#1 by yorhel

2020-01-01 at 07:29 < report >It's a new year and high time for some new VNDB features!



I just pushed out the new lists feature that I've been working on for the past 2 months* or so. The new lists replace the old wishlist, VN list and vote list. It comes with a few major improvements:



- You can create custom labels and freely assign those to VNs.

- You can set a start and finish date.

- You can use labels to make parts of your list private while other parts remain public.



That's not to say this update is an improvement in /every/ aspect. I absolutely suck (Christmas) balls at designing user interfaces, so while I did my best to make sure these new lists implement most of the functionality of the old lists, the UI may be a little awkward to use in some places. I expect I'll be making various adjustments to the UI over the upcoming months based on feedback.



The wishlist priorities (high/medium/low) have been removed in favor of custom labels. Users who used the old wishlist priorities will see three additional "Wishlist-*" labels in addition to the built-in ones. You can freely rename or remove these as you see fit. The "don't allow others to see my visual novel list, vote list and wishlist" profile option has been removed in favor of a label-specific privacy setting.



(* But I've also been working on various other things in the mean time, including the v2rw rewrite and a bunch of minor improvements, so it's not like this reflects 2 months of work.)





API & Dumps changes:



The new lists constitute a major change in the database schema, so this affects the API and database dumps.



Changes to the near-complete database dump:

- Removed tables: vnlists, wlists and votes.

- New tables: ulist_labels, ulist_vns, ulist_vns_labels

- Votes of users on the ignore list are now included in the dumps. A new 'ign_votes' column has been added to the users table so you can still ignore these in your statistics (if that's what you want).



These changes also affect query.vndb.org. Sorry for breaking some of your SQL queries. :(



Changes to the API:

- New commands: "get ulist-labels", "get ulist" and "set ulist" (adding/editing custom labels is currently not yet implemented, let me know if you need this).

- The old "(get|set) (votelist|vnlist|wishlist)" commands still work, but now operate on the new database schema. This comes with a few bugs and limitations:

- The "unknown" status in "get vnlist" is equivalent to not having any labels assigned in the new lists. VNs with no labels are private, so these VNs are not returned anymore unless you are logged in.

- Removing a VN using "set votelist" or "set wishlist" will make the VN appear in "get vnlist" as status unknown.

- Removing a VN using "set vnlist" will also remove the VN from the votelist and wishlist.

- Using "set wishlist" to set a priority other than medium or blacklist will only work if the user has the appropriate "Wishlist-Low/Medium/High" labels (with exactly that name).





And before I forget: Happy New Year!Last modified on 2020-01-01 at 08:39

#2 by ninigi

2020-01-01 at 07:46 < report >Happy New Year all! :)

And thank you Yorhel for the New Year gift ;)



Edit: NvmLast modified on 2020-01-01 at 07:55

#3 by NowItsAngeTime⭐

2020-01-01 at 08:15 < report >Happy new year!



Thanks for the updates. I'll fiddle with these sometime after I finish Bokuten.

#4 by diabloryuzaki

2020-01-01 at 08:47 < report >can i ask the different wishlist and wishlist-high that appear under label column at the same time? i think it is redundant because if it is a wishlist then it will not appear as "wishlist, wishlist-high" but "wishlist-high" only



and i think label have too much content that can make "Stalled, Wishlist, Wishlist-High" appear under same column. it is more better when we have 2 column for label where first column as "progress label" contain playing, finished, stalled, dropped and second column as "list label" contain wishlist-high/medium/low, blacklist



btw happy new year for vndb members

#5 by zabon

2020-01-01 at 10:36 < report >Just popping in to say I love the change to lists. With a little bit of tweaking it'll be perfect.



Edit:

If I were to suggest anything to improve it, it would be to add a way to sort by label type in your searches so that you can more easily find things you had already labeled outside of your wishlist.Last modified on 2020-01-01 at 10:39

#6 by trickay

2020-01-01 at 11:01 < report >Happy New Year! :D

#7 by logosjo

2020-01-01 at 11:35 < report >Happy New Year everyone!

#9 by marianokun

2020-01-01 at 15:13 < report >Happy New Year!!! :D

#10 by adamstan

2020-01-01 at 16:34 < report >I just wanted to file similar complaint to the one already posted in the other thread:

Now I can't just click on "playing" to view that list - now I have to uncklick all the "finished", "dropped", "stalled" etc???

It's really inconvenient. Maybe current lists are better from the database POV, but sadly, UI sucks :(



The good thing, which I really appreciate, is that there's a number next to the each label/tag, showing how many VNs bearing this label are in the list. Thanks to that I realized how huuge my backlog already become.Last modified on 2020-01-01 at 16:36

#11 by nvortex

2020-01-01 at 16:37 < report >There appears to be a bug when you are adding the year manually for the start/finish dates, it marks "error" when you start writing it, it doesn't happen when you are writing the day and month though

#12 by kells

2020-01-01 at 17:01 < report >Happy New Year!

#13 by fuukanou

2020-01-01 at 17:13 < report >Happy new year.

I appreciate the update and functionality of the new lists, but honestly I prefer looking at the old lists. While you can pretty much turn them back by using select columns, they revert to defaults the minute you click off the page. Please could you put in a "set as default" option in the select columns section as well? Also could we have a toggle for the eyes in that select column as well because it's kinda offputting.

#14 by bakauchuujin

2020-01-01 at 17:15 < report >Is there any way to save the selected columns? For instance I want rating on but don't care about added date, do I have to change this every time or can I set which colums to show by defult?

#15 by yorhel

2020-01-01 at 17:19 < report > Also could we have a toggle for the eyes in that select column as well because it's kinda offputting. Custom CSS:

span[id^=ulist_public] { display: none }

Saving column view: Will look into that.

#16 by ada

2020-01-01 at 20:22 < report >Is there any way to set labels for multiple entries at once or do you have to set them for each individually?



Edit: On second thought, I'm pretty certain that I was able to mass select VN before and change their status.Last modified on 2020-01-01 at 22:39

#17 by fuukanou

2020-01-01 at 20:28 < report >IDK if this is possible due to the unified list/wishlist system, but is there a way to display the entries in the order of Wishlist-Low, Wishlist-Medium and then Wishlist-High (or other way around) like it used to be? ATM we can only do alphabetical which makes it High-Low-Medium (or other way around) which is kinda unhelpful.

#18 by panpantrial

2020-01-01 at 21:43 < report >@yorhel

What is the new column for ulist_vns, ulist_labels, ulist_vns_labels, when Querying? Before it was wstat and status for wishlist and vnlist.

#19 by marantana⭐

2020-01-01 at 21:50 < report >Thanks for all your hard work and Happy New Year from Vienna!

#20 by delusionparadox

2020-01-02 at 00:24 < report >There are severe issues with the new UI, but I will try to approach this design while considering the existence of the new lists definitive and the possibility of personalization nonexistent.



First off, by placing information such as votes on the far right, you're causing a tremendous, unnecessary gap that only makes things harder to see given they're often small and few numbers, plus even increasing the font size wouldn't erase the issue. I'll address the case of the votes first and then the gap as a whole. I understand this gap becomes smaller upon choosing to view the vote dates, and you want to have it right next to the votes; but given its optional nature, that it resets when exiting the list, and how little horizontal space a single date takes, I would suggest you move both votes and vote dates to the far left before anything else, much like it was before. This wouldn't interfere with the priority given to the titles, while reducing large gaps and still prioritizing one of the most prominent features of this website (votes).



Back to the topic of the gap as a whole, there still remains an immense space between the titles and... everything else. It makes information *much* harder to parse, incredibly so. This one is honestly harder to address, but I have an idea. You could reduce the horizontal size of the title box, and allow it to expand vertically for the longest titles (so a "second line"). I don't know if this is already implemented because I don't have works with titles that large listed, but if so that would make it even easier. You wouldn't have a couple of options aligned to the right as I'm guessing you do right now, such as Start Date and Finish Date; but it would be a colossal improvement for the user's experience that would make it much more pleasant and easier to parse.



Second, and this has been mentioned already, having to manually uncheck every single option to see just one list then apply those changes takes much longer than necessary (especially given that, imo, most people would tend to check only one, two, or all lists at once). I suggest that when you visit your list, all non-wishlishted titles appear (much like now) but you have to manually check the lists you do want to see. That would make it quicker for most use cases, and more intuitive as well (as opposed to now, where there are some listed and some unlisted, rather than all being one or the other). And obviously keep the wishlist button to facilitate access to that category.



Thirdly, the Labels and Vote options on visual novel pages not having borders makes them much less intuitive to click on. The borders they had before were fine, you can just add those back. The "Remove from list" option suffers from the same, while also the placement not feeling natural. I suggest you either align it to the left alongside Labels and Vote, or make it part of a dropdown menu as before. And some sort of border would be useful too.



That aside, I do welcome these changes for their functionality, and I thank you for your effort.Last modified on 2020-01-02 at 01:28

#21 by greyedout

2020-01-02 at 02:58 < report >The new lists are looking good! :)



I would like to second #16's desire for a multiple selection edit, if it's possible. With the old list, it was often quicker to add a batch of titles to my VN list at once, and then go back and set the comments/status for them all with one multi-select action. Re-adding it would also complement the new custom labels feature nicely, as ticking off multiple checkboxes and applying the label once would be a lot faster than setting them individually - especially if you want to use general labels (genres, characteristics, etc.) which may apply to 10+ titles per page.

#22 by yorhel

2020-01-02 at 08:44 < report >*sigh* I make people angry with every update that I do, but looks like I screwed this up even worse than usual.



is there a way to display the entries in the order of Wishlist-Low, Wishlist-Medium and then Wishlist-High (or other way around) like it used to be? Not the most elegant solution, but yes you can rename the labels to influence sort behavior.



What is the new column for ulist_vns, ulist_labels, ulist_vns_labels, when Querying? See schema.sql (and tableattrs.sql for the foreign key relations). Columns marked as '[pub]' can be publically queried.



@delusionparadox: Thanks for that feedback.



[..] tremendous, unnecessary gap [..] Uh, well, yeah, most VNDB tables look terrible when your browser is too wide. I'll move all smaller fixed-width columns to the left and see if that helps.



I suggest that when you visit your list, all non-wishlishted titles appear (much like now) but you have to manually check the lists you do want to see. And make the visible list inconsistent with what labels appear to be selected? Not sure I find that intuitive.

Alternative suggestion: Would it work if clicking a label filter will by default unselect all other labels? Need to think of a separate way to allow multi-select then, but that way the UI would optimize for the (I think?) common case of searching for just one label.

#23 by adamstan

2020-01-02 at 09:17 < report > Alternative suggestion: Would it work if clicking a label filter will by default unselect all other labels? Need to think of a separate way to allow multi-select then, but that way the UI would optimize for the (I think?) common case of searching for just one label.

Sounds good to me.

#24 by mario3573

2020-01-02 at 10:07 < report >I'm not sure if this is just me but I feel like the colors should be inverted. By this I mean at the top of My List, all the X Finished, X Playing, etc. should be white instead of blue, and when it is selected it changes to a blue ✓Finished.



So basically it would be white when unselected then blue when selected.