Allow the disabling of Profile Pictures

[WildWoofer]

Just popped open a comment thread and noticed the profile pictures were loading slowly, a closer look revealed that many of them were large full-sized artwork(s) uploaded as profile pictures then resized to 100x100 browser side (The most egregious of which was 3000x2000 and 976 KB). There are also quite a few large 900 KB gifs many of which were also resized. Since we now have the option to enable data-saver for reading chapters please consider adding this. It's trivial to do yourself locally if you know how e.g apply "||mangadex.org/images/avatars/*" in Ublock Origin. However since opening a page of comments may lead to as high a data-usage of 20 MB (20 x 1MB) and not everyone may be comfortable/knowledgeable blocking things themselves. Users may not even know that reading the comments is eating 30-40 MB of data for which the primary content is ostensibly text. Admittedly 20MB/page is an upper-bound and In practice it seems closer to 3 MB/page and if the same users post on multiple pages caching reduces that even further. However I still think it be worth considering as an opt-In.

 

[BzzBzz]

> Allow the disabling of Profile Pictures

> It's trivial to do yourself locally if you know how

> Users may not even know that reading the comments is eating 30-40 MB of data for which the primary content is ostensibly text.

> However I still think it be worth considering as an opt-In.

Not a problem at all.
If users don't know or don't care about traffic why would they bother to block it? If users think that traffic is the problem and they are able to determine where's problem lies then their knowledge is high enough to solve it locally.

 

[WildWoofer]

"If users don't know or don't care about traffic why would they bother to block it?"
Yes, this is why I suggested it as an opt-in.

"If users think that traffic is the problem and they are able to determine where's problem lies"
Simply have a "Data Savers" in settings and allow it to be an option. Plenty of users here are on limited / mobile connection and aren't technical, they just know they have 10GB/Month and that they've used nGB of that. They may not be able to determine where the problem lies. If a user currently has the "data-saver" mode on I think it's reasonable for them to think they did what they could and that the bandwidth used is just what the site uses; not knowing they could be doing more.

As an random example take https://mangadex.org/title/15553/tensei-shitara-slime-datta-ken a manga I grabbed from the "top manga" on the home-page. The latest chapter (77) uses:
41.39 MB - PNG Version
6.89 MB - Data Saver Version
Data Saved: 34.5 MB (83%)

Now lets take a look at loading 3 pages of comments from that same chapter (starting page picked at random).
4.61 MB (page 8) + 2.09 MB (page 9) + 1.99 MB (page 10) = 8.69 MB - Profile Images Enabled
529.47 KB (Page 8) + 13.81 KB (page 9) + 51.78 KB (page 10) = 595.06 KB - Profile Images Disabled
Data Saved: 8.1 MB (93%)

I used the "Data Transferred" stat from the networking pane in Firefox if you want to check yourself. So I think the feature itself has merit (In the above example you get an extra chapter+ of bandwidth). Where I think it could be out of scope / not worth the effort is how many people would actually use said feature.

If we apply the 1% rule then we get 21000 users reading the above chapter's comments but I have no idea how accurate that rule is to MangaDex and it's likely a high estimate given that the chapter itself only has 169,415 views. Past that how many of those users want/need to use data-saver and what subset of those users would actually want to disable profile pictures. So if it's too obscure a feature I can totally understand outright rejecting it based on that, feature creep and all that. Truthfully, I just scrape the site with a rate-limited FMD instance overnight and then self-host those files with Komga for my own reading so it's not something I would use.

Edit: Clarifying I'm talking specifically about profile pictures and not images in general.

 

[EOTFOFYL]

General forum gang,
we're guilty as charged here,
but without remorse.

Simple solution is to opt out of

 

[WildWoofer]

To clear things up I'm only talking about profile pictures, images in threads are at least (usually) relevant to the discussion at hand and are part of the "content" of the comments. Blocking them would only lead to people being confused. Obviously if someone wanted to be a dick they could embed something like the: 25500x25500 672 MB Hubble Legacy Field (Not a direct link to the image, just a link to a meta-page). However I don't think that's relevant.