New Recommendations system for Downloads + new comments view
 

Hi All,

Today I have rolled out a new "Recommendations" system for Downloads, along with a few small tweaks of the download pages.

Recommendations

The Recommendations system uses some Scikit and Numpy magic to vectorize and figure out "closest" other downloads to the one you are viewing. This uses the Title, Section (Lots & Housing, etc), Search Parameters, and Tags/Keywords (in that order) to find the closest 10 matches. These matches are then displayed at the bottom of the page.



Other Download Page changes

Additionally to the Recommendations, I have added "More Downloads By" IF the creator has more than 3 uploads on MTS. I've also moved the Author information to the sidebar, and added Social Media links, so it appears in a compact section.



The section for Creator Utilities has also moved into the buttons bar just above the tabs.

Additionally, the tabs now have some rounding on the tabs themselves. The Upload Date and Search Parameters have their own box called "Download Details"

Comments

Comments on Downloads now have a new look, and load inside an iframe on the download page itself.



Thanks posts are indicated with a green border and you can easily paginate while being on the download view itself.

Feedback

One downside to move the Author into the sidebar, is that downloads with a very short description now have even more space left blank. I'm testing out some alternative page designs that can help alleviate that.


Thanks to Nopke, simsample, and Lyralei for helping test these features!

Regards
T

I love the recommendation feature! With the huge amount of content available on MTS I can see that coming in handy for discovering hidden gems. I will add that I'm not a huge fan of the comments redesign, but it could just be me with a potentially unpopular opinion. I quite like the 'read' markers as well as the green highlight for thanks posts, but the dark blue background against the white background (against yet another blue background) looks a bit overwhelming at first glance. That and the usernames/profile pics for comments not matching the design language of the rest of the site I think is what does it for me. I hope that doesn't come off as too negative (I'm sure I'll come around eventually), I love the rest of the new content and am appreciative of the regular work that has been done to the site in recent years

Thanks for the feedback! I get the comments, in the sense of "design language" - MTS is kind of a hodge podge of stuff over the last 20 years. Personally, though, I prefer the light/dark/light view of the newer comments versus the light/light/light of the older comments view since it's (for me) easier on the eyes.

I can also try a more muted version sort of like this:



So, no rounded avatars, a grey background, and no "arrow" between avatars and the post itself.

What I can do, though, is to add a setting that allows you to read comments in the "old" view (aka a new page), and look at the way avatars are displayed.

Would it be possible to make a setting for always showing comments in the old style? The big white boxes on blue background is not very easy on the eyes, especially using dark mode and Slate.
Could be a slide option like what we have for "Show old-style thumbnail overview".

I really appreciate the Recommendations and More Downloads.

I fixed up the Dark mode comments, so it should correctly detect the prefers-color="dark" now!

They still show up as large white boxes on blue background to me. Do I need to re-sign in or something before the correction is visable?

Do you have your colour mode set to Dark? (Note - this is a totally different option from the Slate theme)

As far as I know, I use both Slate and Dark. I mean, on some pages it says "dark" and on some pages it says "Slate". Every page looks they same though so I don't know what differs. Sorry if this isn't helpful!

Hrm it works for me when I try it (both selecting Dark/Default and also Dark/Slate). If you view source on the iframe, the second line should be:

<html color-mode="dark">

(It can also show up as default but the main page will have a color-mode="dark" and so should override this)

I don't know if you changed back or if the changes you made finally kicked in on my end, but the comment view is now looking good/same as before! Thank you!

I didn't change anything I guess it was just cached for a long time somehow?

Good to hear it's working though!

I'm sorry to bother you again, but the comment section is back to being bright white/blue on dark/slate theme. Did something change?

Nope, I didn't change anything at all code wise.

I think the new comments section design looks okay and fresh! I do have one (minor) complaint/suggestion: Navigating the comment section can be a bit of a nuisance, since we now have two up-down scrollbars, the main browser scrollbar and the comment section's own scrollbars, and if your mouse isn't hovering over the comments area of the webpage, you won't be able to scroll down. I don't recall the page behaving this way. Is it possible to do away with the internal scrollbar and make use of the main scrollbar like before?