I tried browsing around in my usual fashion. Movie pages loaded much faster for me, which is nice. There seems to be a big lack of visual separation between just about everything though, and overall the site felt really dense, I found it pretty difficult to use (maybe this is just because it's still in development though.)
Holy moley, security finally!
Technical feedback:
- RSS feeds are not working.
- There is no CSP HTTP header. This would greatly improve security, and also fix the mixed content warnings that occur while browsing the forums.
- The Referrer-Policy HTTP header is set to an unsafe value.
- I realize this is not possible on the demo site as it is hosted on a subdomain, but I'm hoping for an inclusion in the HSTS preload list is planned for the final release.
Design feedback:
- The new design looks great on my 1080p TV.
- It kinda bothers me a little bit that the new theme looks exactly like Twitch's.
Keep up the good work!
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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SmashManiac wrote:
Holy moley, security finally!
Technical feedback:
- RSS feeds are not working.
- There is no CSP HTTP header. This would greatly improve security, and also fix the mixed content warnings that occur while browsing the forums.
- The Referrer-Policy HTTP header is set to an unsafe value.
- I realize this is not possible on the demo site as it is hosted on a subdomain, but I'm hoping for an inclusion in the HSTS preload list is planned for the final release.
Wow, you know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I'd love to talk to you more about this stuff.
- It kinda bothers me a little bit that the new theme looks exactly like Twitch's.
To be fair, the colors are themed from the existing colors on tasvideos.org, and we were first!
If you mean the styling and not the colors, then it is because it is just using bootstrap with a few tweaks, which is probably all twitch is doing
A request for people providing graphical design feedback: It would be immensely helpful if you were to provide a mockup of the changes you desire. Describing such in text makes it hard to directly visualize how they would actually look.
If it involves screen width or something else that could affect various resolutions (including desktop, mobile, and tablet), please provide mockups at different resolutions as well.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4738
Location: Tennessee
SmashManiac wrote:
Holy moley, security finally!
- RSS feeds are not working.
This is known. I will build RSS eventually but it isn't a priority to get to the point of showing everybody
The issue tracker will be useful for knowing what is or isn't known: https://github.com/adelikat/tasvideos/issues
Particularly this milestone:
https://github.com/adelikat/tasvideos/milestone/5
Which is being used for the "must haves" for this to be a viable replacement
What I like:
1) Speed. For a lot of the pages on the old site, I only could "crawl" through them at a speed of Goomba. Now I can browse though it at the speed of Mario doing BLJ glitch.
2) Game resources page. I don't really like the design, but in comparison to what was on the old site, that is definitely better.
3) The user profile page. Finally I can reach my non/rated movie list without knowing beforehand that it is in "rating.exe" which was accessed from some weird locations. In fact, it is now much easier to reach pages you want to reach because navigation was improved greatly, mostly by text now becoming clickable links in places you were expecting it to.
4) Forum design is now the one with the site and seem not to require a separate login. Maybe I will actually use it now.
What I don't like:
1) Link color. On HP Pavilion Power 15, it looks just black. It is only sligthly visible on my other devices. Also, links that were navigated to are no more distinct from unvisited pages because default link is purple which is "been to" color at the same time.
2) Mario and Luigi at the top of the screen were removed. I chased them too much with the cursor to not notice. Not critical, but noticeable.
3) It was 2021, 1920x1080 is totally not the biggest resolution one can get... And by some reason, the new site uses about half of that res' width. Specifically, only 1110 pixels. Old site had only 10 pixels on each site as a padding and it was great.
https://tvtropes.org/ has and option called "Wide Load". If there were some logical reasons behind limiting page width, at least consider full width as a toggleable option.
4) Blue gradient at the top of the page lost some saturation. With new color it can be just safely removed then - aforementioned laptop barely has this color at all. But I would prefer to leave old color. However, new color looks better on mobile.
5) Publication button in a publication is obsolete. You are already at the pub, clicking the button does not do anything.
6) I can't find embedded video module. At all. I just don't like opening youtube site and would then instead download movies locally.
7) Tab design. It lost it's personality. New site has… line of text as a tab, old one has an actual tab frame and color of active/inactive tab.
8) Rating page currently does not have column sorting like the old one did.
9) (minor) New rating system with 0.5 steps instead of 0.1.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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natt wrote:
(How often do those go out; is it daily?)
Was daily. Temporarily it is ahdoc as needed, because I need to rule out if the automatic restarts are causing the site to come down. Will post when it is back on schedule.
Frankly speaking, I'd prefer the current design instead.
I was staring at the front page for 10 minutes, and I'm like "Is it a modern design era (because I'm working on a project where FE design is even worse than here), or my preferences suck?"
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Frankly speaking, I'd prefer the current design instead.
I was staring at the front page for 10 minutes, and I'm like "Is it a modern design era (because I'm working on a project where FE design is even worse than here), or my preferences suck?"
The new movie pages are really bad. It looks very amateurish that the title appears twice in the standard grey area and in the purple header on individual publications; they're right next to each other, no one is going to forget that quickly. I also find it inconsistent that the "obsoletes" notice stayed in the white text box, but the "this movie has been obsoleted!" notice has been moved to the top above the title, which is very easy to lose track of when you're scrolling through a list. Speaking of losing track of things, there is way too little prominence on publication info and details. The publication date is just a tiny speck of info offered sans context, and the rating is tucked away at the end of the description, all the while things most people don't care about (HOLY SMOKES! COMPATIBILITY TORRENT!!!) now suddenly take up a fair bit of real estate. The previous design with its varying fonts and sequestered prominence was much better.
The new submissions page is clunkier too. I think that clicking on things like the time of the run should lead you to the submission page, not just the game name, given that it really doesn't take up much space anymore. I'm also not sure if it's necessary to give a username along with the status; if you scroll through old years of submissions, you just get a listing of a bunch of editors who had nothing to do with the run or its publication doing post-publication tweaks, which really isn't telling me anything useful, especially because it has no context whatsoever.
I think the new forum looks better in theory, but it does seem like nobody is home at the moment with how barren the forums look, and the centering and width does make the pages look pretty squished. The search is much cleaner and I'm glad it doesn't cap you every 5 seconds, though there is a bit too much space dedicated to the "experienced forum user" stuff. I also miss the varying shades on each post, which makes threads look less sterile. Signatures also need at least a line break IMO; right now, at a glance, it's impossible to tell that they aren't just giant quotes put into posts. The profiles are a little dinkier, too. No room for things like genre, rerecord, and vote count? And why are there no clear links instead of just "click on these purple numbers"? The current forum is better in this regard; you can see how to clearly find every post you've made, and the links are all underlined and blue.
Overall, it is a good start with some long-needed changes. I am glad I can finally load a large list of movies without destroying my browser. Hopefully the kinks can be ironed out before it goes live and extinguishes the old dinosaur.
Holy moley, security finally!
Technical feedback:
- RSS feeds are not working.
- There is no CSP HTTP header. This would greatly improve security, and also fix the mixed content warnings that occur while browsing the forums.
- The Referrer-Policy HTTP header is set to an unsafe value.
- I realize this is not possible on the demo site as it is hosted on a subdomain, but I'm hoping for an inclusion in the HSTS preload list is planned for the final release.
Wow, you know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I'd love to talk to you more about this stuff.
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I've PRed fixes for many of the stylistic feedback items mentioned here including some severe issues with obsoleted movie styling. I still need to fix some contrast issues mentioned including text-info and I plan to implement a dark mode. There's some debate to be had over container vs container-fluid but I don't mind the current approach with larger gutters on hidpi displays. I'll post again when the changes are live.
Good to see the website getting https, definitely a needed upgrade.
That being said, it looks way more bland than TASvideos in its current state does. It definitely looks more clean, but it just doesn't look good and I think not changing the design would've been the better choice.
I guess I might as well put my personal thoughts on the whole redesigned visuals and design. I don't like the look of current tasvideos, it feels extremely cheap and old. I like what the new look of the site is going for more, but it could use some tweaks.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
No it does not have a design document. There will probably be one some day.
----
In response to a lot of the UI complaints I have seen, the primary goal of this rewrite is to create a TASVideos that is able to change for the better. With the current TASVideos codebase, it is extremely difficult to implement changes.
Recently we started work on a tier revamp that is quite well received. Even though we're a ways along with this revamp, the current site makes it rather difficult and annoying to actually do.
There are lots of other changes we would like to implement as well that just aren't feasible on the current website. We would like to switch over from our publication lists that show all movies on a given system to something more game based. However this isn't feasible at all in the current codebase.
While the UI had effort and thought put into it, it was not the primary objective of the majority of people who got it this far. If you think you can make the new site look better, by all means please do. The new website is open source for this reason! If you cannot contribute, try to at least be constructive with your feedback. Saying it sucks is not helpful in the slightest.
However, there is one direction I personally outright reject taking the new site. I do not and will not accept that we should keep the design the same as it is on the current site. Even if it were feasible, I do not want that.
I joined TASVideos in 2014. At that point in time I had lots of friends in the RTA community, and a large number of them had complaints about TASVideos. Some of these complaints were based on misunderstandings. Others I personally feel are legitimate. However, a common theme of these complaints, many of which I see in various forms to these day is that TASVideos was outdated and unwilling to change.
I joined TASVideos staff in 2018 with the intention of trying to make TASVideos better. Something I slowly realized as I began to work with my fellow staff members, is that basically all of us have our complaints with the site and a desire to see it improve. The current site limits these changes, but with the new site, as the cliche goes, our wildest dreams can come true.
I want the new site's design to represent that philosophy. I want it to be familiar, that we're not going in a radically different direction, but I want it to be clear that we are on the verge of a new era for TASVideos. I want it clear to everyone who looks at the new site that TASVideos is not only willing, but able to change as needed.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Wow! This is probably the thing I least expected from TASVideos. Needless to say, the new site layout is really awesome. I love everything I see so far. I was surprised to see that even the forums have an updated look! That's so cool!
I saw someone else mention the fact that the content is at the center of the screen with blank areas on the right side. I think this is perfect and it's how websites should be designed. The vast majority of desktop users out there are using widescreen monitors, which makes reading a paragraph that goes across the entire screen annoying. Designing the site like this also means that it can be adapted to any type of display, including phones and tablets, which I know was a goal here. Personally I love this change and it makes reading so much nicer. Overall I can't overstate how happy I am that TASVideos is moving into the future. No more movie tiers? New site layout?? It's open source?! HTTPS!! Count me in!
My only suggestion for desktop users is to have an official dark mode. There are a lot of browser plugins that let you get around this lack of dark mode, one of which is DarkReader. Here's what TASVideos looks like if I use that plugin with default settings:
https://i.imgur.com/5X49qk8.png
This looks pretty much perfect to me. I won't be changing any of the DarkReader settings from here. My only complaint is that I can't use this dark theme on my phone.
Speaking of phones, I wanted to point out a few bugs with the front page when I'm scrolling through on my phone.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/177227489406353408/883409010081009725/image0.png
The only way to scroll down is to move my thumb down the very left and right edge of the screen, because scrolling at the middle of the screen only moves the paragraphs like the announcements or the featured movie. Sorry I can't get a better demonstration of this, the screenshot will have to do. I'm using an iPhone X if that makes a difference.
One quick clarification, we renamed movie tiers to "movie classes" and we changed how two of the classes worked. The system isn't entirely gone however.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Joined: 7/12/2009
Posts: 181
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
I've looked around a bit on my phone. Wow it's actually usable on mobile! Sadly, there's some issues:
The "Newest Submissions" table on the home page is too wide, which causes horizontal scrolling. You can zoom out a bit to remove that scroll, but then it looks like this:
https://snipboard.io/MCjSZu.jpg
This leads me to these tables as well. They're absurdly terrible for mobile. If they stay, they need to have 3 columns at most, combining values with line breaks or just showing less information.
https://snipboard.io/MhIi9d.jpg
In general, the mobile page should show less information by default, hiding the rest via some interaction.
We also have the pages with some list of publications. These are looking great, but needs some tweaks for visibility and hiding details.
https://snipboard.io/EbnONw.jpg
The obsoletes entry needs some contrast from the rest of the publication text. A differently colored background? I also argue it could show up at the end of the publication text, not before. You need to care about the movie before you care what's the old time.
The download links need to be hidden behind some menu action, something like a download button. Combine with the History button for a "more" menu, so it doesn't get a second row of buttons.
The date the movie was published could also go somewhere else, next to the tags/emulator used. And please add a "Published at:" or similar so one can know it's the publication date. Lastly, some way of indicating the date is formatted as MM/DD/YYYY. I forgot it could've been this ~snip~ format and had to look for another movie to confirm.
The publication boxes could also use a max-height cutoff where some sort of "Show more..." is visible, you touch it and the box extends to the full height. Otherwise navigating pages like GameCube Stars you spend a lot of time scrolling past the really long boxes. My phone is tall but every single movie box is taller than my screen, some going to even 2 times the screen size (Ikaruga).
https://snipboard.io/hUJb3w.jpg
The feature publication box in the home screen having it's own scrolling is terrible for navigation: you're scrolling the main page and then suddenly you're scrolling the publication box. If we apply the same max-height cut-off as above here, I'd say we don't need this separated scrolling anymore.
As a bonus report: https://snipboard.io/GJZF8Y.jpg Aria of Sorrow screenshot was small enough that some text fits to the right, but it couldn't fit "attempted" so then it broke to below it. Please no text to the right.
Forum:
Main board list looks good. The boards that don't have a description looks weird and a bit too close to the next item, but could easily be solved by ensuring all boards have a description.
Topic list is bad: https://snipboard.io/76tgQd.jpg
The first column for icons should just not be a column and the icon should be next to the name. One column each for replies, author and last post (offscreen, via horizontal scrolling) wastes space that the topic name needs.
For comparsion, here's discourse on mobile (https://snipboard.io/8iwlgy.jpg) and desktop (https://snipboard.io/XErGsD.jpg).
My only suggestion for desktop users is to have an official dark mode.
TiKevin is planning to implement a dark mode soon.
Awesome!!
Memory wrote:
FitterSpace wrote:
No more movie tiers?
One quick clarification, we renamed movie tiers to "movie classes" and we changed how two of the classes worked. The system isn't entirely gone however.
Thanks for the clarification. I went back and read about the new changes. They sound great to me!
I'm really glad things are changing. I don't really have a design sense so I don't care much about the new look. A bunch of mostly minor things (a lot of them also in current site):
On the home page, why are the links for more movies and more submissions just text, but "More WIPs" is a button? It would be better to be consistent imo.
The random page links at the bottom of https://tasvideos.mistflux.net/WelcomeToTASVideos don't work.
On the movies page, in the system tab, I think the system name should be a link to all movies on that system, and the (All) links are unnecessary.
The Movies by Category tab has an unknown module error.
I like that the game resources pages are separated into separate pages for each system, it's better than scrolling down a giant list. However on https://tasvideos.mistflux.net/GameResources/NES for example, that box under the edit button is unnecessary, that info is already on the main game resources page. And I shouldn't have to click again to see the list of NES games. Also it would be better if the games were organized in a grid with 3 or 4 per row, again so you don't have to scroll as much. And it would be nice if the game names had spaces instead of being the same as the game page name.
I would love a way to go to the last post, as opposed to just the last page, of a forum thread.
What is the point of the "Reset" button on the forums? It looks like it functions the same as the first page button.
On the forum main page, it looks weird that some subforums (the ones with more description) take up more vertical space than the ones with no description. This might just be because I'm used the current forums though.
On https://tasvideos.mistflux.net/Forum/Posts/New and https://tasvideos.mistflux.net/Forum/Posts/Unanswered I think there should be a link back to the forum main page. I know you can still click the forum link on the top but... that doesn't feel right.
On publication pages, I think all of the buttons should open a new tab by default. Or even better, it would be really nice if you could see the submission details and comments, game history, and workbench poll on the publication page too, so you don't have to keep switching pages to see all the info about a pub. Ideally the Publication button shouldn't be there if it takes you to the same page.
Sorry if this seems nitpicky, but it's my genuine feedback.
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