TL;DR
I've had a handful of 1:1 conversations with people or in Discord and wanted to capture current state of things and direction that I'm thinking of building towards. Feel free to leave comments or thoughts, especially if you think I might've missed something we've talked about. I'll probably be adjusting this as I start tackling things 😀.
The Good!
- Good user engagement and retention recently, both from people searching for Minis and creators adding/tagging their own Minis. Haven't been "advertising" on Facebook or Reddit at all either which is great.
- There's a steady stream of incoming Minis and older Minis with people adding tags.
- The Reddit parser I wrote kinda quickly that sits running on our server is doing a surprising amount of work, scanning Reddit posts and comments for new potential Minis.
- The site has been functioning well with very little maintenance outside of normal approving of Minis.
Problems
- Tagging consistency (and only one moderator) - The UI for tagging isn't great and some people think "Oh the more tags I add, the more people will find my Minis!" leading them to add way too many tags. On the other side, sometimes people only add one or two, and I spend time getting those to the approval level.
- The performance of the UI just isn't great for most people, images are loading quick enough, but the main pages have some frustrating workflows.
- Very Mini-centric, not a ton of terrain/scatter. I'm not quite sure how much of a problem this is, but there is quite a few people searching for terrain and not finding it.
What's Next
So what's top of mind to happen next? This is roughly prioritized, but I always reserve the right to do what sounds most interesting on a given day 😀.
Scanning Creators
Problem - Manually adding Minis kinda sucks, especially when creators upload a bunch at the end of every month.
Solution - A while back I kinda secretly wrote an Azure Function that will scan a creator's page for new items and index them. These have been working for a while, but need to be triggered manually.
Implementation - Tracking in TODO:
Autotagging
Problem - Tagging is tedious and people are bad at it.
Solution - Build out the ability to automatically tag Minis on creation, and start to use heuristics to apply tags.
Implementation - Tracking in TODO:
Beta UI
Problem -
- The UI for TMI is slow and not well architected, the beta UI is intended to be a complete re-write to fix that.
- The beta UI does solve that, but doesn't have a ton of people opting into it right now.
- The beta UI has issues with authenticated pages that'd be pretty hard/time consuming to fix.
Solution - I'm not going to focus on getting the beta UI complete, I'm going to get feature parity for the browsing and viewing experience, while leaving the adding, tagging, and moderating experience in the "old" experience for now.
Implementation - Tracking in TODO:
Moderator Clean-up
Problem - I'm the only moderator, partially because the moderator UI is mediocre.
Solution - Find someone else willing to moderate and fix the UI.
Implementation -
Code
Problem - The Mini Index is written in code which leads to technical debt ;)
Solution - Endlessly have debt and fix some of it.
Implementation -
Deeper Thoughts
If you are/want to help out on The Mini Index, below here has some deeper thoughts into what I wrote above including links to GitHub issues to read more.
Beta UI
The beta UI is written in React and currently in a different repo (aluhrs13/tmi-react (github.com)). It's fairly barebones but functional and performant for what it does. Most of what needs to be done was captured above, once that's done, to get "full" parity in the long-run, we'll need to figure out the right way to do JWT tokens between the React front-end and ASP.NET back-end in a secure manner.
Viewing / Browsing Minis
There's nothing too crazy in this space to think about, most of the core experiences are continuing to work well, with a couple features on the backlog that are worth consdiering at some point:
Adding Minis
Overall nothing major here, scanning of creators is by far the biggest improvement we could do and captured above.
Tagging
I hit one of the top problems with tagging above, but the two remaining top of mind are also fairly interesting problems.
- Users need it to be VERY CLEAR that they have met the "bare minimum tagging" bar.
- Most TagPairs are D&D 5e focused. Someone with Pathfinder or other systems experience working through making TagPairs would be really nice.
Tag Clean-up
A chunk of moderating is cleaning up other people's "bad" tagging.
- Need a way to tell or imply to people that they should chill out when adding tags.
- Should tags require a description, that'd dissuade people from adding new one-off tags by increasing the barrier to it.
Driving Engagement and Retention
Not at all high priority
Code
These things just aren't that important.
Other stuff
Other issues that would be nice to do eventually.
TL;DR
I've had a handful of 1:1 conversations with people or in Discord and wanted to capture current state of things and direction that I'm thinking of building towards. Feel free to leave comments or thoughts, especially if you think I might've missed something we've talked about. I'll probably be adjusting this as I start tackling things 😀.
The Good!
Problems
What's Next
So what's top of mind to happen next? This is roughly prioritized, but I always reserve the right to do what sounds most interesting on a given day 😀.
Scanning Creators
Problem - Manually adding Minis kinda sucks, especially when creators upload a bunch at the end of every month.
Solution - A while back I kinda secretly wrote an Azure Function that will scan a creator's page for new items and index them. These have been working for a while, but need to be triggered manually.
Implementation - Tracking in TODO:
Autotagging
Problem - Tagging is tedious and people are bad at it.
Solution - Build out the ability to automatically tag Minis on creation, and start to use heuristics to apply tags.
Implementation - Tracking in TODO:
Beta UI
Problem -
Solution - I'm not going to focus on getting the beta UI complete, I'm going to get feature parity for the browsing and viewing experience, while leaving the adding, tagging, and moderating experience in the "old" experience for now.
Implementation - Tracking in TODO:
Moderator Clean-up
Problem - I'm the only moderator, partially because the moderator UI is mediocre.
Solution - Find someone else willing to moderate and fix the UI.
Implementation -
Code
Problem - The Mini Index is written in code which leads to technical debt ;)
Solution - Endlessly have debt and fix some of it.
Implementation -
Deeper Thoughts
If you are/want to help out on The Mini Index, below here has some deeper thoughts into what I wrote above including links to GitHub issues to read more.
Beta UI
The beta UI is written in React and currently in a different repo (aluhrs13/tmi-react (github.com)). It's fairly barebones but functional and performant for what it does. Most of what needs to be done was captured above, once that's done, to get "full" parity in the long-run, we'll need to figure out the right way to do JWT tokens between the React front-end and ASP.NET back-end in a secure manner.
Viewing / Browsing Minis
There's nothing too crazy in this space to think about, most of the core experiences are continuing to work well, with a couple features on the backlog that are worth consdiering at some point:
Adding Minis
Overall nothing major here, scanning of creators is by far the biggest improvement we could do and captured above.
Tagging
I hit one of the top problems with tagging above, but the two remaining top of mind are also fairly interesting problems.
Tag Clean-up
A chunk of moderating is cleaning up other people's "bad" tagging.
Driving Engagement and Retention
Not at all high priority
Code
These things just aren't that important.
Other stuff
Other issues that would be nice to do eventually.