isoHunt Lite fixes, want feedback

Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 8:02 am

Just use a proxy to get to the .com with all the original features Smile

Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 8:30 am

timtimtimmy wrote:

Canadian, so it doesn't really effect me, yet, but I will give my opinion.

I do find the new design looks good, but honestly, I don't care about looks. But still, it looks nice.

I don't like the "Web 2.0" stuff. For me, AJAX is the new flash. I hate it. While it has its places, I don't think pagination is one of them. Though I will admit you did a better job then most sites, at least from my bit of playing it seems you haven't broken the Back & Forward buttons functionality(on a related note see below). But requiring JavaScript when more and more people are disabling it completely, doesn't seem right.

There is far too much wasted space, I assume you designed it with a 1024x768 resolution in mind, so with my 1680x1050(I always have my browser maximized) there is a lot of wasted space, and the mouse over thing shows up waaay to the right of the other info. From the looks of it you could fit two of the current width columns of data in the screen space that is there. If you are set on using JavaScript so much, maybe detect the amount of screen space you have to work with, and if there is plenty, display more information?

So, my suggestions:
- Make better use of the available space for the increasing number of people with larger monitors. Or, if you are going to keep a design that uses only a fraction of a larger monitors screen space, then _everything_ should be confined to the smaller area to keep it consistent. Though I guess I can't argue with the ad showing up so far away from the results, never even have to look in its direction Razz

- Some sorting options would be nice, no offense, but I often find myself straying from the default ranking.
- Would it be possible maybe to detect the users country, and if they aren't from one like USA, show more info and options, which you have to remove for them? Can always make a separate preference page to keep such options on if you want to keep the current cleaner lite look and feel.
- Option(Like Google) to show more results per page.
- If possible, AJAX free version Razz

And that's all I can think of right now. Good luck with the legal battle, hope the lite version does the trick!

Thanks for all your work making and maintaining this site, including whatever form it ends up in, it's appreciated.

Note:
On a related note to the above mention of breaking back/forward usage, your current non-lite search has an issue with that, at least for me. If you search for something, then go back, and try searching again, the search is still disabled(to prevent people from repeatedly clicking the search button to make it "go faster" I imagine lol) and won't work, and a standard refresh in Firefox doesn't fix it either, you have to shift-refresh/ctrl-f5 to make it work again.

P.S.
Thanks for the example link, didn't realize Beta 2 of Ubuntu 10.04 was out till I clicked the link! Smile

What browser and version are you using? Search is never disabled, we've tested it in on FF, chrome and safari and after backing you can always search again. Since you mentioned ubuntu I assume you aren't on IE?

Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 10:10 am

My biggest grip with Lite is that we can no longer warn each other about malware and trojan horses. There's no way to flag torrents that are bad. For me, this is a major problem. Don't know how you'd change that, but since you wanted feedback, there it is. Smile

Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 11:30 am

IH wrote:

What browser and version are you using? Search is never disabled, we've tested it in on FF, chrome and safari and after backing you can always search again. Since you mentioned ubuntu I assume you aren't on IE?

Windows XP/7 with Firefox. Here are some SS's from Firebug:
http://img535.imageshack.us/i/codet.png/
http://img23.imageshack.us/i/beforeandafteri.png/
^ replace "blocked because of spam" with ".us/"

I just tested it in IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera and they all function fine, just Firefox has the problem for me. And I just tested it in a clean install of Firefox on Ubuntu and it does the same thing, search still disabled after going back.

Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 12:03 pm

You need some advanced search/power search features. Not necessarily sort, but more like selective filtering.

Filter torrents created before a certain period of time...
Filter torrents with less than a certain amount of seeders or peers...
Filter torrents less/more than a certain file size...
Filter by file extension...

In search based indexes, allowing the user to selectively filter is much easier than "sorting" and is generally more effective. That's why Demonoid grew so large so quickly.

I always hated sort functions on other sites like TPB. They're ineffective and only take 1 order at a time. Say I want the best seeded torrent uploaded in the past day. Filter>Sort

But yeah. the rating system should prove decent enough. I understand the reason you are removing comments. But people are going to miss them. If the results at least took you to another page to actually download the torrent though, people could just use Google SideWiki or something...

But I must say, Isohunt Lite is actually a wonderful thing. It shows a torrent site is an indexer just like Google, only it indexes torrents instead of webpages containing torrents. Beautiful work so far.

I just wanted to give some real constructive input because I really think this IsoHunt Lite is an important project & I would love to see it prosper. And I hope this idea catches on.

I hope when this lite version is presented in court, anything searched for on IsoLite, is also done on Google with the filetype:torrent operator. Just to show keyword filtering on your site would mean nothing without doing so on every Google Based search serving data to America.

Thanks for reading

Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 7:53 pm

@timtimtimmy what FF version? I can't reproduce it on FF 3.6.3 on mac.

@jmewes thanks for your thoughts. isoHunt classic already has age filters:
Limit Age within: 1d | 7d | 30d | 6m | None

So bringing those age filters that can combine with sort options to Lite is something we can do. Google for example also added age filters in recent months. Filter by file extension you can do already, simply add the extension as a search term.

ex. search for [linux iso] gives you torrents with those terms, iso most likely as an extension in the torrents' files, and [linux -iso] would give you all the other linux torrents that doesn't contain the term iso.

Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 8:40 pm

Using FF 3.6.3 also at the moment, but I have experienced this issue for some time. The problem is because, AFAIK, Firefox doesn't reset form control attributes when you go back or refresh a page, only when you do a ctrl+f5/shift+refresh. So when you disable it when a user submits the form, if the user clicks back in Firefox the form submit control is still disabled.

Not sure how to get around the problem myself, other then not disabling the form.

Here's a link to a small video if it helps to understand. After I search Ubuntu in it, I hit backspace to go back to the previous page and try searching again
http://yfrog.us/7bisohuntz

Really not that big of a deal though, and doesn't happen in any other browser for me, or even always in Firefox I guess. And its not that much trouble to ctrl+f5/shift+refresh or just click the logo to go back to the main page.

*edit*
Just did a quick search and found this:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2165251/form-submit-button-remains-disabled-when-using-back-button-in-firefox
Person having the same problem, and someone replies with a solution, they also use jQuery.

Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2010 4:39 am

IsoHunt Lite doesn't feel right....I have been using isohunt for the past 2 or 3 years, and....These are the problems i find with Isohunt Lite:
* U cant post comments...
* U cant view the files in the torrent online, common spammer scam.....

After all, f**k u MP** and C*** Smile

God Save Thee Isohunt

Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2010 6:37 pm

My first gripe with Lite upon searching for a torrent is the layout. Searching for a torrent isn't the same as searching for a website in Google -- while a page title and short description may be sufficient for identifying a website, I need more information than that to choose a torrent, and it's information that needs to be displayed in a way to allow easy comparison across different search results. The tabular IsoHunt layout works just fine, and I'm confused why Lite is taking a more difficult-to-read paragraph format, especially with some of that information only available on mouseover.

Second, I agree with the many who are asking for the ability to sort by different criteria. While the IsoHunt algorithm may be good at determining the best torrent with a certain name, there's more to a torrent than a name, and for me personally, what I'm looking for is rarely near the top of the list in a default sort. Many times, I may be looking for a recent torrent, so searching by age would be best. Other times, file size may be factor -- for example if I'm looking for a highly-compressed version of HD video, rather than the possibly "better" (according to the algorithm) versions that may be several times the size. Users know what they're looking for, and know best how they need to sort results to find it. Taking away the ability to sort never improves usability.

Third, while I'm extremely happy the ratings were kept -- and IsoHunt's rating system, easily viewed from the search results, are one of the top reasons why I started using IsoHunt in the first place -- I miss the comments. A one-dimensional metric like ratings are good for being able to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff in search results, but is not sufficient on its own to identify the "best" of those good ones. Just because one result has several times as many positive votes than another doesn't mean it's better, but only that it's more popular. The one with the smaller positive rating could simply be newer. So ratings are good, but ratings supplemented by comments are better.

Until Lite addresses some of these issues, I'll simply be using an out-of-country proxy to access the regular IsoHunt. (Politicians are so silly when it comes to the internets...)

Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2010 8:10 pm

I would say the comment section is really important , if you can add it back cause of the legal problem why don't just redirect people to the torrent site instead of linking to the torrent file directly ?

so at least people could see what the other people talks about the torrent

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:20 am

timtimtimmy wrote:

Using FF 3.6.3 also at the moment, but I have experienced this issue for some time. The problem is because, AFAIK, Firefox doesn't reset form control attributes when you go back or refresh a page, only when you do a ctrl+f5/shift+refresh. So when you disable it when a user submits the form, if the user clicks back in Firefox the form submit control is still disabled.

Not sure how to get around the problem myself, other then not disabling the form.

Here's a link to a small video if it helps to understand. After I search Ubuntu in it, I hit backspace to go back to the previous page and try searching again
http://yfrog.us/7bisohuntz

Really not that big of a deal though, and doesn't happen in any other browser for me, or even always in Firefox I guess. And its not that much trouble to ctrl+f5/shift+refresh or just click the logo to go back to the main page.

*edit*
Just did a quick search and found this:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2165251/form-submit-button-remains-disabled-when-using-back-button-in-firefox
Person having the same problem, and someone replies with a solution, they also use jQuery.

No I think it's some ff addon you have acting up. We can't reproduce the issue in any FF we've tried.

For others, thanks for your useful feedback and we are working on improvements to address them.

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:17 am

IH wrote:

No I think it's some ff addon you have acting up. We can't reproduce the issue in any FF we've tried.

As mentioned previously, it happens for me even with a clean install of Firefox, on a different OS then I regularly use, no extensions, no Greasemonkey scripts, no Jetpacks, just vanilla Firefox.

Perhaps its something to do with cache settings? Maybe your test Firefox's aren't caching the page and are re-downloading it when you go back, where as mine just uses the cached version?

If you search Google for the problem(more generally, not isohunt specific) you can find many mentions of other people experiencing the same behaviour.

No biggy though, just a minor thing I thought I would mention. And sorry for the off-topic posts! Embarassed

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 10:04 am

I hate it!!!! It is the worst thing this site has ever done. I understand that you have to comply with the judge, but damn. I am one of the many people that is here for the forums and not just the torrents.
I have to go thru a proxy just to get to the front page. I hate the isohunt lite..No forums..I want the forums.

I love this site, but I LOVE the forums, and seeing as they don't really pertain to copyright infringment, how come there gone? Were left with the torrents, but no forums..WTF??

I hate it.

~Nerd

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 10:14 am

Good to see you is alive and kicking nerd Laughing

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 10:31 am

Is the forums still not open for everybody ?
http://isohunt.com/forum/