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)
Maybe replace Googles Captcha with an alternative like hCaptcha.
Honestly they are both pretty bad for privacy as the way that they work is a black box. At least it isn’t Cloudflare as it constantly thinks I am a bot
I agree. But at least hCaptchas don’t block you if you use more aggressive privacy-enhancing plugins and they are fun to solve (and don’t require you to find the traffic-light 20 times because your connection is a bit sus.)
And also yes, fuck Cloudflare.
Escalating timers are an antipattern. It punishes anyone who looks away for more than thirty seconds - and thirty seconds per click is not exactly a brisk pace for maintaining attention.
Other than that, good shit, well done. Undo was a welcome surprise. Ditto the repetition prevention.
No wait, one other thing. (Complaint sandwich!) Scaling should be in integer powers. Everything but fully-zoomed-out and extremely-blown-up looked lumpy and distracting. Especially with all the pixel art going on.
I think I agree on the cooldowns. Often times I wanted to step away and let the pixels accumulate, but it’s hard to resist when you realize you’d be missing out on double or triple the amount of pixels you could be placing. If the goal was to reward the player for actively placing pixels, all I can say is it didn’t feel very rewarding.
I kinda disagree about the integer scaling. 1x to 2x zoom is a very big shift without any in-between. It would also feel strange on pinch-to-zoom on mobile without in-between. I think instead it could snap to an integer scaling, or have a zoom slider that works to integer scaling. Overall though I agree, having a way to snap into integer scaling makes the pixel art look better
Have whatever between 1x and 2x, but the desktop scroll-wheel options cannot be 1x, 1.6723x, πx, and so on.
I think it was 30s between every pixel at the start.
It was sort of, but it was a bug. If you just left them, you’d get one every 33ish seconds until you had 6. But if you had 2 then used one, you’d have to wait 66 seconds until you got another, unless you used your last one then it was back to 33.
It was fixed partway through to be as originally intended.
I like the escalating time, but the pacing issue is a fair point.
So perhaps the escalation could be delayed? Give it a tiny larger timer (let’s say, 40s?), and make the second pixel take as much time as the first. Like this:
- current times - 30s, 60s, 90s, 120s, 150s, 180s; total 630s
- my proposal - 40s, 40s, 80s, 120s, 160s, 200s; total 640s
This way you’d be only getting less pixels per minute after 80s of inactivity, not 30s.
Longer waits would be worse.
It should be one every thirty seconds until you hit some limit. Do not incentivize continuously staring at a timer. Do not incentivize obsessively checking a timer. Just rate-limit people in the simplest way that could possibly work.
I get why you’re saying this, and I agree with base reason. However, I feel like fixing the problem by removing the feature is not the way to go, as I think that active playing should be rewarded.
Regarding the base time (30s vs. 40s): I proposed 40s because the total waiting time would be roughly the same. It could be also 20s, if necessary/desired, up to the devs.
Additionally it would be great if there was an audible “ping” once you get a new pixel. Then regardless of the timer or how it progresses people would feel freer to do other stuff while checking the canvas.
One literal pixel every thirty seconds is not “active.”
You went people to drool when a bell rings.
Encouraging users to obsess or react is plainly an addiction mechanic. In a collaborative MS Paint session. Tweaking the details of it misses what’s wrong with it. It’s an antifeature. It’s a mistake.
Just give people one pixel every thirty seconds. “Active” means they check at least every couple minutes, at their convenience, where they will have up to six. If they step away for an hour they don’t get hundreds.
One effect of this is that someone steadily editing got more pixels than someone editing in batches, which felt like a feature when defending against trolls.
Except when the trolls have more free-time than oneself and so can place every 30s while oneself want to get other things done and so would prefer placing in batches.
Encouraging anyone to stare at a screen for two actions per minute is brutal. Especially when those actions, to be optimal, have to happen the moment the timer rolls over.
This is an addiction mechanic.
This is some free-to-play mobile-game nonsense.
No matter how good the motivations are, no matter what narratives we can build around casual versus attentive use, this is a bad decision for software. It is deliberate manipulation of the user’s incentives and habits for destructive patterns of behavior.
Thank you, very clear! I suggest to add one pixel every 30 seconds, plain and simple. If a modifier to this timer is required for reasons, that could be based on the number of pixels placed during the past x minutes or so.
I didn’t love it tbh. I had the canvas up in half of the screen and was doing something else but would look over too early then just be waiting for x seconds for my next pixel.
Same. Watched some streams and found myself listening distractedly while staring at a window with nothing happening. It is, perhaps unfortunately, plenty of time to reflect on why, and to ask whether this is desirable.
The worst example of this accidental mistreatment (in my personal experience) was the idle game The Idle Class. From the genre and the title, you’d figure you can just leave it running, and come back whenever. But the dev added e-mail events that give a huge bonus if you catch them within thirty seconds. I cannot overstate - that is a Skinner box. That is operant conditioning on a random schedule. It’s how brains develop obsessive habits, and eventually, superstitions.
Now that everyone’s been exposed to real-money video games and at least acknowledges some of their tactics are criminal, we should all be mindful of how software influences people. Problems don’t need to be malicious or complex. Reliable incentives over time are profoundly influential.
thank you (and everyone else in this thread) for the constructive feedback!
i’ve added the timers as an issue in the tracker to help with keeping track of everything
i think i got the main points given in this thread, but if theres something you think is missing feel free to reply to this so i can add it 👍
i’ve also added the weird zooming issue also
So much went right that all the negatives are nitpicky.
i’m glad :) it was very fun to run after all
Alpha-blending the color you’re about to place means it’s only a correct preview when the pixel it’s over is already that color. A smaller or even circular cursor of the actual color would remain distinct from the canvas while indicating its effect more clearly.
i’ve created an issue for this so i can keep track of it 👍
thanks for the suggestion!
[Sorry for the double reply]
The “numbers” template style would be considerably more useful if the palette was itself numbered. At least, while using that style.I’ve seen a lot of people struggling to find the template. I think that it deserves its own button.
The dark mode is amazing. Seriously, I want it for the next years. I don’t think that it needs such a huge button though, when a simple half-black half-white sun icon would do the trick.
On desktop the palette has an awkward shape, as a narrow 32x1 strip that you need to roll back and forth if the window isn’t maximised (fairly often, since people were doing other stuff while placing pixels). It would be great if it was a 4x8 somewhere at the right.
A lot of people (incl. myself) were struggling to tell a few colours apart. Mostly dark grey vs. black vs. navy blue and dark chocolate vs. maroon. So it might be sensible to tweak the palette itself for the next years. But overall their hue distribution was really good, in no moment I thought “damn, I need more colours”.
thank you for your suggestions! i’ve created issues in the tracker for each one so i can keep track of them :)
An extended undo functionality would have been handy sometimes. Like, having an eraser that would revert any pixel I have placed myself (and that is still visible) to what it was before while adding one to my pixel store until that is filled. That way I would be able to move or correct things without having to wait (possibly twice as long) for the counter.
i’ve added this as an issue so i don’t lose it
i suggested two additional changes in the issue as a comment, i’ll copy them here for completeness:
- only allow this to happen if the surrounding area also hasn’t been interacted by anyone else (maybe like a 5x5 around the pixel) to be undone by the eraser
- only works for pixels placed within the last 5 minutes
only allow this to happen if the surrounding area also hasn’t been interacted by anyone else (maybe like a 5x5 around the pixel) to be undone by the eraser
What’s the reasoning for this? One of my use cases would have been that I had started to draw something then realised that someone else was drawing next to me, so I’d wish I could have a way to quickly move my thing out of the way. Another one was with a collaboration on a template and in the end trying some adjustments because the template was unsharp. Which was essentially overdrawing other people’s pixels just to see how it looks, then perhaps reverting some of those.
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:)
+1 on the mobile draggging issue
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 :)
The event was fun for the first 48 hours - before the expansion. After that it was mostly policing and defending existing art. I would prefer a 48 hour canvas without expansion.
That said, it was fun anyways. Thanks for all your work and thanks to grant for setting everything up and fixing issues on the fly.
i’ll keep a note of that, a couple people have also suggested alternatives to canvas expansion
i’m glad you enjoyed the event, it was really fun to run (and fix bugs for) :)
A toggle to show grid lines would be awesome.
added this as an issue to keep track of :)
Thanks for making it open source! I’m curious how complex the authentication stuff was. I didn’t place many pixels but it was fun to peek in and see what changed every once in a while! Would definitely be a fan of more in the future, though I don’t have any ideas
I’d be keen to run/test a local version, what do I need in the .env.local as a minimum to get up and running?
It looks like the compose file has
REDIS_HOSTandDATABASE_URLand point to included services. There’s also a few in the dockerfile for settingPORT(3000) and some node stuff I don’t understandTo get it actually running you need to do more than set up just the env but ive got what I needed to do here
https://share.ategon.dev/u/IzcMWM.md
If you want to allow logging in so you can test the features that get unlocked from that heres some code changes to get it working so you can bypass setting up openid
http://share.ategon.dev/u/W7IODE.md
Client will be up at localhost:5173
there’s an issue to write instructions on how to setup the environment
the server requires the authentication server to be fediverse-auth with the current implementation, but there’s an issue to add support for other providers
(once the documentation is written i’ll be putting it in #canvas-meta:aftermath.gg to keep people in the loop)
Yeah, I figured as much. I put it on the backburner as I was wetting up a selfhosted scratch instance for the girls
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.
Same with people who use VPN per default.
That’s the closest thing we have though. The alternative is just people using alts, and at that point might as well not have limits. There can be ways to add exceptions if needed.
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.
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.
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.
The only problem with proof of work (pow) is that it won’t perform the same across devices and will kill battery life. The difficulty of the proof would need to be calculated on page load which could open it up to spoofing a different device.
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)
OK! At least the other batch of suggestions was more useful :) Those are fair points.
I often got the “you’ve already placed a pixel of that color there” error, even though I never touched this area. I also couldn’t fix my own pixelart easily because of this.
You could get around that bug by choosing a different color and then pressing undo. After that it reverted to the correct color.
i’ve created an issue to track this :)
this error was being sent by the server, so somewhere along the chain your computer got desynced from the pixels the server was aware about
Is there a history of the changes stored? I’d love to watch an accelerated animation of the creation process.
I did not find a way to simply “view the entire canvas & download a snapshot,” which would be nice.
There are time lapses, and all the data has been released.
(for completeness as i’m going through all the comments)
there’s a suggestion for canvas snapshots and it should be implemented for next year 👍
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
A really small canvas with a short time sounds cool
Or a canvas that grows with random parts becoming read only
Ye this idea I would like to expand on. Start with a normal size canvas and let it run normally for 24h. After 24h, have a new 1px empty line appear on the bottom every 3 minutes or so while the highest 1px line becomes read only. Keep doing this until the event ends.
This will in turn cause a canvas that keeps expanding downwards but previous creation are “locked in” slowly.
as well as this one, i’ve added it as an issue to keep track of it :)
this one also seems neat, added it as an issue to keep track of :)
