Suggestions for Canvas and future events!

Escalating timers are an antipattern. It punishes anyone who looks away for more than thirty seconds - and thirty seconds per click is not exactly a brisk pace for maintaining attention.

Other than that, good shit, well done. Undo was a welcome surprise. Ditto the repetition prevention.

No wait, one other thing. (Complaint sandwich!) Scaling should be in integer powers. Everything but fully-zoomed-out and extremely-blown-up looked lumpy and distracting. Especially with all the pixel art going on.

On mobile I kept opening the whois pixel by accident when dragging. I often tap and hold to initiate a drag because I'm still looking at the art, but when i drag away and let go, it opens the whois thing. I think if you drag a certain screen-space distance away it should cancel the whois pixel lookup.

The heatmap I found too hard to tell where recent pixels were placed. I think at 100% opacity the "cold" pixels should be dark blue instead of their actual color.

A couple times I placed a dot, realized I actually didn't want it there and ran out of time to undo, which felt bad having to wait 30s. I wish it was a bit longer.

When you try to place a pixel a few milliseconds too early I feel like it should queue it and wait the few milliseconds for you.

I'm not super sure on the canvas having transparency. Most people treated the canvas as white, not transparent. If you wanted a white-on-white drawing, people will just make an outline.

Maybe a concept worth testing: if you place a pixel next to your own pixels, you get a (slightly) reduced cooldown, that way you get an extra boost when completing your art. (At the same time, I think there is beauty in the canvas being as simple as possible:)

Thanks for making it open source! I’m curious how complex the authentication stuff was. I didn’t place many pixels but it was fun to peek in and see what changed every once in a while! Would definitely be a fan of more in the future, though I don’t have any ideas

Have the cooldown time vary incrementally across the canvas—so there’s a “hot” end where people can make things quickly (and get overwritten quickly), and a “cool” end where designs take longer to draw but are more permanent.

First: Ta k you so much to grant and everyone else who made this project possible. I had a lot of fun, i think the problems made it even more sympathic.

One suggestion: maybe after expansion, the final canvas could be a 16:9 Format. This way its easier to find a frame for those who want to print it out. But maybe 2:1 like the actual canvas is fine too.

Im looking forward for next year :)

If alts are really discouraged, please take steps to actually prevent them.

[Sorry for the double reply]
\ The "numbers" template style would be considerably more useful if the palette was itself numbered. At least, while using that style.

I've seen a lot of people struggling to find the template. I think that it deserves its own button.

The dark mode is amazing. Seriously, I want it for the next years. I don't think that it needs such a huge button though, when a simple half-black half-white sun icon would do the trick.

On desktop the palette has an awkward shape, as a narrow 32x1 strip that you need to roll back and forth if the window isn't maximised (fairly often, since people were doing other stuff while placing pixels). It would be great if it was a 4x8 somewhere at the right.

A lot of people (incl. myself) were struggling to tell a few colours apart. Mostly dark grey vs. black vs. navy blue and dark chocolate vs. maroon. So it might be sensible to tweak the palette itself for the next years. But overall their hue distribution was really good, in no moment I thought "damn, I need more colours".

Okay wild idea for a smaller canvas :

Have the canvas fade out to white a little every hour.

Eventually old pixels would die and people would either have to maintain or draw new stuff. It would make the timelapse more interesting and more animated by default.

It would be amazing if parts of it could be animated. Maybe multiple layers of canvases (say, 5 frames, shown over a second). Each with their own images, which could be viewed as a flipbook.

Instead of going for a larger canvas, go for more layers.

Just a thought.

I started this, and never got started: https://lemmy.ca/c/musicleague

Part of the problem was that musicleague only works with a spotify login, but it could work with a fediverse login!

MusicLeague: https://musicleague.com/user-guide/

1. Each league is made up of a certain number of rounds.
2. Each round has a musical theme, like ‘covers’ or ‘I want your sax.'
3. When the round opens, league players are notified to submit a song that fits the theme.
4. When everyone has submitted (or the submission deadline arrives), everyone receives a link to the playlist to listen, consider, and then return to Music League to assign points and add comments to reminisce, toast and maybe a gentle roast.
5. Once the votes are in, everyone will be able to see the results, including who submitted what, how everyone voted, and all the comments.
6. Points are earned from round to round and accumulate through the entire league until a winner is crowned.

What we can do better:

• fediverse login instead of spotify
• submit from any music service, not just spotify
• multiple playlist options, with a note for when a certain song isn't on a service

This shouldn't be an annual event, but rather a perpetual one

Alpha-blending the color you're about to place means it's only a correct preview when the pixel it's over is already that color. A smaller or even circular cursor of the actual color would remain distinct from the canvas while indicating its effect more clearly.

I personally think the whois pixel function should also show the exact coordinates of the pixel, to make it easier to find the exact spot for templates.

Unless I missed something, the only way of doing it now was using the coordinates in the bottom left and then working from there.

That’s just a minor gripe anyway, the whole thing was great, thanks for organizing it!

Maybe replace Googles Captcha with an alternative like hCaptcha.

Hi, Voyager dev here, I’d like to see a very small, terse API for clients devs to make a more seamless experience!

The MVP IMO would be a way to automatically log the user in when opening the Canvas, perhaps by

• well known Canvas user handle for client to automatically DM for OTP
• client waits for OTP in DMs
• client adds a query parameter with the user handle and OTP to the URL to open browser, so user is automatically logged in with 0 clicks!

And I could see stuff beyond this. Like an API to know event metadata, docs on how to embed Canvas in app (would be great for engagement)

Anywho simple is best but would be awesome for tighter integration of apps/clients with a documented API!

The chat function was quite cumbersome in my experience (as someone without a matrix account); it was pretty slow to load as well.

Maybe such thing could be integrated into Lemmy itself somewhere in the future?

I often got the "you've already placed a pixel of that color there" error, even though I never touched this area. I also couldn't fix my own pixelart easily because of this.

The event was fun for the first 48 hours - before the expansion. After that it was mostly policing and defending existing art. I would prefer a 48 hour canvas without expansion.

That said, it was fun anyways. Thanks for all your work and thanks to grant for setting everything up and fixing issues on the fly.

Is there a history of the changes stored? I'd love to watch an accelerated animation of the creation process.

I did not find a way to simply "view the entire canvas & download a snapshot," which would be nice.

Extra editing features:

• Colour picker (from canvas)
• Show symbols/numbers on palette when using that template display style (e.g. label colour 23 so you don't have to count)

I'd be keen to run/test a local version, what do I need in the .env.local as a minimum to get up and running?

Overloading middle-click as both scroll and color-select, when right-click goes unused, is a weird choice. Especially when empty pixels don't count as white. Early on, I had no idea why my chosen color changed seemingly at random. Later, I had to mindfully select white from the bottom palette, when every other color was picked from nearby.

Could you make each pixel be made up of lots of smaller pixels? Maybe some sort if repeating pattern.

One another game suggestion: The Turing Test, reversed.

Using LLM API, make people:

1. Ask one thing and spot a human answering them;
2. Answer one question and make another human believe they are an LLM.

Only these two rounds (or a text box + checkbox) per a session with a set delay, from a random user or a robot. The goal is counter to the current discourse of noticing LLMs being not humans, but the opposite – people being rewarded for acting like machines and spotting real people in the web poisoned by generative models. I don't know if scores are needed, just complimenting DMs maybe, because mastering tactics to break LLMs destroys the fun.

Besides only English input for the simplicity and a stop-list of words, it needs a balancing system that mixes fake and real inputs to cause no LLM-only hours across all timezones. To make it more interesting, there should be some additional prompts to LLM, like 'answer like an old lady' or 'answer like a nerd' to make LLM seem more humane.

Theming it after spies, zombies, whatever may help.

A toggle to show grid lines would be awesome.

A really small canvas with a short time sounds cool

I think it would be good to get some privacy and security people to work on the software. I think bots and duplicate accounts are a big issue but maybe you could try implementing some sort of new tech to solve it.

Overall it was a great experience. I just got annoyed at the Australians

I would like a shorter timer for small instance. So bigger communities have a longer timer and small a shorter one. But i affraid it wont help at all.

Protected area as in minetest. It would help against grief.

Also for new account with 0 coms, just created during this canva event : restriction, second layer for drawing before approval...something like that ?

Not suggesting any big things here... All I propose is to have the options for toggling the canvas overlays (empty canvas, heat, template) directly within the canvas editing screen instead of putting it in the sidebar, kinda like Google Maps. I think the sidebar version would be preferred in mobiles, so you could make this desktop only.

Alternatively, you could allow the user to place pixels on the canvas even while the sidebar is opened, like the way it was for the first 48 hours of the event. Also ensure the right side of the color palette is not hidden by the sidebar.

An extended undo functionality would have been handy sometimes. Like, having an eraser that would revert any pixel I have placed myself (and that is still visible) to what it was before while adding one to my pixel store until that is filled. That way I would be able to move or correct things without having to wait (possibly twice as long) for the counter.

Suggestions:

• When getting rid of bots, undo their changes.
• Assign the pixel timer based also on IP, not just account. That should discourage people who used multiple accounts just to have more pixels.
• Don't let freshly created accounts to place pixels. They compound with both issues above.

I would suggest a small countdown to the end of the event on the place where the pixels count and coordinates belong (circled below), only displaying during the event.

pay for a billboard, lol.

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Taking the risk to make myself unpopular but here is a wish from the heart.

Discourage/ban all nationalism. Especially flags.

Reasons:
Nation-states and country borders are a fairly recent invention in history. In this time and age, it's quite counter-intuitive to still keep identifying oneself with (or get emotionally attached to) such divisive concepts that have been devised by those who govern. Especially in a game like this where collaboration is encouraged regardless of anyone's location or belief, we should not get counter-productive over flags and the politics associated with them, or get to argue wether flags represent government entities or the people (they are usually owned by the former, just to say).

Further, I find flags (and also logos) are just so utterly uncreative things to draw. To me, it just shows how societies are still immature; false attachment to the divisive and competitive concepts they were raised to believe in, to the benefit of those who profit from divisiveness and competitiveness. Therefore, please consider a ban on all flags and instead encourage "real" artwork (especially original one).

e: For those who still want to display some honorary mention of their ethnicity/people/heritage, there is likely plenty of symbolism available which may suit their case much better than a symbol of nationalism.