Microcosm Feature Suggestions

Rather than put these into the Croudfunding thread, I thought I'd start a new one.

Following the photo of the day palava, I thought that these two suggestions were good:

Hmmm ... would there be any mileage in Microcosm adding such a tagging mechanism, e.g. [nsfw]link[/nsfw] which would not only flag something up as NSFW but also, if you clicked on it, asked you for confirmation that you wanted to visit it, just to prevent people from clicking through to NSFW targets accidentally? (You might be able to switch off confirmation.) May of course already be planned.

And for that matter, could other users tag something as NSFW, in the same way as youtube/dailymotion has a family-friendly filter?

hmm - that sounds useful - perhaps flagging a post so that then users with a "safe images only" setting get presented images in that post inline/linked rather than embedded

someone would need to check that the posts were actually nsfw

or, have a drop down option like some other forums which reads "show post"
so you can still read the thread, just have the option of viewing things that your mrs/boss etc might not quite like.

or, have a drop down option like some other forums which reads "show post"
so you can still read the thread, just have the option of viewing things that your mrs/boss etc might not quite like.

indeed - could just have at the top/side of the post something along the lines of

"embedded images have been disabled in the post as they may be deemed not safe for work - click here to display them"

No need for the text contents of the post to be messed with/hidden

Also you were able to have a global setting like google image search that enabled/disabled nsfw images then those users happy to have all images embedded wouldn't even be troubled with it.

"sink threads"
(goodbye any visibility for helmet, rlj, or fighter planes threads)

An "ignore slightly" function that renders the ignored posts in small alpha-faded text.

Rather than put these into the Croudfunding thread, I thought I'd start a new one.

Following the photo of the day palava, I thought that these two suggestions were good:

Boston Big Picture does this quite neatly, photo no. 24.

A bit of an ask but would it be possible to have auto-search/alerts based on for sale criteria. I saw in one of the mock-ups that there were fields such as seatpost diameter/material/rear spacing etc. It'd be good to be able to have an autosearch like this:

Component: Frameset
Rear Spacing: 120mm
Dropouts: Track ends
Material: Carbon

To have a notification pop up when something was posted in classifieds meeting all these specifications would be good.

Less is more: http://www.theonion.com/articles/internet-users-demand-less-interactivity,30920/

The Onion reckon that's satire, but I loathe: forced registration, post signatures, social media share integration, and all the noise that gets in the way of whatever you happen to be doing and regard what they've described as the pinnacle of UX... just get out of the users way and help them find what they want as quick as possible.

Increasing user engagement isn't accomplished by force increasing the vanity metrics that measure it.

On flags... I've loosely planned what I'm calling a YayMehGrr system... whereby you can indicate approval or disapproval... or meh, of most stuff. And hopefully this will replace what is comment/reputation/karma on most forums with something that over time might be used to make the stuff you're interested in rise to the top of some views, and the stuff you dislike sink to the bottom.

Which pretty much covers the flag function as well as sinking, ignore (posts, users, items).

Except it will eventually... after much product evolution... become implicit rather than explicit.

It may not neatly cover the flag as NSFW filter level, but I might consider how to make it so.

How about doing something with webfonts, such that posters in the nursery get a font that resembles crayon, and as their post count / rep goes up they proceed in stages to a grown up font. Anything Tester writes could be in a fine, authoritarian Clarendon, whereas anything I write probably ought to be in Marker Felt.

Urgh, no.

High user engagement is a goal, and web fonts are unfortunately quite heavy (40kb per font face and variant). As quick web pages increase engagement (how much people stick around and use the site), I want to avoid all extra downloads and webfonts fit into that.

That's before we touch upon the difficulty in consuming a web page potentially made up of 20 font faces.

If we use any custom fonts, it will be for headers only... nothing else. I want all content rendered in native fonts for each platform, and the best way to achieve that is simply to say "sans-serif" or "serif".

^^my posts would vary between crayon held with a fist and poor graffiti, indraripper might just be kids finger painting

^^ no fun.

actually, serious suggestion - take a look at http://icomoon.io/ and see if it would benefit you using a webfont for all your graphics, as opposed to images.

mine would be cave man drawings i guess...

actually, serious suggestion - take a look at http://icomoon.io/ and see if it would benefit you using a webfont for all your graphics, as opposed to images.

There's a myth that it is good enough. It's not. Same with vector graphics.

The problem is that depending on font size, zoom level, etc... differing levels of detail should be apparent to enhance understanding and perception of the icon/graphic.

Fonts and vectors don't work like that... so you'd need whole sets of fonts/vectors for each zoom level.

It's much easier just to use a single sprite image, and faster too. And if you're on a high DPI device, to use a much higher res version of that.

That entirely depends, like everything, on the designs you have for your icons/graphics, and the range of devices/ resolutions/zooms you intend to support, and the care you put into their creation. I have had great success in some cases by using icomoon for some projects.

Nothing is a blanket solution, and certainly not sprites.

Well, I shall bear it in mind and experiment with options when I get to that stage.

I'm curious as to how you're doing any metadata for non standard thread types. Say, in classifieds, is { "framesize" : "54cm" } selected from a list, or is it a free for all?

Can anybody input { "thing" : "specification" } as and when, or will it be specific to the type of forum or administrators' needs?

Any key:value pair is fine.

How about an @Username function, to alert someone you've named them in a post?

Dickhead, Cunt, Shit, Asshole and other users with generic user names would be chasing posts all over the place ;-)

The best thing about this website is the soundslides:

http://slowcoast.co.uk/

Perhaps have a section for soundslides or videos?