Topic: [FAQ] e621 Survival Guide

Posted under General

How do I disable the mobile view?

There are multiple ways. The quickest (which also works without an account) is to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Disable mobile mode support".
The other option is to disable it in your (advanced) account settings, where it's called "Responsive Mode". Simply go to settings, click "Advanced", then disable responsive mode. Be sure to check the other settings as well, there's a few new items there that are pretty self explanatory.

How do I disable the gestures?

Second verse same as the first, in your account settings under advanced.

How do I get the old themes back?

You don't. Those are no longer compatible with the new site and had to be axed. Though we do want to bring them back one by one as soon as possible. However right now they're on the bottom of the list of things that need doing.

The current layout is terrible.

It will be improved and polished as time goes on. Getting the new codebase up and running had a higher priority than making it look pretty, simply because the old codebase was basically held together by wishes and duct tape, and was vulnerable to a few things on top of having atrocious performance.

If you're good at CSS have a look at this thread and feel free to provide feedback or CSS snippets, that'll help us get things polished that much quicker.

Change it back.

No. This is literally impossible to do as this was not a UI update at all, it was a full blown migration to an entirely new codebase. This decision was also not done lightly, but due to the ever growing pains of trying to keep the page functional on an entirely inadequate software for the sheer size of our page.

What is the plan for the near future?

Currently the plan is likely another day or two of critical bug fixing (we've identified a few more things that were working in the beta but magically aren't right now), and afterwards directly tackle the UI. We hope to have things much more consistent on all clients before next week is over.

So, what are the new features?

In short:

  • maximum of 40 search terms at once
  • no more length limit to the blacklist
  • all pages load faster
  • custom backdrop behind all submissions to ensure that transparency isn't letting our background color shine through, making transparent images easier to see.
  • Lore tag to supplement TWYS (not yet fully set up due to me being busy collecting bug reports, but soon!)
  • We're now Open Source

Updated

notmenotyou said:

The current layout is terrible.

It will be improved and polished as time goes on. Getting the new codebase up and running had a higher priority than making it look pretty.

Did you fellas attend the EA:s school for releasing stuff before they are done? Goddammit mods, there is a reason people hate this type of shit.
Take your time and do things properly instead of just taking a paniked scat on all of us.

So, why not make the new codebase, and make the site look good and actually work prior to rushing a push to the new codebase?

sharkiiie said:
So, why not make the new codebase, and make the site look good and actually work prior to rushing a push to the new codebase?

Because the codebase was done for a few months now and nobody wanted to provide additional feedback on the layout during the beta.
Like, we gave ample notice and options for people to chime in. Both threads were in the stickies for ages.

Is there still some way to view "Comments on my posts?" Seems that button is missing, or moved just enough to elude my minuscule brainpower.

notmenotyou said:

How do I disable the mobile view?

There are multiple ways. The quickest (which also works without an account) is to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Disable mobile mode support".
The other option is to disable it in your (advanced) account settings, where it's called "Responsive Mode". Simply go to settings, click "Advanced", then disable responsive mode. Be sure to check the other settings as well, there's a few new items there that are pretty self explanatory.

How do I disable the gestures?

Second verse same as the first, in your account settings under advanced.

How do I get the old themes back?

You don't. Those are no longer compatible with the new site and had to be axed. Though we're probably bringing them back one by one as time goes on. Right now they're on the bottom of the list of things that need doing.

The current layout is terrible.

It will be improved and polished as time goes on. Getting the new codebase up and running had a higher priority than making it look pretty.

ho thank god i thought it was stuck like this... thank you and keep up the super good work < 3

Updated by NotMeNotYou

whimsicalsquirrel said:
Is there still some way to view "Comments on my posts?" Seems that button is missing, or moved just enough to elude my minuscule brainpower.

Account* > My profile* > "Comments On" (should be two rows below Join Date) ^^
(*Or just click your username from here)

Updated

lickario said:
Account* > My profile* > "Comments On" (should be two rows below Join Date) ^^
(*Or just click your username from here)

You know, I was messing around in there and just didn't really notice that.

Ya ill be completly straight with you. Ive used this site for like 7 years or however long its been. Almost never made any comments, but you need to undo this. It went from completely perfectly fine, and a well made easy to find what you want website, to i cant find anything. Or the feature's i used the most like daily top posts just being gone. The reason i used this site of the other's was its ease of finding what you want. Without that. Well. I think you get the picture.

Looking good. Been quite excited for this update to come out and see the new layout, and I think it came out pretty decent. The only things I do not like, is that the news tab on top of the page seems to be hidden by the ads. Had significant trouble clicking my way into this article, but after a few attempts and zooming in I managed to find it.

Will be fun trying out the new site to its fullest, but my first impression so far is that it's only a positive change, as the lack of a mobile version of the site has been a pain for quite some time,at least to me.

Here are a few things I have to report for the future!

• I cannot seem to view the user who uploaded a submission on that submission page, only the moderator who approved it. In order to view who uploaded it I have to go into history.

• When viewing my comments, or comments that have been left on my uploads, the score of the comment and the score of the submission the comment is on no longer show.

• Similarly, if the comment is on a deleted submission, you can't click the 'deleted' image anymore as it no longer appears, if you want to reach the deleted submission and read its comments/history. In order to get there you have to click the 'x days ago' link under the commenter's name.

Just a few things~

work3k7 said:
Ya ill be completly straight with you. Ive used this site for like 7 years or however long its been. Almost never made any comments, but you need to undo this. It went from completely perfectly fine, and a well made easy to find what you want website, to i cant find anything. Or the feature's i used the most like daily top posts just being gone. The reason i used this site of the other's was its ease of finding what you want. Without that. Well. I think you get the picture.

The old link to "Popular" does seem to be missing, maybe that will be added back in. For now I found a link to it on the left side of the "Hot" section, so it looks like popular is still available: https://e621.net/explore/posts/popular

Looks like you can easily see a week or month of popular stuff instead of just daily. That's either a new feature or just much easier to see now. Nice.

now i am not the most tech savvy so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but couldn't you just add a way to go back to what the site was before the update in the settings? so that people who don't like how the site is now can go back to what they preffe while you make improvements to this newer version of the site.

lord-of-frost said:
now i am not the most tech savvy so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but couldn't you just add a way to go back to what the site was before the update in the settings? so that people who don't like how the site is now can go back to what they preffe while you make improvements to this newer version of the site.

If we could have kept the old layout we would have done so. It wasn't possible.

yflash said:
Is the favorite order going to be fixed?

Yes.

pepperyena said:
Here are a few things I have to report for the future!

• I cannot seem to view the user who uploaded a submission on that submission page, only the moderator who approved it. In order to view who uploaded it I have to go into history.

• When viewing my comments, or comments that have been left on my uploads, the score of the comment and the score of the submission the comment is on no longer show.

• Similarly, if the comment is on a deleted submission, you can't click the 'deleted' image anymore as it no longer appears, if you want to reach the deleted submission and read its comments/history. In order to get there you have to click the 'x days ago' link under the commenter's name.

Just a few things~

Yeah, those are some really annoying changes and oversights.

Honestly I think this was a case of "if it ain't broke... Don't fix it", I never once had a problem with the old layout, yeah it kinda sucked on mobile, but I used e1547 and that totally solved that issue (I'll come back to this), on desktop it looked well refined and quite stylish with the themes and tiled texture backgrounds, sorry to be harsh but this just looks like a default forum html template and a HUGE step back.

But the biggest kick in the teeth is the fact that the new APIs have completely ruined apps that relied on the old ones, e1547 as mentioned earlier just loads indefinitely and Imgbrd-Grabber just returns zero results, which sucks for me as I use it almost daily and it's the only fully featured batch downloader that I could find that works well under Linux.

I know you're under no obligation to do so, and I'm just a freeloader who's word carries no weight, but please consider just RETCONNing this and going back to the way e621 was before.

Edit:

notmenotyou said:
If we could have kept the old layout we would have done so. It wasn't possible.

Sorry, this was posted while I was writing my comment, is it alright if I ask what was wrong with the original codebase that mandated a total rewrite? I'm not really up to speed with the news of this site, like most I'm just here for the content.

Updated

Gonna be honest...

Seeing the "Download" button open the static image in a new tab rather than redirecting the original tab brought a tear to my eye. 10/10 feature. Please keep it for all eternity.

But aesthetically, a lot of work is needed. I know you addressed that in the original post, but I'm just saying. It feels really rushed if anything.

I'm not an artist or tagger or even a common user of this site, so apologies for asking: What exactly did this change make better?

To me, some dumb guy perusing the site for images two or three times a week, this looks like a straight downgrade. Browsing feels disorganized and messy - the tag search bar frequently juts into ad windows, and the bottom line of images ends with three images while all other lines end with eight - the profiles page went from legible and easily understandable to an ugly jumble of words, and the tag list to the side when looking at posts is so compact and squished together I can barely read them at all.

I dunno about this new layout... if this is the end result of five months of public beta and it's going to stay, I don't think I wanna stick around for another five months just for the site to be back on par with the original layout that I had no personal problem with.

Some advanced search features seem to be broken. On the old site, I could make a search like "~tag_a ~tag_b ~tag_c" and it would show all the posts with any of those three tags, but this feature now stops working if there are more than two tags.

EDIT: Nevermind, it didn't work with three tags when I first tried it. It was a blank results page with no thumbnails. And then it worked when I tried it with two tags. And so I left this comment. But then I had the same problem with a normal search, and now, after refreshing the page, it's working fine with more than two ~ tags. I'll let you know if I figure out how to reproduce this bug, but I don't think it's related to the ~ feature like I originally thought.

Updated

I know it’s ass right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing what new design/formatting they come up with. I am going to miss the old layout, yes; I thought it was flawless... yet, perhaps there’s something even better in the works.

Fingers crossed! Good luck to the devs sorting things out.

Edit: Holy shit, I forgot to mention- The best feature so far, for me, is the small play button in the thumbnails to show that the post is animated. God damn that’s so important. Maybe that was always a feature for desktop or something, but I’ve only ever used the site on mobile. Whatever happens with the design... please keep that ;_;

slimegod said:
I know it’s ass right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing what new design/formatting they come up with. I am going to miss the old layout, yes; I thought it was flawless... yet, perhaps there’s something even better in the works.

Fingers crossed! Good luck to the devs sorting things out.

Edit: Holy shit, I forgot to mention- The best feature so far, for me, is the small play button in the thumbnails to show that the post is animated. God damn that’s so important. Maybe that was always a feature for desktop or something, but I’ve only ever used the site on mobile. Whatever happens with the design... please keep that ;_;

idk about mobile, but ik for a few months at least the was a little little tag by the thumb nail that showed is something was a gif and a different one for if it was a video. it was kind of cool.

I for one like the update overall.

I think it's kinda funny that you guys used JS to show the adult warning, I'm guessing that's likely temporary.

If I had a piece of feedback for the time being, I think it would be a good idea to make the images in the comments list-view a fixed width, while maintaining aspect ratio, that way the comments stay in alignment and it's easy to scroll down and keep things consistent.

I am also heartbroken that you guys changed the APIs, I wrote a program a couple years back that no longer functions.

If it's for the sake of optimism though, I understand.

notmenotyou said:

Change it back.

No. The beta was open and public for nearly 5 months. We gave ample warning and opportunity to chime in with the feedback.

Tbh, when I checked the beta I assumed the design was a placeholder with how... basic... it looked.

Seconding the people asking why the codebase needed such a large change. I hope it was important enough to justify making your site borderline unusable

No. The beta was open and public for nearly 5 months. We gave ample warning and opportunity to chime in with the feedback.
[/quote]

As if people pay attention to that crap. I have been on this site for 4 years and never looked at news. All I did was look at posts everyday. That's it. This new style does not work on my phone. I am typing this on my laptop by the way. Whoever came up with changing the site needs to be fired immediately. I have seen no fewer than 10 posts in which people agree that the old style is still superior than this garbage. As for the idiots who participated in the Beta... I have no words to describe the level in disappointment for agreeing to this grotesque monstrosity.

notmenotyou said:

How do I disable the mobile view?

There are multiple ways. The quickest (which also works without an account) is to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Disable mobile mode support".
The other option is to disable it in your (advanced) account settings, where it's called "Responsive Mode". Simply go to settings, click "Advanced", then disable responsive mode. Be sure to check the other settings as well, there's a few new items there that are pretty self explanatory.

How do I disable the gestures?

Second verse same as the first, in your account settings under advanced.

How do I get the old themes back?

You don't. Those are no longer compatible with the new site and had to be axed. Though we're probably bringing them back one by one as time goes on. Right now they're on the bottom of the list of things that need doing.

The current layout is terrible.

It will be improved and polished as time goes on. Getting the new codebase up and running had a higher priority than making it look pretty.

Change it back.

No. The beta was open and public for nearly 5 months. We gave ample warning and opportunity to chime in with the feedback.

Feels like you knew about all of these problems prior to release but then blame the userbase for 'not giving enough feedback'? Typical dev behavior in 2020. Blame the userbase for a lackluster product.

Hire a better web designer while you're at it, because whatever you're trying to do.. This ain't it chief.

Honestly I think it looks okay, kinda similar to what furaffinity did. Only thing I really miss is being able to see the “gif” and “webm” tags, I’m on mobile half the time so it gets a bit confusing. Otherwise, great job!

notmenotyou said:

The current layout is terrible.

It will be improved and polished as time goes on. Getting the new codebase up and running had a higher priority than making it look pretty.

Change it back.

No. The beta was open and public for nearly 5 months. We gave ample warning and opportunity to chime in with the feedback.

You should still do something like give people the option to switch to and from the current and old layouts. I wasn't even aware that a change would be made in the first place, so I couldn't do anything about it, and I'm sure many others are in the same boat.

Yeah, wherever the beta was, nobody saw it.

Also, the lack of "welcome page" where you get to see cute mascots and a search bar and nothing else is sad :(

I don't think there's much at all wrong with the layout, formatting-wise. Change is easy to hate but I think I can get used to this stuff easy. People saying it 'hurts their eyes' are grossly exaggerating. This happens with literally every update for every online service with regards to formatting, even when certain things are objectively better.

There are a few features I miss. Using on desktop, the searchbar no longer auto-completes specific searches, which makes the site a little more cumbersome to comb over for new stuff. I saw that the landing page will be back eventually, so that's nice. I don't mind where the view for pools and parent/child posts are, but it seems a bit less intuitive for quickly going between the two or scanning through parent/child chains.

Some things seem unrefined right now. Elements on the left bar on posts that were once contained within the bar, or popped out with a nice little background, now just kind of hover. Some of it feels a bit cramped, though this may be because of a merge between mobile and desktop.

I don't at all mind the new tag searching function, as it makes trying to find things (like obscure, specific copyright tag names) easier. That's really nice. A little polish with the space given to certain elements would help, but it really isn't that big a deal.

I miss the welcome page already, and the prev and next buttons on pools are SUPER WIDE, that by far is my biggest problem rn.

You might have been better off using the old site as a base for improvements. This feels much too clunky and unfinished.

notmenotyou said:
If we could have kept the old layout we would have done so. It wasn't possible.

What is this supposed to mean? "We had to change to this objectively worse version because..."

I've been here for well over 5 months and never saw anything about a beta. Did you all intentionally not place it in the news feed at the top so that people wouldn't know about it?

The absolute state of e6 in 2020, folks.

I can't say I'm fond of the new system for the search bar. It used to be I could type in one letter and then select from previous searches, but now I have to type everything out every time? Wtf?

Sorry, this is just bad. Also I must agree that i was not aware of a beta but I would have likely been uninterested as the site was fine as it was.

Made an account literally just to say this
I find it funny that something as tame as watersports is apart of the new default blacklist, but hard stuff like vore and crush aren't, lmao

Also why did the site change? I didn't keep up with the news at all, was the old codebase too shit to work with anymore?

Where can I find what pools an image is in? As the site is right now, I have to manually sift through the pools, sorting by author and the like until I find one that has a specific image in it. I used to be able to find out what pools an image is in by looking at the image's page.

When looking at images on a pool, I'd like to have prev and next buttons at the bottom of the image too please...

There are some really important things being said in here about ways that the site has flaws but a lot of vague criticism that I don't think are gonna help at all

This layout honestly just reminds me of FA's new layout, which was an odd mess of an attempt at a "modern" design & look. I changed back to the old one almost immediately on FurAffinity, but I guess doing the same here won't be an option.

The profile page, for one, looks like almost all of the elements on the page are way too big/long to properly fit on the screen (at least for my small screen, though it was fine on the old layout) (https://i.imgur.com/LAy4khq.png)
Not really sure what the point of changing the ANIM/WEBM tag on thumbnails was for, though. I primarily use this site from my phone, so knowing when I'm likely going to run into a 1920px gif that'll crash my browser or slow it down vs a webm I can choose to load after looking at the filesize/resolution was pretty nice.
On the same note with thumbnails, I don't remember there being such a large gap between the last image in a row & the end of the page (to the right), yet all the text/tags/etc on the left seem to be getting scrunched up; Is it just me? (https://i.imgur.com/bZkNw0w.png)
Only other thing I notice immediately is, on submission pages, why is the +Fav button... a button? It makes the Download & Change Size Mode text look so out of place like this.

Hopefully it either improves or I get over it soon, since I might just go back to rule34 for the time being...

yeoldenut said:
You might have been better off using the old site as a base for improvements. This feels much too clunky and unfinished.

The old site has been the base for improvements and additions for years. That has come at the cost of that code being maintainable, and it gets to a point where changing this piece of code affects some other seemingly random piece of functionality. Try to keep adding or improving something, and some other things break for apparently no reason.

flavor said:
What is this supposed to mean? "We had to change to this objectively worse version because..."

Because the old site's backend had to be rewritten, and that rewrite meant the old UI couldn't be kept. However, this roll-out isn't the end of the changes, it was just as much as they could do with the feedback they had gotten. But now that it's officially out of beta, the additional public exposure will generate more feedback to keep improving the layout.

flavor said:
I've been here for well over 5 months and never saw anything about a beta. Did you all intentionally not place it in the news feed at the top so that people wouldn't know about it?

It was in the news feed, I saw it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention what the default blacklist actually is. Here are all the tags

gore
scat
watersports
young -rating:s
loli
shota

I mean I kinda get the gore and pedo stuff but watersports being there is just funny by contrast. The furry community has far weirder and much more unnerving stuff in it.

azarath~azzy said:
The purple button right below the news bar and right above the image? that's how it is on desktop

In my defense, it wasn't there when I was on here earlier.

Am I just blind or is there no option anywhere to collapse your blacklisted tags by default in the /post/ section? Feels like a massive regression, imo.

I'm going to really miss the front page with custom characters and stuff. It may have been a small thing, but it was like, the personality of this site.

karimi said:
I'm going to really miss the front page with custom characters and stuff. It may have been a small thing, but it was like, the personality of this site.

Wasn't it originally just esix at the front page? I've been using the site for probably 6 or 7 years and I remember all the other characters came later

Are we just getting rid of the popular page? Hot seems fine but we wont be able to see what was popular on what day anymore.

I'm always consistently surprised by all these website design downgrades going out of their way to fix what isn't broken. I'm sure there's a reason for it, but hot damn is it annoying to search for stuff now.

So the only way for me to view something that has been arbitrarily blacklisted whether I want it to be or not is to log in and stay logged in? Why is there even a default blacklist to begin with?

saen-wyrwulf said:
So the only way for me to view something that has been arbitrarily blacklisted whether I want it to be or not is to log in and stay logged in? Why is there even a default blacklist to begin with?

I assume it's for new users to the site or people casually browsing. That said, it makes no sense why other things aren't also blacklisted.

I never even knew there was a public beta for this new site. I would say it's a nice design overall compared to previously but it's not nice to lie.

As Omniscient said, try not to blame the userbase when at the end of the day, we are the ones using the site.

Adding a note for people who use RSS:

1. RSS atom url has changed from /post/atom?tags=x+y+z to posts.atom?tags=x+y+z . There is an automatic HTTP 200 redirect (but I'm not sure whether this will do the right thing for all RSS readers)

2. The title and description fields have been unswapped (I say unswapped because in the previous format, the title held the description [tags])

Wow really, watersports is auto-blacklisted but vore and 100 other things isn't?

Also what the hell is the point of obfuscating the number of tags on the sidebar? There's literally no reason to do it by default.

The old site was perfectly fine; don't fix what's not broken.

I understand why the change was needed, you can only patch a boat so much until it doesn't float well anymore.
Here's my feedback:
Search is working really well, i like that there are tag suggestions now, makes it easier to use the site for new users.
Aesthetics need some work. maybe a stylized e621 icon up there instead of the simple text it is right now. getting the front page working again would be good as well. lots of room to make things prettier.
To be honest i feel like all the bad reactions are overreactions, the site still works mostly the same way as it did before. And that is great! I just hope it gets polished

I just want to say that I was never aware there was a beta going on. If there had been a mention of it on the main page, in big red letters, then more people would have known.
Modern graphic design is awful too but this isn't the place to rant about that.

notmenotyou said:
Because the codebase was done for a few months now and nobody wanted to provide additional feedback on the layout during the beta.
Like, we gave ample notice and options for people to chime in. Both threads were in the stickies for ages.

I somehow missed it, or saw option to test. :/

I've been on e6 for quite a while now, and I've spent a fair bit of time lurking on the forum, but this is the first time ive ever felt the need to post.

I'm not going to complain too much about the change, because I know I'll get used to it in time, but I'll echo others in saying that I miss the page with the search bar and mascots. I'm sure the devs just saw it as an unnecessary step that most people hurried past, but I vastly prefer it to being greeted with a bunch of random uploads I didn't search for.

Also, the page numbers between the 'previous' and 'next' buttons are gone (at least in the favorites section), and I'd like them back if it's possible. I have a shameful amount of favorites, and I used those page numbers frequently.

I knew there was a beta, but I guess I missed the part about "we need your feedback to improve it because it's gonna replace the main site soon".

"But the plans were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That’s the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"

(Probably not fair if it was a pinned forum post but with the amount of people saying they weren't aware at all of a beta... just brought this to mind!)

I'll be honest here. The new design is absolutely terrible and there's nothing to excuse it. It looks like it was made over night by somebody fresh out of design school. I've been using this site for more than 10 years now and not once have I've seen any notifications about a new design beta, so like with the majority of the user base, it was impossible to provide feedback since there was no ample warning that was mentioned. If you've provided an actual way to view the new design and provide feedback much like FA's design and reddit's old.reddit link, this could've easily been avoided. It should be known that sudden drastic UI changes to look neat and modern never work, especially when they're pushed out onto the public in their pre-alpha phase.

As for what's broken, the search bar doesn't save search history anymore which makes it so each time you come to the site, you need to type out your filters each and every time where as before, your browser would allow it to be saved into cache. This makes it extremely tedious to search for your specific filters each time you visit the site.

As for a suggestion, the readdition of the home page would be largely welcomed. Coming to the site only to be immediately met with the newest images is rather distasteful in my eyes.

Will the Popular Section(Day, Week, Month) return?
Or is the new Hot section an replacement?
And if so, is the hot section dayly, weekly or monthly?

The popular section? Currently it seems to only be linked in the sitemap .

It doesn't need to return, it's still here. AFAICS it has all of the old functionality too, though I guess the scoring system it runs on is different.