Amusements

[altivo]

Well, other than cooking a fairly elaborate dinner, I didn't get much done today. The reason?

SoFurry.com has gone live, and apparently before they were really ready. The code bugs and holes are enough to make several termite hills. It's all quite strange to me, why they would take a successful, long-lived site like YiffStar and rebirth it into something that looks like a bloated copy of FurAffinity, with extra bugs. But that's what they did.

About nine months ago, users of FurRag.com, the writing site I have frequented for several years, learned that there were plans to shut the site down, merging it into YiffStar which would be reborn as SoFurry. Not surprisingly, the resistance was strong. Though FurRag allows erotica and fetishes, those are not the primary focus necessarily. Quite a few of us had no wish to move to YiffStar or SoFurry, and said so. The forced exodus was at least delayed indefinitely if not cancelled. Today I was greatly amused to watch the erupting controversy over at SoFurry, as long time users there threatened to move to FurRag if they didn't get back the features they liked about YiffStar, and pronto. The forum section on FurRag hit a peak user count of 152 on Saturday, by the most users who had ever been online at once there. I believe it was YiffStar users checking us out. It appears that some of the migration may go in the opposite direction from what was originally planned.

Snow finally stopped late this morning at an official accumulation of somewhere around ten inches. Driving to work tomorrow may be an adventure. Winds are picking up and this stuff is all powder and will blow around very easily.

Comments

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

No dinner details tonight to set your Pavlovian canid buddies drooling?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Tomato garden soup
Pork chops slow cooked in cranberry and wine sauce
Brown rice
Mixed vegetables with Brussels sprouts
Jello salad
Sweet potato raisin bread (Gary made this)
Wine and Tea
Mince pie for dessert

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

*looks at SoFurry*

Wow. That is awful — someone completely botched the UI design. It looks like you end up with about five different sets of tabs on a profile page, each one of which does something slightly different. And the layout just seems unfinished: the links in the login bar aren't lined up properly; the font sizes are inconsistent, with some headings smaller than the text they precede; random text (not a link!) changes color when I mouse over it… yuck.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes. And the display and functionality is broken differently in each browser, and even in each version of the same browser. It's hard to believe that they worked on this for a year and then rushed it to production, replacing a site that was functional with one that doesn't work for most of their users.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While things are slower than I'd have wished on C&Q, the work is still going on. I'm resisting publicly encouraging people to wait, since I have no real ETA for a private alpha, let alone a public beta, but I can safely say that C&Q's directional goals are rather different than SoFurry's.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, and from what I can understand of it, your goals fit my desires more closely. But we are looking seriously at getting a management team together to keep FurRag running, since it comes closest to meeting the goals of those of us who still use it. Certainly SoFurry is nothing like FurRag, and I mean that in an exclusionary sense. I don't belong there, and I'm not alone in feeling that.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm hoping people who are on FR will check out C&Q when there's something there to check out; I honestly think there will be things that may make it more attractive in functional terms, but building a community will be very important. I've been a bit cagey about the overall scope in part because it's still in flux, but in larger part because I don't want to appear to be promising things that aren't delivered.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty confident that the core users at FR will be looking at C&Q as soon as you announce that it's ready to be looked at.

One plea from me, as you continue with your development. This grows out of what I see at SoFurry. Please keep cross-browser and cross-version compatibility at the top of your priority list. It is evident that the SF team only looked at their work in Firefox, and then only with the latest version of Firefox. Consequently, users of Internet Explorer, Firefox 2 or 3, Opera, or any other browser find themselves presented immediately with an unusable site. I'm guessing that this is largely due to the vagaries of the heavy stacks of CSS they have used, with so many CSS features failing to produce the same results in various browsers.

Sites like LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, and Furaffinity manage to find their way around this limitation, and still look decent while offering full functionality to their users without being browser dependent. SoFurry has failed that test and unless they fix their error pronto they are going to lose large numbers of followers. Yelling at the users to "upgrade" their browser to Firefox 3.5 or (yuck) Chrome is not going to help. People have many valid reasons for not riding the cutting (or bleeding as I think of it) edge in application software, and that isn't going to change.

Functionality is more important than appearance, and especially so when the appearance is largely clutter and glitz as it seems to be in the case of SF. I trust you will be more thoughtful and proactive in your planning. ;D

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'll be certainly trying to maintain compatibility with older browsers, and I'll be testing with FireFox 2. From what I can tell SoFurry has done a lot of "home-rolled" coding, and that's a double-edged sword; part of the reason for basing your work on other people's well-tested libraries is that if you know the library works on IE 6, you'll probably have very little work making your site do the same.

Having said that, I'm willing to cut SoFurry a little slack here, because it's sometimes easier said than done to get access to older browsers -- once you've upgraded your Windows installation to IE 8, for instance, it's awfully difficult to "roll back" to an earlier version. My suspicion is that FurAffinity and LJ don't put a lot of effort into maintaining compatibility with older versions -- it's simply that they haven't changed their core design appreciably over the last few years.

Also, IE 6 is... well... more of a problem child than I think people sometimes understand. I noticed in your list you didn't suggest a site should strive to be compatible with FireFox 1.5, or Mozilla 1.0 -- but those are newer browsers than IE 6 is! IE 6 came out in 2001. FireFox 2.0 is actually a few months younger than IE 7. I expect C&Q to be compatible with IE 6, but... we'll just say I'm not unsympathetic to web developers who are screaming "For the love of God, upgrade" at people. :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There are major issues with requiring the newer browsers, unless you have a select audience that can easily deploy them. IE6 is not a high priority unless you care about the technically and financially challenged user who is stuck with Windows 98SE and can go no farther for whatever reason. Firefox 2 may be an option for that user if they are able to do the installation, but some will not be able to do that. The newer versions of both IE and FF require newer operating system versions and much larger amounts of system resources. I don't think Microsloth even offers IE7 for Win98. Firefox can probably be installed but will run like a slug on most machines with such limited memory. I understand the difficulty in testing with IE6 unless you happen to have an older machine with Win98 handy, but when you get to beta level I'll bet someone will show up who has just that.

I would hope that a site focusing on writing doesn't really need all the gadgets and hocus-pokery that we see in sites like SoFurry or F4L.

Currently on the SoFurry forums they are telling people to install Chrome, which I find arrogant in the extreme. Chrome has only just been released for Linux, and I find it crashes far too much to be usable. As far as I know, it is not available for Mac users at all, nor for older versions of Windows, even Windows 2000.

While I agree that you have to draw a line somewhere, it really is essential to be functional with more than just the very latest Windows and Firefox. SoFurry designers seem to have utterly missed the boat on that.

Another big failure for them is dealing with varied screen sizes. They have pissed off both the users with the newest wide screen monitors and probably the majority of their users who have 1024x768 or 1280x1024. Anyone with a smaller screen probably can't use the site at all, while those with the large screens find that their space is being wasted.

My ongoing complaint against web designers in general is that they seem to think that anyone who doesn't have gobs of memory, some sort of gamer's edge video accelerator, and a broadband connection is a defective unworthy of using their wonderful site. The truth is that somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of U.S. users still have no access to broadband at all (I can't get a working connection where I live, for instance) and/or are running on machines four or more years old that have some limitation on memory, speed, or operating system version. The arrogant response that "It works fine for me, schmuck, so you should get a new computer/OS/browser/video card" simply doesn't make sense. And certainly it won't win friends or influence people. XD

I know you are far more sensible than that, but unfortunately the coders of sites like SoFurry and FurAffinity often seem to be so wet behind the ears that they simply can't grasp these facts.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

People tend to assume that the "average" user is more or less like them. This means that people who do cutting-edge stuff tend to assume that many more people are keeping up with them than there actually are. The thing is, though, there's no reason to assume this doesn't work both ways: people who are running with systems that are behind the "average" user tend to assume that many more people are doing the same than there actually are. What you really have to do in both cases is look at the numbers.

I do analytics for a single-author furry writing site, which is about as comparable a data set as I'm likely to get here. Windows 98 users account for 0.4% of the traffic. That's less than the number of people who've visited it using browsers on either the Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii! 98% of Windows users are running XP or higher, and only 9.5% of those using IE are running 6.0 or lower. (Less than half the visitors to the site are running IE at all, so IE 6 users account for about 3.9% of the total traffic.) Less than 1% of all FireFox users are running a version under 3.0, and nearly 70% are running 3.5.x. While obviously these numbers vary from site to site, my suspicion is that they won't be wildly different for Claw & Quill.

I feel a little compelled to defend the design profession here. :) A lot of effort at big sites goes into "progressive enhancement," providing features for newer browsers while ensuring that older browsers still function. Yahoo! has a standard for this they call Graded Browser Support. It's easy to miss all this work from the outside because if you're using an older browser the site still seems just fine -- it's only when you go to it with Safari 4 instead of IE 6 that you go, "Whoa, where did all this extra stuff come from?"

There are places where "advanced" techniques would be very useful on a writing site: for instance, being able to re-order chapters in a novel and novels in a series with drag and drop. The trick is making sure that those techniques are still going to work on older browsers, not just the one that you develop with, and ideally that there's an alternative that doesn't require Javascript at all. While C&Q doesn't use the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, we'll be aiming for a pretty similar approach to theirs -- full support on A-grade browsers, and verified functionality on a C-grade browser.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

While C&Q doesn't use the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, we'll be aiming for a pretty similar approach to theirs -- full support on A-grade browsers, and verified functionality on a C-grade browser.

This sounds good to me. Just for a point of information, I despise "drag and drop" or most other things that require me to use a mouse rather than the keyboard. As a fast and reliable touch typist, I much prefer to keep my hands where they are most efficient, and not lose my home position every few seconds to tweak a mouse. As long as an alternate approach is possible, though, I won't complain. (I'm the kind who actually learns and uses all those ALT-hotkey options in application software.)

Your statistics are interesting, and I won't dispute them except to say that such measurements can be self-confirming. If the site is not friendly to low bandwidth users or those with older hardware and software, they aren't likely to frequent it much. I'm not saying that this is the case with your site, but just pointing out the issue, which I think is often missed by today's self-styled web experts.

IE is certainly on the decline and FF is moving into the ascendancy at least for the present. However, Firefox 3.5 is just so bloated (as is the case with the latest versons of OpenOffice) that I'm extremely resistant to installing it. I've been in computing since the days when a mainframe with 64K of memory was considered large. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur. ;D ) I have trouble understanding why a simple word processor needs to occupy 100 megabytes of disk space and can't run in a gigabyte of RAM without bringing a system to its knees. Web browsers were originally intended to be thin clients, and I just can't understand what happened to that philosophy. But I digress, probably.

I don't use Windows. I do use Linux extensively. The Linux releases of even products like Firefox tend to lag a bit behind the Windows versions. If you want a stable system, it rarely pays to install new releases as soon as they come out. Therefore I tend to lag by one release on such things.

I don't buy a new car every two or three years either. I usually wait until I'm pushing 100K miles, or 8 to 9 years. Likewise, I refuse to be tossing computers into the landfill every couple of years to keep up with Microsoft's bloated products or the latest games. At five years I'm likely to be thinking about an upgrade. I know this is not quite the norm, but three years without upgrade is probably pretty common for home users and especially so for the non-technical types. That's why Vista never really took hold and XP remains the most widely used version of Windows. The same happened with Windows ME vs. 98 a decade or so ago.

As long as you focus on function before appearance, and keep bandwidth as tight as possible (limit excessive graphics and huge scripts or CSS, and absolutely no required Flash content) I'll be really pleased.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

The site I got the measurements from is actually pretty low-bandwidth friendly; it uses (but doesn't require) Javascript on some pages, but for the most part it's all text, and you can actually view it in Lynx without being aware you're missing anything. I've actually been using computers since the days of the TRS-80 (and in fact ran a BBS on one for years), so I'm familiar with a pretty broad spectrum. :) I'm also a pretty good touch typist, although I've come to prefer mice for things mice are good at.

While this is somewhat of a digression, here's my take on web browsers: while they were thin clients originally, one can make a good case that that was a step backward. The model of "server sends a screen, client fills out a form and sends response, server updates screen" is that of the mainframe terminal that personal computers--by which I include the TRS-80 and the Apple II--were clear improvements on. There's an awful lot of stuff that the original model simply didn't allow for.

In fact, when you click "Reply" on LiveJournal, you're seeing something that model couldn't do: it opens up the reply box with Javascript. I can click the arrows on the calendar box and it doesn't have to reload the whole page, it just updates the calendar. That's only possible through Javascript and the ability to send/receive HTTP requests from those scripts, rather than just based on browser requests. I think Javascript and "Ajax" and other woo-woo-sounding things get a bad rap primarily because they're only really noticeable when they're doing something annoying. When they're making your experience better you may not even be aware they're running.

I'm not a wildly cutting edge guy, either--I usually don't have the resources to be updating computers (or cars) every couple of years. My laptop is only about two and a half years old, but my desktop is a PowerMac G5 from mid-2003. That was kind of high-end then (although it's just a single processor model). I think it's probably reasonable to assume that there's a lot of machines still in use that were ~$1K PCs from mid-2003.

As long as you focus on function before appearance, and keep bandwidth as tight as possible (limit excessive graphics and huge scripts or CSS, and absolutely no required Flash content) I'll be really pleased.

I tend to believe form follows function. C&Q's (very) informal mission statement is Presentation matters, but I think it's perfectly possible to have a beautiful site that's very easy to use. (Actually, I'd go so far as to say that sites that are hard to use are very rarely beautiful, and a really beautiful site is rarely hard to use. But I've been interested in UI design for years, so I'm the kind of guy who would say that.)

While I will steadfastly defend Javascript (at least in principle), Flash gives me hives.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reassurances. I didn't mean to imply that you were one of the "wet behind the ears" web designers, by the way, because I know you are far from that.

Javascript is generally OK. Java, though, is a royal pain to the low bandwidth user. Most browsers simply lock up while they are downloading those applets or scripts or whatever you call them. You can't even cancel out of it. This becomes really, really irritating with some sites. Flash... well, evidently you get it. So few do, though.

I've been looking forward to C&Q, and you only make me more eager to see it come to fruition. Thanks for taking time to discuss it.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

My biggest annoyance at SoFurry - and admittedly, I only stopped by for like two minutes - would have to be the size of the thumbnails.

I go to see if there's any good new art (I particularly like the stuff from Lonewolf666), but now the thumbnails are too small to get an idea if it's a picture I want to waste time loading at all.

Epic fail.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There is a little, almost unnoticeable, gadget at the top of the thumbnail window that will enlarge those images. Like so much of the SF design, it goes undocumented and poorly explained.

If you are using anything other than Firefox 3.5, there are much more serious problems. IE 6 and 7 can't navigate at all, as the links don't work (who knows why?) Firefox 2 and 3 can't even see the titles and descriptions, and are only presented with the thumbnail for art and the authors' user icon for everything else. I don't have Opera to check with, but from what I hear, it has similar issues.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to come up with a comparison between the loveless porn and a romantic kiss, here, and then translating KISS to the traditional Keep It Simple, Stupid, but my brain just can't come up with the joke.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. I don't see much romance in SoFurry, nor, for that matter, did I ever see it at YiffStar which is why I abandoned ship there several years ago.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Re: Thumbnail Enlargement

Another epic fail. It defaults to the very small and cramped thumbnails whenever you change pages. Like, when browsing.

How they've managed to make something THIS BAD is beyond me.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's a simple and common failing of "web designers" today. Most of them are too young to have any grasp of issues like compatibility or market share. The idea that using resources conservatively is a good concept is beyond their comprehension. They put form before function, and seem to think that animated graphics and color themes matter more than usability.

Worst of all, they assume that everyone who matters has the same software and hardware that they do. So if you don't have the latest whiz bang processor, the most accelerated graphics card, and an uncapped broadband connection, they will look down their noses at you and tell you to upgrade if you want to use their wonderful site. Hence SoFurry, a web site that only works with one version of one browser, requires massive bandwidth, and consists largely of colorful little widgets that don't work.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

I haven't poked it too much, but the bit of browsing and clicking through I did... all seems to work fine under Safari.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

I should clarify. I say that because normally if a site is built poorly with little regards to the W3 convention standards Safari balks at it (being the first and still only browse I think to conform to the standards 100% thus passing the Acid 3 test). Indeed the old Yiffstar site often failed outright when trying to run it on here, but this one seems to progress smoothly. Overall though i don't have opinions on it just as I don't really have opinions on FA or other such sites. I don't use them enough to have some perceived stake in it...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, the site's functionality is shaped by internal politics and the attitudes of its owner, of course. There are issues with that, and some of them may yet prove fatal. The design, regardless of function, is horribly cluttered and confusing in my opinion (and I'm not alone.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I suspect there may be version issues with Safari too, as someone was complaining that it didn't work. I don't have access to it, so I didn't try. The only browser I have that seems to work 100% with the site is Firefox 3.5.6. That does seem as if the coding is right on the edge somewhere.

[quoting-mungo.livejournal.com]

The real kicker for me? I liked Yiffstar, for different reasons than I liked FurRag. It was never going to be my main archive, but a site unapologetic enough about its porn to have it right there in the name? Is a very nice counterpoint to FA's rabid "must make sure people can't view the porn without having an account" bullshit. Even if I fucking hate the name Yiffstar; at least it's better than SoFurry (oh my $deity, what were they thinking?).

And now SF is buying into that bullshit, scrambling to try to make itself look decent, all the while their forums and the journals (for some reason listed on the main page) are full of people saying things along the lines of "it's (just) a furry porn site". So much for the name change being a change of the site's image.

(I'm also getting rather tired of people on the SF team taking things personally and/or treating me as though I don't know what my computer is doing — I was so vindicated when one of the testers came back after trying the site in IE and said "whoa. you're right." I should send him my PayPal address, since he was the one to say "I bet five bucks it works fine.")


-Alexandra

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There is a pretty valid reason for trying to keep explicit stuff behind a curtain. Even if the server is located in Scandinavia or some other place that has no blue-nose laws, once it gets blacklisted by providers or by nations that filter internet traffic aggressively, your users in those places lose all their access. In some cases, users who even just try to access your site may be subject to prosecution. While the adult screening at FurRag was buggy and unreliable, I can't fault it for being there.

As for the attitude problem at SF, I agree, it is severe. Far worse than FA, which is already on the margin of what I can tolerate.

[quoting-mungo.livejournal.com]

FAIK Yiffstar also had a clickthrough type screening, which I have no issue with. I understand why such things have to be in place, silly as they are. What I cannot get behind is how galleries are moving towards making explicit content available only to registered users.


-Alexandra

[altivo.livejournal.com]

At least in the U.S. I think it has to do with court decisions. Click through is not considered to be sufficient prevention to keep juveniles from viewing "offensive" content, since they can (and will, I promise) just click through it. You live in a culture where individuals are held responsible for their actions, but a good half of the world doesn't work that way. By requiring registration, a web site is considered to have acted "in good faith" to provide parents with an opportunity to screen children's internet access. The e-mail confirmation requirement is considered sufficient. Parents who choose to restrict access can keep a tight hand on a child's e-mail more easily than they can on their direct web use.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

From my hunting around so far, Altivo's reasoning is the one that most sites use. There's also the somewhat practical reason that requiring users to register is an effective way to cut down on comment spam/abuse -- if you're identified by your email address, there's at least a theoretical minimum amount of accountability you can be held to. (Also, many sites are running someone else's software, like PHPBB or Drupal, and the configuration choices are more limited. The ability to say "an unregistered user can view all content, but only after clicking this box" may simply not be available.)

I've been thinking this through for Claw & Quill and so far have come to no useful decision. :) However, reading your posts on this on FurRag's forums has given me a fair amount to think about. My original reaction was more or less, "Bah, humbug" -- registration is a one-time nuisance, and I plan to have C&Q support OpenID by the time it's really open, which should mean anyone with an account on an OpenID-supporting system like LiveJournal can skip the email-verification hula dance. But you've made me reconsider that, particularly in light of functionality I'd like C&Q to have at some point after launch. At the very least, I've come around to think that if you share a direct link to a story, it should always work, even if the story is marked as explicit content and the visitor is unregistered.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Two small thoughts on this. If you plan to share content by direct link without any identity validation of the reader, even I might ask you to make that an option that the writer can allow or disallow, perhaps on a per-piece basis. Something like the way LJ or Facebook allow you to specify that a post is readable to "friends only" or "registered users" or "anyone."

Anyone can pass around that direct link. Kids are guaranteed to do so if they get their hands on it, so if there's any real concern about them having free access to something (even if just to avoid clashes with the law or overly zealous parents) it's something to consider.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

There will be ways to limit access similar to LJ's approach. (Looking at my data model, I'm not sure it actually matches my notes on this, but, well. Pre-alpha and all that. Ahem.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It needn't be as complex as LJ if you are creating a writers' and readers' site I guess. Social networking isn't at issue then. Unless you have some goals of which I'm not yet aware, I don't mean to ask you to build "FA for writers" or anything like that. ;p And if I need to limit access to something down to a narrow few, I would probably use a site like Etherpad or Google Docs instead.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I must admit, I prefered the lay out of the old YS. However SoFurry IS running an awful lot quicker for me than the old site ever did.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I never used the old site enough to compare, but I find that SoFurry is much slower than FA and about comparable to F4L (which I consider pretty much unusable.) Worse though is the user interface at SF, which is just plain broken. Badly designed, poorly implemented, untested, and incompatible with the majority of installed browser software. The incompatibilities are severe enough to make the site unusable.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*headshakes* People really attach far too much significance to ultimately irrelevant details of websites.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's the old problem of valuing appearance before function. That issue is widespread, unfortunately.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I wonderered what had happened to yiffstar, it's kind of a poor replacement, I can't find stories easily by my favourite writers nor search on them easily. It is awfully bloated.