On Monday 22 September 2008 20:30, Zero3 wrote: > Hello > > Here is my usability review I offered to do. > > - Zero3 > Wikipedia ======
Developed by: On the Tor article, this says "The Tor Project". I've changed the Freenet article to say "The Freenet Project", with a note about FPI/volunteers in the changelog. Available in: If I just include a list of languages with largish l10n files, wouldn't that be original research? I haven't done anything with this yet. Tor doesn't have such a header. Statistics: I agree the old stats are ridiculously out of date, but what to replace them with exactly? As far as I know there aren't any content stats; the FMS board stats for example don't break things down by content. Please post the stats you would like us to cite. They would need to be mirrored onto the web so we can have a somewhat permanent link on wikipedia to them. Google: We have a pretty good ranking in any case. There's an entire industry dedicated to optimising search engine rankings, we can't really afford to play with that, and IIRC Google ignores tags nowadays anyway? Website ===== Website front page: I have got rid of the reddit/digg links for the 0.7.0 announcement. Adding graphs could be counterproductive, we don't want it to look like the Statistics page! We could mention the last commit or commits in the last week in a box somewhere maybe... The fundamental problem is that actual Freenet users get their news from the mailing lists or from FMS, *not* from the web site. This isn't going to change. We could post new builds on the website using the same text as goes out in the announcement... would that help? Usually it's just a bunch of bugfixes etc, of little value to anyone not on Freenet. And the 0.7 announcement would have to disappear. Alternatively, we could try to reinstate regular status updates - once a week, once in two weeks, or once a month. These could be posted to the web page as well as the mailing lists/FMS. This is probably the best way forward as it has a wider value. What is wrong with the prominent "Press enquiries should be directed to Ian Clarke", exactly? "Note to editors" etc are common on both web pages and press releases, no? We *could* move it to the People page, but we'd likely have more misdirected enquiries/frustrated journalists, no? What is Freenet? ========== How much knowledge of p2p is it safe to assume on the part of a user? Most people visiting the web site will probably have come across the term "node" somewhere - e.g. supernodes in p2p networks. It's not immediately obvious how to cleanly juggle the second and third paragraphs to define "node" before using it: It would of course be convenient to define "node" in para 3, but we don't really want to have to move para 2 to after para 3, because imho para 2 is more important, isn't it? With regards to usage in China, there was a website freenet-china.org, it is still up, but seems to have been last updated in 2003. They did publish news onto their Freenet site (which may have been a separate network). They had their own (localised) distribution of Freenet (0.5? 0.3?). Also, we have one chinese developer (not sure if he's mainland) and at least one anonymous chinese mainland translation contributor. There were several boards on FMS distributing chinese news. Sadly these now seem defunct, the only chinese discussion is on zh.freenet between the two people I just mentioned. With regards to the middle east, I dunno. Freenet has certainly been used to distribute censored content in the west - the Diebold files, lots of anti-scientology stuff, politics of all sorts (anarchist, white supremacist, animal rights), and so on. Why do people reading the What is Freenet? page need to understand "advanced stuff" ? The first paragraph is IMHO essential, it's not realistic to expect people to read the Philosophy page before reading the What is Freenet? page: Freenet *is* censorship resistant, that's one of its defining values. Having said that, it might be a good thing to include the diagram - if we can prune enough text for it not to go over a page. But we have to get across the idea of a censorship resistant distributed datastore, and the current text does that. Download page ========= I have removed the bit about promiscuous mode, since we don't actually ask the user about it any more. IMHO "opennet" is a bad name, it's non-obvious. But in the simple mode UI, the only mention is the Strangers page and the security levels. What is the problem with the link to faq.html#firewall? The link works, and leads to useful text, no? If we move the ports to the Connectivity page we will need to update the FAQ item. What is the problem with the links for additional info on each OS? That is, what would look better? I have rewritten the post-install section, comments are welcome. Installer ===== The security warning from Java isn't ideal, agreed. Fixing it would mean buying a code signing cert for a large amount of money per annum. The rabbit: You mean in JWS or in the installer? We have a scalable version of it somewhere... Improving the danish translation is of course a good idea, well volunteered. :) Seriously, if it's readable, we should keep it, right? I have made the auto-start option top-level so it is between "base" (which despite being mandatory had and maybe still has some optional components), and "plugins". If we want to keep the selection then we should show the accurate size of the plugins. Official plugins are loaded from the web site over HTTP, I don't think they are updated by default but I'm not sure; this is the main reason why somebody wouldn't want the plugins. Maybe saces can get around to fixing this by implementing revocable plugins over Freenet? Apart from that, several of the plugins do things that advanced/paranoid users may object to: if you are on an untrusted LAN, MDNSDiscovery and UPnP are a bad idea; JSTUN may be a problem if you're worried about people trying to find your node by analysing STUN requests. The current autostart detail text: "Start the node automatically on startup. STRONGLY recommended. If this is turned off Freenet will be much slower: it will take a long time to get up to speed after every restart, downloads will take longer, and the node will be much less useful to the network." Comments? Making a full-page question out of it would probably involve making significant source level changes to IzPack, so isn't likely to happen. We could get rid of the other options but is that a good thing given we need the page anyway? It might be possible to change the [Finished]. Perhaps there is an l10n key for it? Probably it's part of IzPack's l10n keys, but it may be possible to override it. I really don't understand why creating a user - a measure which is solely intended to improve security by not having Freenet run as System - causes concern for so many windows-using geeks. You can't log in as that user, and thus it isn't visible on the login screen. And it's standard practice on unix. And it improves your security against a hypothetical exploit in Freenet. WHY IS THIS BAD? Having said that, it does seem to cause some installation failures, so maybe we should turn it off. However, running as the installing user isn't straightforward, we'd probably end up running as System. Nextgens??? The custom firefox profile is essential. Okay, if we get rid of the activelinks, it's a little less essential performance-wise, but still reasonably important especially if you load gallery sites or the Activelink Index. For security it's fairly essential - it's easy for a regular website to read browser history and scare users, and probably report that info back to the site owner. It may be possible to avoid all these issues by making a custom XULRunner-based browser, but making a good one will likely be a lot of work - the basic XULRunner browser is *really* minimal. I do have an idea for how to auto-fix the it-set-freenet-as-default bug by editing profiles.ini however. I haven't implemented it because I need to find somebody who can reproduce this bug - it doesn't happen for me on either iceweasel 2 or firefox 3, with the command lines used by the Browse Freenet script. But we still get reports every so often... maybe it's a windows specific bug? Or maybe FF1? So it may be possible to remove the "don't close me" window. I agree we should use the bunny for the start/stop scripts. https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2623 The idea behind the start/stop icons is that gamers for example may want to shut down Freenet before starting an online deathmatch, and then start it back up again afterwards - whether or not they are actually using it immediately afterwards. Just having the "Browse Freenet" link encourages the kind of classic p2p behaviour of "Start it up, expect instant satisfaction" that we cannot provide, and neither can most other p2p networks, certainly for large not-so-popular files. Resurrecting the tray icon is a good idea, but hardcore gamers are going to want to shut that down as well, especially as it would have to be coded in Java for it to be maintainable. A minimal GUI java app only takes 10MB of RAM, so hopefully the majority would use the tray icon for starting and stopping Freenet. But even here, the majority of XP desktops have too many tray icons to show them all at once, so most users won't see the tray icon unless they go looking for it. Popup notifications make sense; exposing notifications for e.g. RSS feeds has been in the bug tracker for a long time, maybe exposing them skype-like makes sense too. The wizard ======= I have changed "I am not a newbie, please skip the wizard!" to "I will configure the node manually (not recommended).". This is probably a good thing IMHO. I have added a bug for show the wizard until the user acknowledges it: https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2624 The problem with browse.cmd (Browse Freenet) opening a browser pointing to the current directory is fixed. Please install a new test node and verify this. The bandwidth limit page is automatically skipped if UPnP successfully detects the bandwidth of your connection, and the value detected seems sane. However, if you have UPnP turned off, or the plugin turned off, or a direct connection, or a router behind another router, this won't work. A free public bandwidth testing service might be an option but would probably be detectable, likely easier to identify as Freenet than JSTUN is?? Something hosted by us would certainly be detectable as Freenet-related. As regards memory usage, unfortunately: - The user does know if he has little RAM e.g. on a low spec computer. - The datastore and the queue can use huge amounts of RAM, and *this is dependant on the size of the store and the queue*. - Java doesn't provide a way to detect the total AFAIK. It might be possible to build platform specific glue to find out. When the salted hash store is enabled by default for new nodes (given a size limit on the store autodetection or the bloom filter), and the db4o branch is merged, then hopefully we can get rid of this, and tell the user when the queue is so large that he should increase the memory limit. Unfortunately finishing the db4o branch is more work than various usability tweaks, so it's not a high priority at the moment. I do think it should yield reductions in system impact, overall hassle, and improvements to performance. Fproxy: Activelinks =========== Ian wants to get rid of activelinks. Any thoughts? IMHO it should be decided by the theme... the theme we are considering for the new default, by Dieppe, will not have them. http://amphibian.dyndns.org/freenet/browse-mockup/html/browse.html http://amphibian.dyndns.org/freenet/mockup2/mockup2/html/browse.html (Probably somewhere between the two; both by Dieppe, I just host them). Your justification for activelinks is exactly right however: 'Though not all equally pretty, the activelinks give you some of the first visual proof that you are about to enter "The Freenet", and each activelink works as an interesting little teaser for the sites behind them.' IMHO activelinks are an important part of the first time user experience: they reduce the chances of the user not being able to see what to do next with Freenet. On the other hand, Ian thinks they're ugly. And they do make the page take longer to load. I would be interested in your views: we can reopen the debate on activelinks if need be. Fproxy ==== Widening the menu so that each item fits on a single line would likely waste a lot of space with the default theme, especially as in many languages these are wider still. Introducing some spacing might help, but the real solution is to eliminate unnecessary menu items, use submenus, and a new theme, probably with the main entries in a menu bar at the top. See above. I agree re highlighting. https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2625 The messages page only shows up if there are messages, no? And when you remove the last message, it should disappear from the menu, and redirect to the Browse Freenet page?? I'm sure that's how it worked - I wonder what has changed??? Are you sure about this? I agree about the plugins page. https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2566 The config page: https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2626 Icons for the different security levels would be very useful, we could use them in the new theme (we are going to make the security levels a permanent part of the interface, and make several things that are currently alerts no longer alerts but displayed on their own pages with maybe a count as an alert). https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2627 There are major changes planned for the Friends page, but it may be a while before they are all implemented. Look here (different to the 2 urls mentioned previously): http://doc-fr.freenetproject.org/Fproxy_mockup We should make the relevant page more self-documenting, as you say. The Strangers page will be on a sub-menu so not immediately visible. With regards to the form, is it sufficient to simply mention it? Paste the reference here (the node will usually automatically strip chat client line prefixes): OR Enter the URL of the reference here: OR Choose the file containing the reference here: Enter description: Add Current activity should be moved to advanced mode only: https://bugs.freenetproject.org/view.php?id=2628 The thinking with the ports box was that adding a Friend would often not work because of port forwarding issues. That was before we had an "Internet connection" page. Should we completely move it? Or maybe have some more self-documentation? "Please note that adding a Friend may not work unless you have forwarded UDP port XYZ on your router" ??? I have slightly improved the strings on the form in 22750 (trunk). Please have a look. Downloads and uploads ============== "Global queue" is distinct from per-client queues, which are also possible in FCP2... fortunately nobody uses it for persistent requests. I have changed it to "Downloads and uploads for [name]". I have tried to improve the upload form a bit. Comments welcome. I'm not sure what to do about CHK versus KSK/SSK. Who exactly should be using this form anyway? Just uploading a file will not make it available to anyone else. We need some self-description, like you said... Browsing Freenet ========== Maybe we should get rid of ALL of the dev flogs. I know when I have updated mine a number of people have been offended at its being included. And I very rarely update it - after all, I have better things to do with my time, like developing Freenet! This is evidently true of the others too. If I was to start doing regular status updates again I could post them somewhere... my blog is the obvious place. Any "authoritative" official freenet freesite would need to be protected by security measures we don't have right now: if the key was leaked to a bad guy the consequences could be bad. The rest ===== IMHO FMS is *really* important. However, it is not easy to use, and it's not going to be easy to use in the foreseeable future. An FMS plugin is currently under development which we could bundle and embed in Freesites, so would be much easier to set up, and obvious from day one. Of course it's going to take time to develop a good web UI for it, and you'll still need to do CAPTCHAs to start with. Freemail has never worked reliably for me. :| ISF has a description in English saying it's a french index. Isn't that enough? With regards to indexes: - Both versions of the activelink index are categorized. - TUFI is in fact also categorised, but not by default. The menu at the top allows you to select by category. I'm not sure how accurate the categories are, maybe some sites aren't categorised. In any case it has usable descriptions, which is enough to make it usable IMHO. - You might try to persuade TUFI's author to make changes, but we don't run that index... - None of the indexes we include at the moment link to child porn. However, we select them purely on the basis of utility. - French flogs will be of interest to some users. Porn will be of interest to some users. Isn't much of the point of the indexes to help the user to find something of interest reasonably soon after installing Freenet? - In the long term (hopefully sooner) we will have a search box on the fproxy homepage using XMLLibrarian. There are some bugs to fix in the spider before this can happen. Of course, that doesn't really scale either, but we'll see what we can do. - I agree that topic-specific indexes are the way to go long term. However the web at large seems to think that search engines are the way to go. Hopefully we will have both. Right now we probably don't have enough dedicated users to maintain more than one or two topic-specific indexes. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 827 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20080923/3917d438/attachment.pgp>
