I have been gone for a couple of days but i was just wondering if this is something new you guys are working on? Sometimes it works and other times it doesnt. Then there is sometimes it just puts up a pic that says link. I find that rather annoying. Then in the Megan QT thread there is 2 links and the thumbnails show Misty Anderson not Megan.

If the bugs were corrected i think it would work out really good.

It's a new feature introduced a couple of days ago.   It works on the same principle which creates thumbnails on mainpages.  Some links generate a thumbnail some don't.  When links don't generate a thumbnail the 'link'-symbol will appear.

To be quite frank.     I don't like it either.  People are forced to click on links which they don't see.  Run the risk of clicking on a streaming-site, which some never want to click.  Copying/pasting those links is a headache. Some antivirus-software doesn't respond properly.  There can always be 'a snake in the grass' .  One should be able to really see on what they click.

Im not a fan of the new features either.

 

Turning links into the word ‘Link’ is kind of annoying especially as you have got to ‘Mouse Over’ to see what website you are being directed to. I definitely like to know the name of the site before clicking on it. Also its better to see at a glance which sites have already been linked to.

 

Also the thumbnail feature is kind of annoying as well. Its ok for when someone just gives one quick random link to a page without giving any info. But on posts where 5 or more links have been given and a thumbnail has already been included it just makes a real mess of the post. Especially when the links are to .jpg images then sometimes 3 or 4 thumbnails will clog up the post. It can also move all the other links out of position and make big gaps.

 

It would be better if the thumbnail creator was an optional extra so you could just click a button to switch it on or off.

I really dislike this for the aforementioned reasons. Sometimes I want to copy and paste a bunch of links... this makes it a long, drawn-out affair.

 What about thumb preview, and link both? It doesn't seem like that would be too difficult of a modification.

I like it either way but it does seem to have it's bugs. If i want to see the URL I hover over and look at the status bar, and if i want a link it's simple to copy the location. Unless your passing multi links on to other forums or something...

It's a work in progress and should help avoiding redirecting/404 -sites, not cause people to click them blindly. The reason is that if there's a thumb, it's definitely a valuable gallery, otherwise it's most likely not so important link anyways. The main idea is still to gather galleries. In addition, the generic "link" -text could be replaced with "redirecting", "dead" etc. in the future. Or the link could even never be seen, if the link is harmful.

The main reasons for this feature is to make the site more visual, since we're too textual to gather the interest of a common surfer. Other reason is of course to make the first few posts more valuable for identifying the model, and to help members decide if they want to read the thread.

I'm still evaluating the possibility to give the possibility to turn the feature off. Forcing people to post galleries instead of links to unusable content would keep us protected and on our track. Therefore, people posting galleries should be rewarded and their posts really should gather much more attention...

Well I for one have no interest in passing links on to other forums Hunter ... I just collect a lot of models and keep a text archive of gallery links for all of them, highlighting those I've downloaded etc. But sometimes it may be months before I do a 'catch up' of what's been going on in a thread, hence the need to copy multiple URLs.

It would be good if the feature was optional in my opinion, if that's possible. Maybe set to 'on' as a default, so those who dislike it can make the effort to turn it off, leaving you to still benefit from the positives you describe? A "warning: link may redirect" notice could be useful. Even so, I like to know the URL addresses for 'research' reasons (can give clues to what sites a lesser-known and hard to find model appears at) - so it would be a shame if you can't see the link at all once it's dead or starts to redirect.

[quote user="Vatsis"] if there's a thumb, it's definitely a valuable gallery, otherwise it's most likely not so important link anyways....[/quote]

Sorry, but I don't agree.  Some (valuable) gallery-links just don't generate a thumb.  That doesn't mean it's worthless.

I would recommend to seriously reconsider this feature.  A post with several links look rather 'messy' (thumbs and "link" 's) and what if a link dies ?  A lot of ( x )'s ?

I don't like the the new feature. There should be at least the url under the generated previews to make it possible to search for them on a page. If you have a bunch of links to post  and want to be sure not  to make reposts it's often faster than using the search function. When no preview can be generated there should be only the url.

Nevertheless I think the server capacities can be used more useful, for e.g. for editable previews for all requests.

All valid points. I'll take the picture-preview feature off until the tech difficulties can be fixed. Hopefully not too many got attached to it...

I think I'll put resources on elsewhere - there's never enough bandwidth.