And I probably made a mistake making all the pools inactive by default. I'll just set them all to active.

I'm gonna go through and lock a few that I think are finished again since the giant list is bothering me, so if you need one unlocked, drop me a line.

IMO ideally there should be enough pools floating around in danbooru that putting them all in a drop-down box would be ridiculous. I move that we change the system to use pool ID numbers, just like the "parent" box under "edit" uses.

Unless I'm misunderstanding how the drop-down works? I certainly don't see 200 pools there. Maybe surasshu has only left 18 still active (I can't seem to see this on the pools listing), but that seems unlikely.

Also, can we change the name "Public" to something more intuitive, like "Collaborative", or something? It seems like "not public" should mean "hidden", where this is clearly not the case.

albert said:
Thinking about it just gives me a headache, and it feels like a whole lot of work for not much gain. I don't have major problems with the current system. I hope someone can give an example of a common scenario where it doesn't work.

When you want to read a series of comics, getting to the next page is a hassle. You have to follow the parent link, wait for the list to load, try to recognize the page you're currently on from the thumbnail, then click on what seems to be the next post, wait for it to load. If you got it wrong, start over. If you're not sure you got it right, also start over.

Or go to the parent page and open each post in a new tab. Wait for a while until they all load. Then realize whoever uploaded the pages got the order wrong; but it's not a pool, and parent/child relationship don't have ordering.

LaC said:
When you want to read a series of comics, getting to the next page is a hassle. You have to follow the parent link, wait for the list to load, try to recognize the page you're currently on from the thumbnail, then click on what seems to be the next post, wait for it to load. If you got it wrong, start over. If you're not sure you got it right, also start over.

Or go to the parent page and open each post in a new tab. Wait for a while until they all load. Then realize whoever uploaded the pages got the order wrong; but it's not a pool, and parent/child relationship don't have ordering.

Can't you parent the posts and make a pool? The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Yes, sure. But people upload a comic, parent the pages, and think "there, I've made a useful contribution". That's not enough. You need a pool to make it readable.

Exactly. And having all the pages show up with an ugly yellow border around them screaming "I AM A MERE INFERIOR CHILD IMAGE!!" doesn't help either. :P

LaC said:
Yes, sure. But people upload a comic, parent the pages, and think "there, I've made a useful contribution". That's not enough. You need a pool to make it readable.

And you need parents to not spam the front page. Anyone can always make a pool later, but parenting is essential.

It's extremely easy to make a pool if the images have been parented, by the way. Just create a pool and import using parent:######. Perhaps a shortcut to this from the parent image should be made available to make it as easy as possible for the uploader to do it with a couple clicks.

If the most important thing about a bunch of posts is hiding them, perhaps they shouldn't be uploaded at all.

Uh, you probably already know this, but that's wrong.

Yes, the premise is.

albert already explained the function of parenting quite clearly a few pages back, and I see no issues with it. Of course, sequential images should be pooled.

memegui said:
Something is very wrong here:
post #234190
There should be an option in pools to make them appear in the pool list but not on posts: Hidden.

Pools should generally be significantly less invasive than this. Since they are also used for subjective tags, they should show up similar to the tag list instead of this giant cluttery warning at the top. Since they're so huge and annoying right now, it kinda makes me not want to put stuff in pools. It could look something like this:

http://i32.tinypic.com/2vhtzjb.jpg

Yes, the interface for pools is not perfect, and there's already been a lot of discussion on how to improve it (on IRC too). I'm ok with putting "collection" pools in the sidebar, but series navigation needs to be above and/or below the image to be useful.

Parenting has its share of problems, too: take, for instance, a comic where you have multiple pages, and several versions of some pages (b/w and color, v1 and v2, etc): you end up with a multi-level hierarchy, which is something albert wanted to avoid, if I'm not mistaken.

Anyway, the point of this thread is to get people to use pools for multi-page posts, since they now allow navigation.

That looks nice, surasshu, but there is definitely a pool hierarchy, some pools should be more invasive than others.
For example, a doujin pool should have the big bar on top.
A pool like "Bare legged bunnies" may appear like http://i32.tinypic.com/2vhtzjb.jpg
And a pseudo-private pool like "memegui's test pool" shouldn't appear on the post page at all.
I guess it's up to the moderators to decide the level of a pool, a user should probably be able to set it when he creates it or any time after that.

surasshu's mockup looks quite nice. One thing I'd change, though, would be to have a "current/total" counter rather than just a "total" next to the pool names. Otherwise looks good. And I guess we could have pools separated into categories based on importance, but IMO just having them all in the sidebar is just fine. Pool listings don't really need to be in your face.

0xCCBA696 said: surasshu's mockup looks quite nice. One thing I'd change, though, would be to have a "current/total" counter rather than just a "total" next to the pool names.

Agreed, I really like both the mockup and this suggestion.

Perhaps we could still have the banner up top (albeit smaller) describing what a pool is, but I'd say it's optional at this point.

surasshu said:
Since they're so huge and annoying right now, it kinda makes me not want to put stuff in pools.

Parent/child boxes are just as huge and annoying. See post #271216: clearly, the pool box is the useful one in that case, with the parent box just wasting space.

BTW, can you explain to me why hiding a few comic pages is so vital to you? You can still get even longer streaks of uninteresting but unrelated posts, anyway. Is this an RSS problem? Does it only apply to the most recent posts? In that case, the parent links might as well be removed after a week or so, can't they? And what about series published at intervals (Habanero-tan, Nyoron, etc.)? Don't you want to know when a new one is posted? In that case, hiding it because an earlier comic was posted months before is downright counterproductive.

Well, what I find weird is that child images appear in search, since that is what I thought parenting was supposed to stop. The way I understood parenting is that it unclutters the search results by grouping together images that are very similar. If I searched Nyoron, I don't want to see 10 pages of thumbnails of essentially the same thing. I just want one thumbnail and an indication that says "there's more like this under here".

Maybe it's just something I wish it did, though.

My suggestion from before was to transfer that functionality to those pools that contain similar items, such as comics, but I understand albert's argument that it would probably make things more complex, since pools also have that "subjective tag" functionality.

And an image can have multiple pools, it can only have one parent, so I don't mind that top thing so much in that case. It could be smaller though or off to the side, it's not necessary that it's that big.

Just to be sure, is it okay to group doujin pages with a pool instead of using the parenting function?

surasshu, if you search for nyoron, you want nyoron. Why would you want to have to go through an extra step to see all the comics? However, if there are two variations of the same pictures (duplicates, different resolutions, draft/finished, etc.), then I would only want to see the best one, yes.

The problem is that parent/child relationships are used for things which are too different.

For duplicates, I'd like children to be hidden in all searches, except when explicitly looking for a picture's children (the link in the parent box).

For comics, I don't think it makes sense to hide them in normal searches (eg searching for "nyoron"). I understand that some people want batches to be condensed in the "recent posts" view, but it's dubious that you'd want a new post hidden just because it's added to an old batch (eg, a new habanero episode that gets parented to the first one).

You can't do both things with a single function, and I think the parenting function is more appropriate for the former.