All Bugs in DA_Eclipse 6/12/19

I am a Computer Scientist and these are all the bugs and User Interface messes I have found that no one seems to be specifying. Things don't change when you say they are bad but when you provide concrete evidence.

!!!!SKIP TO '@@@@' FOR DETAILS ON EACH BUG WITH HOW TO REPLICATE IT AND PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOFS!!!

SUMMARY AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE WITH CONCLUSION!!!

Hi, I have been a Deviantart user for the past 10 years. I recently created a new account on Deviantart after a couple of years of doing nothing but checking my messages. I saw the new layout and thought: 'cool, some changes'.

Well, I was wrong. It wasn't some changes but a new overhaul.

I love the fact that the website was getting an update but then I went to put on my profile picture. I had a 2000x2000px piece ready- I know, massive, but I also remembered that old DA wanted 200 to 50px square image.

Still, I assumed this was new so I will try my piece- the same piece I had uploaded to other social media and it worked fine. It was... pixelated? So I shrunk it. First down by 50%. Then my 50% again. Then I googled the size needed. I then attempted 300px, 250px, 200px, 150px and finally at a 100px it looked like it should.

Well, the worst part is over right? Nope. I decided to use their new text editor to make a bio. Oh boy...

@@@@

Step by step visual bug replication:

1. Profile Picture:

I had a 2000x2000px profile picture:

Why is it's edges glitching out as a profile picture? Look at the black outlines in the middle of the triangle.

Now, let me try a more reasonable number. 300x300px.

The Edges are still messed up and not smooth. So is the middle:

Now let me put 100x100px on my profile pic, what I found after trying 2000, 1000, 500, 300, 50, 250, 200, and then 150 pixels.

Looks ugly, right? But let me show you the result on Deviantart:

Looks pretty HD to me. How is this fair? Having to try and try again to find the perfect size?

I tried multiple pictures. When I uploaded some realistic pictures, the messed up lines weren't too bad but when I uploaded an art piece with thick black lineart, that's when the problem arose. Please try it for yourself, I have found 100px to work the best.

I am sure this is not supposed to happen nor is this the intention of the website creators. Hence why I'm calling it a bug.

2. Text Editor:  !!!THE BUGGIEST THING ON ECLIPSE!!!

And this is actual bug, as in text disappearing, emoticons glitching, formatting going missing all while working on your text. This happens in the comments, journals, literature writing, and bio.  There might be more places this new text editor is used but I only know these 4 as of now.

First of all... What's up with that massive wide screen editor? Why does it take up the whole screen in such a ugly and disruptive way? Where did the HCI department of this website go?  Because I can understand the inner workings of this site and this is not good user interface.

I see conventions broken here in the worse possible way. A pure white text editor which shows no boundaries--how am I supposed to tell where the text border ends and where the page begins? Why is it pure white? It kind of hurts me and my wife's eyes. Also you have to select text to be able to put formatting on it? Why? Why isn't there a toolbar up at the top like word or even on the side like Photoshop? Maybe at the bottom like Facebook? Why am I allowed to do more formatting in some places and not the others? The users are screaming about customization and how it's getting taken away... and you can't even give them more formatting on every single place where the text editor is used? Why is it inconsistent like this?

Here are the text editing options you get in the comments, journals, submit literature box and bio in order:

Let's talk about one more issue before I mention the typing glitches. You know the plus sign at the left side of a new line to add a picture/video/gallery/emoji (Oh boy, we're going to talk about this soon) and link? Yeah, sometimes it stops showing up until I press enter. I think it happens after I saved a journal to draft and then open it again.  BTW, why can't we save literature to draft?

Now this is the juicy bit: The Text Disappearing!

 I'm going to use Submit Literature for this.

Let me use all the formatting allowed first:

Let me copy the link of this divider deviation, turn it into the thumbnail, which then makes it appear in the center for some much needed customization.

Let me add some windows emoji (I could only do that on Chrome. Firefox didn't allow it. Though I tested this issue on both browsers and it persists.)

Going to add 'an emoticon or avatar'

Eh? Why's the plus icon all the way up there? Maybe because I'm on a bulletin? Let me backspace.

It's still up there... What? Let me press enter and backspace.

Well, another little bug... this happened for the first time during my testing. Anyway, moving on to the big, big bug.

Now here I started struggling to replicate the bug. This bug is very inconsistent and I haven't exactly pinpointed what causes this bug. So to imitate what happened when I first encountered this bug (And what made me write this journal in hopes for all this being fixed either by quick bug fixing or by removing the forced eclipse until the website is actually stable) I copied some text from a notepad and pasted it. I'm not sure if that's what causes the bug.

I remembered the DA emoticons being the buggiest thing so I pasted it in between the "Italic" and "Underline".

I deleted the emoticon by selecting it a certain way and....

One character from the end of each 'paragraph'(i.e. before next line) was gone. The window emoji was glitched and my divider was missing.

Imagine adding 3 dividers and having a 30 point list and this happens. The last letter of every list item is gone and so are your dividers, only because you wanted to delete an emoticon you didn't like. And then imagine this happening 5 times within an hour.

It took me so long to find what actually did it. And what did it was that I selected the emoticon half way as depicted below:

And then pressing delete or backspace, sometimes one and sometimes the other.

To find what caused this bug, I kept pasting it and deleting it, using control+z and control+y to replicate my issues from before. I was able to find one sure way of replicating it which was selecting the emoticon a certain way and pressing delete and/or backspace from the keyboard but I have encounter this exact same issue by doing the following:

• Ctrl+z

• Ctrl+y

• Pasting

• Deleting

mainly the DA emoticon but sometimes even the copy pasted divider can cause this.

Another Inconsistency that I consider to be a bug with the text editor:

If I copy a formatted and decorated text in the same text editor, everything is perfect:

*text*

*Copied*

*pasted underneath the original text*

Sorry, I can't show you the whole thing because EVERYTHING IS MASSIVE ON DEVIANTART NOW. Even my wife, who needs essentially thick harry potter glasses to function(she's jokes about this herself), doesn't need or want every text and image on my phone and computer to be as large as possible. Heck, I would prefer if it was as small as or smaller than the old DA. I have done countless research and found people saying the same thing.

Anyway, what the heck happens when I copy this and paste it onto a new 'submit literature' on another tab?

Why? Just. Why? It's so buggy. Nothing is consistent. I feel like working to make anything look customized and personalized on the new Deviantart is hell. If you're trying to make this website more professional, why are you taking these artist's creative freedom away and forcing them to follow unnecessary and unwanted rules in a bug filled new version of the website? Eclipse is obviously not complete enough to be released, this should still be in beta testing.

And if you are using new users as beta testers then you are doing them a disservice. You're giving them a handicap over old users. Heck, I wish you just asked when I was making the account if I was a new user or not and if I say no, then I get the old DA. But no, you force this bug filled mess on a person trying to do business on your website. I love DA. I love where Eclipse is headed. I love that in the future you want to add more customization and you want to remove html and css and replace it with formatting etc. I love that you want to bring chat in. I love that you want to hide unwanted and unmarked NSFW posts. But it's just incomplete as of right now.

Oh, another issue that I am facing WHILE I MAKE THIS JOURNAL:

Let me just paste something I copied, like a sentence I decided to move lower or higher.

Did you notice anything?

Where... are my 'next lines'? why did all my separate paragraphs get merged together? WHERE ARE MY BLOODY INDENTATIONS? So I can only type now. I can't even copy paste anything. If I write a sentence in the wrong place I'll let you guys know, who knows, maybe it's too long to rewrite. God, the bugs make me so angry. I don't even want to type.

But I will power through because deviantart needs to know why people are so angry--what are they actually experiencing. I also want deviantart to know that I can see your potential and what you want to be.

But right now, you're too darn buggy.

Let's talk about something related to the text editor but different enough for a new heading.

3. Add emoticon or avatar

First of all, what the heck are these search bars? In what 'modern website' do I have to complete my query and press enter before I see any search results? also the results don't make sense-! I'm going into that too fast. First of all, this is what I'm taking about:

BTW, why is the Avatar list empty by default?

I know I can still search people up...

But there are 2 issues with that. One, my icon shows up zoomed in for some reason? Here, Go to my profile and look at my icon. And then compare it with this:

What the heck happened? What? how does this even happen? How can a bug like this exist and the devs think it's okay to make Eclipse live? Even something as simple as this is buggy! So much is buggy here and I haven't even tested EVERYTHING. I have only interacted with a small part of the website!

Okay, 2nd issue. How am I supposed to find plz accounts or anything if I search in plz and all I see is one dead account named EXACTLY 'plz'

Don't believe me? TRY IT YOURSELF!

Okay, so we need to search and find these accounts FIRST before we type their name in the search and hope they aren't bugged out? What? Why does it work like this?

Okay, now it's time for me to talk about the search bar. I can't finish talking about all the bugs of 'emoticons or avatars' without talking about it's search first and then segueing into art search. When you search in avatars for plz, at the least, all plz accounts should show up. Just like how when you search for heart in the community, all icons with hearts in the community shows up.

4. Search bars:

So. I search for 'watch' in the 'community' in 'Emoticons or Avatars'. I wanted a icon that gave me a cute little +(person) so I can ask people to watch me if they are interested.

Guess the results:

Okay.... I see 4 'thank you for the watch'... These are really tiny and hard to see (They are a little zoomed up there)... I see the deviantart mascot holding the watch guy... I see a little +(person), okay, I was looking for that- why is there so much fnaf. Are you telling me that there are literally, only 6 icons in the whole of DA that are about 'watch'? heck, I would understand if a wrist watch showed up, but what is this FNAF..... and just rando.

I went to my old account to check what shows up there.

First of all, looking at this:

Holy heck am I glad it's big! I love not accidentally clicking out of it or having to open it again and again because of a missclick. The new one is so small, I click anything I have to try and find the buggy little '+' icon again and search all over again. I just like that this one waits until you close it. This way you can put all the emoticons you want in an easy, non-disruptive manner.

Okay, let me search for 'watch':

Actually, it had the same results.... Except it searched BOTH official emoticons with community ones. Why separate them out like this!?.... but you know? Being able to see more of what shows up makes it easy for me to choose the icon I want to- also, 'wow, the icon I was looking for, wasn't in the community section at all! it was a official emoticon!'.

Yeah, I found this out, but you really think people are going to try this hard to find it or are they going to give up instead and not use emoticons and hate Eclipse? Because I am seeing a lot of the latter happening.

Honest to goodness, Eclipse simply needs to make an improvement to the search and the way it presents it. It's too tiny, too compact and showing me unrelated emoticons. Sure, the old Deviantart's search result wasn't the best, but it at least has visibility on it's side and that's not doing Eclipse's search system any good. They should in fact, improve upon the search system so it can accurately show us what we want and do it in a visually presentable manner.

Okay, let's talk about normal search. The MAIN Deviantart search.

Let me try and find myself:

............. So, I don't exist.

https://www.deviantart.com/qezp0yc41xq What is this

Okay, back to a slightly serious note. This journal is extremely long, but if you love this website I hope you read it and I hope you share it and help me raise awareness so the devs can notice and do something about this.
Either they can magically roll out fixes for all of this, or they can remove Eclipse as live and give the toggle back to everyone.

Before I write the summery and conclusion, there are a few suggestions I want to give to bring customization back while keeping everything as Eclipse seems to want it.

Customization:

1. Let people move the different 'sections' on their page left or right along with up and down. Any section should be allowed anywhere, there is no reason to restrict these people's artistic freedom in their page.

2. Along with fixing the Emoticon and Avatar thing, when people copy paste a thumbnail, it shouldn't just automatically take up a whole line and be a divider. They should be able to use it in the middle of the text  <--- Like this. The thumbnail can have a max size like old deviantart but no minimum size  <--- Like this.

3. If you are removing journal skins, which were css, I believe, then you can let people have a image as a background. Or they could have 3 images as background. One that makes the top, one that makes the bottom(like journal skins) and one that can be repeated to make longer according to how long the journal is.

4. Let people write under their spotlight pieces and gallery like old DA.

5. Let there be unlimited 'sections' that act like the bio. as in, you can put pictures on it, you can write text on it and really format it with all the dividers, buttons, plz icons, funny memes and gifs, whatever they want.

6. Let people give these 'sections' a background. Plain colored, gradient or image, like the custom box you guys have. If not, let the page have a background, the sections can remain the way they are.

7. Have as much of a word toolbar as you can in your text editor. Like google docs.

Other suggestions to improve HCI:

1. Reduce the size of everything. Why does the cover image take up half of my computer screen? look at youtube covers or facebook cover, they are more reasonable.

2.  HAVE THE BIO OPEN FULLY AT ALL TIMES! why do you have to click 'show more' to see the whole thing?? If the creator didn't want the person visiting to see a long bio- THEY WOULD WRITE A SHORT ONE.

I've been writing this for 6 hours, I can't think of anything else of the top of my head, but these are just some suggestions. Honestly, these suggestions might turn all the hatred towards eclipse into welcome. At least some of it.

SUMMARY:

The big major bugs:

1. The Avatar being blurry when uploaded at anything but 100px

2. The text editor deleting the end bits of each paragraphs when you ctrl+z or delete n emoticon. Also all the paragraph spacing being removed after pasting text.

3. Avatars being zoomed in when searched through Emoticons and Avatars.

4. When you search to add in avatars and icons, unless you search in the exact names, nothing shows up.

The Many but Tiny bugs:

1. Inconsistent text formatting when copy pasting to a new text editor

2. Search does not start showing results for things as you're typing. It doesn't show results that match what you wrote first, but show what it thinks people find relevant first and it's getting it wrong often.

3. Can't search and find smaller deviantart members. Have to search them on google instead.

Honorable mentions(Not exactly bugs but should be treated as such):

1. Inconsistent text formatting tools in different text editors like comments, journals etc.

2. Wide screen, weird text editor.

3. No toolbar.

4. Can't save Literature as draft.

5. Large text, large text editor, large bio, large sections, large cover. We aren't so hard of seeing, making them smaller will not only make it aesthetically pleasing but also make it easier to navigate the website.

6. Avatar list empty

7. PLEASE READ CUSTOMIZATION HEADING UP THERE ^

Conclusion:

Eclipse is trying to do a lot of good. It's trying to bring in proper chatting system, it's trying to give us better and instant notifications instead of having us reload, it's trying to remove unnecessary NSFW, and it's trying to make most of the customization from the old deviantart possible with tools instead of coding.

I see a bright future for it. I really do.

But right now, it's buggy, incomplete, and we can't even do half the things people can do on old deviantart and if we try and do it, we encounter so many bugs and errors.

Eclipse needs to go back in beta. I'd say for 6 months to a year longer. If it doesn't then it's purposely sabotaging it's new members by giving them broken and missing feature--the same features that work without issue on the old website--and pitting them against people who can still use the old website.

Please give the toggle back. Eclipse is NOT ready.