Galleries are missing on some subcategories

Has this website changed? (Or maybe I messed up somehow?) When I click on Gallery I still see thumbnails of selected projects as before. However now if I change to Artwork/** /selected projects to anything else (Archviz or Animation or whatever) I get a text list which means I have no way of choosing what to look at other than by clicking at random based on meaningless topic titles. Is this an actual change or can I “fix it” on my end? How can I see non-curated posts?

Galleries are only available on categories, not on tags (except for the #featured tag). If you visit #artwork:finished-projects for example, it works as expected.

That is not how it used to be, so no it “doesn’t work as expected”; it is not a solution to my question. This is in my opinion an unfortunate change. I do not believe that most of us who have been working so hard for months trying to improve our skills are going to be inspired by only looking at the work of “experts” who have been doing this for years. We can already do that on Blendernation. Far more interesting, the main purpose of a forum, is to see the work of others trying to improve their work. If I can’t see their work or show mine why bother?

Yeah I get that with the old plugin, all tag pages would show as galleries. But that also included tags where it made no sense. I’m not sure what the best solution here is - technically, we can define a list of tags that will show as galleries, maybe that’s a starting point? (CC @Fweeb what do you think about this?)

And I don’t quite follow your point about experts - the regular forums, like #artwork:finished-projects are sorted by activity only, not by likes etc. The #featured tag gallery is different because it’s curated.

Refresh my memory, was the gallery view an optional choice for tags? If it wasn’t optional, then I can certainly see how having all tags default to gallery view would be annoying… especially with no way to revert to a standard list view.

I’m not necessarily a huge fan of just having some select tags (other than #featured) show as galleries as that feels pretty arbitrary and gives an unpredictable user experience.

My main recommendation would be to include a toggle on category/tag views where users can switch between gallery and list view at their own discretion.

If that’s not trivial to implement, then perhaps we can do a logical ‘AND’. If the user is looking at a list of tagged posts AND those posts are in an #artwork subcategory, then use a gallery view. For all other categories, use the standard list view.

I’m sure both of those options are probably more difficult to do than setting more tags as galleries, but they’ll give a better user experience here. If we can’t do either of those options, then what we have currently is probably the best way to go for the time being.

Since in my experience the categories I visited were always shown as galleries I do not have an opinion on tags were galleries (thumbnails) didn’t make sense. What I do have a strong opinion on is that on tags where the subject matter is artwork (Blender is after all amazing software for VISUAL media) the default for viewing posted work should be VISUAL. and not lists; I.E. galleries. “The old plugin” (not sure what that means in regards to making the forum work) was working fine at least in that regard.

What I meant by the “Expert” comment is that if you only make curated work visible then you are (either purposely or unintentionally) discouraging and/or hiding posts by beginners or intermediate Blender fans. I am assuming that is not your intention.

To be clear sorting by activities works well. In fact showing only “favorites” or “most liked” or similar would not be an improvement on curated selections since the final result would still be similar. A toggle option would work. Having lists ONLY FOR discussion centric tags were galleries do not make sense, that do not include artwork submitted by Blender users would work as well.

It wasn’t a user-setting, and adding that is not trivial. At this time, the theme component doesn’t support any ‘advanced’ logic like you’re describing…

And yes, I agree with your concern about having inconsistent UI.

Actually, I don’t agree with this. The old plugin would show ALL tag lists as galleries, even for posts that did not contain images, and it quickly became a mess. It’s better to default to post lists in that case.

We’ll have to keep the galleries as they are for now. I don’t have budget for custom development.

1 Like

hi Bart

Recently found myself browsing through the Archviz part of the forum. I either have go into “Finished Projects” and scroll through mentally filtering everything that is not architecture/realistic related or use the tag filtering and open multiple browser tabs from the posts list.

Over on the Discourse forum (very quick scroll through the post), found an example of another website that allows for such a feature (random example from said website below), maybe it’s already possible natively?

It requires activating the galleries for individual tags, that’s why it works on the other site. They only have a limited number so it’s doable. We have far too many :-/