Howdy.

After receiving some spirited feedback last week, it became abundantly clear that our communication channels can stand to be improved.
Thus, here we are. Welcome to the first e621 devlog, where I shall talk about some of the changes and features that will be coming in the future versions of the site.

If you have any feedback for me, please leave it below. Including whether you'd like me to continue making devlogs like this.
The only thing I ask is to be patient with me. We do not have a massive development or PR team here – as it stands, I am the primary developer for e621, with no budget or an abundance of time, but with some helpful contributions from other volunteer devs.

Release Pipeline

Before we begin, I need to clarify how releases work around here.
Some of you already know this, but some may not.

We are currently on a weekly release schedule.
New major versions of the site get rolled out every Wednesday. Sometimes, there are more minor patches deployed on other days – typically due to bugs being discovered.

However, we do not immediately deploy the latest changes to the live site.
Any major update is first rolled out to e926.net for testing purposes.
If you are in our Discord, you can receive updates whenever this happens in the #dev-announcements channel.

After a week on e926, the major version will be deployed on e621 – usually with some bug fixes, if needed.

Development Goals

The obvious goal here is to make the site better.
But that statement is so generic that it barely means anything.

Right now, my primary objective is to make the user experience better for mobile users.
Whether you like it or not – and I am old enough to dislike it – the majority of people interact with the site using a mobile device. To put this in more concrete terms:

• 50.4% of visitors use an Android device.
• 24.9% of visitors use an iOS device.

That is a massive number of people who likely had not been having a great experience on the site.
E621 had many updates since its creation, but at its core it is still a site from 2007, just with a fresh coat of paint here and there.

Of course, I do not intend to leave the desktop users by the wayside. After all, I myself am one such user.

What You Can Do To Help

Simply put, help me test this damned thing.
I could really use some feedback and / or bug reports on the builds that get deployed to e926 before they get pushed to the main site.

Any feedback is welcome, although I urge you to be constructive.
Simply stating that you dislike something is not terribly useful – I would like to know why you dislike it.

Upcoming features

The following changes had been released on e926.

Main Menu Changes

This week had not seen as thorough of a rework of the menu as last time, but I still touched up on a few things.
One of the complaints regarding the navbar had been that getting to your account was somewhat inconvenient.
I've hopefully made a few steps in the right direction with this design.

Notably, I have added your current avatar and username to the header – clicking on either one will take you to your profile.
The buttons for the themes and settings have been moved lower to the far right of the secondary navbar, to save space.

This was actually somewhat challenging to implement, mainly due to the fact that usernames can be as long as 20 characters.
Also, some users have no avatar at all, so for now that button will display the first letter of their username.
We might have something better to replace it in the future, but this should work for now.

Additionally, the various menu icons had been replaced with new ones. This is most noticeable in the mobile menu.
For a while, the site had used font-awesome for its icons, which had its benefits and drawbacks. These new icons are instead SVGs from Lucide.
They offer a bit more flexibility – and also look better, in my opinion.

The mobile menu had also been tweaked to improve usability.
The primary navbar (on the left) had been adjusted to make it easier to click on the individual buttons.
Also, yes, the duplicate "Account" button is gone. Rejoice.

Search Page Changes

Last week, I reworked the layout of the search page to make it easier for me to shift items around.
It should be relatively unnoticeable – if you go to e621 right now, you might not even spot that something had changed.
However, it had made designing a layout that can accommodate both mobile and desktop users significantly easier.

This time, I made some visual changes to the desktop layout.
The sidebar is more visually separated from the rest of the posts.

One of the long-standing complaints regarding searching for posts on e621 had been that the tag input is not terribly convenient for long queries.
Last week's update already addressed this somewhat by making the input automatically expand vertically if the text is too long to fit.
This time, however, I've added a fullscreen mode to the search page, for a minimalist view.
(Don't tell anyone, but that's actually just the mobile view of the search page.)

This project actually started with me trying to fix pagination on mobile... and then things kind of got out of hand.
At least, the pagination should do a better job of not overflowing the page on mobile. In theory, at least.
Here are some screencaps at various resolutions: mobile, tablet, desktop.
It also had me contemplating limiting the maximum search pages to 99, since trying to fit three-digit numbers on there gave me a headache.

As an added bonus, clicking on the ellipsis ("...") now allows you to input a page number directly and be immediately taken there.

Home Page Changes

Nothing extraordinary this week, I'm afraid.
I did have to make some changes to fit the new main menu, but that should be relatively minor.

A bigger change is that the "Popular" button now takes you to the order:rank search, rather than the actual Popular page.
The justification for this is that while the Popular page is useful, it's not possible to search it. And the "rank" ordering provides a fairly similar output while also allowing you to narrow down the results based on your preferences.

And speaking of searching – now if you type something into the searchbox, clicking on either of the two buttons below will actually search for your input.
The "Popular" button will add order:rank to your search automatically, of course.

Footer Rework

Last week saw a minor redesign of the site footer, especially on mobile.
That... did not work especially well, actually. It ended up a little wonky and also a little buggy.

This week's attempt actually looks pretty decent, in my opinion.
As an added bonus, it explicitly states the release number that the site is currently running. Somehow, that was not a feature before.
You can thank binaryfloof for that change.

Other Miscellaneous Stuff

I fixed a few bugs here and there. In no particular order:

• The sitemap page was overflowing on mobile due to a very silly design decision.
• Privileged users can now use the "apply to all" button for the tag scripts, instead of it being restricted to staff only.
• The wiki excerpt on the search page got restyled to look a bit nicer.
• The related posts on the posts/show page used to get misaligned if one of them was blacklisted.
• The related tags on the upload page now include a "Contributor" category button.
• The guest warning dialog got restyled to look a bit nicer.

Additionally, a few changes were made by the volunteer developers.

• binaryfloof fixed a rather irritating issue with the user feedback history.
• Tarrgon fixed a bug on the comment index page that could cause the site to throw an error if you stumbled upon your own deleted comment.

Thank you to both of them for their contributions.

The full changelog is available in this thread, as well as on github.

I for one appreciate a devlog like this. Thank you.

This update didn't seem to have much of an effect on the desktop side, so I don't really have much more feedback about this update in particular. However, there are a few minor issues that may be worth bringing up with the wiki excerpt on search results. The feature itself isn't really a problem, it's easily collapsed to hide by default and you mentioned adding an option to remove it completely, so no complaints there. But I notice when searching certain tags, mainly artists, that the excerpt is largely pointless and a waste of space. Artist tags often have a wiki that just copies their site URLs (that may or may not be out of date from the URLs in the Artist page), or unnecessary or irrelevant information. As examples:

tenebscuro
ingi
winick-lim (particularly egregious given the info someone put in the wiki, being blasted on top of search results)

This probably happens a lot because when editing an Artist entry there's a field for "Notes", which is actually for the tag's wiki page, something that's not clearly indicated. And once something is added to their wiki entry, it can't be removed (the wiki entry can be modified, but trying to erase it all when there's no relevant info to give does nothing, leaving the text that was there). Unlike normal tags, and even character or copyright tags, wiki pages for artist tags don't really talk about what the results contain, and is at best just information about the artist themself (though often not even that). I wonder if it may be possible to have the wiki excerpt collapsed by default when searching artist tags.

Regarding the changes currently live on e926:
- Wiki Excerpt: Displaying the tags at the top of the page does seem redundant. If the user would like to see the see for a tag they can press the '?' on the list of tags present.
- Fullscreen Mode: this seems underbaked at the moment and only takes up space on the lefthand side. This may be better as a user setting. Addons like re621 often handle CSS like this so it may be better to leave it to third parties for minor visual features.
- The Footer: The new footer seems to be pretty invasive at the bottom of the page currently. by taking up maybe 15% of the vertical height of the window it. This with the circle around the logo it draws the eye in a bad way (to me).
- Sign-in button: Not sure of the purpose of this design choice. A simple link to the sign-in page seems to be functional and doesn't add more vertical height to the header.
- Posts Window?: The posts now being in their own little bordered window seems like an odd visual change. I'm personally not a fan as it makes the site a bit lopsided.
- General Design: (Related to above) I prefer the simpler aesthetic of the current e621's layout and design, where things are all connected together. Again if people want their own custom CSS that can be handled by 3rd party tools. With this in mind too these changes will definitely break the CSS tools that already exist. This is pretty unavoidable, but it may be much better to have large changes vetted, tested, and look good before rolling them out and having devs need to roll out nightly patches for their tools.

Mobile:
- Top of the page: At the moment, the top of the page (header + search + wiki) seems to have extra space that takes up half the screen on my device (galaxy s24). This seems unintentional and messes with navigation. (may be best to remove the tag info preview altogether or have it be a user setting)

Other thoughts on e621's rolled out changes:
- Profile Button: Having the user's profile be easily accessible is great, makes it easier to navigate for sure.
- Welcome Page: Neat redesign, though the buttons don't seem very consistent design-wise. I'd prefer the simpler (but still tasteful) text links instead of the new bubbles for latest and popular.

Edit:
Overall I think e621 is an excellent and important art database and booru site. From my point of view, the site should be simple, elegant, and optimal as well as be a platform others can easily build off of if they want more functionality or fancy UI.

I don't have any programming skills whatsoever, so all I can say is I prefer the old tag search omnibox that logged my keystrokes for every letter. It allowed me to remember artists or tags I have "pinned" for lack of a better term for easy searching.

watsit said: ...

Thank you for the feedback.
One thing that I consider doing is having a different section on to for artists.
The wiki page is usually pointless there, but stuff like gallery URLs and alternate names are not.
Kind of like what derpibooru has, ex. https://derpibooru.org/tags/artist-colon-dankflank (NSFW).

ShuffleFur's critique of Fullscreen Mode aside, looking at it on e926, I have a suggestion should it stay. Currently the button is under the search bar on the left in normal mode. Clicking it switches to fullscreen mode, but the button moves all the way to the right side of the screen, to the right of the search bar. IMO, the button to switch between normal and fullscreen modes should stay in roughly the same area. Placing it to the left of the search bar in fullscreen mode would be a bit more intuitive. It's easier to keep track of visually and to switch back and forth as desired, and will be quicker to undo in case of misclicks.

shufflefur said:
Regarding the changes currently live on e926:
- Wiki Excerpt: Displaying the tags at the top of the page does seem redundant. If the user would like to see the see for a tag they can press the '?' on the list of tags present.
- Fullscreen Mode: this seems underbaked at the moment and only takes up space on the lefthand side. This may be better as a user setting. Addons like re621 often handle CSS like this so it may be better to leave it to third parties for minor visual features.
- The Footer: The new footer seems to be pretty invasive at the bottom of the page currently. by taking up maybe 15% of the vertical height of the window it. This with the circle around the logo it draws the eye in a bad way (to me).
- Sign-in button: Not sure of the purpose of this design choice. A simple link to the sign-in page seems to be functional and doesn't add more vertical height to the header.
- Posts Window?: The posts now being in their own little bordered window seems like an odd visual change. I'm personally not a fan as it makes the site a bit lopsided.
- General Design: (Related to above) I prefer the simpler aesthetic of the current e621's layout and design, where things are all connected together. Again if people want their own custom CSS that can be handled by 3rd party tools. With this in mind too these changes will definitely break the CSS tools that already exist. This is pretty unavoidable, but it may be much better to have large changes vetted, tested, and look good before rolling them out and having devs need to roll out nightly patches for their tools.

Mobile:
- Top of the page: At the moment, the top of the page (header + search + wiki) seems to have extra space that takes up half the screen on my device (galaxy s24). This seems unintentional and messes with navigation. (may be best to remove the tag info preview altogether or have it be a user setting)

Other thoughts on e621's rolled out changes:
- Profile Button: Having the user's profile be easily accessible is great, makes it easier to navigate for sure.
- Welcome Page: Neat redesign, though the buttons don't seem very consistent design-wise. I'd prefer the simpler (but still tasteful) text links instead of the new bubbles for latest and popular.

Edit:
Overall I think e621 is an excellent and important art database and booru site. From my point of view, the site should be simple, elegant, and optimal as well as be a platform others can easily build off of if they want more functionality or fancy UI.

Howdy. Thank you for the detailed breakdown.

Two things of before I follow up on individual notes.
First, I don't want to offload features that will benefit users into some vague 3rd party tools. Especially when said tools are largely unavailable for the majority of users.
Not to mention the fact that most people aren't actually terribly interested in seeking out 3rd party tools to improve their experience - they just want a good experience from the get go.
Also, I personally don't like it when developers expect third party modders to pick up their slack in games, and I don't like it in web development either.

Second, no, it's not possible for me to make releases that are entirely without issues. There is not a large team behind this, it's basically just me with some help from some volunteers.
I test everything I release, but things do slip through. Best I can do is gather feedback and patch it as soon as I can. Which is why I want to get more feedback on e926 before the changes there hit the larger userbase.
Perhaps if the subscribestar takes off we can have something better.

Now, to the actual notes.

Wiki excerpt

People really don't care about seeking out wiki pages to find out what tags mean. That is evident in both tagging and their search queries.
Especially since the ? link is not very self-explanatory, not to mention tiny. It's almost unusable on mobile, actually.

Fullscreen mode

Yep, the button location was a bit last-minute. That can definitely be improved.
I will likely add a (smaller) button that will open a popup window with other search options like this - like adding an option to have the searchbar stick to the top of the screen when scrolling down, for example.

Footer

Not entirely sure why this is a problem, really, since you don't normally see it unless you deliberately seek it out.
But you do have a point about the circle around the logo. I'll think about what to do about it.

Sign-in button

It's actually just easier to design it this way. Plus, it promotes making an account to anonymous visitors, which is a good thing.
If you logged into e9, you would notice that the button is replaced by your avatar. That is actually a response to the feedback from last week – people thought that clicking the "Account" link was a little inconvenient.
So I added a larger interaction area and placed the avatar in there. I think it looks pretty neat. Not entirely sure what you mean by it expanding the header though - it's not supposed to do that.

taranuka said:
I don't have any programming skills whatsoever, so all I can say is I prefer the old tag search omnibox that logged my keystrokes for every letter. It allowed me to remember artists or tags I have "pinned" for lack of a better term for easy searching.

Sorry, I'm genuinely not sure what you are referring to.

watsit said:
ShuffleFur's critique of Fullscreen Mode aside, looking at it on e926, I have a suggestion should it stay. Currently the button is under the search bar on the left in normal mode. Clicking it switches to fullscreen mode, but the button moves all the way to the right side of the screen, to the right of the search bar. IMO, the button to switch between normal and fullscreen modes should stay in roughly the same area. Placing it to the left of the search bar in fullscreen mode would be a bit more intuitive. It's easier to keep track of visually and to switch back and forth as desired, and will be quicker to undo in case of misclicks.

Good call on not moving buttons over to the opposite side of the screen, yeah.
As I mentioned in the response to Shufflefur, I'll put it into an options menu of sorts, so that it does not stick out as much.

cinder said:
Sorry, I'm genuinely not sure what you are referring to.

I think they're talking about pre-ng/pre-quick complete when the search bar used to have a memory of previous searches.

dba_afish said:
I think they're talking about pre-ng/pre-quick complete when the search bar used to have a memory of previous searches.

Oh, we actually have a mockup for something similar: https://etc.cnd.pet/devlog/25.02.04/extra/autocomplete.png
But that's a feature for later.

cinder said:
25.04.02

2025-02-04. ISO-8601 or bust! :D (In e621's home country, that title date will most likely get parsed as April 2nd, 2025.)

the majority of people interact with the site using a mobile device.

I believe the stats you gave about ~75% of users being on mobile.

Are there any stats available on the device breakdown of users who upload art, add or change tags, edit the wiki, etc? I suspect those users are much more likely to be on desktop/laptop, but I don't know for sure.

Right now, my primary objective is to make the user experience better for mobile users.

As long as it doesn't make things worse for desktop users, I think this is a reasonable goal.

"Worse" means stuff like having buttons that take up a third of the screen on a desktop monitor, because they have to be that big on a 4" phone screen so people can successfully click them. This is an example; so far I haven't seen anything like that on the live site.

E621 had many updates since its creation, but at its core it is still a site from 2007, just with a fresh coat of paint here and there.

That's not... bad? It doesn't have infinite scroll or cute animations of the page elements tumbling into place when you do a portrait/landscape change. It does allow for relatively quick access to fap material an archive of fine art. :D

(Remember, FORTRAN and slide rules put humans on the Moon and returned them safely to the earth.)

previewing dtext that contains a [section] causes the little avatar in the top right to duplicate equal to the amount of [section]s in the dtext.

kora_viridian said:
That's not... bad? It doesn't have infinite scroll or cute animations of the page elements tumbling into place when you do a portrait/landscape change. It does allow for relatively quick access to fap material an archive of fine art. :D

It actually is pretty bad.
Not because of cute animations or what not, but because its layout is composed largely of rigidly positioned table HTML elements.
That's one of the reasons why every other page either overflows the window or otherwise breaks on mobile.

Settings page - inputs are larger than the bounds of the screen.
Tags page - table is overflowing the screen
Forum - page title is crammed into a box that is a third of the page width
Profile - used to overflow the page heavily until I updated it, still does not look great
etc. etc. etc.

That's the reason why I immediately dismiss any feedback from people who say that "if it isn't broke, don't fix it".
Because the site is broken visually in multiple ways.

kora_viridian said:
Are there any stats available on the device breakdown of users who upload art, add or change tags, edit the wiki, etc? I suspect those users are much more likely to be on desktop/laptop, but I don't know for sure.

I don't have detailed data on most of it, but I do have visitor stats on /uploads/new.
The fraction of people who are using a desktop computer is much larger... but it is still not an overwhelming majority like you would expect.

• 40% of visitors are using windows
• 33% use an android
• 14% use iOS
• 6% use a mac
• 2% use gnu/linux

That's 48% for desktop and 47% for mobile.
Which is actually impressive, since that page is not super-great on mobile.

cinder said:
I don't have detailed data on most of it, but I do have visitor stats on /uploads/new.
The fraction of people who are using a desktop computer is much larger... but it is still not an overwhelming majority like you would expect.

• 40% of visitors are using windows
• 33% use an android
• 14% use iOS
• 6% use a mac
• 2% use gnu/linux

That's 48% for desktop and 47% for mobile.
Which is actually impressive, since that page is not super-great on mobile.

What happened to the other 5%? Also it's barely a majority.
Are they using a samsung smart fridge or an apple watch to upload stuff? (or more likely tv)
Also can you contrast number of uploads to number of visitors to the page? and how does it count postybirb?

The stats definitely show desktop users are 3x more likely to visit the upload form than mobile users. hmm

I second the fact it's not particularly mobile friendly, but it's not that bad either

snpthecat said:
What happened to the other 5%? Also it's barely a majority.
Are they using a samsung smart fridge or an apple watch to upload stuff? (or more likely tv)
Also can you contrast number of uploads to number of visitors to the page? and how does it count postybirb?

The stats definitely show desktop users are 3x more likely to visit the upload form than mobile users. hmm

I second the fact it's not particularly mobile friendly, but it's not that bad either

Some of it is rounding. Some are just not reporting the OS they are using.
Some people going to that page from their TV or whatnot.
Also, I would guess that some PC users have extensions that block this kind of tracking.

Just because someone goes to that page does not mean that they upload anything.
That page has the highest bounce rate on the site – one in five visitors immediately leaves after opening it.

snpthecat said:
and how does it count postybirb?

External uploads (should) never actually load the html of the site and run the javascript to count in the analytics (the analytics are clientside and require javascript), so any external uploader is not counted

Looks like there's a lot of stuff in the pipeline. Thanks for all the hard work!

cinder said:
The fraction of people who are using a desktop computer is much larger... but it is still not an overwhelming majority like you would expect.

Interesting, thanks! You're right, I was expecting a bigger majority for desktop - like, anywhere from 66/34 up to 80/20 or so.

Which is actually impressive, since that page is not super-great on mobile.

I don't think I've ever tried to use the new-upload page on mobile. I suspect the (existing) feature where you can provide a direct FA, Weasyl, etc URL and have e621 go grab the image for you is doing a lot of the lifting for mobile uploaders. I think adding tags would be somewhat painful on mobile.

(When I uploaded images from desktop, I'd always have a dozen or two tags I knew could immediately apply, just from looking at the image once, so I'd put those in the "tags" box first thing. Then I'd switch tabs back and forth between the e621 upload page and the art page on FA (or equal), so I could see the details in the image and find other tags that should be applied. Sometimes I'd pop a new tab to the e621 wiki to research a tag or two. It seems to me like that trying to use that same work flow would be somewhat difficult on mobile.)

snpthecat said:
Are they using a samsung smart fridge or an apple watch to upload stuff?

This is probably based on the User-Agent strings that browsers send to e621. This is just a line of text that has the browser's name and version, the name and version of the OS the browser is running on, and a few other things. Nearly every web server has an analytics package available that will summarize the User-Agent strings for you in various ways.

Like Cinder said, some critters tell their browser to not send a User-Agent to a site at all. You can also get browser extensions that will make your browser send a fake User-Agent - either fixed, or rotating randomly. Sometimes this is for privacy; sometimes this is for access - a few sites are sensitive to what browser they think you are using.

and how does it count postybirb?

PostyBirb uses Google Electron, so it most likely counts as Chrome, on whatever OS the critter using PostyBirb has (Linux, Windows, OS X).

Electron is a somewhat-stripped-down version of Chrome. If you write your application in Javascript, following certain rules, then Electron lets you package your application and the stripped-down Chrome in a way that's easier for non-technical users to download and use.

(<hat type="tinfoil">
Since it's Chrome at heart, it will also have all the "suck all the personally identifiable information out of your PC and upload it to Google" functionality permanently turned on.
</hat>)

I don't know if Electron lets the application developer append or change the User-Agent string it sends. I would guess you might be able to append something, so e621, FA, etc would see something like Chrome/133.0.0.0 Electron/133.0.0.0 PostyBirb/3.1.53 from a PostyBirb user. If PostyBirb does that, it would be possible for the site owners to get stats on how many critters are using it, but they might have to modify whatever "canned" analytics package they are currently using.

By default, PostyBirb also puts an ad for itself in the post description, but the PostyBirb user can easily turn that off. A search shows something like 5,600 posts here have that ad, but I suspect the actual number of posts uploaded using PostyBirb is higher.

kora_viridian said:
This is probably based on the User-Agent strings that browsers send to e621. This is just a line of text that has the browser's name and version, the name and version of the OS the browser is running on, and a few other things. Nearly every web server has an analytics package available that will summarize the User-Agent strings for you in various ways.

The analytics are tracked clientside, not serverside
Look in your browser console for https://plausible.dragonfru.it - that's the analytics, it's a self hosted https://plausible.io instance

Postybirb does not load the html, and does not execute the javascript, so it is not counted in analytics at all

donovan_dmc said:
The analytics are tracked clientside, not serverside

It might not be the "daily driver" that staff uses every day, but something has to get tracked server-side. Citation: destroyed posts is a non-zero number, and as far as is publicly known, none of the staff have been v&.

Look in your browser console for https://plausible.dragonfru.it - that's the analytics, it's a self hosted https://plausible.io instance

Looks like uBlock Origin is blocking that for me, via the EasyPrivacy filter list. I guess I'm a Birb now! :D

kora_viridian said:
I think adding tags would be somewhat painful on mobile.

I never had much trouble with it. honestly, a lot of the features of Android's Gboard in some ways make it preferable to vanilla e6 on PC in relation to tagging as well as mirroring stuff from Twitter or elsewhere.

kora_viridian said:
It might not be the "daily driver" that staff uses every day, but something has to get tracked server-side. Citation: destroyed posts is a non-zero number, and as far as is publicly known, none of the staff have been v&.

I mean.. that's not really analytics? Those are just stats based off of counts in database tables
The info about destroyed posts are still stored (basically everything but the file) should it be needed later, the stats list is just counting those entries
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/07020a6295258a158ef2040a36a82d63b89f0779/app/logical/stats_updater.rb
Actually, it's counting the difference between the highest id and the existing posts, so it's overestimating

I'd hardly call that "tracking", none of this is explicitly tracked for the purpose of stats, it's all just there and can be used for stats

As far as I have been made aware and seen there are no other user based analytics
I've seen the openresty config and know there's nothing there
While I haven't seen the prod e621ng code, I sincerely doubt there's anything there
All of the analytics shown to us internally are from plausible, so it reasons to believe that everything comes from there

There is datadog in the e621ng repository, but that's used more for monitoring rather than analytics
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/07020a6295258a158ef2040a36a82d63b89f0779/app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb#L11 (ratelimited login)
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/07020a6295258a158ef2040a36a82d63b89f0779/app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb#L18 (successful login)
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/07020a6295258a158ef2040a36a82d63b89f0779/app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb#L22 (failed login)
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/07020a6295258a158ef2040a36a82d63b89f0779/app/logical/danbooru_logger.rb#L16 (add user id)
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/07020a6295258a158ef2040a36a82d63b89f0779/config/initializers/datadog.rb#L3

These are related to error and login attempt tracking, so the actual analytics boil back down to plausible

kora_viridian said:
Looks like uBlock Origin is blocking that for me, via the EasyPrivacy filter list. I guess I'm a Birb now! :D

If uBO is blocking analytics, that would definitely suggest many desktop users aren't getting counted. So that

• 50.4% of visitors use an Android device.
• 24.9% of visitors use an iOS device.

is over-counting mobile use since adblocking is much less prevalent on mobile compared to desktop. I just looked, and it appears dragonfru.it is blocked here too by uBO.

donovan_dmc said:
I mean.. that's not really analytics? Those are just stats based off of counts in database tables

It's not analytics at the level of detail we're talking about. I understand that the stats page is essentially doing some SELECT COUNTs against the database, and some arithmetic.

My point was that with 12,271 destroyed posts over almost exactly 18 years - a bit over 680 a year, on average - at least a few of the images from those destroyed posts would most likely be interesting to the Man.

I am not a lawyer, but I think that in at least some states, if somebody uploads an image like that to your server, you are legally required to tell the Man about it. I don't know if Arizona is like that or not; again, I am not a lawyer.

If you call the Man and say "hey, somebody uploaded something Bad to my server", he is going to ask you for more information about the upload.

One of the things he will ask for is the IP address of the machine that uploaded it, plus any other information you may have about that machine.

If you tell him "We don't log any of that stuff server-side, and the uploader blocked our client-side analytics, lol", then the Man is going to get in the v&, drive over to e621 headquarters, put you in the back of the v&, and offer you plenty of time alone to reconsider your IT configuration.

The Man may also have a plan to drive to your ISP, grab your servers, and put them in the tan v&, so he can then look through them at his leisure.

The way an e621 user would know that you ended up in the v& is through the rumor mill. That's not the most reliable thing in the world, but it exists.

The way an e621 user would know that the servers were in the tan v& is that the front page of the site would suddenly resemble that still image that showed up during the "attract" mode of the arcade cabinets when I was a kid. (The image would at least be in HD now, rather than sub-CGA.) Users also wouldn't be able to access any of the rest of the site.

Since, as far as I know, none of the above (rumor mill or redesigned front page) has happened, I strongly suspect that e621 has at least some server-side logging.

Also, if the process does resemble the above, I would expect there to be a very small number of the e621 principals - like, 1 or 2 people - that are responsible for it. They would most likely want to have backup from the company lawyerdog, or have enough money to hire their own lawyer, if they are going to be the position to make that type of report. I don't think e621 would ask a volunteer to be in that position.

I've seen the openresty config and know there's nothing there

I find it really unlikely that Nginx doesn't talk to rsyslogd (or the new-style second-kernel equivalent) and dump something in /var/log.

Or, maybe that level of logging is done by Cloudflare, and made available to the e621 principals if they want it - as far as I know, all "public" HTTP/HTTPS access has to hit a server at Cloudflare first, and then gets sent on to e621's actual machines. I know Cloudflare can forward the HTTP/HTTPS data connection to e621, but I don't know how it handles the "metadata", like the source IP address.

All of the analytics shown to us internally are from plausible, so it reasons to believe that everything comes from there

Like I said, Plausible may well be the "daily driver". I just think there has to be something more than that on the server side.

I also realize that the current staff member(s) who know what the configuration is, or what procedures they follow, may not want to comment on exactly what the configuration is or how the procedures work, and that's fine.

...simple request logging is not analytics
I made no claim that there isn't any logging
I don't get what your position is here? You seem to be trying to get me on some technicality that I haven't claimed?

The actual analytics that are used are clientside, that's plausible
There is serverside monitoring within e621ng, that's datadog
I am sure there is some form of logging somewhere, but that is not analytics
It could be aggregated into some form of analytics, but it isn't, so I don't see it as being particularly relevant here

kora_viridian said: ...

Stop conspiracy posting, please and thank you.
Whatever you are smoking might be too strong.

No, we don't have any secret analytics or fingerprinting. It's pretty much just Plausible, Revive, Datadog, and Cloudflare.
Whenever someone tries to upload CSAM to the site – which happens fairly infrequently, may I add – that does get reported to the authorities.
Nobody got put in a v&, whatever that means, because we don't sneakily collect data on our users' every moves.

e621's primary business model involves driving traffic to the BD storefront, and that's kinda it.
There's no conspiracy here. If you don't want to believe me, that's your choice, but please stop going on those tirades about how the Man is after you.

"Vanned" is chan-speak for getting on the FBI, or local equivalent, watchlist, Cinder.

votp said:
chan-speak

That tracks with the tin foil hat type rambling included

cinder said:
Sorry, I'm genuinely not sure what you are referring to.

I think this is what they are referring to:

https://i.imgur.com/8lia3U4.png

Main page still has the functionality, and it was something that I heavily used on this site and a few others.

deadoon said:
I think this is what they are referring to:
https://i.imgur.com/8lia3U4.png

Is your device only used by you? Are you bold enough to save your search history?

My usual searches all come up in the URL bar. Just pressing "e" used to be for e6 but morphed to "dragon, -upvote", I have a handful of other searches I keep up with daily, you can probably guess what they are lol. "sc", "sh", "av", "scp", "loo", "fe". And that's actually the extent of my manual searching, for everything else, I got my re6 subscriptions.

I like seeing a form devlog. Will each update get its own thread or will they all be contained in a master thread? Would be nice to see this pushed in the announcement bubble since I don't check the forums much, but if this is going to be a weekly affair, best not I guess.

Can't say I've seen much in the way of changes (sans re6 breaking) aside from the upper right and the adjustment to the search bar text wrapping, which was a long time coming. Always having to scroll back and forth to see what's been typed, or checking the URL.

I have some quick feedback to the recent changes. This update broke autocomplete in the posts and favorites pages search-by-tag field. It works fine on the landing page (https://e621.net/).

Dropping autocomplete support means device-saved searches are gone. It also defeats recalling recent session searches, like going back to a search a few minutes ago to tweak a tag or query directive.

My complaint to appears be the same complaint that @deadoon and @taranuka have.

I haven't dug any deeper (it has been a long time since I've done web developement), but this may be of help: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/autocomplete

PS: Thanks for the thread. There's features that I didn't even know about (better mobile, even though I'm not a heavy mobile user, is a good thing!) and over communication is always better than under.

donovan_dmc said:
I don't get what your position is here? You seem to be trying to get me on some technicality that I haven't claimed?

As far I as I understand it, you've claimed that the "daily driver" logs are e621's hosted Plausible logs - you said that those logs are what were "shown to us internally". *

I don't disagree with your statement that what the e621 staff saw was the Plausible logs.

(*From before you got fired from staff and forced to claim it was voluntary.)

I am sure there is some form of logging somewhere, but that is not analytics

If Varka, NMNY, and DasaDevil Hal Greaves don't want to go to UNITED STATES FEDERAL PRISON, I can guarantee you that those logs exist. (The fedbois might have to extradite at least NMNY, but they already know what paperwork to send to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland to do that.)

That tracks with the tin foil hat type rambling included

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't meant they're not out to get you.

Try reading the US national political news sometime.

cinder said:
Stop conspiracy posting, please and thank you.
Whatever you are smoking might be too strong.

Stop enshittifying the desktop site for the sake of phonetards, please and thank you.

I don't smoke anything.

please stop going on those tirades about how the Man is after you.

OK, fedboi.

Now that’s a forum post to leave off on… lmao.

Anyways, I’m appreciating how much you do cinder! Loving the dev log, and can’t wait to see what improvements come next!

user_318479 said:
Stop enshittifying the desktop site for the sake of phonetards, please and thank you.

y'know, sometimes I kinda want to never fix/replace my PC, just so I can feel like, in-part at least, my existence has caused people like this to shit themselves over nothing.

anyway...

^{_{ʚ(ϵˆ⌔ˆ)϶}„}

manitka said:
Now that’s a forum post to leave off on… lmao.

Fun fact: they didn't actually delete their account, they just renamed it

Notice how their profile doesn't say the account is unverified and there's no deletion log

I don't know if they're too chicken to actually delete their account or what, but they've also been hiding a bunch of their stuff on the forums

--
Oh, and for the rest of y'all to laugh at them more over, enjoy this dmail they sent me
I love it when people show their true colors, throwing out more conspiracies (I did resign voluntarily for my lack of time and mental health reasons, I was not in any way fired or talked to; I'm doing a loy better on the latter now, hence why I'm more willing to talk about it) and showing a full victim complex

I also have no idea what red I gave them they're talking about, contrary to seemingly some people's beliefs I don't keep a catalogue of every single person I've ever punished for any reason, and put them on some shitlist if they get the punishment reversed

donovan_dmc said:
I don't know if they're too chicken to actually delete their account or what, but they've also been hiding a bunch of their stuff on the forums

I've seen a couple users go through periodically and hide older forum posts and/or post comments of theirs. IIRC, they've done that before, so it's nothing new or unique.

watsit said:
I've seen a couple users go through periodically and hide older forum posts and/or post comments of theirs. IIRC, they've done that before, so it's nothing new or unique.

Sure, but that's not the point
They renamed their account to look deleted as if they exited the site, but that account is very much still active

donovan_dmc said:
Fun fact: they didn't actually delete their account, they just renamed it

Notice how their profile doesn't say the account is unverified and there's no deletion log

I don't know if they're too chicken to actually delete their account or what, but they've also been hiding a bunch of their stuff on the forums

--
Oh, and for the rest of y'all to laugh at them more over, enjoy this dmail they sent me
I love it when people show their true colors, throwing out more conspiracies (I did resign voluntarily for my lack of time and mental health reasons, I was not in any way fired or talked to; I'm doing a loy better on the latter now, hence why I'm more willing to talk about it) and showing a full victim complex

I also have no idea what red I gave them they're talking about, contrary to seemingly some people's beliefs I don't keep a catalogue of every single person I've ever punished for any reason, and put them on some shitlist if they get the punishment reversed

Oh no I could tell since their page didn’t say unactiveated (and they hadn’t changed their name when I first read their message even, I was just laughing for a solid minute), but it’s still frankly hilarious that they sent all that and then “retired” their account.

Come on you don’t keep an excel sheet of all the people you’ve ever given a negative record? Lol

Also glad things are getting better! Alright I must sleep and stop flooding this forum lol

donovan_dmc said:
I also have no idea what red I gave them they're talking about, contrary to seemingly some people's beliefs I don't keep a catalogue of every single person I've ever punished for any reason, and put them on some shitlist if they get the punishment reversed

this is the only thing I could find that'd kinda fit the bill but it's not even a neg, it's a neutral. and it's also kinda nothing, so yeah, I've no idea what they're on about.

It's nice to see a log! I'd say it should be stickied so it doesn't get buried and people can quickly provide feedback as needed when the UI updates roll around. Also, maybe consider a proper site announcement for MAYOR redesigns, like the one you tease in one of those screenshots (these ones are really minor, despite what people yelled about).

Honestly, the consistently funny thing about people crying for a UI redesign that is meant to make people on phones feel better is that they CONSISTENTLY get told the majority of the users online nowadays use phones and not desktops/laptops (try and compare using a 150€ phone vs a 150€ PC and tell me what you'd pick if you earned 300€ a month), and I say this as someone that prefers desktops to go online, but also uses his phone a lot because I don't want to boot my MacBook every time I feel like going online and not sit at my desk.

I was NOT expecting about half of the people uploading to use the mobile skin, I had to use it a few times, and after the 4th time that e621 got booted off RAM while I tried to copypaste a link nearly made me yeet my phone from the train. One feedback I can provide for them and uploaders in general is to allow tag groups like postybirb does, so you can add a dozen or more tags with one click/tap

dba_afish said:
this is the only thing I could find that'd kinda fit the bill but it's not even a neg, it's a neutral. and it's also kinda nothing, so yeah, I've no idea what they're on about.

From what they told me, they originally got a negative record, but was able to get it removed after talking with him about it (I don't have the message anymore so I can't see exactly what they said, but the wording could've probably been interpreted as either the record being removed, or downgraded to a neutral).

user_318479 said:
(*From before you got fired from staff and forced to claim it was voluntary.)

No, what Donovan said in here is a very short version of what he told us, which tracks with prior events IMO.

dba_afish said:
this is the only thing I could find that'd kinda fit the bill but it's not even a neg, it's a neutral. and it's also kinda nothing

That's what it was. I found the conversation about that in Discord, and pretty much everyone, including Donovan, agreed the record was probably too harsh for a one-off (AFAICT) mistake. Post was misflagged as DNP because the artist had some do not repost disclaimer somewhere offsite. Avoid posting flags are only for names found on our avoid posting list. Anything else is basically an attempt at a third-party takedown which we do not accept. Kora was warned about abuse of site tools with a neutral record, with the record being lowered to a staff note.

I've been checking damn near every non-inferior flag every day for a few months now, and I usually won't escalate misflags to tickets/warnings unless it's repeat behavior or the flagger gives away their bad faith intentions through some other action, like misflagging and also whining in the comments or tag edits about how something is immoral. I'd rather the unflag speak for itself. No, we're not going to delete something just because it's flagged. Even repeat misflags I'm not likely to report if they're made in good faith. Sometimes people have stubborn brain malfunctions and need a correction or warning, though.

so yeah, I've no idea what they're on about.

Kora is aggrandizing what should be mundane events into hyperbolic superhero-like terms. I think this is pathologized, studied behavior with an actual medical term. I have had anxiety issues that caused me to interpret things as a lot more than they were and then behave irrationally as a result. Feels a little similar to what I'm seeing here. Been doing a lot better since I became staff and started handling my shit.

Anyway, entertaining diversion but I wouldn't want the drama to distract from a thread that's supposed to be useful. I will just add that these changes (read: any at all) are not "enshittifying" the website. The first time I read that I was incredulous for like 12 hours. Yall... Please. These changes are about recognizing that the website is and has been shit for many years as standards and expectations elsewhere have risen. We can do a lot of things better.

abadbird said:
Anyway, entertaining diversion but I wouldn't want the drama to distract from a thread that's supposed to be useful. I will just add that these changes (read: any at all) are not "enshittifying" the website. The first time I read that I was incredulous for like 12 hours. Yall... Please. These changes are about recognizing that the website is and has been shit for many years as standards and expectations elsewhere have risen. We can do a lot of things better.

Honestly this, this is the smallest UI redesign I've seen and people were whining about enshittification (And this is before the confirmation that yes, 75% of people use the mobile version of the site and they deserve a nicer UI instead of a crammed desktop UI that, as Cinder stated, is currently broken in a lot of pages).
I'd consider a gallery site enshittified if they decided to covert all images to 40% quality JPG to save server space, or turn the gallery into a carousel with autoscrolling unless you are interacting with it, or 70% of the request firefox does to a site end up blocked by Ublock because they are ads (fun fact, firefox mobile supports ublock origin AND dark mode natively, and I think the Orion browser on iOS ships with ad and track blocker by default. Have fun migrating if you wanted those features and didn't know module browsers support it!), and not "We made some icons a bit bigger and made the mobile dropdown menu neater"

I use e621 with a fairly big zoom level on desktop in order to be able to read
My main feedback right now is the main page. Since the padding on the search bar is so large and it's a fixed value, now every time I open the site it scrolls down to focus on the search box and it completely hides the navigation at the top
On the old layout everything stayed in view because the padding between the top and the search bar scaled down with your zoom level

Ah, so once again it's the phoneposters laying waste to the modern web.
Too bad it's literally impossible to have styling look different on mobile and desktop.

Holy flat earth, batman! That user really had a meltdown over the UI change?

I'll admit that I don't really like the wiki blurb at the top of the page based on your search, but I'll get over it.

I also don't know what CSAM is, but I assume, based on how it would apparently summon the eldritch horror known as 'Da Man', that it must have to do with cubs that are RL. So to speak.

furry_birb said:
Holy flat earth, batman! That user really had a meltdown over the UI change?

I'll admit that I don't really like the wiki blurb at the top of the page based on your search, but I'll get over it.

I also don't know what CSAM is, but I assume, based on how it would apparently summon the eldritch horror known as 'Da Man', that it must have to do with cubs that are RL. So to speak.

CSAM is Child Sexual Abuse Material, the legal name for CP
There's also CSEM, Child Sexual Exploitation Material, but that's seen much less frequently (to the point that Google shows no definition for it unless you specifically search for it)

Looking at e926.net, on a search results page like this, it seems the search bar and tag list has been put into a separate "box". The box is lacking the theme background, with the top and bottom slightly offset from the box with the search results' top and bottom, making it look disjointed, misaligned and unthemed.

watsit said:
Looking at e926.net, on a search results page like this, it seems the search bar and tag list has been put into a separate "box". The box is lacking the theme background, with the top and bottom slightly offset from the box with the search results' top and bottom, making it look disjointed, misaligned and unthemed.

You could have just said "I don't like it".

What is it supposed to be jointed to, in your opinion? What should it be aligned with?
What makes it more unthemed than, say, the header?

I deliberately removed the image background from it to make the interactive elements stand out more – some of the backgrounds created a somewhat unpleasant effect around text that made it harder to read.
I also added a little border to separate the posts area from the sidebar more clearly.

watsit said:
Looking at e926.net, on a search results page like this, it seems the search bar and tag list has been put into a separate "box". The box is lacking the theme background, with the top and bottom slightly offset from the box with the search results' top and bottom, making it look disjointed, misaligned and unthemed.

honestly, it might be best for the hex gradient background to not be placed in a box with text, the visual noise from the pattern might make it a bit hard to read some of the text sometimes. I will admit the separation does look slightly odd on mobile, though.

I could go either way on the offset, though. it honestly looks fine to me.

on a bedbug i personally have with the fullscreen button: i hate how it moves when press it and just jumps from the left-side of the screen to the very top-right

i understand that "fullscreen" in this case is meant to change the whole layout of the page, but out of all the ui elements that should be in anyway anchored in place regardless of layout; it should be the button that changes the layout

cinder said:
What makes it more unthemed than, say, the header?

honestly, though? I do think the header looks better when every element that dosn't contain actual text has a transparent background.

dripen_arn said:
on a bedbug i personally have with the fullscreen button: i hate how it moves when press it and just jumps from the left-side of the screen to the very top-right

i understand that "fullscreen" in this case is meant to change the whole layout of the page, but out of all the ui elements that should be in anyway anchored in place regardless of layout; it should be the button that changes the layout

Yes, that's a feedback I was given previously too.
And I do agree. The whole section with the "fullscreen" button is very much not great.

I've tried out a few ideas on how to deal with it during the week, but none of them are satisfying.
I'll keep working on it.

dba_afish said:
honestly, though? I do think the header looks better when every element that dosn't contain actual text has a transparent background.

I don't really agree with you. I think the solid color looks cleaner. This looks like someone scribbled on the site with a marker.
It creates a bit of noise that draws the eye away from the core content, imho.

And to be honest, in its current state (without the header) the big hex background is so minor that I don't think a lot people would even notice the difference if it was removed altogether.

dba_afish said:
I will admit the separation does look slightly odd on mobile, though.

Also, could you elaborate on that?
What separation do you mean, and how does it look odd?

cinder said:
I don't really agree with you. I think the solid color looks cleaner. This looks like someone scribbled on the site with a marker.
It creates a bit of noise that draws the eye away from the core content, imho.

for me it's mostly the stark line between plain, single-color background and the hex pattern. especially since it seems like that line is just sort of an arbitrary distance below the site logo and the secondary menu items.

cinder said:
And to be honest, in its current state (without the header) the big hex background is so minor that I don't think a lot people would even notice the difference if it was removed altogether.

I dunno, it was definitely one of the first things I noticed and the first things I changed with CSS, both on the old header and the current one. (on mobile)

cinder said:
Also, could you elaborate on that?
What separation do you mean, and how does it look odd?

the borders between elements make them feel a bit like seperate "ideas" rather than all parts of the same thing, I guess. it's kinda hard to explain.

Just passing by that I am grateful for the devlog thread as it is a nice step for a better communication about changes on e621.

I don't think I have much to add about feedback though welp, maybe I will remember something that wasn't said already later.

cinder said:
You could have just said "I don't like it".

I'm getting mixed signals here.

cinder said:

What You Can Do To Help

Simply put, help me test this damned thing.
I could really use some feedback and / or bug reports on the builds that get deployed to e926 before they get pushed to the main site.

Any feedback is welcome, although I urge you to be constructive.
Simply stating that you dislike something is not terribly useful – I would like to know why you dislike it.

I specifically mentioned the left panel looking misaligned and unthemed, making it look disjointed. You just boil that down to me saying "I don't like it", despite me saying what specifically I saw as a problem to address. If you think I'm not clear enough and need more info, you're free to ask, but this comes across as rather dismissive (along with other statements you've made). Honestly, even "I don't like it" should be valuable feedback... the more specifics the better, of course, but if people aren't liking the UI changes, that's still worth considering. It's pretty clear some of these changes are preferential and not necessary for fixing the mobile UI, so if nothing else, if people keep saying they don't like it, it's a good bar to measure how to approach less necessary changes (or how much people would prefer the extra effort be put in to keep it visually consistent/similar after changes are made for mobile).

It really seems like too much is going on at once. You're simultaneously fixing the site to work better on mobile, while making extraneous look-and-feel changes you and some users may prefer and that others may not. So when people bring up issues with the latter, it gets lumped together with the former, and in turn leaves less resources to deal with the latter as issues with the former are still being dealt with. It's one thing when look-and-feel changes are necessary to unbreak the site for mobile, but as your comments indicate, some of these visual changes are personal preference and could be left alone for now while still fixing mobile.

cinder said:
What is it supposed to be jointed to, in your opinion? What should it be aligned with?

Like it is now, on e6. The rest of the page/search results, as it otherwise still is (it's right next to it, showing the search and other relevant tags in the results, and grows vertically with the page, which makes it look "off" to be at a different offset and lacking the same themed background as the main section of the page).

cinder said:
What makes it more unthemed than, say, the header?

Maybe the header could be themed. One could argue that the header should stand out as a bit different since it contains separate functionality, but I don't think I've ever seen it with a themed background to know if that would make it look better. Either way, I don't think the sidebar having the themed background should hinge on the header having a themed background.

cinder said:
I deliberately removed the image background from it to make the interactive elements stand out more – some of the backgrounds created a somewhat unpleasant effect around text that made it harder to read.

It hasn't been a significant issue before now. In the years I've been here, I don't think I saw it mentioned once as a problem. Even so, if its something the other admins have also wanted to address, it seems like something that should be done separately from mobile fixes so as to not get lumped together as something that must be done for the sake of the mobile UI, when it's a change unrelated to it.

cinder said:
I also added a little border to separate the posts area from the sidebar more clearly.

The little border seems small enough that it doesn't really break the flow of the page, and helps segregate elements. It's just the misalignment and background inconsistency that makes it look bad to me.

watsit said:
It hasn't been a significant issue before now. In the years I've been here, I don't think I saw it mentioned once as a problem. Even so, if its something the other admins have also wanted to address, it seems like something that should be done separately from mobile fixes so as to not get lumped together as something that must be done for the sake of the mobile UI, when it's a change unrelated to it.

I mean, unless I'm mistaken, the top part of the page embellishments haven't even been there since the switchover to NG. so this update is fixing something that's been missing since 2019.

dba_afish said:
I mean, unless I'm mistaken, the top part of the page embellishments haven't even been there since the switchover to NG. so this update is fixing something that's been missing since 2019.

That's about the sidebar on the left of search results (where the search box and tag list are). Currently it's all visually one section with the search results, having the same vertical alignment and the same themed background image, while on e926 (coming in the next update), they're in separate "boxes" with the left box being at a different vertical offset and lacking the themed background image that the main section with the search results still has.

watsit said:
That's about the sidebar on the left of search results (where the search box and tag list are). Currently it's all visually one section with the search results, having the same vertical alignment and the same themed background image, while on e926 (coming in the next update), they're in separate "boxes" with the left box being at a different vertical offset and lacking the themed background image that the main section with the search results still has.

I think I'm just wrong about this, I swear that the background of the main part of the page had just been blank regardless of settings for the longest time, I think I just had it set to "none", though.

watsit said: ...

Acknowledged.

yeah, looking at it and messing with the CSS on my laptop, I think I agree with Watsit here. the embellishment backgrounds in general are relatively unintrusive, and if someone is bothered by them they're probably going to be bothered by them across the website, not just when they're under the taglist, at which point they could just turn it off in the themes settings. I think keeping the page look more, consistent would be better.

Will there be return of the Multilingual Welcome banner in some form? I miss being greeted with the Crab and Zombie language after I log in.

alexyorim said:
Will there be return of the Multilingual Welcome banner in some form? I miss being greeted with the Crab and Zombie language after I log in.

Yes, I would like to have it somewhere.

I don't think it fits neatly into the profile page. One suggestion I've heard was to put it on the actual login page.
I've had some mockups made a little while ago for a better-looking login page: https://etc.cnd.pet/devlog/25.02.04/extra/login.png
So I could start working in that direction.

If you have better suggestions, let me know.

cinder said:
Yes, I would like to have it somewhere.

I don't think it fits neatly into the profile page. One suggestion I've heard was to put it on the actual login page.
I've had some mockups made a little while ago for a better-looking login page: https://etc.cnd.pet/devlog/25.02.04/extra/login.png
So I could start working in that direction.

If you have better suggestions, let me know.

I want to be greeted with multiple languages here again.
Will do. 👍🏽

furry_birb said:
Holy flat earth, batman! That user really had a meltdown over the UI change?

I sensed a dejavu when someone had a (albeit mild-mannered) meltdown over a UI change 5 years ago.

I just felt the changes went too fast, but the changes were from 5 years ago. My perception of time has warped. 😳

Patch 25.01.27-fix.3 had been deployed to e621 today.

• Added an option to turn off wiki excerpts.
• Fixed an issue that caused the pagination to overflow the page sometimes.
• Fixed an issue causing the mobile gestures to take you to pages that did not exist.
• Fixed an issue that caused pagination to be displayed vertically on pools pages.
• Fixed the secondary navbar dividers being misaligned on the post versions pages.

Is there a particular reason we're getting things added to the themes rather than proper settings which would exist across browsers and devices? We've only got 28 preferences right now and with bit_prefs being a bigint we should be good for up to 63, so it can't be a size limitation

Also, there only being a reset button in the themes setting is rather confusing, it took me a few minutes to figure out I need to go to a page with an excerpt and click the x to change that value

donovan_dmc said:
Is there a particular reason we're getting things added to the themes rather than proper settings which would exist across browsers and devices? We've only got 28 preferences right now and with bit_prefs being a bigint we should be good for up to 63, so it can't be a size limitation

themes are available to people who aren't logged in

donovan_dmc said:
Also, there only being a reset button in the themes setting is rather confusing, it took me a few minutes to figure out I need to go to a page with an excerpt and click the x to change that value

I will say that this is a bit confusing though, the number next to the button is also a bit confusing as to what it could mean. when seeing it go from 1 to 2 I was thinking that maybe each wiki entry had its own toggle and that's why it was a reset, but no it's just a site-wide thing.

dba_afish said:
themes are available to people who aren't logged in

I will say that this is a bit confusing though, the number next to the button is also a bit confusing as to what it could mean. when seeing it go from 1 to 2 I was thinking that maybe each wiki entry had its own toggle and that's why it was a reset, but no it's just a site-wide thing.

You got a 2? I only got 0 and 1, and I have no idea what clicking the button even does.

votp said:
You got a 2? I only got 0 and 1, and I have no idea what clicking the button even does.

it seems like
0 is collapsed
1 is expanded
2 is hidden