This Strip is Not Safe For Work!

Project Circles Suggestion Suggestion for a quality of life improvement: Project Circles. What are project circles? They are named lists that users can create and then add other users to. Then when a project is made (be it a strip, a flipbook, an animation, or anything that surfaces in future) one or more of these lists can be assigned to it, dictating who can participate. If a project has a project circle list assigned to it, everyone on that list can participate in the project! How it would work: A user clicks on a link allowing them to create a new Project Circle. They are asked to give the Project Circle a name. Once it is named, it is added to their Project Circles list and may be edited. Editing consists of entering the user names or user numbers of other users. If valid, the users will be added to the circle in question. Of course users may also be removed. How is it used: When a new project is created the option exists to designate it a Project Circle project, just as things can be designated Friends Only or Public. This gives access to a dropdown where the creator can choose one or more of their Project Circles to add to the project. This should be dynamic so the nature of the project can be changed at any time. For example a Project Circle project should be able to be converted to Public or Friends Only at any time, or projects of other sorts converted to Project Circle.

Why this is useful: 1. You can include others in your projects without having to add them to your friends list and without them having to add you to theirs! Unlike a friends list which really has no practical meaning for art projects (most artists will tell you art is no place for friendship!) Project Circles would allow you to choose only specific participants who fit a project. Likewise if someone acts up or "trolls" a project, kicking them off the Project Circle that gave them access isn't likely to cause the sort of meltdown and drama de-friending would cause. 2. Being included in a Project Circle acts as a direct invitation to participate. Being on someone's friends list doesn't really give any indication of whether or not they'd like you to take part in a specific strip, but being included on a Project Circle for that strip certainly is a direct invitation and gives encouragement to take part! 3. If you are working on a project with a friend, making a project circle containing the two of you is a more convenient method than trying to pass strips! When one person completes a panel they can just leave the project there and see if the other person wants to contribute, or jump back in themselves at any time. No timers to worry about!

Real World Cases for Use: Someone wants to do an Undertale fan comic, but of course hating on Undertale is a meme, so any attempt to have a sincere Undertale comic would simply lead to it being vandalized or ridiculed. The Undertale fan can create the Undertale Fan Comic Project Circle and add only people they know are sincere fans of Undertale to the project circle. They can remain friends with people who might ridicule their interests due to not having given those friends enough rope to hang themselves. Someone is a fan of drawing vehicles and knows of 3 other users who likewise also love to draw vehicles. They can create the Vehicle Enthusiast Project Circle and add those 3 other users, and use that circle to create vehicle-centric strips! As opposed to struggling to incorporate panels from users who say "I have never actually drawn a vehicle before in my life but thought I'd give it a try right at the climax of your big chase sequence" they can rest assured the chrome will remain quite shiny until the finish line! Someone could create a Nude Figure Drawing Project Circle without necessarily living under a cloud of impending doom and looking at the screen through barely-parted fingers every time they log in to check the progress of the project. This is only in theory, and this may well be impossible under any circumstances.

Additional Good Things: Allow easy copying of an existing Project Circle to your own Project Circle list so you can make use of it to create projects as well. When a strip is using a Project Circle, have the users in the circle displayed visibly at the top of the screen so people can see what they're getting into and with whom. Politely asking someone if they will grant you admission to a Project Circle is less tense than asking for inclusion on their friends list, especially if the art topic is the main bonding force.

I don't see any technical problems to implement this but there are several things to consider: in a way this means we are having small clubs or groups and we are essentially slicing up the page to small manageable parts .. so it would make sense to do something like this if we got many more users (i'm thinking 100+ active ones .. but then again as we gain users storage space will be my upmost concern) another problem to consider is how these groups would be managed: e.g. what if you don't want someone to join, what if you want to kick someone out, and what if there are 3 seperate Undertale groups because people got mad at each other or didn't know that there was already a group for this also consider that we cannot make truly exclusive things here (e.g. the filenames are made with easy archiving in mind so you can spy on secret strips - in a way everything is public) .. one way I see that this would work if we wanted to make Chutney into a franchise of sort -- like if the site was just a template that anyone could set up as their own site like a WIKI or wordpress or something similar (but I digress) .. anyway so I'm not against the idea but I feel the site is way too small to add this feature at this point (also believe it or not I had a similar idea when I planned the site -- I kind of wanted 'houses' that would compete with each other for stars and likes - and there would have been a seperate house for people making jokes or writing serious stuff etc. -- anyway so once again I'm on board but we are way too early to worry about it) .. then again we definetly need something like a folder (for a series e.g. a naked jesus folder) or tags of some kind to make navigation of the archives easier at least -- and that could be the first step towards this (of course tags have the problem that I'm not sure how PHP and SQL could be pushed to implement them -- it's a thing that is easier to add for other new kind of databases)

`Peyo` Hey there! Of course I don't consider anything like this urgent or necessary, but I wanted to get the concept out there, and I am glad you had similar thoughts. On a couple points you brought up... At its base it's really just an easier way to give a group unfettered access to a strip. (I gave actual case examples, but they're all just built off that simple idea.) For example, right now you can do all the same things using friends only games or secret games, just with the added issue of dealing with passing and timers, or having someone have the strip passed to them at an inconvenient time, or having difficulty coordinating the project. Or, for example, if the owner of a secret strip stops using the site for whatever reason, leaving the strip forever locked away and out of reach. A circle of people with access means the project it applies to would always be in reach for that circle to finish as people get inspired. So more than anything it's just a convenience and refinement. It does have application on higher levels, but what I would imagine it being most used for is 1 user making a Project Circle with another user's name in it and just using that to make strips they can work on together without any risk of "losing" the strip to others if a timer expires. Unless the site underwent a growth surge I don't think it would ever go much beyond that. As for letting people join or kicking them out, since it's really just a list of usernames maintained by the person who owns the strip, all that would be up to them privately to manage as strip owner. My write-up made this sound a lot more grand than it is, as it's really just something that lets you create a smaller "friends list" for a targeted friends only game. Thanks for reading it over, in any case!

indeed I think I thought a bit ahead from the original idea.. but then again I learned the hard way that there is no such a thing as adding a "simple little harmless feature" (e.g. I initially thought animations will be something like 2-3 frame little things .. I had no idea)

`Peyo` I certainly hope animation hasn't been doing the site any harm!

it's not so much as that it does it harm it's more like that it was such a silly little feature .. but uhh.. things escalated very quickly -- you guys pushed it to the limits in a few days I'm not sure how I can explain this.. in a way the whole site is just a cheap little thing built on old tech and attempts to mimic things that is easy for new tech by using complicated hacks and many features were added as an experiment only to see if they are possible in the first place .. but we kinda got used to them now and well.. the site mimic-ed new stuff too well and now it's hard to explain why certain features are tricky to add here so uhh.. the site is posturing as something better than itself and it does it so well that people actually believe that it is -- but in reality it was already pushed to the limit in the background like adding the animation was pushing the site to its limit -- it was just a little hack to see if it was possible in the first place -- but it ended up as something popular so now there is demand to push it further -- but as there was a tradeoff with the tech (for cost effectiveness mostly) further upgrades need to be hacks (which ironically end up on top of other hacks) in a way I feel the site was already pushed waaaaay beyond it's limits but I also clearly see the demand for more

anyway for now I added groups: [/group](/group) (let's take this one step at a time) this is as basic as it gets .. let's see how it goes

so far it already feels limited .. I need to keep reminding myself that these are not tags

`Peyo` Interesting and I appreciate the insight! However there's nothing wrong with the site being made this way. That method describes the entire AAA Gaming industry and all products by Autodesk! The difference being unlike the people running those corporations, you're actually an invested user of the product and doing it as a passion project, so I think this site will end up doing fine from a technical standpoint. You could actually just put your foot down and say no new features and the site is still the best thing going based on the tools and the ability of users to protect their work from vandalism. It's really great! I appreciate it a lot! I was a little confused by the group feature at first but then I realized it was really allowing you to title things as a series, then I was like "Oh nice!" Good feature!

indeed it's a problem of the entire programming industry ..sorry I realise I ended up just rambling in the end it's a bit half baked .. my plan is to add the tags on top of this later (as soon as I figure out a good way to add them)