DollfieDreams Member Acclimatization Thread (new site Q&A)

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Edited August 25, 2023 by ParacosmDoll

29 minutes ago, Wolf said:

This is what I see on the root doll profile page.

This is how it looks under My Dolls. If you aren't see this I am guessing I have a caching issue.

I see what's happening. I don't think it's your cache. They are actually exactly the same, code wise, the only difference is that the main Doll page has a sidebar, which if you're browser is not allowing the site to go to its max width it will make the profile images look skinnier. The sub sections don't have that sidebar so the images are going to their full width.

This came up on the old forum in the discussion about this site too - but seeing as the photo board isnt in any particular section I assume Smartdoll/Obitsu/etc are also fair game there now - will there be some kind of tagging system? I see theres fields where we can type our own tags but I doubt anyone's gonna do that. 
It would be nice to have a different colour tag for each major brand represented here too - DD's I guess would be yellow (due to the yellow boxes), Smartdoll orange of course.

10 minutes ago, Majikaru-Rin said:

I'm really liking the new website so far! I do have one question, in the Doll Directory sections where you can describe your dolls story and personality would it be possible to have the ability to create proper paragraphs? I typed mine in formatted with paragraphs but once I saved it the whole thing became a huge wall of text which just looks messy to me.

I changed them into "editor" fields. So you should be able to do that now. ^^

2 minutes ago, Monty said:

This came up on the old forum in the discussion about this site too - but seeing as the photo board isnt in any particular section I assume Smartdoll/Obitsu/etc are also fair game there now - will there be some kind of tagging system? I see theres fields where we can type our own tags but I doubt anyone's gonna do that. 
It would be nice to have a different colour tag for each major brand represented here too - DD's I guess would be yellow (due to the yellow boxes), Smartdoll orange of course.

Baldylox and I were actually talking about this today. I think I'll add photo sections for each type, under their own sections.

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Edited August 25, 2023 by ParacosmDoll

The new site looks amazing! Thank you, Averis!!! My computer is probably too old for it.  hahahaha  ❤️ 

Thanks so much for pulling this together! I haven't poked the mobile version yet, but I probably will when I'm trying to become human again tomorrow morning. 

Are we going to be able to submit header/banner images again?

I like the website do far! 

I am struggling with the marketplace, though.

Isn't there a section like the older marketplace, in which users could post their dolls for sale?

Also, although the "display" version of the marketplace looks very neat and nice, is there a chance of having your listings last longer than 2 weeks?

Cheers x

I've been poking around a bit and noticed some things:

- Privacy. There doesn't seem to be an option of making your online status invisible, your activity is visible to everyone and I'm also not very happy with having my full birthday displayed to everyone. Most forums have options to hide these things.
With every single edit and thing I do on the forum being visible in the list, it kind of feels like I'm being followed all the time. It's not like I'm doing anything secret here, but it's a bit unnerving that everyone can follow my every move. I wish there were options to choose what is shown in the activity page and who it's shown to.

- Profile settings. Not a big thing but in the list of page links in the options are a bit outdated. I don't know anyone who uses yahoo or AOL for example -or what ICQ even is. And then it's missing current places like instagram, tumblr, etsy, blogs +possibly other social media that are currently popular with doll people.

- Text editor: you can't turn the formatting off apparently. It's not a big deal since I can still add bb code links and images by manually writing them, but if I attach a file from my computer, that will show as the image and not as code and that's a bit annoying to look at when trying to compile a message. Especially if I have code and attachments mixed together in one post. 😕
- Also related to ^ the preview didn't show my smiley turning into an emoji, but it did. And the emoji view can't seem to be turned off like on the old forum.

- Search. It's a bit limited. I can't seem to find an option to for example search all of user X's posts within a certain thread, because the search requires a keyword every time. The author is not enough. This is a serious limitation -or then I'm just blind and can't find where to do this. Also for fun, I attempted to search the new marketplace Dollfie Dream section with just the keyword "Volks" and got no results. I had to search specifically in the Dollfie Dreams - Dolls section for it to work. So the search can't look in subdirectories apparently and there is no option to enable it. You have to painstakingly manually select every single section you want to search in.

- Marketplace. There should absolutely be seller/buyer location mentioned in every listing. Because of the layout you have to go all the way to the seller's profile and hope that they've mentioned it.

- Uploading images. Just a small kink but when you're uploading a new avatar for example, there's no recommended pixel size mentioned anywhere on that page. The first attempts with using a wrong size img made it horribly grainy. So guidelines would be nice.

 

Other than those things the forum seems to be fine and working well. I'm not personally sure if I like the look much... everything is so spaced out and you need to scroll forever for everything . Like even the replies of this thread: if the reply is short, there's a huge blank space under it because the whole box is fitted to show all the information under the username. I prefer things to be more compact and viewable with one glance, but that's just my personal opinion. I do like that there's also a dark theme available so I don't have to be blinded by the whiteness in the evenings. xD

Edited March 19, 2019 by Yenna
addition

I second @Yenna's thoughts once these things are "fixed" I think the forum would look much improved

24 minutes ago, Yenna said:

- Text editor: you can't turn the formatting off apparently. It's not a big deal since I can still add bb code links and images by manually writing them, but if I attach a file from my computer, that will show as the image and not as code and that's a bit annoying to look at when trying to compile a message. Especially if I have code and attachments mixed together in one post. 😕

I'd like a way to toggle the WYSIWYG mode off entirely. I quoted a post in another topic, one that included inline tweets, and I couldn't remove those individually. Maybe it's just that I don't like editors where I can't see codes or I'm just dense, but I couldn't make it work. Inserting links takes more steps than on the old forum too.

26 minutes ago, Yenna said:

Other than those things the forum seems to be fine and working well. I'm not personally sure if I like the look much... everything is so spaced out and you need to scroll forever for everything . Like even the replies of this thread: if the reply is short, there's a huge blank space under it because the whole box is fitted to show all the information under the username. I prefer things to be more compact and viewable with one glance, but that's just my personal opinion.

I have this complaint about websites in general for years now. I assume it's because of mobile and small screens, but I hate that everything everywhere is huge and spaced out now. For some reason, the online sites for every credit card company are the absolute worst with this.

I have a question about the Mark item in the doll lists... What is supposed to do? 

Also, I'm in love with the dark theme 💕 and I'm now at mobile and it shows perfect too! 

About the doll lists, it seems to be Makers and not Makes in the category section. And I don't really like the way the credit IP.Board Collections by DevFuse is shown, maybe with the rest at the bottom? 

Edited March 19, 2019 by Singer Yuna

Thirding Yenna. I'm another who really doesn't like to be tracked like that. I would also love to see the option to hide activity, online status, and full birthday.

Other than that, I'm pretty darn happy with the new site.

 Thank you for all your hard work, the site is beautiful! I’m going to try hard to be more active this year! As far as feedback, I do agree about an option for privacy settings.

3 hours ago, Yenna said:

 I'm also not very happy with having my full birthday displayed to everyone. Most forums have options to hide these things.

There is a "Not Telling" option at the top of the list for Birth Year when you edit your profile.

I'm also a little confused, when you sign in there's a "sign in anonymously" checkbox for me, does that not make it so people can't track you? 😮 I agree that that should be fixed.

The new site looks great! I’ve only been able to access on mobile for now until I get home this evening. But I love the functionality. 

I also can’t seem to find the marketplace? 

4 minutes ago, hats said:

I also can’t seem to find the marketplace?

I found if you scroll right to the bottom it is in the menu at the bottom along with other links. 

2 minutes ago, Error-Chan said:

I found if you scroll right to the bottom it is in the menu at the bottom along with other links. 

Thank you!

5 hours ago, cfx said:

I have this complaint about websites in general for years now. I assume it's because of mobile and small screens, but I hate that everything everywhere is huge and spaced out now. For some reason, the online sites for every credit card company are the absolute worst with this. 

I've also noticed this. Especially in the past couple of days when I was updating the theme on my blog. I spent hours upon hours reducing the font size and spacing everywhere on the theme, and there's still a lot I missed. I don't even like the look on mobile so I don't get it.

I also noticed that on the top menu there's the link to the activity page (where you can stalk what everyone does on the whole forum), and on that page you can choose to "condence" the view. I wish that was available most of everywhere. I'd like to condense the whole forum if possible. xD

Now that I've been around a little longer, the reaction notifications are really starting to irritate me. I find it completely redundant to see that user X has reacted to post Y. Mostly because I can see the amount of reactions in the activity stream already where it says the post itself was made. It's completely useless to get separate notifications for those because unlike comments, you can't even reply to reactions. I couldn't even find a place to turn them off in the notification settings. Most of everything else can be turned off but not those? They're just flooding all activity streams and are useless in general.

And like I said before: privacy is still an issue for me. I'm fine with posts showing up in feeds, that's normal for forums but the reactions, edits and revisions on doll profiles etc. should only be visible if the user wants them to be.

I found something else too: You can add another user's signature to your ignore if it's distracting etc. But I can't find anywhere to get it back in case I need to see it again.

Edited March 19, 2019 by Yenna

May I make a suggestion about the subcategory structuring of the new Marketplace?  It seems impractical that each main category (DD, SmD, Obi) has so many subcategories that several get collapsed under a "and 3 more"/see all categories link, and it also seems impractical to have separate Wigs/Eyes/Clothes/Shoes/Props subcategories under each main category when most of those items can be shared among doll types.  Would it be possible to Instead structure it like:

DD main category with subcategories for Dolls / Heads / Bodies / Parts
SmD main category with subcategories for Dolls / Heads / Bodies / Parts
Obi main category with subcategories for Dolls / Heads / Bodies / Parts
**Accessories main category with subcategories for Eyes / Wigs / Clothing / Shoes / Props

Do you see what I mean?  It reduces the amount of redundant subcategories and puts all the small accessories listings in the same place, instead of having to decide whether a 8-9" wig should go under DD/wigs or SmD/wigs or Obi/wigs etc etc.

Edited March 19, 2019 by ryotakishu
rephrase for clarity

Absolutely love our new forum! Averis, you've done FANTASTIC WORK! Incredibly visually appealing, easy to navigate and functional. Thank you SO MUCH!

16 hours ago, Poofiemus said:

Are we going to be able to submit header/banner images again?

Yes, but we're planning to keep it to about 20 in total and rotate them out every so often.

11 hours ago, Bellatrix said:

Isn't there a section like the older marketplace, in which users could post their dolls for sale?

Not sure I know what you mean. There is "dolls" under each brand type.

Quote

Also, although the "display" version of the marketplace looks very neat and nice, is there a chance of having your listings last longer than 2 weeks?

Listings can be renewed, but this is also meant to keep things moving instead of just sit forever. But, too, just like Ebay or such you can just post it again.

10 hours ago, cfx said:

I'd like a way to toggle the WYSIWYG mode off entirely. I quoted a post in another topic, one that included inline tweets, and I couldn't remove those individually. Maybe it's just that I don't like editors where I can't see codes or I'm just dense, but I couldn't make it work. Inserting links takes more steps than on the old forum too.

It turns out that enabling code editing would open the site up to be vulnerable since it's pure HTML with no limit. I can keep looking for a limited version, but for now it is what it is. I actually like it and despite having access to the code myself, I never use it, but that's just me. 

9 hours ago, Singer Yuna said:

I have a question about the Mark item in the doll lists... What is supposed to do? 

I'm actually not entirely sure myself. >< As I didn't code any of these features, there are a lot of things I'm still learning. I'll have to poke around the authors site to find out.

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About the doll lists, it seems to be Makers and not Makes in the category section. And I don't really like the way the credit IP.Board Collections by DevFuse is shown, maybe with the rest at the bottom? 

This can't be changed or removed without paying them more money. ><

10 hours ago, Yenna said:

- Privacy. There doesn't seem to be an option of making your online status invisible, your activity is visible to everyone and I'm also not very happy with having my full birthday displayed to everyone. Most forums have options to hide these things.
With every single edit and thing I do on the forum being visible in the list, it kind of feels like I'm being followed all the time. It's not like I'm doing anything secret here, but it's a bit unnerving that everyone can follow my every move. I wish there were options to choose what is shown in the activity page and who it's shown to.

You should be able to log in anonymously. I'm not sure there is a way to hide activity, though. I can add an option to hide your profile all-together, though, but I'm not sure that's a suitable option.

Quote

- Profile settings. Not a big thing but in the list of page links in the options are a bit outdated. I don't know anyone who uses yahoo or AOL for example -or what ICQ even is. And then it's missing current places like instagram, tumblr, etsy, blogs +possibly other social media that are currently popular with doll people.

Yes, I need to fix that. The old ones are still there mostly from the move from DD.

Quote

- Text editor: you can't turn the formatting off apparently. It's not a big deal since I can still add bb code links and images by manually writing them, but if I attach a file from my computer, that will show as the image and not as code and that's a bit annoying to look at when trying to compile a message. Especially if I have code and attachments mixed together in one post. 😕
- Also related to ^ the preview didn't show my smiley turning into an emoji, but it did. And the emoji view can't seem to be turned off like on the old forum.

This is just how it work. The best thing I can suggest is add the images last. The editor can be altered with plug-ins, but so far I haven't found one to hide or reduce the images while editing.

Quote

- Search. It's a bit limited. I can't seem to find an option to for example search all of user X's posts within a certain thread, because the search requires a keyword every time. The author is not enough. This is a serious limitation -or then I'm just blind and can't find where to do this. Also for fun, I attempted to search the new marketplace Dollfie Dream section with just the keyword "Volks" and got no results. I had to search specifically in the Dollfie Dreams - Dolls section for it to work. So the search can't look in subdirectories apparently and there is no option to enable it. You have to painstakingly manually select every single section you want to search in.

I'll look into it, but there is a search by author option once on the search results page. A bit of a two-step process, yeah, but it is there. And I searched for Volks from the Marketplace page and just ticked "Adverts" in the search drop-down and got a bunch of results. So not sure we're seeing the same thing here.

Quote

- Marketplace. There should absolutely be seller/buyer location mentioned in every listing. Because of the layout you have to go all the way to the seller's profile and hope that they've mentioned it.

I can add a "shipping from" field.

Quote

- Uploading images. Just a small kink but when you're uploading a new avatar for example, there's no recommended pixel size mentioned anywhere on that page. The first attempts with using a wrong size img made it horribly grainy. So guidelines would be nice.

It is mentioned in the guidelines of the site, though.

4 hours ago, ryotakishu said:

May I make a suggestion about the subcategory structuring of the new Marketplace?  It seems impractical that each main category (DD, SmD, Obi) has so many subcategories that several get collapsed under a "and 3 more"/see all categories link, and it also seems impractical to have separate Wigs/Eyes/Clothes/Shoes/Props subcategories under each main category when most of those items can be shared among doll types.  Would it be possible to Instead structure it like:

DD main category with subcategories for Dolls / Heads / Bodies / Parts
SmD main category with subcategories for Dolls / Heads / Bodies / Parts
Obi main category with subcategories for Dolls / Heads / Bodies / Parts
**Accessories main category with subcategories for Eyes / Wigs / Clothing / Shoes / Props

Do you see what I mean?  It reduces the amount of redundant subcategories and puts all the small accessories listings in the same place, instead of having to decide whether a 8-9" wig should go under DD/wigs or SmD/wigs or Obi/wigs etc etc.

If enough people want it changed that way, I have no issue changing it. I was under the impression that people wanted things to remain mostly segregated by brand.

 

Other than that, nothing will be perfect. It is a new system with its own quirks and limitations. I feel the benefits outweigh some of the little niggles and such. Of course changes can be made where possible, but some thing won't be possible. I appreciate those that are happy with the changes and apologize to those that aren't. 

3 minutes ago, Averis said:

It turns out that enabling code editing would open the site up to be vulnerable since it's pure HTML with no limit. I can keep looking for a limited version, but for now it is what it is. I actually like it and despite having access to the code myself, I never use it, but that's just me.

I'm a former programmer and still do stuff by command line much of the time on PC, and took me years to start using a GUI-based word processor. I'm old and this is likely "old man yelling at clouds" territory.

But that said, could we at least get some kind of tutorial or command list on how to use the editor, because I'm really struggling with it? As it is, posting for me is a real chore if I want to actually quote anyone or edit my own posts even.

1 hour ago, cfx said:

I'm a former programmer and still do stuff by command line much of the time on PC, and took me years to start using a GUI-based word processor. I'm old and this is likely "old man yelling at clouds" territory.

But that said, could we at least get some kind of tutorial or command list on how to use the editor, because I'm really struggling with it? As it is, posting for me is a real chore if I want to actually quote anyone or edit my own posts even.

I can certainly try. ^^ I'll make a post when I get a little time.

 

EDIT:  Also the thread for header image submissions is still in the feedback section for those that want to do that.

I also tried to condense the side bar of posts a little bit more by putting the name next to the avatar instead of under it and reduce the space between elements there. I also reduced the line height of text to try and reduce the space between lines.

SECOND EDIT: I also reduced the height of the forum list on the homepage.