Favorites pages broken

[TranshumanOtter]

Why have favorites pages changed?
Up until yesterday the pages were sequential, 1 for the latest favorites added and then 2, 3, 4, ... and so on. It was a good system as it allowed users to go back to a spcific pint of their faves and also to find the last page with a simple binary search (i.e. Try a big number, if the page has faves then use a bigger number, if it doesn't have faves then halve the number the go back, repeat the process until you find the last page) with only a few passages.
Now each page seems to have a unique id which is non-sequential and not based on anything user-facing. These are the links for pages 2 and 3 of my favorites: /favorites/[my username]/644957032/next , /favorites/[my username]/643472658/next.

Why was it changed to this crazy system? It makes it impossible to know on which page you're on and impossible to go back to a specific point. Furthermore how are these ids generated? are they fixed? do they change? If I unfave some submissions or they are delete by the uploader/s will the id's of the pages change? What If I unfave a lot and then re-add some, would that change the ids?

As of now the favorites are practically broken. If I wanted to go to page 164 I'd have to load 164 pages before reaching it or simply forget about it. This will cause stress to users, to the server load (since to go to page 4 we'll have to load 4 pages instead of just using /4 in the url's end) and doesn't provide any benefits at all.

Personally I will a make a small program to map my favorites pages so that I'll have a guide when I want to go back to a specific point, but something like that is beyond the skills of any non-programmer in the forum. What will they do?

 

[NoahGryphon]

i hate this change too! i use to always put numbers in the address bar to go to a specific page and now its gone! they need to add some way to go to a specific page number!

 

[RinjiPantera]

I agree. I absolutely hate this change! This is just a crappy instance of trying to fix something that isn’t broken! We need to find a way to get a site admin’s attention to address this issue and put the faves system back to the way it was before.

Anyone else who agrees that this is a problem, should also reply.

 

[Stratelier]

The new URLs could be some sort of timestamp, i.e. the URL basically decodes to "list the next page of favorites newer/older than [when]" which actually is quite useful from a technical perspective... at the obvious cost of being very non-user-friendly.

If they were submission IDs (or internal fave-IDs), that would also be useful from a technical perspective, however it would naturally require referencing an item that exists (otherwise, the URL no longer works) so I don't see that as a case.

 

[Kanahu]

Why have favorites pages changed?
Up until yesterday the pages were sequential, 1 for the latest favorites added and then 2, 3, 4, ... and so on. It was a good system as it allowed users to go back to a spcific pint of their faves and also to find the last page with a simple binary search (i.e. Try a big number, if the page has faves then use a bigger number, if it doesn't have faves then halve the number the go back, repeat the process until you find the last page) with only a few passages.
Now each page seems to have a unique id which is non-sequential and not based on anything user-facing. These are the links for pages 2 and 3 of my favorites: /favorites/[my username]/644957032/next , /favorites/[my username]/643472658/next.

Why was it changed to this crazy system? It makes it impossible to know on which page you're on and impossible to go back to a specific point. Furthermore how are these ids generated? are they fixed? do they change? If I unfave some submissions or they are delete by the uploader/s will the id's of the pages change? What If I unfave a lot and then re-add some, would that change the ids?

As of now the favorites are practically broken. If I wanted to go to page 164 I'd have to load 164 pages before reaching it or simply forget about it. This will cause stress to users, to the server load (since to go to page 4 we'll have to load 4 pages instead of just using /4 in the url's end) and doesn't provide any benefits at all.

Personally I will a make a small program to map my favorites pages so that I'll have a guide when I want to go back to a specific point, but something like that is beyond the skills of any non-programmer in the forum. What will they do?

Agreed 100%.

I don't know much about coding and even less about coding a site to be used by a massive amount of users, all I know as a user is this new system is ugly, uncooperative, confusing and I HATE IT.

If I want to go to a certain page in my own favorites, let me do so by typing the number into the browser and going to it. DO NOT force me into some bullshit system where only the RNG gets to decide where you go.

Also, did you notice that they took the "Disable Titles" button and took it out of the impossible to accidentally click-on upper left corner of the Favorites galleries and put it directly in-between the 'Back' and 'Next' buttons? The one place where your mouse is pretty much always going to? Where you can accidentally click on it and waste your time?

Who is making design decisions now? Why are they still allowed to be designing the format for this site when it's clearly this user-unfriendly? Because this is a small, small part of the site; what happens when the bigger, more general site starts being subjected to the same thing?

This needs to be rolled back ASAP. It's broken now. It wasn't broken before. FIX THIS.

 

[Kanahu]

I agree. I absolutely hate this change! This is just a crappy instance of trying to fix something that isn’t broken! We need to find a way to get a site admin’s attention to address this issue and put the faves system back to the way it was before.

Anyone else who agrees that this is a problem, should also reply.

AGREED.

 

[Kanahu]

Maybe this is a back-end change that turned into a bug? Gonna submit a trouble ticket just in case.

 

[Stratelier]

Still, I can respect the idea of making a permanent URL for a given page of favorites. Consider:

- Although subtle, page offset values are more work on the server database, especially with very large offsets. E.g. if you're viewing page #150 (with 48 items per page), the server must parse data for 720 submissions even though it will be fetching only one page worth of actual data.
- Due to FA's content labels (general/mature/adult), what actually appears on a given page offset will vary from one user to the next. E.g. If half of your Favorites are adult rated, then what you see on page #3 will be page #2 for someone who has adult content filtered out. Meaning that any attempt to share URLs with another user (TinyURL, Twitter, etc.) may or not show them the same page it shows you.

 

[TranshumanOtter]

Still, I can respect the idea of making a permanent URL for a given page of favorites. Consider:

- Although subtle, page offset values are more work on the server database, especially with very large offsets. E.g. if you're viewing page #150 (with 48 items per page), the server must parse data for 720 submissions even though it will be fetching only one page worth of actual data.
- Due to FA's content labels (general/mature/adult), what actually appears on a given page offset will vary from one user to the next. E.g. If half of your Favorites are adult rated, then what you see on page #3 will be page #2 for someone who has adult content filtered out. Meaning that any attempt to share URLs with another user (TinyURL, Twitter, etc.) may or not show them the same page it shows you.

It doesn't have to parse anything. For example you want to go to page 123 and you have 24 subs per page. Now hopefully the fa server uses a list to save users' faves so all you need to do to load page 123 is load items from index 122*24 through 123*24. Generalized with P as the page and N as the number of subs per page you get a simple interval of [(P-1)*N ; P*N]. Now maybe they do not use a list to save users' faves and stuff, but that would just be a dumb database design because it limits your ability to do things and it also makes it harder to select intervals.

 

[TranshumanOtter]

Let's move the discussion over here where @Dragoneer is present forums.furaffinity.net: Changes to favorite pages' URL