehand - we didn’t feel that was the case with the activity page becoming the homepage because we’d had the activity page up for a long time and asked for feedback, but we clearly need to do some work to get it to where it needs to be to make as many people as we can happy.
 
Edit: We’ve dropped it back to the activity page for now. We’ll keep working on it; feedback can continue here.

It seems that the site has reverted to its old version.
 
Me, I’d keep it mostly the same, but I’d put Activity in the left-most button instead of Images, since Images and the Derpibooru button lead to the same spot.

@SpacePaladin
 
Ditto.

I’m thinking that the side stuff could work. The problem was, as a lot of people said, it was causing too much clutter, making the front page bigger than it should be. I think it could work if we made it more condense, so that 3 to 4 images would be shown per row. I’d vote for a smaller font or less information.

@Clover the Clever  

 
I don’t know if this is actually a good solution, and given that there’s only two of you it might be impractical to implement, but in an ideal world one idea would be to have some kind of ‘turn this image and all the comments into a forum thread’ button for the moderators.

@nyxabuse  
That’s a good idea. Unfortunately once that happens I foresee people thinking the thing got deleted, then never checking the forums because they don’t know it exists / is just where bad images go to die.
 
Also I foresee Clover doing a spit-take at the idea.
 
 
For now, the Activity page is back to being its own separate thing, and the homepage back to being Images. It’ll be reworked and made the homepage again at some point; we’re hoping that people might actually hit that “Activity” link every once in a while to check up on it.

@Clover the Clever  

 
I’m sorry , but I actually like this better.
 
I wish it was the older activity page , without the featured image and with the top 5 week pictures.
 
But it seems that I was the only one to love seeing the highest rated pictures , right in the activity page actually…so if I’m alone , I guess i have to let it go. ;(
 
@mod team , Good luck in your future projects for the site.