My Internet connection (or e621) is slow at the moment, and I noticed something:
e621 loads all preview images, even the blacklisted ones. In my case, that's ponies.
A split second later, it hides them.
Wouldn't it be more efficient, in terms of bandwidth, to not download blacklisted preview images? We Germans love efficiency!
(I know a single preview image doesn't have that many kilobytes, but with many users and many blacklisted images, it adds up)

Ze Germans! (I can confirm this.)

Munkelzahn said:
My Internet connection (or e621) is slow at the moment, and I noticed something:
e621 loads all preview images, even the blacklisted ones. In my case, that's ponies.
A split second later, it hides them.
Wouldn't it be more efficient, in terms of bandwidth, to not download blacklisted preview images? We Germans love efficiency!
(I know a single preview image doesn't have that many kilobytes, but with many users and many blacklisted images, it adds up)

Then it would require additional work at server to check which images should be downloaded. Blacklist purpose is to get that work done on client side, so no matter how big your blacklist is would not affect other users.

While it would technically be possible to prevent the images from being loaded until you click the 'Hidden' thing on the left, it works fine now and the bandwidth drop probably wouldn't be worth the time it would take to develop it.

Efficiency vs usability vs stability.

Perfectly, the system works as followed.

You load the html, javascript kicks in as soon as the html finishes, the images are being downloaded simultaneously, but the javascript should strip the bad images before you are even supposed to see them.

HOWEVER if there is a hiccup, the html won't finish or is slow, javascript doesn't begin until the html is finished, but the images will continue to download, faster because they are on another server. This will cause the fault you are getting shown.

The two proposed solutions have inexcusable flaws.

The first would be server handled blacklist.
Lemme tell you in one word phrase why that would be bad: 503s for everyone.

And the second one is to not wrap the css in javascript, and have it always happen. The problem with this one is simply that breaks the site entirely for non javascript users, and we get a LOT of them.

So that's not gonna fly either.

Aurali said:
And the second one is to not wrap the css in javascript, and have it always happen. The problem with this one is simply that breaks the site entirely for non javascript users, and we get a LOT of them.

That means that Mobile users would be screwed, right? Because don't phones use javascript for the internet to display correctly on their systems?

Moon_Moon said:
That means that Mobile users would be screwed, right? Because don't phones use javascript for the internet to display correctly on their systems?

partially true, a lot of feature phones have their own built in javascript engines, if they even have a web browser. . and those are never really that powerful or standards compliant.

However we do work natively on the iphone, android and windows phone.