Takes five times as long to find the ones I'm actually interested in following...
How about putting it back the way it was, and have the IT guys do something that constitutes an actual improvement?

https://e621.net/pools or click Listing in the menu. The main link just points at a different page than it used to.

kiranoot said:
https://e621.net/pools or click Listing in the menu. The main link just points at a different page than it used to.

Any reason for that?

In my opinion, it's easier to find what I'm looking for in the list version. The tiled version embeds the titles amongst other information that makes them harder to scan. The reader's eyes have to cover more ground and change direction more often to find the same information.

I wish this change had not been made, or if there's a compelling reason it must, then a personal preference toggle in settings would be nice to have.

I was actually the one who was constantly bothering about changing the pools page back to thumbnail gallery view.
Yes, it was originally thumbnail gallery. There was discussion about this on the beta site forum. I don't remember who it was, but someone asked if it could be changed back into list view like on the old website, reasoning being that that's how it has always been.

My point with gallery view is that it would be high time that pools page would be actually useful for regular users (aka users who will not bother coming to forums but still openly complain of these things on discord servers) and not just site contributors and powerusers. There are many other websites which are dedicated for reading pirated comics and doujins which are doing so much better job and hence why people utilize them a lot, even users from this site, I just won't directly name these sites because pirated content and linking to pirated content rules.

If I were regular user who simply browse content here and wanted to take a look at comics for example, if I previously clicked on pools page, it would simply be huge list of things. I have absolutely zero context of anything in here unless I open up everything in new tabs and then close them when I see it's content I dislike. Now as there's thumbnails, I can see stuff like something is a comic featuring sonic, that is a gay pokemon comic which seems to be extremely liked, that is a cover for comic I was following, that seems to be BDSM cobold, etc. etc. just generally more information available when simply browsing.

Of course it's not perfect (series/collection is awful naming scheme and would need at least note next to field what they mean, pool landing page is for last updated series but it's not noted anywhere on the page, the thumbnail information is for first post in pool, etc.), but there has been feature requests in past for stuff like pool tags (forum #252802) and comics tab (forum #259310) and as we now are on software which is open source and will be modified more, at least I feel like this would be the first step towards features that users actually want from the site.

I mean, if someone disagrees or if I'm wrong, do tell.

mairo said:
I mean, if someone disagrees or if I'm wrong, do tell.

I disagree. I've been on the site for eleven years and never saw it in tile view. I'm just one person, though.

ccoyote said:
I disagree. I've been on the site for eleven years and never saw it in tile view. I'm just one person, though.

Which goes back to my point of old powerusers of the site just hating the change, rather than it being actually worse.
"That's how it was 11 years ago, so that's how it should be now"

My comment on how it was tile view was at the start of beta of the current site.

mairo said:
Which goes back to my point of old powerusers of the site just hating the change, rather than it being actually worse.
"That's how it was 11 years ago, so that's how it should be now"

My comment on how it was tile view was at the start of beta of the current site.

That's not what I'm saying at all. I interpreted you as saying it used to be like that; I'm saying I don't remember it.

Look, if minds are made up, I don't feel like my objections are likely to change them. However, as a professional designer, I think it's a choice that makes the site harder to use.

It would still be nice if there were a preference toggle in settings.

I actually like seeing the thumbnail for the first post in the pool instead of just having the name to go by. When browsing for something new to look through, it lets me know at a glance whether it's something I like or not.

But it's also very true that having the pools displayed in a "card" format makes it harder to quickly scan the page. In my opinion, a hybrid solution would be best, with pools shown as a list, but with thumbnails on the side. In fact, I might try implementing something like that in re621. Shouldn't be too difficult.

Also, I completely missed out on the fact that the pools page defaulted to the gallery view now, since the customizable header tabs module in my userscript had the pools tab set to the list view since the very beginning. Whoops.

I was also thinking about some sort of hybrid of the two. One of the major things it's trying to accomplish is to show people visual previews instead of forcing them to click through on things. There are several different types of usage scenarios to consider and I'm trying to consider them. Since the old page is still there, and accessible I'm currently treating this like an A/B test to collect feedback since people are seeing the page now instead of it being unknown and without feedback.

Cleaning up the titles and removing irrelevant information might also make the page more approachable, as it cuts down on some of the visual clutter that is visible.

On the design side, tables are much harder to make work on smaller screens, they don't scale very well, so there is more purpose to the gallery view than just being a visual preview.

I don't "hate" it, since I like having the visual reference rather than having to recognize by name every comic I've seen or not and want to follow or avoid.

But having some ability to click to the last page of the pool like what was introduced before the tile view went into effect would be nice. Also a way to either toggle to see the last page instead of the first, or show a last page alongside the first, so it's easy to see when I'm past the new (to me) content.

kaworu said:
I don't "hate" it, since I like having the visual reference rather than having to recognize by name every comic I've seen or not and want to follow or avoid.

But having some ability to click to the last page of the pool like what was introduced before the tile view went into effect would be nice. Also a way to either toggle to see the last page instead of the first, or show a last page alongside the first, so it's easy to see when I'm past the new (to me) content.

I quite like this suggestion. I'll play with it and see how viable it is.

The only thing I struggle with with the new pools, is the organization of one. With the re-aplication of at least the reverse pool order button it would be a lot easier to get things organized again.

kiranoot said:
I quite like this suggestion. I'll play with it and see how viable it is.

Thanks

While we're making suggestions; is there a possibility of the listing page indicating the range of ratings within a pool? EG "S only", "Q - E", "S - E", "Q only" etc... Or at least show the highest rating within the pool.

Right now it only shows the rating of the first page which isn't ideal for representing the whole pool.