I started writing my own Overchan recently:
http://metachan.org/
Anybody have something they want to see in this sort of site? I'll be raiding the English Image Boards thread soon and changing the DB structure after that will suck.
My big idea is that I'm going to put checkboxes next to the board listings. You can then check off the boards you like and have a script generate a navigation frame for you.
Somehow distinguish between image boards and discussion boards?
It's looking good so far.
Good idea. I added little talk bubble icons for now. Will probably make discussion boards collapsible, like the alternate URLs and whatnot, when I get the chance as well.
At first I thought you meant a clone of the overchan navigation, where you could set up which boards you wanted to appear in the sidebar. That would be a lot more popular, I think.
That is what I meant, it's just not programmed yet. T.T
Yes, and you also said that. I am half asleep, sorry.
maybe add http://onechan.net
english adress is http://e.onechan.net
Forgive me for intruding into the realm of code-monkey-business here, but for the love of God, please do not use the - and + metaphor for expanding and collapsing things. It's one of those idiotic things that persist in Windows, as well as (God help us) being copied in other GUIs, despite the fact that it makes no logical sense at all...
Other than that, it looks interesting so far. Let's see how it develops.
Onechan is actually in there. You have to open the settings section and then click on DE in the language filters (or ctrl-click to select more than one). Eventually all those settings will stay set between visits (via a cookie) and so be less of a pain.
I wonder how feasible it is to parse the accept-language header that browsers send and set the languages filter automatically. We could even remove all the improper uses of the word 'hentai' if they have Japanese set as the preferred language, lol.
I could tweak the DB so that sites can have multiple languages, but there really isn't a lot of English posting going on at Onechan AFAICT. In the meantime I'll look into adding a 'show all' link for people who don't want to fuss with the settings.
Well I don't have any objection to changing it, but what would I change it too? The plus and minus make perfect sense to me. I click on the plus to get more content, click on the minus to get less, and if there are no children under the element to show/hide then there is no plus/minus.
The only other options I know are triangles and filled/empty circles. These have a huge disadvantage, however, in that they can be used as normal bullets as well. So people can't tell right off if they are a bullet or a collapse control. I tried to Google this and apparently the Apple Finder even does use them as both bullets and collapse controls. It will have a right pointing arrow even if clicking on it does nothing!
Maybe they fixed that idiocy by now, but it just goes to show that even the UI designers mixed up that triangles are not bullets and should never be used as bullets in a program that uses them to indicate more content is present and that clicking will do something. I imagine that would cause a lot of fruitless clicks.
Is there a good alternative I'm missing? Maybe it's impossible to find a symbol that's obvious to everyone and it should just be '(click to show more)' or something like that. I do really like not having that wordy about section and that complex settings section cluttering things up unless people actually want to see them.
>>10: I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. The Mac OS has always used triangles for this, and they have always had the function of expanding or collapsing a list or showing more options in a window; they've never been ornamental bullets. Link to wherever you're finding this BS, please?
As for another alternative, just plain text links or HTML buttons saying "Show More Options" or "Show Less Options" or something would be ugly, but still make more sense than "plus" and "minus."
Personally, I have this pet-peeve that people should stop applying the suffix -chan to image boards and also stop acting like "-chan" indicates and means "image board".
But that's just me.
ATPM 10.02 - ATPO: Outliner User Interfaces
http://www.atpm.com/10.02/atpo.shtml
>This is the way the Finder works, by the way: you can “collapse” an empty folder.
Looking at it with your dissenting opinion in mind, it's possible he is using 'Finder' to refer to the app that subsection is about. If that's true, however, it is weird how he capitalizes it like a name and uses a 'by the way' as if it were about something else.
If Finder were a general purpose name for a type of app it wouldn't be capitalized. So there must be a Company X Finder and an Apple Finder? He then refers to a 'pre-Panther Finder' right below adding to the mix.
So downgrade that part of my comment to 'some Apple application programmers even confuse triangles for bullets' if you aren't convinced. Weaker example, but I still don't see anything wrong with my reasoning that proceeded it.
I'll look into the 'show more' alternative. Maybe right underneath each heading would be good. That's somewhere you'd logically look for the content and it doesn't get in the way of reading the header like putting text where the symbol is now would.
Well I did avoid calling the Evangelion site "Reichan" like Overchan does. ^^ Not much I can do about most of them, though. Maybe bug their admins to change their site names, heh.
Now that I think about it, isn't chan short for channel in this case too, though? That has a little more validity.
Anyway, updates related to the thread:
1) Language detection added. Now defaults to showing English sites and any sites with languages matching what your browser asks for (any priority level and location is fine). For Mozilla this can be set in 'Edit->Preferences->Navigator->Languages' and for MSIE it's 'Tools->Internet Options->Languages...'.
One hopes that if your UI is set to German or whatever this is set automatically, but who knows. Well that was interesting coding even if not very useful, I suppose.
2) "Show all sites" link appears above the table if some sites are hidden.
>>12
echo that for using -tan to mean 'personification' or 'mascot'. Even if it's a burly guy. Sheesh...
Aha, found a 4th type of collapse control today. Up and down pointing instead of right and down. So stole the design and am trying it out now. Does seem less likely to be mistaken for a meaningless bullet than the right pointing or circle varieties at least.
>>13: I still am not sure what the heck you're talking about. "Finder" refers to the part of the Mac OS in which you can move files, open applications, etc; so basically, the part of the Mac OS that the user interacts with. As far as I know, it has always referred to this. There is no other Finder...
Well then I was correct all along. Apple has had triangle markers that do not collapse anything despite using them to do so in other places.
What's wrong with the current overchan?
Just wondering.
Isn't that what I asked to start the thread? For anything someone wants added?
The only real improvement I have at the moment is that everything is in a database. This will let me do the navigation generated from checkboxes (or cookies, or short URL aliases, etc.). Currently I save a copy of the Overchan Navigation and edit it to my liking. This is annoying to keep up to date or change and I have to save it online somewhere anyway to access remotely.
There must be other neat things to do with all these sites in a DB, though. For example you could run a link checker each morning. For any dead boards you could hide them, or maybe just mark them in red, or replace them with a mirrored copy of the last time they were alive, or replace the link with an equivalent (4chan boards for IIchan boards, for example). Maybe more useful for everyday operations you could DL the HTML for each board each day, compare them, then list the number of new posts next to the board in parentheses.
I'm just looking for ideas like that while I fill up the database and decide what tables are needed. Adding something after the fact could mean visiting every site in the various image board threads we have here a second time.
>>19: Whatever, dude. I am totally incapable of following your line of thought. I wish you would take my word for it that this has never been the case, though.
Empty directories have open/close arrows next to them, even though clicking those do not reveal anything. So they are essentially bullet points marking directories, and not interface items that signify that there is hidden content.
Not a major issue to be sure, but an inconsistency.
So some directories should have disclosure triangles, and some should not? Not an inconsistency. Clicking on the disclosure triangle and having it reveal nothing signifies that the directory is empty.
thick-headed retard GET
If you think so, then, as I said, it's not a GUI element for revealing hidden content (because its existence does not imply that hidden contents exists), it is a bullet point that marks directories and secondarily shows and hides their contents.
Regged an extra domain with no wap suffix, heh:
http://imageboards.info
Just redirects to the metachan one for now, though. Will make it a mirror and have the page detect what to call itself later on. If I'd know how freaking cheap info domains are I'd have started with this. Oo
I would suggest you remove non-anonymous boards from your listing.
I only care about the images and not the interaction so much, so like having non-anonymous boards in there. The default settings already keep them hidden (well there is only one example to hide so far), since I know others feel differently.
If everyone I talk to complains, then I might start calling non-anonymous ones galleries and stick them in a 'didn't quite make it' listing. But then what would 5chan have rated as? It's weird calling it a gallery when it was users posting the images and users commenting on them.
Forcing all image boards to be anonymous might be just like using -chan for site names all the time. Something we're taking from the Japanese and not deciding ourselves. Maybe those furry boards that everyone hates could cut down on the trolling they get if they required sign up, for example, and that would outweigh the benefits of allowing anon.
> Forcing all image boards to be anonymous might be just like using -chan for site names all the time. Something we're taking from the Japanese and not deciding ourselves.
Uh, no. The -chan naming is western (just overtook from Futaba Channel - 99% of the other Japanese imageboards don't have that suffix in the URL - and the name of Futaba Channel isn't 2chan either).
Options for Anonymous and not having to register is a Japanese thing, though.
Not that I'd want to argue whether it's really important - but personally I don't like how westerners introduce their stuff into imageboards (stickies, required registration, etc.), simply because I like the simplified Futaba Channel style. But that's just me.
>>30
I can see why you'd want to include other sources of images, but you're missing something. The whole point of the original overchan is to provide a collection of these nascent anonymous image/discussion boards and promote their use. Sites like hongfire with registration and static galleries are a dime a dozen and already listed on multiple link lists, ranking sites, and other websites.
5chan was a weird mish-mash, but it's not up now so don't worry... be happy. ( ´3`)～♪
Furry boards can never be free of drama, anonymous or not.
>Forcing all image boards to be anonymous
Who's forcing anyone? Simply omitting a board from a list isn't some kind of threat or ultimatum.
Good point. It hadn't occurred to me that Overchan wasn't a general image board listing. Overchan does make the additional requirements they have clear at the top, though.
I guess this is a second difference between the two sites then. I'm not interested in excluding image boards of any type. The filters seem adequate to meet the needs of the anonymous preferring people anyway and a codebase filter could always be added as well.
In that case I'd go with your idea of calling them galleries. While some do allow comments, the interfaces in general de-emphasize communication with their grid thumbnail layouts that hide comments untill you view the whole image and static ordering of images. (no bumping to the top on a new comment.)
i see the googlerank spambots have discovered kareha
To fucking bad for them that I'm using rel="nofollow" then.
>>29
It wasn't me-- I don't push my ideas on other people websites unless I'm being an ass-- but that makes three of us.
I guess I should finalize the DB and do some work on user features for metachan.
The most recent field I added was a "normalized board name" field. So every board with the same content would have the same name (when you turn it on).
Coming up with a good taxonomy and fitting every board to it is turning out rather painful, though, heh.
If this keeps up, I'll have to turn on captchas, no matter how annoying that is. For now, I'll try to add some hacks to the script to detect obvious spammers, and see if that helps.
Please don't turn on captchas, I regularly browse this site with a text-only browser and wouldn't be able to post :(
you can go on IRC and ask someone to tell you the captcha
>>49
...
It was only a suggestion ('-`)
Captcha are unique per IP address. Nobody else can tell you what your captcha is, unless they have access to the database.
Idiot was spamming without even using a proxy. What the hell?
OK, this thread is just collecting spam now. I'm just going to close it, and if >>1 ever wants to revive the discussion, he can start a new thread and link to this one for the old posts.