Forum: Bug Report and Feature Requests

'traffic light' or other colour/color highlighting for cues

Freyrs_stories 🚫

so there are a few examples of this on the site already. see 'in progress' 'inactive' etc. this is close but not quite what I'm talking about. there is already a tag preference system and what I am suggesting is in a way an extension of this.

I personally avoid m/m combinations but I frequently see stories that list the code 'for completeness' with a disclaimer in the blurb. because of this I do not want to 100% block the code, however I would love a quick visual que that the code is there.

so why did I call it a traffic light? well think of it as green for a favoured code, amber for a caution code and red for avoid but not exclude.

the logic wouldn't be onorous but would definitely require some thought and may be somewhat CPU cycle expensive compared to a default parsing but it could be a useful cue / key for those wanting a little something extra in their feed.

it's a couple of decades since I tried my hand at programming for the web. I don't think perl was even fully standardised, css didn't exist and iFrames were still all the rage. html 1.0 and 2.0 and lynx and then Netscape days. yes I'm 'that old'. the web wasn't even publicly available at that time, you had to have an academic account to get online and gopher, pine and archie still held significant sway.

Replies: Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Freyrs_stories

so why did I call it a traffic light? well think of it as green for a favoured code, amber for a caution code and red for avoid but not exclude.

What may be a caution or avoid code for you, could be the opposite for somebody else.

For this to be done properly, users have to be able to specify which code is what to them and then the site uses each user's preferences to properly color code the tags.

It's not impossible, but it would require reworking the whole site's display mechanism to offload the rendering from the server to the browser in order to not kill the server.

It's a neat idea, but, I'm not sure it would ever be workable.

Replies: Freyrs_stories Unicornzvi

Freyrs_stories 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

the basic premise is this:

colour 1, 'green' user preferred or favourites
colour 2, 'amber' user has a 'cautious' approach. likes in some situations but not others perhaps
colour 3, 'red' user will normally avoid or has strong preference against it.
colour 4+, other custom selections or perhaps a default(s) that indicates a sub-code which belongs to a higher level list. such as BDSM, Groups or other options taken from the category search page.

I'm not sure how the site handles the current examples such as those with a 3rd colour on top of the text and I understand that this system may not transfer well.

the primary problems I forsee include:

logic load - how to identify each string in a list and after fetching that user's specific settings render the modified text. could be very demanding O(N^2) or worse

load latency - this would introduce many additional checks before any fetch could complete O(2N+)

browser specific (in)compatibilities - I remember a lot of problems in the past where specific web pages needed to identify the exact client browser in order to fetch the correct code. a bigger issue in late Netscape and early IE days, most installed browsers are chrome based these days but still needs to be considered.

programming time Vs user time. how many people want / use it compared to development and testing time. extreme count at either end would be bad. huge time sink for little appreciation or very significant load increase, see first two points.

from what I've seen it can do html5 might work but would likely lead to a complete rewrite to handle all the requirements just for what seems like a simple system but I know is not. could be worth putting on a long term goal list rather than trying to patch into current design.

Unicornzvi 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

It's a neat idea, but, I'm not sure it would ever be workable.

As an alternative that might actually be feasible - add to the list of excluded tags you have a list of cation tags which would be just colored somehow rather than excluded.

Replies: Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Unicornzvi

It's a neat idea, but, I'm not sure it would ever be workable.

As an alternative that might actually be feasible - add to the list of excluded tags you have a list of cation tags which would be just colored somehow rather than excluded.

Regardless of how one selects how to Color-code tags, the mechanism to apply the coloring needs to be integrated into the listing delivery mechanism. And that means integrating this coloring system into all the themes that the site supports.

Not a simple job.

Replies: Unicornzvi

Unicornzvi 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Didn't think it was simple, but since you already have the exclusion list I thought it might change it to possible.

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Forum: Bug Report and Feature Requests

'traffic light' or other colour/color highlighting for cues

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