Waterfall Staff

Community Update - More Teasers

The more progress I make, the more I have to show off. And since showing you guys what I'm working on means I can get feedback and hopefully not get too far down the wrong path that it's not easy to change, so you get to see more of what's done!

First, a quick note to NSFW artists - please make sure your work is tagged appropriately. The prescribed tag that must be present is "nsfw" - not a variation on it. You're welcome to add your own variations in addition to it, but that tag MUST be present. This is coming up because we've had people not tagging it and it showing in features. Using the tag correctly makes sure minors can't see it (or adults who just don't want to, for that matter), and is mandatory. The "this blog is for adults only" toggle isn't enough, since that's not explicitly an NSFW flag.

With that out of the way, let's see what we have for you. As always, WIPs and will likely change a little in the final version.

Accessible Fonts

One thing that a lot of sites don't do well is acessibility. Waterfall probably doesn't do it well either, but that's no reason not to try and fix it. So, first things first - font size, and dyslexia mode.

There's been plenty of research that specialised fonts can help dyslexic folks read better, so there's an option to enable that now. Doing so changes the font for the site to the one pictured, and also increases line spacings a little, since that apparently helps too.

In addition, there's a large font option too. The screenshot above has both dyslexia mode and large font enabled to give you an idea of what it looks like.

Image IDs and captions

This took a surprising amount of fiddling to get working, but it's finally working 100%. Image and Art posts now support Image IDs natively, if the uploader chooses to use them (which they absolutely should!), as well as captions. Image IDs are used by screenreaders too, while captions show on hover with the mouse. Head over to XKCD and hover over a comic to see what's possible here. Obviously, the image ID in the screenshot sucks and you should use actually good ones rather than jokes, but that's on a private testing build so I figured I'd have a little fun.

While we're on the subject of Art posts...

Art Theft 3.0

The art theft system has been completely overhauled, and we're skipping 2.0. That's how much it's improved. Unfortunately, I can't really show you for this since it's just a mess of code, so I'll describe it instead.

Art Theft 3.0 now uses five different algorithms to determine whether the site has seen an upload before. Instead of using the file itself as a comparator, it uses the actual image. As usual, I don't want to get too in depth to prevent workarounds being discovered before I can patch them, but it involves a bunch of stuff like wavelet decomposition, perceptual hashing, histogram analysis, yadda yadda.

You probably don't care what those words mean and just want to know what it changes, so here's a summary:

• Lightened/darkened images are caught now.
• Resized images are caught now.
• The algorithms are crop resistant, so cropped off watermarks are caught.
• JPEG compression/artifacting is caught and adjusted for.
• Adding noise to an image is caught and adjusted for.
• Changed aspect ratios are caught.

I borrowed 500 art posts from the site and ran them through a generator to create variations, then had the algorithms run on them. Only 12 weren't caught. Checking those 12 there was a common theme among them (sketchy style, no/little colour, or a lot of whitespace), but this is a staggering improvement on the existing system, so it'll be deployed in the next update. Best of all, it barely slows posting down at all.

This is the main reason the rewrite has taken about a year to do.

Group Blog Permissions

The page for this is ugly as sin right now so I want to see if I can improve it a bit before launch.

The motivation here was simple - Tumblr's way sucks. You can either do nothing, or everything. It's the same way here right now, so I wanted to fix that. Rewrite's blog permissions are fully granular.

URL Purge

I said a while ago that inactive URLs would be purged occasionally. That system is now finished, and the first purge will be on the day the rewrite is deployed. Here's your warning.

And that's it for this update - more to come soon!