For my understanding, is it distracting visually (interfering with the simple design of the site), or psychologically (knowing that competitors are swarming)?
Psychologically, a lot. It’s not the pressure of knowing they’re swarming, as such. For me, it’s knowing the types of captions different Captioneers write, then seeing them active, I start considering those captions myself. And, of course, associate each caption as it appears to a likely active Captioneer.
Also, there’s the voting aspect. Captioneer A is a keen pun fan. Is she active? If so, it would pay to focus on puns. Captioneer B is active, and he likes dark humour, I’ll angle for that. Etc.
Finally, there’s just thinking about habits of other Captioneers. Oh, Captioneer C has been staring at this pic for an hour. Why does Captioneer D keep coming and going? Why am I active when I told my wife I was really tired and going to bed early
You know me, mate, I overthink everything. These may all be distractions inside my head only.
It’s certainly funky Chris and there’s no doubting your talent. I wonder why it’s photo specific though? I would prefer to see anyone who is anywhere on the site, displayed at the top of the home page.
Seems this feature is more fun for me than it is for others!
I’ll make it configurable so captioneers can turn it off if they want to.
Will keep an eye on how many people are turning it off, and if it’s a lot of people, I’ll turn it off by default.
I will build a site-wide presence feature. For technical reasons that will need to happen later, once I’ve finished migrating all the old code to the new system.
Thanks, mate. To be fair, I got over most of the over-thinking issues pretty quickly, but the visual distraction remained.
It’s also that, at caption time when the brain is racing trying to think of a funny angle, who is on-site at that moment isn’t important to me. It’s information that I, personally, don’t need.
Again, I apologise for the negativity. The innovations and constant work you do behind the scenes are outstanding and should be more widely appreciated.
Thanks for disabling the icons, Chris. Like James I don’t need this information.
An idea: How about a vote on whether we want the new info or would prefer the site as it was?
It’s definitely better, thanks Chris. I’d still prefer nothing at all while I’m captioning a photo though.
The info displayed on the home page doesn’t bother me. I reckon it would be better if shown exclusively there.
Then you could see at a glance all the live activity, but could also click on a photo and not be distracted by that info while you’re trying to caption.
One thing I’ve noticed with the Live Viewers list is it seems to include inactive tabs. That is, if you have multiple tabs open in your browser, and one is open on a photo’s page, the Live Viewers list shows you viewing that page even if you’re not actively viewing that tab.
I like the new live list
I dislike the new live list
