Currently it isn’t really that easy to find scripts that could assist you. Take the “replacing A with G” booster I am working on as an example; Unless you know it exists, you have no chance of finding it in the scripting library, as it is fludded with random scripts that don’t really help me right now but are categorized as boosters so I can’t uninclude them in the search, many versions of a script piled one over the other, and if the script you are looking for is tagged etc, you also have to deal with a ton of other etc sub categories as html representation and chat stuff when you are just looking for a filler script.
So what do I think should be done?
More categories/sub categories: The current scripts could be sorted into many more categories pretty easily, such as fillers, html representation, chat, and puzzle creation. creating more types just for sorting shouldn’t be too hard, as there is no need for new properties as there was when you added boosters. And maybe also allow some types to exist with each other on the same script, such as “filler booster” or “puzzle creation booster”, or simply make those subtypes.
Make different versions of the same script appear under the same name; There are so many, many scripts that are just there for the same purpose of their other versions, just different in some way, and won’t lose anything by just being under a scripts series when you search instead of showing each individually. I know it will take a lot of UI creation and coding, but I really think it will make it so much better.
Searching by tag: currently we can only search by name (maybe we can add subtypes in the query in the address bar, but it isn’t obvious enough to be the primary solution), and we can’t enter the category of the script there, which is pretty confusing, as it shows the tag as part of the name in the search results. It would be really nice if we had a dropbox of categories to choose from, or letting script writers write keywords that their puzzle could be found by.
Yes, definitely agree! I’ve been wanting to see improvements in this area for a while. In response to the things you mentioned:
Do you have any specific suggestions for categories based on common script functionality? I know one that I’ve seen filling up a lot of space is custom constraints for labs and puzzles (as the devs have used EternaScript to do this).
There’s a little “history” to this one. Nando recently (past few months? past year?) added the ability to edit scripts, so that already exists. However, there’s no “versioning”, so the version that’s there is the only version that exists. I do think it would be cool to have a Git-backed system or something like that so that all versions could be concurrently available.
The other issue you wind up seeing is people copying scripts. Part of this is due to the fact that you can’t run other people’s scripts directly due to security concerns, however that should hopefully be fixed sooner rather than later (see my suggestion about that). However, I do think (and I actually hope) we’ll still see copies still happening for the purpose of editing/hacking/adjusting/extending/fussing with other people’s scripts. I’d also like to see some sort of Git/GitHub-like forking/branching mechanism so the relationships can be seen, and if it’s git-backed, even allowing changes to be merged in, etc.
At this point, search is just kinda broken. IE, searching for my script “Switch Lab Data Dump”, I can search “lab data” but not “data dump”. Better filtering, especially for categories, is a must though, and I was very surprised when I had found that out previously. Searching by description would also be a plus. Also searching by user would be great (as would seeing a user’s scripts on their profile or such!).
Something else I had considered to help clean things up is “project folders”. This way, I could split up my code into multiple scripts without flooding the script list, and I could also group related scripts/utilities together, for things like libraries or just grouping scripts for similar purposes.
Do you have any other suggestions for a better browsing interface? I know Foldit just has a list kinda like Eterna does, but it would be great if there were a better way to find interesting scripts - better categories is probably a big step here though.
[Sry for long time before commenting, I good a lot of stuff going on and I kindof forgot :P] http://imgur.com/a/RPRk1
This could work for different releases of the same code (i.e v1, v1.5, v2), different versions (I don’t have any examples, but basically parallel codes that do similiar things but neither of them is the next gen of another one), and also boosters+their non booster sub-code
Also there shall be category pages, kindof like how there are in getsat. I will write more stuff if I can think of them tomorrow