User talk:Simetrical/Censorship

Confused
"Add another JS variable to every page (sigh) containing a list of image categories to be blocked. We can omit the variable if it's empty, which should be a common case."

Omitting the variable sometimes seems like it be destined to break things that might try to rely on it. It seems much easier to just have it be an empty array in the page source if it's actually an empty array.

That said, this implementation in general feels very odd to me. I think it may be over-complicating the issue to make this category-specific and allow the user to specify categories, which seems to be the current implementation idea. I'm not even particularly sure how a user would specify this binary state (show the images or obscure the images) per-category. That doesn't seem like something that Special:Preferences could handle very easily right now. And, it relates to my next point regarding user-defined category names below.

"To every user-added image on the page, add a class for every category, to the tag itself. (Yes, sigh, more cruft in classes. Can we easily get categories for images on Commons?)"

Relying on user-defined category names seems like a disastrous idea. Commoners and Wikipedians like to move things around, usually arbitrarily. "Spam blacklist" or "Bad image list" are software-defined names which means that they're able to be consistently found on many installs and don't break at users' whims. I can't imagine any sane developer trying to implement child-protection features or a new JavaScript feature or anything by relying on user-defined category names (in GET requests, CSS class names, or anywhere else). It simply isn't practical. --MZMcBride 06:01, 23 July 2010 (UTC)