Perhaps you recall earlier discussion about how the archives system as it exists is not very good. Well, good news! I'm working on fixing that and want help testing!

https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/

Go to the above link, and test things. Upload files, download them, rate them, review them, whatever! Report back here with things that you think don't work right or are confusing! For the moment I'm just aiming for parity with the existing archives so things that aren't present there are not important to me right now (but if you comment with them I might make a note to work on it later).

Notes/known issues:
  • URLs will be updated later (when I declare the new archives to be no-longer-beta) so existing archives URLs will continue to work and you'll be able to reach the new archives in the usual way. This also means file shortlinks are misleading for now.

And to entice you to help, some highlights of what's new:
  • Files are versioned, so updates don't completely blow away the existing file
  • More flexible browsing, including easy access to the most popular files
  • More accessible landing page
  • Much easier to design templates so we can more easily make changes
  • Files can have any number of authors (more than the fixed limit of four)
  • Files can have any number of locations (more than the fixed limit of two)
  • An actual test suite so we can make changes and be confident we're not breaking things

So, please do test. If nobody does, I'll have to assume things work well enough and I can promote the new stuff out of beta, at which point my response to complaints that things are broken will include an aspect of "nobody told me this when you had a chance."
I got a server error: 500 when attempting to upload. I did intentionally try to break it by including "Anonymous" as co-author three times as well as uploading it to the same directory twice with different file names.
You mean you set Anonymous as coauthor at the same time as you were trying to upload twice with different file names? I suspect the issue is just Anonymous, if you can try those cases individually for me.
When viewing files for approval, the message for admins seems incomplete:
Quote:
"You can approve (or reject) it in the Admin."


I've never once seen the Admin Portal of a website just referred to as "the admin." It's always been "admin portal", "admin area." I get that's a proper noun and thus you say it's correct, but it just feels socially incorrect. I get that one would say "You go to Mexico for great tacos" but saying "You go the Admin to approve or reject files" is just... wrong?
Tari wrote:
You mean you set Anonymous as coauthor at the same time as you were trying to upload twice with different file names? I suspect the issue is just Anonymous, if you can try those cases individually for me.

Your suspicion is correct, Anonymous doesn't work but uploading twice in one directory (and duplicate authors that aren't Anonymous) works.

Edit: Also, shouldn’t uploading the same file twice to the same directory not be allowed? All it would do is unnecessarily clutter that directory.
I'm randomly getting CSRF validation errors, but I'm not sure why, when and how. Tested across multiple browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Brave), but still the same. Also, it doesn't happen always, so I don't really know how to trace down this. At least _iPhoenix_ got the same issue:

Quote:
<@P_T> Also, sometimes I'm getting CSRF failures when using the new Downloads section, anyone else having that too?
<saxjax> [_iPhoenix_] yeah me too
Preface:
My thoughts, mostly on styling but there are some usability concerns too. I've included some information in invisible, size-zero text (as to not crowd the post with small implementation details, etc) throughout, so for more information, one could select the whole post and paste into your favorite text editor.

Landing page:
Initial thoughts:

  • There's so much blank space it's almost awkward. Space is good, but preserving the consistency of smaller buttons throughout the site is more important in my mind.
  • The buttons feel like they are going to swallow me whole- so much padding, heh. The text in them is almost hard to read because of this. Long, small text is kinda hard to read. The smart people putting together accessibility guidelines have a thing for this- see https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/#visual-audio-contrast-visual-presentation. It's not strictly applicable here, but it looks official and makes a good point.
  • I think it also helps the page if one puts the borders seen all around the site. It's a page done in a more modern way, sure, but I think it fits in better to the rest of the site with borders.

I like seeing the site source without the dinosaur fossils for a change ;)
Result (click to enlarge):


Listing pages I:
I've already done a mockup of how I envision this looking so there's no point in me rewriting what I have to say. Though I have actually done a decent amount of research into designing webpages (mostly out of necessity) I don't think there's much I would change there, besides making "more info" into a button of its own, making the text a little smaller, and fixing some accessibility issues.

One key thing- I don't think that the objective shouldn't be to cram as many projects on a page as possible but to attempt to make each program as appealing as possible. The former is ugly and results in me looking at a wall of text. It may be beneficial to give users the opportunity to make a short description (< 300 chars, perhaps?) for this page and a long description for the "more info" page (if they don't you could just truncate the long description or something).

Listing pages II:
Ignoring that mockup, here's what I suggest as far as style changes to the current listing page:

  • The breadcrumbs look a little out of place. I just kinda stuck em in the mainbodyinner but they could go anywhere
  • It's still kinda got the wall-of-text feel so I added some padding in places, made sure the description column couldn't take over the world, and vertically aligned program names.
  • The description column is still pretty wide, so I added an author column.Maybe one could put first authors here?
  • I'd personally use mm/dd/yy hh:mm:ss as a default for dates here. Thinking about it some more, users have their own date format strings in their preferences, so I guess one could use those?

Forget what I said about not seeing dinosaur HTML earlier- I found some! :P Instead of using classes for even/odd, you could just use nth-child(odd) and nth-child(even) in your CSS for that https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:nth-child#Keyword_values
I did my styling to the "Most Recent" page, but this idea applies to other pages, too.

Here's what that looks like, kinda. It's more subtle here. (click to enlarge)


Guess what the next header is going to be :P Listing Pages III:
This focuses more on the sorting pages.

Initial Thoughts:

  • Basically everything in section II, plus:
  • The tables look off to me a little bit because the columns don't really line up.
  • I'm not a fan of the clicking on the link and waiting for another page to load to change the sorting of the list- I think this is a valid reason to whip out some JS.
  • The bottom looks a little off- missing the fillet/round on the corners.


Didn't do a mockup for this one.

People smarter than I am can probably find more things to do here, this was just a quick pass. I'll probably edit this with more things later when I have more time.

UI stuff ↑


UX stuff ↓
My thoughts on organization. Edit: It turns out I stole these from commandblockguy. It doesn't change the quality of the ideas, or the details I fleshed out further.

Instead of the directory-based organization, it might be better to think about what they want first (games, math, art, etc), and make compatibility like a filter.

Each file could have little icons indicating which calcs/platforms it is for, and maybe even libraries it needs (dcs, c libs, etc). The user could select what calculator they have with radio buttons or checkboxes or something, and it would filter out the programs.

This is a difficult problem and there was some fairly extensive discussion in the previous thread.

I personally didn't come up with a good solution, so here we go: we basically run the user through a flowchart.

First, we ask them "Are you looking for TI calculator programs, Casio Programs, or Computer Programs", but with huge icons. Like, maybe as large as the icons in the floating menu thing in SC3.

Say they click TI programs. We then ask "Are you looking for Monochrome Calculator, Color Calculator, or Computer Programs" (with big, huge icons/popups with like a TI-83 screen for monochrome, a TI-84+CE screen for color, and like some Apple II computer for satire, err, the computer menu).

If they click color, we give them some tips on differentiating between a CSE and a CE, show them two more options, and bam! we've figured out what calculator they have. Having a standard checkbox list for advanced users is a good idea, too. For bonus points, this could be saved in a cookie or something.

Ideally, we can narrow down a platform for a clueless user in three clicks or less and one click for advanced users- I think this is a fair sacrifice for preventing compatibility problems.

I also think it would be nice to automatically give programs PotM winner/PotY winner badges somehow. I know the latter exists, but the former could be nice. There's even a list of winners floating around in the PotM subforum. Not sure how that could work, though.
Quote:
For the moment I'm just aiming for parity with the existing archives so things that aren't present there are not important to me right now (but if you comment with them I might make a note to work on it later).
Further improvement is definitely possible but not my priority right now. I have a separate feature request bug that includes things like major style changes and refers back to the previous thread.
Fixes for most of the issues I've noted are on the way:


Refer to the first post in this thread for most up-to-date status.
I've thoroughly exercised the code that migrates the old data to the new system, so you can browse the new archives will all the old data which should make it much more interesting (and maybe expose some additional weirdnesses now that there's realistic data in it).
What is the default sorting on an overview page? Currently it looks like it's by the zip name, which I personally don't like. Also, where can I find the title of a file itself? Shouldn't that be the default sorting?

Also, I remember you said something about a different sorting algorithm for votes, here. To me it seems that a 9.7/10 rating out of 40 votes is better than a 10/10 from 1 vote, so I wonder if you currently use this system or not?
I found a bug. The downloads count seems to be broken on the top rated files page. HailStorm should have 343, but it is displayed as 2058. Other files are displayed as having 2 times more downloads than they should, but the actual downloads and the displayed downloads always seem to be evenly divisible (343 x 6 == 2058, and there are other examples of similar things happening as well). Overall it looks very good though, keep it up.
LINK: https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/top/files?sort=-average_rating&page=5
EDIT: same here: https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/users/epsilon5
It also looks like the author downloads rank is always the same as the number of files rank.
The new archives look great so far; I love the idea of streamlining them for the average user. I just have a few suggestions:


I think there should be a more prominent option (maybe on the landing page, before selecting "most popular"/"most recent"/etc) for the user to to select their desired calculator/platform. I'm glad the new archives seem to favor the popular new 84+ CE, but what if I don't have one? I have a few friends who are still sticking with the old monochrome 84+ and others who prefer the nSpire platform. Shouldn't it be just as easy for them to get programs from the new archive format?
I know some others have brought up the potential for misidentifying their calc (I don't think the average user is that stupid), so maybe the calculator selection should include a picture of each model. If the dozen or so different models are overwhelming, maybe show the most popular models by default, and a "show more" button to access the less popular models.

I also liked the old archives' option to separate programs by intended use (math vs science vs games) but backtracking was a bit clunky. Maybe checkboxes can be used to filter by program type?
PT_ wrote:
What is the default sorting on an overview page? Currently it looks like it's by the zip name, which I personally don't like. Also, where can I find the title of a file itself? Shouldn't that be the default sorting?

Also, I remember you said something about a different sorting algorithm for votes, here. To me it seems that a 9.7/10 rating out of 40 votes is better than a 10/10 from 1 vote, so I wonder if you currently use this system or not?
Tari wrote:
Further improvement is definitely possible but not my priority right now. I have a separate feature request bug that includes things like major style changes and refers back to the previous thread.

Coding Enthusiast wrote:
The new archives look great so far; I love the idea of streamlining them for the average user. I just have a few suggestions:
See above. Concrete suggestions are welcome but not going to be actioned right now.

_iPhoenix_ wrote:
It also looks like the author downloads rank is always the same as the number of files rank.
On the user details page, you mean? Just a case of displaying the one value twice, rather than both values.

epsilon5 wrote:
HailStorm should have 343, but it is displayed as 2058. Other files are displayed as having 2 times more downloads than they should, but the actual downloads and the displayed downloads always seem to be evenly divisible (343 x 6 == 2058, and there are other examples of similar things happening as well).
Ah, good eye. That'll be joins in the ORM interacting in surprising ways with aggregations. (You might note that HailStorm has 6 ratings.) Pretty easy to fix; looks like it's only on the user page, not browse page.

I've now pushed fixes for the ranking display and misreported download counts.
Found a bug: you can vote for files you're a co-author of.
Not a bug: it's only supposed to block voting for users with the ability to make changes to a file.

However, I observe that the old system blocks any coauthor so I guess the new one should follow suit. This change is now on its way to the server.
There haven't been any more comments lately, so I'm pushing a new version that removes the big scary "we might eat your data" warning from every page and redirects old archives paths to the new ones.

You can ensure you're hitting this version of the site by opting-in at cemetech.net/7/, or I'll push it to 100% within a day or so if there aren't significant problems. Versions 0.1.dev395 and newer have the redirects in place.
Maybe this is related to the changes you've been making to the archives, but the archive contributions section of everyone's profiles is blank...

mr womp womp wrote:
Maybe this is related to the changes you've been making to the archives, but the archive contributions section of everyone's profiles is blank...


Yes, you're right about that, that changed Wink
  
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