[GM] #3: Content Galleries

For about ten years now I have had a dream. That dream has been to have an easily accessed and viewable means of going through our public member submissions much like one would on other popular fanfiction or art sites. However, it was never "the most important thing" going on at any one time so I never pressed the issue.

Well, I finally decided to just up and do it!

With the philosophy of "it doesn't have to be perfect the first time", I've gone ahead and created (and thankfully had it reviewed and approved by James) a new "Content Galleries" interface on the site that follows the aesthetic standard for our UI and does just about all the things we need it to do at first blush. That meant a robust filter option and what was, to me, the most important feature: shareability.

So, knowing this is not the final form (I have a future wish list to have the Graphics Gallery have a thumbnail view showing the images and maybe even the ability to select and filter by tags/labels), let's take a walk through this new site feature.

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Content Galleries

(All images are sourced from Atra's login and UI preferences)

Where do I find them? Under Activities of course!

This will then take you to the landing page:

And from here we have...THE THING FOR FICTION:

You will see in this screenshot the basics. Those are: when it was submitted, by whom, for what competition if that suits your fancy, the submission itself, upvotes and sharing. I have already seen some discussion on upvoting. This is always going to be a double edged sword and there's a reason downvotes don't exist anymore in a lot of spaces. Nor should they. But upvotes can have positive impacts too. Primarily, as someone not part of the site, it gives you an at a glance view of "oh this is popular" and then you are more inclined to click into it. It's also something that a lot of online users expect from these kinds of galleries. If it truly causes quantifiable negative impact, we can definitely remove it later, but for this initial implementation we are going with a closer to expected experience design.

Now, one thing we have to account for is that typically you'll find a link to the File Submission in these galleries. But for Fiction, sometimes members just post that into the Submission Box. So how do we display these? By truncating the text and adding a shiny button. Behold:

Click the file icon and you will get a pop-up modal window with the submission text for easy reading. That's convenient!

There is already a robust filtering implementation in place letting you search by PIN, Name, Unit, Competition, date ranges, and if you've upvoted it or not (which really lets you use upvotes as a sort of favourites/bookmarks method):

It's also really easy to get a pre-filtered link to a gallery item if you want to share it around! Just click the three-dots (which is basically the universal share icon at this point) and you get the link. This is similar to the Discord auth code copy functionality:

Now! There was one change that may impact people. If you are using the "Quick Links" box on your main landing page, you will have had Possession Inventory removed as a default icon and replaced with Content Gallery. This can be added back very easily. Just hit the settings cog (in below image) and then remove and add whatever you need:

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I'm excited over this, and not just because it's my first time implementing a feature add to the site itself (I TOUCHED THE BOAT!). This is something I've dreamed of the site having for almost as long as I've been a member. And it's finally here. It's not done. Not complete. But it's here, even if I had to drag it kicking and screaming into existence. That's something to be happy about. I can't wait to see more content added and shared around.

Thank you all.