Phoenix-hot takes

Hey all, hope you’re well. I’ve been working on some stuff on and off since the last time I posted but I’ll have more on that in the coming weeks. For now, I wanted to get back to answering the questions that some of you posed. I thought long and hard about which were the most interesting but, in a typical bout of THP indecision™, I couldn’t make up my mind. So, instead, I’ve opted to answer nearly all of them in short form.

Without further ado, in order of submission:

Speculation on why imageboards are intimidating to the uninitiated, either from a conceptual or UX perspective.

I don’t think there’s much to this one. The vast majority of users on the current internet use only a handful of sites, largely social media. They are accustomed to the flow (and often mobile-first design) which is often very different to an imageboard. Not having a user account or replying in the way they’re used to throws a lot of them off.

General opinions on the imageboard model — maybe with a bit of comparison to the alternatives.

It’s something of an aberration historically, I think. Never quite as widespread (in share of communities/whole internet) as more traditional forums or text-first boards, they were a niche that very much depended on that early 00s boom of wider internet penetration and faster speeds but before conglomerated sites and, uh, more responsive models came around. They’re fine for casual discussion but the lack of permanence of their content and general focus on anonymity is a double-edged sword: I think it’s more difficult to form an attachment to a community or topic. Something like a “tradtitional” phpBB-like forum definitely tends to foster a sense of community more but those have generally fallen out of favor as the internet continues to centralize on larger sites. Specialist sites still continue and are active, however.

The ideal community; i.e., your most ideal vision for THP in as explicit detail as possible.

Mm, difficult to describe even if I dedicated a whole post to this question. I would say that it would be a space where people felt at ease to experiment with writing and various different takes and angles for characters while having engagement from a slice of the community in a consistent matter. Not only would a story get feedback and suggestions in a helpful manner but things like speculation about plot, general touhou canon and whatever would happen organically here and there. Discussion and recommendations would not be like pulling teeth. Maybe it’s a little naive but I’d like it to be a nice and helpful place where one could find whatever it is they liked and not have to go to other touhou/fanfiction communities.

It might also be nice to have a little more persistence and the ability for users to message one another directly, if they so desired.

The history and inner workings of the mystery box.

There’s not much to this one. For the longest time I’ve thought that the segregation of stories among boards made it more difficult for people to appreciate activity and where it was. The difficult part was leveling-up my skills and making sense of the old code base enough to do something about that. The current implementation is not something I would do now, as it’s fairly crude, but it works well enough and I don’t see any reason to change it until there’s a general redesign or something.

I think I’ve discussed some of this in previous posts (do point out if I haven’t) but basically when a post is marked as an update it checks against the tripcode submitted and the first post of the thread. If it matches or is a new thread (with a subject), it gets marked as an update and several things happen and information is added to several parts of the backend (not only in posts tables but for storylist and other purposes). Then, on the front page, it simply pulls entries sorted by timestamp in order.

Your current thoughts on the division of the boards and speculative possibilities on their future handling.

It’s terrible and never really made sense in a series with an ever-increasing cast. I was at first on the fence back in the day about adding more boards or even having “geographical” divisions, eventually came out as slightly against it, but I was in a minority position. Moving away from locations and consolidating things is definitely something I want to do but how information is presented has to change for that to happen. That is a major issue that requires a major investment of time and effort.

A history of hidden features/easter eggs on the site.

Most of these things are just done by me for my own amusement. There’s been quite a few such as the snow, this still implemented thing, silly 2hu hats for all images, the activity generator that mocked the uselessness of the IRC community, and a few others, some of which I don’t think have been discovered but I’ve hinted at in posts here and there.

What being admin of a site means in practical terms; e.g., investment, daily cleanup, etc.

Most of the time it means cleaning up spam. The rest isn’t something you really have to check in very often as, if things are running well, there’s no real need for intervention. Being on standby and having contingency plans for when things go wrong is key, however! An unexpected problem can crop up and require scrambling until a fix is implemented.

Things like backups are done via scripts at least once a day and cleaning up old data is something I do only twice or so a year. Keeping an eye out for security patches is important and so updating and rebooting the server from time to time is part of the job. It’s also important to monitor, from time to time, who is trying to access the machine (usually bots or nascent DDOS attempts) and fiddle with the firewall or scripts to nip intrusions in the bud.

Oh and I guess sorting out certificates does take some effort every couple of months. Other than that, an average day is chill.

Thoughts on the adoption of newer image/video formats like WebM and WebP.

Most are fine, though there is some debate on which is superior (like flif or avif or webp) for normal usage vs long term and specific use cases. For me all that really matters is that it’s patent unencumbered and anyone can implement them without paying royalties. It’ll be a while before any of these gain traction, if they ever do, but I do occasionally play around with them and see if I can integrate them on THP.

The daily struggle of browser compatibility with the site.

Update your browsers, seriously! Not only is it better for your security but “new” features (standardized and decided years ago but trickling down gradually into browsers) get added all the time that make for better user experiences. Thankfully most browsers now support things I’ve used on the site like grid and more advanced CSS @media queries because, oh boy, they make life easier and provide better control on how information is displayed on a variety of screen sizes. Still, there’s always going to be someone stuck on IE8 or something and I can’t be bothered to support them.

Stick with either Firefox or a Chromium derivative (Chromium without google stuff is probably best, I could also fill a whole post on the many sins of Chrome, Brave, New Opera, etc). Privacy and performance are important.

JQuery, its usage, and why external dependencies are icky.

Jquery has fallen a little out of fashion (other frameworks are more popular) but it provided a key compatibility layer that made sure that scripts written in it would work uniformly across all browsers. Less of an issue now that IE is dead but it does make a lot of coding easier, especially with selection of elements in a uniform fashion.

As for why external stuff is a little icky:

A) Bloat. The dependency can be quite large and filled with libraries that you aren’t using for your current environment. Technically can be removed but in practice it’s a huge hassle because the JS ecosystem is a little bonkers.

B) Just writing your stuff to depend on can make it more difficult down the line. A project may stall or go in a direction you don’t like and “forking it” and maintaining a branch it can be a huge ask, especially if security concerns do crop up. THP used to depend on several defunct libraries that I got rid of years ago and, boy, it was a huge hassle to rewrite everything that depending on it.

Thoughts on federation and federated web services like Mastodon and Matrix.

Awesome but they likely need a huge investment of capital and talent to make it easier to compete with more established platforms. If Discord goes to hell, I’d like to host our own THP Matrix homeserver but… the tools aren’t quite there and some of the features are still lacking. Still, good signs ahead: Matrix is dealing with spaces/groups currently and making progress.

Usenet shitposting.

What little remains is really fantastic. Wizened nerds from another era talking about niche interests including DIY computers, historical technology, obscure series and whatever else.

Why THP wouldn't work as a BBS (besides activity-related reasons).

If imageboards are too esoteric for people, a BBS would be dead on arrival. If you had to do something so… out there, you could just provide an API for someone to use telnet or something to access and post info in regular threads.

The difficulties of catering to smelly dumb mobile scum.

Too many devices, too many resolutions. Thankfully tools and specifications I previously mentioned and implemented in modern browsers make things easier. A lot of the site overhauls have been subtle, substituting old conventions for newer ways that can be manipulated in more precise fashion. But still, it’s often hard to tell how things will render. It’ll continue to be a struggle until a larger UI/UX overhaul and break with some of the paradigm.

How the storylist works on the backend.

I believe I’ve talked about this to an extent already. In case there’s something obvious missing there, tell me what you wish to know specifically.

The possibility of text editing support?

I replied to this comment saying that it was already implemented but I never know if people actually read what I write. So, just in case, I’ll point to this previous entry.

How the process of flypapering and catering to newbies is going.

Making the storylist to look at, simplifying the post box (adding a reply button on bottom), having story thread links appear at the bottom of the page,and a bunch of other things have been the main focus. The aim is to make the site easier to use and lower barriers to participation.

I really don’t have the faintest idea where the site could be advertised effectively. It would likely require an effort that’s not just limited to me.

Alright, I believe that’s it and sorry that it took me so long to stop procrastinating and put my thoughts down properly. Let me know if there's anything that remained unanswered or that you would like to learn more about. I may do more detailed posts on some of these issues in the future if warranted.

I hope to have more to share about the ongoing work on THP sometime soon. Until next time, take it easy!