The Nonnie Watering Hole. Watch out for dinosaurs.
Imzy: the Good, the Bad, and the Missing
Eventually to be sent along to the site developers. Because betaing is a holy responsibility, and also if I can whine my way to a better fandom site, I'm going to do it.
The Good:
The multiple profiles, being able to view all your comments/other people's comments, and the anon name thing is great on a fandom front, especially for fandoms with known trolls and assholes. I might not be a part of the Hockey RPF fandom, but I can see them making a very happy home here.
Spoiler and NSFW posts. These are discreet and useful! I like them.
Exists but needs work:
Image Posts: seems to have insufficient customizability for art posts.
- Can't resize/change the preview, the actual picture, re-arrange the pictures OR change the placement.
- Can't preview the post as a whole
- Not sure if it's possible to add more than one photo
Text Posts:
No spell check. Someone out there has to save me from myself when it comes to spelling because I sure as hell can't.
I've asked them the character limits to text posts (and for comments), but haven't gotten a response yet.Character limit for posts 40 000. It's pitiful next to DW's 300 000 character limit for posts. LJ's size limit for posts is something like 65 000 characters, so even LJ is beating this.I don't know if fandom in general will ever go back to posting fic off-archive instead of just linking it, but given that there's an actual comment feature, auto-cut, and communities on Imzy, it's possible.
There's a post image option for text posts (trying it right now)
Okay, so that works (the image is being hosted on Imzy). It's resizable in the same way pictures in LJ used to be (painfully), though, thank god, at least the aspect ratio seems locked. Also, I've tried a couple time to take this out of being inline with the text, and it just isn't working for me. Not intuative.The formatting options are pretty limited. You can switch to html, but I haven't tried it.
Link/Share Posts:
You can only do one link for these, I think. It would be nice to be able to do a list of them in the same post so that you could do multiple recs. Of course you can always do normal links in a text post, so that's hardly a deal breaker.
It seems like clicking on a share of a share takes you to the previous sharer, not to the content. Can anyone confirm this? And is that good or bad, do you think? On the one hand, you can see what everyone down the line has thought. On the other, you might have to click a billion times just to read one stupid article.
Comments
- They aren't threaded. I'm not sure this matters that much. I've been on sites that use threaded comments since forever, and it feels really weird. Just talked to Imzy help. They are thinking of making comments more threaded (five deep was mentioned), but infinite threading will not be happening
- when you click in the wrong place on your screen they disappear and don't come back. That is very uncool. Hey nonnies, if anyone notes this, leave a comment with the Imzy help. It's not supposed to do that.
- Comment size limit is 10 000 characters.
Interface
- Clunky. Images instead of words are stupid and annoying.
- It's boring and ugly. On the upside, it is readable when they chose to use words.
- The auto click-for-more cut removes all formatting and makes it look like I don't know where the enter key is. Also, it's really not very long. On the upside, there's an auto-cut! I would have killed for that back on LJ, and still would on Tumblr.
- I don't want an autocut for pictures unless they're NSFW. Pictures are fine. It's the twelve mountains of text I want to avoid. (I'm thinking this would be best handled with a viewing preferences option rather than site-wide changes. Obviously people will have different opinions on this. Also, I feel like this was an option I might have clicked in community creation, and now cannot find again...can anyone else confirm?)
Doesn't Exist, and Should
- No private messaging/ask system (I don't like the ask system because it replaces PMs, but as a feature on its own, I think it has a purpose)
- No default personal site for posting/collecting your stuff
- No option to make posts connected (like post 1 of 3)
- There's block people (pretty comprehensively!) but I can't find a 'block stuff with this tag' We now have filters to both include and exclude tags on communities. Top right side of comm, directly under the new post buttons, look for the upside-down pyramid of lines. They say they're going to eventually give the option to make these sticky so you don't have to re-enter them every time.
- Porn. I hate 'I know it when I see it' outlines as a user. Love them as a mod, so I know where they're coming from, but man, I wish they'd be really, really clear on this. It's pretty clearly going to be the sticking point of fandom conversion. Talked to them about it. In brief, fic is probably fine, regardless of rating (but possibly not regardless of content). Someone else has recieved notice from them that porny art is a no-go. I'm pretty sure this is the legitimately porny kind of fanart, not nudes or naked people embracing nakedly, but I'm still waiting on full confirmation for that.
Your thoughts?




Definitely seconding the need for tooltips or words on buttons. Graphics are not intuitive.
On mobile, I found that clicking off the comment box even to get a menu that didn't close out of the way so you can read what you're writing could end up closing the comment box and losing the comment. Clicking in the wrong spot shouldn't be so dangerous. On mobile, it's a really easy thing to do.
I really, really wish a community admin could create tags on the fly. Like really, really.
If we're going to have not HTML formatting techniques, having a cheat sheet or help with how to format posts and comments seems like a necessary thing. I have no idea at this point except trial and error and edit.
Make endless scroll turn off able. Please.
I LOVE the multiple profiles thing. And markdown formatting. Markdown is great.
Agree about being able to turn off endless scrolling. An option for paginated scrolling would be nice.
Don't like how comment viewing preferences don't stick, and I don't like that there's not an option to view the oldest comments first.
The site color scheme hurts my eyes.
I don't like the idea of only five threaded comments. That really isn't enough.
And I really want an option where stuff isn't so instantly-loading (like, without the messages about somebody making a comment while you're typing one or whatever, or the stuff with the loading circles and lines as it grabs the newest version of something--IDK, it's hard to explain?). I'm trapped on a super-slow internet connection. So far, I haven't had any problems, but I haven't poked around the site that much yet, either.
About the personal site, I was just thinking of making a community for myself for that purpose. For collection and for posting my art and stuff. However, as it is if we do that it means we can only create one more community, since it says it's 2 communities per user in beta.
I left this on the other post because I hadn't seen this one, but I'll repeat myself: the posts (and in fact the community main page itself) are too narrow. I guess everything has to be mobile-friendly now, but honestly other websites manage to have a regular version and a simplified mobile version. I don't like how much this looks like Facebook. The other thing is comment threading. Ok, no infinite threading, but 5 is too little. I guess the individual Anonymous names compensate for that, but still it's gonna be annoying to keep track of a conversation when they're very long and there's no visual representation of questions and answers. At least put some color on them so we can see clearer who's answering who.
You start off with two communities, but you get one more each month you are active on the site, until you reach the maximum of ten.
If you're making an image post and want to add more pictures, you have to drag and drop the other images in the comment box. Not very intuitive, but I think they're working on improving images posts to make things easier.
That seems about right, and I both like and dislike this feature for the reasons you listed. It's not too bad when the original is just one post away, but there's already been an instance when I had to click twice because the link was to a post that had already been shared. This could become a problem, though I have no idea how it could be improved.
It matters when there's a lot of discussion going on, with numerous long comments. It doesn't happen often because Imzy is in closed beta and the site is still very quiet, but the way comments are displayed makes it hard to follow some of the longer discussions. Threaded comments would be awesome, and I wouldn't mind if they introduced thread titles down the line too.
According to the staff, private messaging is already on the way.
This has been discussed on /Imzy in the past. You can create your own personal community to use as a kind of blog (or anything else you'd like to use it for). You can also set things up so you're the only one who is allowed to create new threads. Relevant links:
Personal communities - Explains the concept of personal communities in details
A new interesting thing -- BlogMunity? - The original discussion that kind of spawned the idea of personal comms.
Well, as this name suggests, the blue banner on creating a new profile for communities is annoying enough.
The grey is inoffensive but also terrible to read on for long times.
Blocking tags would be great, yes.
Seconding having an option to connect a series of posts into post 1 of 3 [next], 2 of 3 [prev][next], etc. That is necessary for serialized content.
I also want an option for paginated scrolling. I've noticed that the endless scrolling here is a little bit buggy, which makes it seem as if there is no more content when, instead, it is just imzy very slowly serving it up
I second the complaint about the light text on a stark white background being hard to read. I don't want to spend any time squinting at text like this. The font seems to exacerbate the issue.
The layout generally is not something I'm fond of, particularly how it seems to change so completely depending on what sort of page you're on. Elements move from the top to the side, and from the left to the right. It makes it harder for things to feel smooth.
For pluses, the multiple profiles thing is great. Community controls seem to be nice. I like the idea of controlled tags. And I like the landing page, with its dash-like community newsfeed thing.
The limit of ten tags per post will be really limiting for some communities.