Hey everyone! Thanks for participating in Canvas. I wanted to make a thread to collect together suggestions people have that can be worked on before the next Canvas.
Feel free to also throw in suggestions for future Events we can build and run for the fediverse.
Ill be collecting suggestions together and making issues for them in the repository for myself or some other contributors to work on (the projects open source so anyones free to contribute! https://git.sc07.company/sc07/canvas Feel free to reach out to me and I can help get you set up with the codebase)
Okay wild idea for a smaller canvas :
Have the canvas fade out to white a little every hour.
Eventually old pixels would die and people would either have to maintain or draw new stuff. It would make the timelapse more interesting and more animated by default.
ooo that sounds fun
i’ve created an issue for this so i can keep track of it :)
Taking the risk to make myself unpopular but here is a wish from the heart.
Discourage/ban all nationalism. Especially flags.
Reasons:
Nation-states and country borders are a fairly recent invention in history. In this time and age, it’s quite counter-intuitive to still keep identifying oneself with (or get emotionally attached to) such divisive concepts that have been devised by those who govern. Especially in a game like this where collaboration is encouraged regardless of anyone’s location or belief, we should not get counter-productive over flags and the politics associated with them, or get to argue wether flags represent government entities or the people (they are usually owned by the former, just to say).
Further, I find flags (and also logos) are just so utterly uncreative things to draw. To me, it just shows how societies are still immature; false attachment to the divisive and competitive concepts they were raised to believe in, to the benefit of those who profit from divisiveness and competitiveness. Therefore, please consider a ban on all flags and instead encourage “real” artwork (especially original one).
e: For those who still want to display some honorary mention of their ethnicity/people/heritage, there is likely plenty of symbolism available which may suit their case much better than a symbol of nationalism.
Suggestions:
- When getting rid of bots, undo their changes.
- Assign the pixel timer based also on IP, not just account. That should discourage people who used multiple accounts just to have more pixels.
- Don’t let freshly created accounts to place pixels. They compound with both issues above.
IPs should never be used to moderate, they are shared across too many people. Often multiple neighborhoods will share an IP.
I do not like the idea of using IPs for that either, but since it’s only for the timing instead of locking people out of the service, it’s less of a concern.
And as db0 said IPs are far from optimal but they’re the best thing that “we” [actually the devs] have available. If you have some alternative way to discourage simultaneous multi-accounting, by all means, suggest it here.
there’s an issue to add support for undoing pixels with bans, but that would mainly get used in very bad circumstances and wouldn’t be the default
as others have mentioned, there’s not going to be anything that automatically does actions against IPs, instead opting for a flag that moderations can look into further
i’ve also mentioned somewhere else in the thread, but i wouldn’t want to punish new accounts as, especially this year, it brings new people to the Fediverse and i don’t want to hamper the growth of that :) (it also isn’t very possible to get a reliable creation date of new accounts because of how the fediverse is designed)
If you undo the changes done by a bot it could cause chaos. It is better to let users know it needs to be fixed.
Also you could do some sort of proof of work to make it unfeasible to have a bunch of alts.
If you undo the changes dome by a bot it could cause chaos. It is better to let users know it needs to be fixed.
It could cause chaos if done poorly, indeed. But I think that there are ways to minimise this chaos.
One of them would be that reverted pixels are marked as “reverted by the admins”, and that appears in an overlay similar to the heatmap.
Also you could do some sort of proof of work to make it unfeasible to have a bunch of alts.
Like in cryptography? I like this idea. Perhaps it could be used when there’s a reasonable possibility that two accounts are from the same user; for example same IP, or same username but different instance, etc.
I would suggest a small countdown to the end of the event on the place where the pixels count and coordinates belong (circled below), only displaying during the event.
i didn’t end up getting to this before the event ended, but this should be added for next year
On mobile I kept opening the whois pixel by accident when dragging. I often tap and hold to initiate a drag because I’m still looking at the art, but when i drag away and let go, it opens the whois thing. I think if you drag a certain screen-space distance away it should cancel the whois pixel lookup.
The heatmap I found too hard to tell where recent pixels were placed. I think at 100% opacity the “cold” pixels should be dark blue instead of their actual color.
A couple times I placed a dot, realized I actually didn’t want it there and ran out of time to undo, which felt bad having to wait 30s. I wish it was a bit longer.
When you try to place a pixel a few milliseconds too early I feel like it should queue it and wait the few milliseconds for you.
I’m not super sure on the canvas having transparency. Most people treated the canvas as white, not transparent. If you wanted a white-on-white drawing, people will just make an outline.
Maybe a concept worth testing: if you place a pixel next to your own pixels, you get a (slightly) reduced cooldown, that way you get an extra boost when completing your art. (At the same time, I think there is beauty in the canvas being as simple as possible:)
I’ve created issues in the issue tracker to keep track of these for next year :)
- Mobile Pixel Whois triggers too easily
- Heatmap colors
- Increase undo cooldown
- Grace period for pixel cooldowns
- No white background
- Idea: adjacent self pixels should receive a slight reduced cooldown
thank you for the suggestions!
Happy to participate!
The one thing I wasn’t super sure on was the undo timer… was it really 30 seconds 😅? I thought it was 5-15s, but i didnt really time it. And I’ll be honest, I missed it maybe 3 times, so not much.
Besides just increasing the delay, there’s 2 other thoughts:
- A bigger target takes less time to hit (tho making it bigger might bother some, as it obstructs the canvas)
- Two times I missed were bc I failed to notice my mistake. Maybe some extra visual feedback when you place a pixel could help. For example: when the void made it to my art, I accidentally made a dark gray become black, so it was harder to notice the color change. i was too busy focusing where to place the next pixel
Overall if you feel that the undo time was fine as it was I could easily respect that decision :)
