Just happened to look at my profile, and noticed that my most recent model’s thumbnail was… moving?
…Ok, I’m being a bit funny; I have a series of models where I upload both a jpg thumbnail with no animation and a gif thumbnail with one on it. Now, historically, the animated gif one has been the main thumbnail on other sites I upload it to, but if I tried to set a gif as the main thumbnail on Thingiverse, it would just default to the grey “cog” picture to indicate that uh-oh, something went wrong.
However, that seems to have changed–and there’s a bit of an issue with that.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good change, but the issue is that this change, as far as I am aware, was never communicated with the userbase at large. The only way I found out about it was because I accidentally forgot to indicate the jpg as the main thumbnail, and it just so happened to default to the gif. I apologize if I just missed it, but if I had known this was a feature sooner, I would have started uploading gifs as thumbnails for other previous models, and wouldn’t have had to go back and edit a number of my previous uploads to reflect that.
So this brings me to the title of the post. I’ve been paying attention to the AMAs and this forum, but despite a lot of big promises, it feels like not a lot of changes have been coming to the platform. But while I understand a lot of the work being done right now is probably just taking a comb to straighten out the spaghetti code of a long-negelected site, at a certain point, I was genuinely wondering if any concrete changes were actually being made.
The issue, of course, is that while at least one has been made that affected me, I didn’t know about it until I discovered it by accident.
This is an issue.
So here is my proposed solution:
Whenever a change is made and is pushed to live, a popup comes out of the notification icon the next time someone logs in, with the title “new features are here!” or somesuch. It then details what changes have been implemented. It’s nice that we have the forums, but general users aren’t checking here every day, and even so, some small changes like this one aren’t being mentioned.
At the very least I think this would do a lot to improve the users’ opinion of the new team, but I really just want it so I can know ASAP what things I am now able to use on the site.