Currently, we have a quick option to switch from popular to recent posts in the gallery. We've had quite a bit of discussion about changing which one is the default option - having new art show up first would help smaller artists, but it could also drive new users away if they don't see anything that grabs them right away.

In general, once people begin using a site, they want to look at all the various sorting systems, and they'll likely begin looking at the newest art coming onto the site. That's a system that works for most other websites out there - capture new users with the most notable posts, then ease them into the new art when they join.

Hopefully that makes sense. We're going to keep the popular posts as the first thing people see, but once they change to other sorting systems, those will remain the default.

We currently have the site setup to open a preview page when clicking on the submission; this allows people to navigate using keyboard shortcuts. At this point, the site navigation is mostly finalized. We may have some tweaks, but we won't be making large changes. I believe the current system functions mostly the way you've requested, so we'll not plan on changing this. However, if there is a large problem with navigation that many people want addressed, we can look into it and see if a change would help.

While this isn't a high priority issue, it's something that we're eventually going to look into; this would be a helpful feature for those who do not upload artwork.

I've been throwing this around for a while. While I would like for GIFs to be imported, we'd likely have some issues - either animated GIFs would appear in artwork, or still GIFs would appear in multimedia. I know the site was originally created to have animated files in one single area, but I wonder if it's actually a problem to allow animated GIFs in the art section.

I think we'll want to bounce this around a bit. The best work around right now is to upload a new file, but having a solid solution would be great.

FibS, thanks for sending this suggestion in to us! I took a look, and we have a fairly similar suggestion that we're going to talk to the devs about; it's a simplified version that would allow users to tag people involved as well as link to each others' submissions. 

• How many people would use this? A good amount based on the votes from the other thread.
• How easy would it be to implement? Not very easy. We're looking at an overhaul of the submission system, and this would need to be done in a way that currently existing submissions aren't negatively affected. Even if a secondary system were created, checking for duplicates automatically would definitely put a large burden on the submission processor; it would also lead to a large development time.
• How easy would it be for users to use? The new submission system could be intuitive if done right. However, if users were the ones choosing admins for their work, this opens the door for potential conflicts and drama.
• How much work would it give staff after this is implemented? It depends. Depending on the accuracy of the duplication checker, it could give false positives. There's also the potential for staff needing to clear up conflicts.

I'm just thinking out loud, but it seems like allowing users to cross-list and tag other contributors would be less development work - we'd be using the same system with some small modifications. It could also possibly be easier to use, especially since other users on the site would be able to tag related submissions and the appropriate artists. I think there would be more moderation issues popping up from that. I'm leaning towards using the tagging system.

What do you think, FibS?

We're looking into adding that in the near future, actually; I agree that having networking through shouts on a page is important, and we'd want people to be able to add or remove those from their profile if they want.

Okay, I appreciate keeping it around for now. I'll have our dev team take a look at this.

I'm going to talk to the developers about showing the character limit when people type. It'll take a while to get to this on our list, but I agree that it'd be helpful to see when you hit the limit.

For now, it appears this is resolved. If there are any additional issues with this, feel free to submit another ticket.

I'm currently going through and checking all of the past suggestions that have been made. For this, I feel two ways about it.

For:

People who have slower internet connections could benefit from this; the images are small, but they could bog it down if there's a large number of various images.

Against:

The images should be stored in the cache, so repeated views of the same image shouldn't actually slow down the connection.

Some people will accidentally disable seeing pictures, and this has a potential to confuse or anger users.

When it comes to layouts, keeping things simple tends to be the best - if there's not a strong reason to give an option, it's best to not have it. The one case where keeping images could be detrimental is with tons of notifications when someone uploads dozens of images, but the effects would be minimal for the vast majority of users; someone who does have loading issues because of poor bandwidth would likely experience it for every website.

Those are my thoughts. I'm going to mark this as declined for now, but we could definitely revisit if there were a large amount of demand for text-only options.