Upcoming UI changes

[Conan]

Apparently this was linked to in #fa. Before you get your hopes up, this is just another revision to the existing UI to "prepare" for the new one. Like the time they made the site fluid and changed the navbar... Two years ago.

http://chi.furaffinity.net/

Gone is the front page news column, replaced instead with a annoying notice at the top, guaranteeing that the users will become even more out of the loop with the site news than they already are.

In an effort to be more like DeviantArt, the front page is now just thumbnails. Bigger thumbnails. These bigger thumbnails have also made their way to the user pages, where they look out of place and are now about 1/3 the size of the preview image. They're big enough that the preview image is pointless. Now your eyes can be raped without mousing over an image!

They've also regenerated all thumbnails for all submissions to the bigger size, so custom thumbnails for old submissions now just show the submission in thumbnail size.

This is obviously another attempt to appeal to mobile users. The larger thumbnails are pointless on a proper screen, I'd say they're almost too big. Too big to be considered "thumbnails" at least. More like handprints.

[loki]

Looks awful. They stole the dropshadow effect straight from dA - worse yet, there are no titles for any image thumbnails, no "frontpage" for featured/popular work (although that is a mixed bag too) I also don't see the point of splitting up the work into 3 categories instead of just keeping it in area with applicable filters. The thumbnails are too large as well. The color scheme is still pretty ugly too.

[Jim Demintia]

It looks...exactly like I made the site look using Greasemonkey. Wow.

[Conan]

Looks awful. They stole the dropshadow effect straight from dA - worse yet, there are no titles for any image thumbnails, no "frontpage" for featured/popular work (although that is a mixed bag too) I also don't see the point of splitting up the work into 3 categories instead of just keeping it in area with applicable filters. The thumbnails are too large as well. The color scheme is still pretty ugly too.

Things like the drop shadow and rounded corners look horribly out of place. Nothing else on the entire site is styled like that.

Oh well, gotta have large, rounded, drop-shadowed buttons for people using their tablet to access the site. Mobile web! Web 2.0! So hip!

[zed]

The UI designer in me is getting ready to hang himself so he no longer has to remember that he saw this trainwreck. It was bad enough previously that 100% of the site was implemented using table elements (my brain is full of fuck ), but now the announcements are floating in some random div, and all the art is surrounded by rounded borders that look like they were puked out by an old draft of HTML5. FurAffinity is a previous-generation website desperately trying to dress up like a web 2.0 site.

FurAffinity will truly jump the shark once Dragoneer catches a whiff of this newfangled database thing called "NoSQL" and starts demanding that the database be "sharded" (whatever that means, but it sounds good, since SQL is so sloooow).

[ProvincialTwit]

Insert 'sharded'/'sharted' joke here.

[Jim Demintia]

FurAffinity is so tightly coupled to the whole LAMP philosophy- all the rage in, oh I dunno, 2005 or so before everyone realized that PHP and MySQL are a bunch of garbage and don't scale. I haven't even seen the code and I can tell you there are SQL queries just randomly littered in the files everywhere, and then the code that renders the query results will probably break beyond all repair if you were to replace the query with even a different schema, let alone something like NoSQL.

Personally, I wonder if Yak will catch on to this "eventual consistency"* bullshit that Twitter uses, and when their caching shits the bed again, he'll claim it's a feature, and not a bug.

* If you've ever wondered why it takes eight zillion years for your Twitter followers' new icons to actually show up in your browser/client, well, there you go.

[loki]

The UI designer in me is getting ready to hang himself so he no longer has to remember that he saw this trainwreck. It was bad enough previously that 100% of the site was implemented using table elements (my brain is full of fuck ), but now the announcements are floating in some random div, and all the art is surrounded by rounded borders that look like they were puked out by an old draft of HTML5. FurAffinity is a previous-generation website desperately trying to dress up like a web 2.0 site.

FurAffinity will truly jump the shark once Dragoneer catches a whiff of this newfangled database thing called "NoSQL" and starts demanding that the database be "sharded" (whatever that means, but it sounds good, since SQL is so sloooow).

I can't wait until they try to implement HBase or something similar and manage to screw up the MapReduce algorithm. NoSQL looks interesting for when you don't need transactional features but I've never personally used it. I'm sure they'll try to use Hibernate before they get around NoSQL....

[zed]

FurAffinity is so tightly coupled to the whole LAMP philosophy- all the rage in, oh I dunno, 2005 or so before everyone realized that PHP and MySQL are a bunch of garbage and don't scale. I haven't even seen the code and I can tell you there are SQL queries just randomly littered in the files everywhere, and then the code that renders the query results will probably break beyond all repair if you were to replace the query with even a different schema, let alone something like NoSQL.

Personally, I wonder if Yak will catch on to this "eventual consistency"* bullshit that Twitter uses, and when their caching shits the bed again, he'll claim it's a feature, and not a bug.

* If you've ever wondered why it takes eight zillion years for your Twitter followers' new icons to actually show up in your browser/client, well, there you go.

Silly me, I keep forgetting that the site is so badly written it's not even safe to assume that they even have the separation of business logic and database abstraction needed for them to even consider NoSQL integration.

I can't wait until they try to implement HBase or something similar and manage to screw up the MapReduce algorithm. NoSQL looks interesting for when you don't need transactional features but I've never personally used it. I'm sure they'll try to use Hibernate before they get around NoSQL....

The FA staff would deserve the inevitable Java/XML hell that comes with Hibernate.

[Three Cheese Pepperoni]

This website layout has to be among the most fuck-ugly designs I have ever seen, not exaggerating. I'd rather keep seeing the current one we have now.

On the homepage, there's absolutely no sense of proportion, and it looks like the designer just threw in elements (Rounded boxes! Larger thumbnails!) because they sounded cool, but without understanding why they are cool.

The page gives the illusion that it's stretched. My eye is focused on the left/middle half of the screen, and then it slowwwwwwwwwly drifts over to the right side. It's too much to take in with no focus; it's just a onslaught of freaking thumbnails.

The links and informational text for some reason are still the size of a blip. And the Fender journal bar at the top just seems like it was added in as an afterthought. It's so unadorned and barren (again, with no focus on it), it seems like a nonentity. It doesn't even look like people should read it; it looks unimportant.

And then the banner just still there, sloppily left on the top... Ugh! Sorry for the diatribe... This thing is just ugly as sin.

[Pi]

the designer just threw in elements because they sounded cool, but without understanding why they are cool.

To all outward appearances, this is how they design their infrastructure and solve their problems, too. There's a reason I describe FA's administration practices as 'cargo cult sysadmin'

[Conan]

Thank u Summercat:

http://preyfar.dev.furaffinity.net/

screenshot

They're.... bringing the old UI in line to what the new UI is supposed to kinda maybe look like. You know, instead of spending time actually finishing the new UI. I'm sure this is another "oh, we have to PREPARE you for the new UI!!!!" things, which exactly 0 other websites do.

Interestingly, the navbar changed, which was last moved... to "prepare" people for the new UI. Now it looks like they ripped off Google.

[Ketsuban]

The only complete sentence I can muster is why in the unholiest of fucks do you have FIVE THOUSAND UNREAD SUBMISSIONS?!

[Conan]

The only complete sentence I can muster is why in the unholiest of fucks do you have FIVE THOUSAND UNREAD SUBMISSIONS?!

Because I give no fucks. 

[ColeTrain]

I am not sure if FA staff is pulling their own version of April Fools at the moment or they picked a bad moment to implement their UI, but if they are doing the former....the joke's not funny, as their change to the interface utterly fucked up a large number of thumbnails.

[saiwolf]

I am not sure if FA staff is pulling their own version of April Fools at the moment or they picked a bad moment to implement their UI, but if they are doing the former....the joke's not funny, as their change to the interface utterly fucked up a large number of thumbnails.

According to This thread, the thumbnail system was updated, so the server has to 'recache' the thumbnails and "that takes time".

So now my FA looks like ass ugly large thumbnails and lots of broken images.

[Conan]

I am not sure if FA staff is pulling their own version of April Fools at the moment or they picked a bad moment to implement their UI, but if they are doing the former....the joke's not funny, as their change to the interface utterly fucked up a large number of thumbnails.

According to This thread, the thumbnail system was updated, so the server has to 'recache' the thumbnails and "that takes time".

So now my FA looks like ass ugly large thumbnails and lots of broken images.

The "they need to recache" smells like bullshit. They worked fine on the demo site. Another bit of incompetence from Yak? Absolutely!

$100 says this doesn't actually need to be done in production, they're just too lazy to do it any other way.

[saiwolf]

I am not sure if FA staff is pulling their own version of April Fools at the moment or they picked a bad moment to implement their UI, but if they are doing the former....the joke's not funny, as their change to the interface utterly fucked up a large number of thumbnails.

According to This thread, the thumbnail system was updated, so the server has to 'recache' the thumbnails and "that takes time".

So now my FA looks like ass ugly large thumbnails and lots of broken images.

The "they need to recache" smells like bullshit. They worked fine on the demo site. Another bit of incompetence from Yak? Absolutely!

$100 says this doesn't actually need to be done in production, they're just too lazy to do it any other way.

The words "Production" and "Test bed/Development" have no meaning for the FA code team (comprising soley of Yak). My FA screen STILL looks like a god damned pinboard.

It's like they have no concept of testing before releasing. And that thread I linked? Any critique is met with "Y R U BITCHING ITS JUST A WEBSITE." or "WorksForMe(tm)"

[Pi]

Yet another instance of "we added a new feature and broke it at the same time!"

Great job, team.

Of course, yak doesn't see it this way:

<Pi> yak[away]: congratulations, your continued fuckups are chasing users away!
<yak[away]> anyone who is seriously leaving over a website's design change on april 1 is either a dumbass or a drama queen. in either case 90% of them will be back within two weeks even if they do leave.
<yak[away]> leave the trifle complains out of this
<Pi> okay and how about the nontrivial ones
<Pi> like: you completely fucking botched this, yet again
<Pi> or is that meant to be an april fools joke
<yak[away]> i've botched nothing. the overwhelming increase in the load on the server working with zero thumbnail cache was expected.
<Pi> you disappear for upward of a month, do something that cripples your deployment, and think it went *fine* because it was "expected"?

I really wish this were an April Fools joke.

[Conan]

<yak[away]> anyone who is seriously leaving over a website's design change on april 1 is either a dumbass or a drama queen. in either case 90% of them will be back within two weeks even if they do leave.

They actually think...
that they can mask their incompetence...
by pushing this out on April 1st...
thus freeing themselves of any responsibility when things went horribly wrong?

...really?