Site feedback

PrintsDepot
1

I’ve just created an account and noticed a few annoyances right off the bat.

  • You can’t manually set your avatar and the avatar assigned to you by default looks like some AI-generated slop
    • I figured out how to set the avatar, but it is very non-intuitive (the interface does not visually show you can actually do it while in edit mode) and the cropping utility for selecting an avatar kinda…. sucks.
    • The default avatar still looks like AI slop
  • Accounts are required to have a first and last name (weird)
  • The info box for “reupload of another model” mentions Prusameters, which gives me the ick and makes me think the site is being scraped from Printables
    • A lot of the design decisions look like you’re trying to copy Printables, but if that’s the case then why wouldn’t I just use Printables?
  • No dark mode
  • No import functionality
  • No 3D preview functionality for uploaded models
  • The title of the page is stuck as whatever the last model you looked at is (eg. when you view a model then go to the homepage or your user profile page, the page/tab title remains whatever model you were looking at)
  • Clicking on “creator center” in your profile brings you to the model upload page(???)
  • The image upload utility is very bad (vue-img-cutter) and absolutely murders image quality
  • The text editor for the model descriptions is awful
    • Pasting contents does not preserve formatting
    • Trying to select text and change its style or paragraph formatting, only the first line is affected
    • Very little WYSIWYG functionality (you can’t even use formatting tags– you just have to set the formatting and pray it works)
    • Can’t embed images, but can embed videos??
    • A lot of the UI text is in Chinese, including font families
    • Links are not distinct at all and don’t appear to be links unless you hover over them with your mouse
    • A lot of really weird newline handling
  • Setting a model license doesn’t seem to persist very long– any change elsewhere and it clears your selection
  • Image quality of the cover photo is atrocious
  • Why are the images appended to the description on the page?
  • Small headline description text is just truncated from the description
  • Your email address being placed under your username when you click your avatar in the corner is super weird and feels like an infosec hazard
  • Editing an existing upload can only be done from your “uploads” page and can’t be done from the model page itself

    • Editing the cover photo seems to hang on “uploading” as if it’s trying to re-upload everything?

    • Editing appears to not work at all, see error message

      image

  • The image carousel stretches all images to 4:3

I’m sure I’ll find more but I’m doing other stuff so I can’t dedicate more time to this.

2

I noticed a few of those issues. The issues that bothered me the most:

  1. The formatting in the description editor. I realized that if I didn’t want the text to run together and instead wanted separate paragraphs, I need to press Enter twice so it looks like two blank lines in the editor to get a single line to separate paragraphs.
  2. It bugged me to have a weird image assigned as my avatar when most sites allow a custom avatar to be uploaded (such as this forum) and if not there’s usually a color circle with the first letter of the username which is fairly inoffensive.
  3. I didn’t like being forced to enter a first and last name. Most people have an online user name. I entered “Liberty” and “4Ever”.

I hadn’t noticed that clicking on the assigned avatar in the upper right reveals the user’s email address. That’s not good. It probably violates some country’s online privacy laws.

On last week’s Sovol live stream, I asked about the ability to transfer my designs from Printables or Thingiverse so I don’t need to laboriously upload those designs to PrintsDepot. Ben said they weren’t trying to have designs uploaded from other sites and intend PrintsDepot as a site for new designs. It was convenient when Prusa started Printables for me to give Printables my Thingiverse login and have Printables import my designs.

3

It only shows when your signed in.

4

Showing a user their own email address isn’t a big security issue. :slight_smile:

5

It can be if your email address contains your real name. Having it visible anywhere other than the specific settings page where you can change it (something else you can’t do on PrintsDepot) indicates that it might be visible elsewhere, where it doesn’t belong. The email address being in an inappropriate place needlessly erodes trust.

It’s a poor design choice all around.

6

Thanks for the detailed feedback. We will fix the bug