Howdy.

Welcome back to the weekly devlog.
In case you missed it, here is the one from last week – it resulted in quite a bit of useful feedback.

This week's release does not have an abundance of new features.
I stepped back a bit to fix some bugs, address some pain points, and just generally polish it a bit.
That, and the settings page design I was working on is taking longer than I hoped.
Thus, e621 and e926 are currently running the same version of e621ng.

Before I cover the changes in this week's release, I have a quick poll for y'all.
https://strawpoll.com/2ayLQVPJzn4

Posts Page

The posts page got some slight touch-ups from last week.
I've reworked the "controls" section under the search bar that previously only contained the "Fullscreen" button.
I am still not entirely happy with the design, since I am somewhat worried that the icons are not exactly self-explanatory without text labels.
However, I believe that it is a vast improvement over what I had last week.

I've also implemented the "sticky search bar" feature that is also toggleable in the controls section – it is an option to have the search bar follow you down the page as you scroll.
It works in both regular and fullscreen modes. It's not currently available on mobile for technical reasons, but I'll be working on getting that done next week.

As a minor note, I have also replaced the "search" icon with a new one.
I am fully intent on phasing out the font-awesome icons sooner rather than later – inline SVG icons are more customizable and don't require us to include a whole icon library.

Finally, the search page should now display the approximate results count.
Just keep in mind that it is not terribly precise, for performance reasons.
It is essentially just the number of pages multiplied by the number of posts per page.

Wiki Excerpt

This had been a somewhat contentious feature so far.
The target audience for it had always been regular users, who may not even know what many tags mean.

With that in mind, I did add a way to disable it permanently – without having to resort to custom CSS.
You can either click on the "X" in the top right corner of the excerpt or go to the Themes page and disable it there.
You can also set the default state of the excerpt on the Themes page, but that is already saved whenever you collapse or expand it on the posts page.

Excerpts now also support wiki page redirects.
For example: https://e621.net/posts?tags=long_blonde_hair

I also fixed some bugs that were affecting the wiki excerpt.
For example, including quotes on the wiki page used to cause a strange visual effect in the excerpt.

Google Lens

I have replaced the link to Google's reverse image search in the footer with the one for Google Lens.
The old search did not seem to work consistently for everyone, and seems to be in the process of being phased out anyways.

Google Lens should have more or less the same functionality.
Please let me know if you have any issues with that link.

Bugfixes

I spent a bunch of time this week solving various issues on the site.
Big thank you to everyone who reported these, by the way.

• Restored the arrow labels in the sequential paginator. This should make it more useful, plus it just looks better.
• Fixed an issue that caused keyboard shortcuts to prev / next search results pages to break. Both of them accidentally got assigned to the same hotkey.
• Fixed some width issues that were causing the pagination to sometimes overflow the page on mobile.
• Fixed an issue that caused a scrollbar to appear in the main menu on desktop under very specific circumstances.
• The font size in the sidebar had been increased on mobile to match how it used to look before the posts page rework.
• Fixed an issue causing post notes to layer above the main menu on mobile. Just more z-index shenanigans.
• Fixed a couple of buttons in the takedowns form line breaking for no good reason.
• Adjusted the logo borders in the footer a little.

cinder said:
You can either click on the "X" in the top right corner of the excerpt or go to the Themes page and disable it there.

Link is broken, should just be /static/theme.

not really directly related to anything that changed this week, but I was just kinda reminded of enterkeyhint randomly. that's the thing that makes the enter key on virtual keyboards change to have a context sensitive icon/text, I don't think it's something that users are really going to notice, but it's also probably not much effort to implement.

Overall I'm a fan of the tweaks!

- Really appreciate the tag info being a setting.
- The current implementation looks pretty good doesn't feel like it's encroaching/adding too much.
- I've come around to the icon in the top left, it does look good with the user's pfp.

Other notes:
- The little overlap of the main content element and the sidebar on the Posts page seems a strange choice

perhaps a tweak for it to line up could be:

/*(on the main 'content' element with the post thumbnails)*/
margin-top: 0.25rem;
margin-bottom: 0.25rem;
border-top-left-radius: 0rem;
border-bottom-left-radius: 0rem;

I think I understand the intended vision of the posts being 'extended out' from the side bar, though I'm not sure if that's communicated well. Since there is little padding between the thumbnails and sidebar it feels unintentional (to me).
Adding padding to the content element may also be a solution to this. I could be nitpicking for polish though.

Did the blacklist box scroll get removed? Or, rather, didn't the blacklist box used to be smaller by default?

I've also implemented the "sticky search bar" feature that is also toggleable in the controls section

So for stuff like this, are toggles for removing them on the horizon, or is that what the custom css is for?

dba_afish said:
not really directly related to anything that changed this week, but I was just kinda reminded of enterkeyhint randomly. that's the thing that makes the enter key on virtual keyboards change to have a context sensitive icon/text, I don't think it's something that users are really going to notice, but it's also probably not much effort to implement.

The usefulness of that seems marginal, but I guess why not?
I've been trying to improve the site's accessibility in general, but that's a long process.

shufflefur said:
Overall I'm a fan of the tweaks!

- Really appreciate the tag info being a setting.
- The current implementation looks pretty good doesn't feel like it's encroaching/adding too much.
- I've come around to the icon in the top left, it does look good with the user's pfp.

Other notes:
- The little overlap of the main content element and the sidebar on the Posts page seems a strange choice

perhaps a tweak for it to line up could be:

/*(on the main 'content' element with the post thumbnails)*/
margin-top: 0.25rem;
margin-bottom: 0.25rem;
border-top-left-radius: 0rem;
border-bottom-left-radius: 0rem;

I think I understand the intended vision of the posts being 'extended out' from the side bar, though I'm not sure if that's communicated well. Since there is little padding between the thumbnails and sidebar it feels unintentional (to me).
Adding padding to the content element may also be a solution to this. I could be nitpicking for polish though.

Thank you for the feedback.
People have spoken up about the sidebar before. In my opinion, it's such a minor change that it does not terribly matter in the grand scheme of things.

redlxix said:
Did the blacklist box scroll get removed? Or, rather, didn't the blacklist box used to be smaller by default?

So for stuff like this, are toggles for removing them on the horizon, or is that what the custom css is for?

The blacklist section had not been touched. Its max height had been set to 50vh for the past 7 months.
https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blame/037cc8565524e8a4b5c5776930bd9ba49304621a/app/javascript/src/styles/common/blacklists.scss#L87

There will not be a customization option for removing the search page control buttons.

Rolling devlog, makes sense! And easier to find feedback too (if people stopped using the other topic lol)
The tag wiki blurb makes sense for people who are less used to tagging or are just curious to find aliases and related tags, I think it's a nice addition.

Curious about what the poll will be for~

cinder said:

Finally, the search page should now display the approximate results count.
Just keep in mind that it is not terribly precise, for performance reasons.
It is essentially just the number of pages multiplied by the number of posts per page.

Ooh! That's a lovely little new feature. I used to do this in my head when ballparking the number of results to a query.