Serin

November 1, 2017

Next: I can see you’ve played Knifey-Spoony before

A Voice Like Honied Gilbert Gotfried

<b>In which our Hero gets alerted nicely and then gets alerted less nicely</b>

I’m in the (open)office, expressing my deep frustration to my brother-in-contracting Hollywood, when a stranger in the hotel-desk next to us says, “Wow you have a really great voice, like you should be on radio.”

I’m not saying he wasn’t sincere. I’m just saying that was the most amazing shut-the-fuck-up I’ve ever gotten.

Well played, fellow nomad.

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Suggestion, not issue: That hero image box on the entry page is in heavy black, spanning the editing space. Like a good sidekick it is ferociously loyal in its unwavering insistence that you provide the missing. Also like a good sidekick it provides pathos by looking like an error until you have filled it to its satisfaction.

Only thing is that populated or not, it makes the title feel cut off from the body, which feels off, or wrong, or something to me. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel like the edit page has failed to load. It makes me feel like my title is missing.

As a solution, I’d consider maybe adding a button on the end of the title block, to enable the hero image drop. And/or something to let me shrink the hero image so that I know it’s there but I can read my entry as an entry and not as two.

Actually let me make that strong. The fact that the image input is starkly black makes the page look like an error. Make it softer, grey or narrower or something else so that it doesn’t rip the entry in two.

Then the other stuff is more suggestion.

Yeah.

Oh. Also, actual issue, I uploaded a too-big jpg that caused an “unsupported format” alert, but then the subsequent successful submission didn’t clear the error so that now I got to watch my entry post while staring at an error message.

Sleepy Gene

How big was it?

3 replies

You know it didn’t occur to me to check. 2056×1548, saves to 355 kb. Doesn’t seem like it should break anything. Got it at URL below.

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.esellerpro.com%2F2594%2FI%2F741%2F3%2Flrgscale183.jpg&f=1

The DiaryMaster

November 2, 2017

@serin Do you mind if we test on our side, using that image? You’re correct that that size shouldn’t present a problem.

@thediarymaster It’s not my image but for testing purposes rather than publishing, I don’t see how there’s any issue. Fair use.

Those are very good points on the image box – I like the idea of making it fly out with a button, will consider that. Could you let us know on the size of the image you tried to upload? I would like to check on that, thanks!

9 replies

I’d actually answered that question but it’s hidden as a reply to Sleepy Gene.

2056×1548, saves to 355 kb. Doesn’t seem like it should break anything.

Got it at URL below:

@serin The uploader accepted this image without complaint after I saved it locally using a simple name. I think the uploader was balking at the Unicode in the URL. 0x741 is a particularly nasty epithet in Sanskrit.

@sleepygene That makes a lot more sense. I fired a bunch of images at the uploader and it didn’t balk at bigger files or pixel-ier files. If there’s opportunity to make the error message let me know it’s a naming issue and not a format issue, that’d be great, but not so urgent. I mean, I’ve got a recording of an opera in sanskrit, but I doubt most people make much use of the language.

Thanks for figuring it out.

One more data point for you, @thediarymaster. This conversation has been sending me doubled email notifications, because someone left me a note, and someone notified me. Nice if there’s a way to consolidate the notifications, for my inbox and your bandwidth.

Thanks both of you for all the helpful feedback, you win tester gold stars for today. I agree that it’s much more likely that it was the URL – we took the image and tested with it successfully after saving locally as well. Will look into better messaging on URL problems for the future.

Also @serin on the double notifications – noted, and it’s something that has been bothering us too. We are looking into a way to make it so it doesn’t double up, but still sends you a notification on notes/replies without mentions.

@thediarymaster Does The Software have an option to “uncollapse” chains of replies by default? @serin observed he had already answered the size question but it was asked again due to the answer being in a collapsed set of replies. Most comment management software (I’m thinking of newspapers with Disqus, Zendesk, maybe Taboola) leaves the first few replies open by default and only collapses later reply families after a troll frenzy commences.

Just want to second @sleepygene‘s thought here. Barring issues, the replies are relevant and interesting, and other people playing in that sandbox provokes more interaction. (Or more provable, the converse discourages it)

November 3, 2017

@sleepygene it does not have that today, but this is one of the things I wanted to try out and see how people reacted. I’m personally finding it lacking that I don’t see the replies, so thinking about either making it a setting or just making them expanded by default. Thanks!

@serin yes I think you are correct, thanks! We are thinking about changing this.

Jane Says

Your title made me laugh this morning 😀 😀

1 reply

Just before writing that post, I was trying to convince a friend that being read to is inherently pleasant, even if the voice was Gilbert Gotfried. 🙂 I don’t think my very-bad-impression helped to make the case.

Eric

“You should be on the radio.” This somehow seems ripe for silencing people in multiple scenarios.