Feature suggestions and discussion [READ THE FIRST POST]

@byte[]  
Ohhhhh. I wondered about the weird cut-off thing for a while. I just fixed the descriptions when needed. _{which is almost always, because it doesn’t usually keep the same formatting}

Tumblr is infamous for randomly changing things like that without warning or explanation.

I’d like to see an option for gifs and webms similar to what they added to e926, instead of animated thumbnails, there’s a little indicator that tells you the image is animated,
 
It could be like the simple “webm” text you put over webm thumbnails” but instead of a slideshow, it just shows the first frame.

@Background Pony #1F59  
Isn’t it written in About uploading that Derpi devs don’t think that one-frame thumbnail is the best idea?

@gexon_pane  
I would like to see that as option

About notifications auto update.  

@Background Pony #BE35  
Correct on both counts.
 
Back in The Day™, every tab polled the site every ten minutes. Due to the way that users typically browse this site though (opening a few search pages, then opening a ton of tabs with images) this means that one user might be putting out between 1-3 requests/min of just polling the notifications endpoint. Multiply that by the ~500 active users at any given time, and that’s between 500 and 1500 additional requests/min of time better spent serving your actual requests.
 
Wanting to preserve at least some of the behavior, I allowed the JS to poll the endpoint only if the tab was focused. This is the current behavior, and while turned out to be a reasonable compromise, I realized at the time that I was not happy with the change.
 
I tried approximately a year ago to fix this by adding a websocket endpoint to push notifications from the server, once our Rails 5 upgrade with ActionCable had gone through and the kinks worked out. This had two problems.
 
First, the behavior of our users became relevant again. Each user could have 3-20 redundant sockets open at a time, corresponding to 1500-10000 open connections at a time, and this was significantly tying down our app instances. A fix to make all open tabs share one connection was theoretically feasible, but not done due to problems with the implementation.
 
Second, someone with unknown intent decided to try to flood off our appservers with connections to ActionCable. I tried to put in place mitigations for this, but the server instance I bound it to kept leaking memory, so I decided to revert all the efforts to use push notifications.
 
Today, we are stuck with what we have because the alternatives have ended up being worse for us than we imagined.

@byte[]  
A good solid explanation.

I don’t know if this has been suggested already or not. If not, has anyone considered setting a Discord server up? It would be hella better than IRC. I mean come on. IRC is older than even me. Sure many still use it but the capabilities are quite limited to more modern communication systems.
 
Just a thought as someone who could never get used to how IRC works and went straight to Team Speak the Discord.

@Chaotic Mind  

 

@The Smiling Pony  
…Do you have bad experiences with Discord or something?

@SuperSupermario24  

@Zeb  
Any discord “horror stories” anyone would like to share?

What’s the deal with the horror reaction to my suggestion?

@Background Pony #71D0  
@Chaotic Mind  
We attempted a Discord server test internally among staff members and it all went so horribly wrong that we lost two of our staff members over it.

@Luna  
I think I know what went wrong with it if the problem is what I think it is. Discord has improved greatly since then. Better management, better bots for control, and all that.

@Chaotic Mind  
Did it improve since two weeks ago?

@Luna  
That recently? Damn.  
I suppose not. I won’t question what went wrong since that is obviously private.

We considered switching to Discord last month for our site related chats, but after some concerns were raised, we decided to shelf that idea for the time being.
 
Two people left staff around the same time. It wasn’t entirely related to discord though. One wanted to peruse another project, and the other had a lot of stuff going in on their life.

I can only imagine what horrors took place beyond the mod pale.

@Joey
 
@Background Pony #6C0E  
I think I for sure know the concerns raised about Discord in relation to how things work here. Would take some considerable work with roles and security verification to make it work. Not easy or really feasible as is now.

When typing in a tag that has been aliased to something else (for example: scissoring is aliased to tribadism) you will get that:  
 
and then that:  

 
So wouldn’t it be better for the aliased tag to show up in this place as a suggestion? Maybe even it should be there with some indication that it is an alias. An arrow symbol as a prefix or something like this. Tribadism has over 1200 images in it so it would be on the first place.
 
–––––––  
And by the way:  
@The Smiling Pony  

 
So what? :P From @Ponylooker in the General Tagging Discussion thread:
 

I would like to make a suggest . Can we have a app . Safari and Chrome browsers always are slow , so why not

@Wonder Sparkle  
I was thinking of that but decided not to suggest it due to what it would take to implement all the features the site uses in a dedicated app on Android/ iOS.
 
Another issue is on top of the aforementioned the apps would need even more features to make do with less working memory if one were to have several images open in “tabs”.
 
Basically it will be a bit of an undertaking if this is done.