Unpopular opinion: {{category:number}} considered harmful

Too long, won't read:

Problems:

• breaks preview
• breaks searching within page
• breaks web search
• speed bump when reading
• becomes a rebus story when overdone
• no tooltip with stats
• not even a title attribute with the name
• not even the ID - have to quote the post then reverse lookup somewhere
• icon chooser provides no organization other than flat alphabetic list
• need to use icon chooser unless you want to memorize IDs

Solutions:

• option to disable, replacing icons with names
• use descriptive names instead of numeric IDs
• add tooltips
• improve selection interface

Very long, have snack:

Boards software allows users to easily insert graphics that correspond to champions, items, and summoner spells without linking to an external site. We start with a set of double curly braces, within which we add the category of icon, a colon, and then (here's the harmful part) the number that uniquely identifies that object, matching the official API.

However, I believe this is harmful to the Boards overall.

The first issue appears in the mouseover preview in the thread listing. Instead of "Looking for help with Udyr" starting with "Does Essence Reaver's second passive work for him?..." we see "Does !item 3508 's second passive work for him?...". This defeats the purpose of the preview, when people aren't even trying to do so. I'm sure we've all seen threads that start with a hidden image for the thumbnail but then surprise you with a different image when displaying the actual thread, but that's done as a joke. Fully escaping your post has a similar "surprise" effect, but, again, that's intentional. I'm pretty sure someone saying "Need quick help for Ahri counter" wants people to see "is Trundle a good counter?" as quickly as possible, rather than showing people "is !Trundle a good counter?" until they deign to click through and load the full thread.

The next issue is another usability problem. Everyone knows (I hope) about using your browser's incremental search feature to find text within a page. Press Ctrl-F or ⌘-F, enter a search term, and the browser highlights that term in the page so you don't have to manually read through everything to find what you're looking for... unless you're looking for a champion, item, or summoner spell that someone has chosen to represent with its icon instead of writing out the name, in which case you're out of luck.

The next issue is similar, but isn't merely an inconvenience - it affects the long-term health and longevity of the Boards. In the same way that your browser can't find "Aatrox" in , neither can search engines like the Boards search feature and external services (like Google). Elements for icons not only don't have an "alt" attribute to describe them to search engines (or screen readers for the vision-impaired), they don't even have a specific filename. They reference a handful of large images that contain a grid of many icons and then specify the coordinates of the desired icon. It is as opaque to search engines as it could get. If a thread with Twitch strats is full of instead of the word "Twitch," and you're doing some Googling to improve your Twitch play, you won't find that thread. You might find it via the number "29" (Twitch's unique object ID), though. Wow, that brings me back to learning MIPS in my computer architecture class, where the syscall to print was "4" rather than a command like "print." But that's only if you wanted to print a string. Printing an integer uses "1," printing a character uses "11," and so on. That is how you include Boards results for specific champions, items, and summoner spells when you Google. 114, 77, 51, 145...

But even when you've successfully found a thread to read, you'll be humming along nicely, reading words in a language like a normal person, and then suddenly the author of the post you're reading decided that it would be better to suggest instead of Ghost and not only is there a giant space between the lines of the paragraph to accommodate this icon, but you suddenly have to read a picture, throwing off your groove. We all know how to read here. This isn't necessary.

And then you realize that a speed bump was worlds better than this mountain range of monster truck course obstacles that interrupt the flow of your uh can you stop that I forgot what I was okay then. This is a rebus story. It belongs in Highlights Magazine, where children are learning how to read and how to find a toaster in a tree. This is the kind of poster who doesn't know how to make a Powerpoint presentation without an animation and three arbitrary sound effects between every slide. When Boards devs see this sort of thing, they know they have become death, destroyer of worlds.

What do we gain with all this, you ask? We gain... a tiny picture. Nothing else. When you're browsing for icons to insert into your post, you can mouse over them to see a description, including names, item costs, stats, and so on. This is neat! But when you post that {{category:n}}, none of it comes through. It might have been actually useful to be able to hotlink an item when discussing it so that readers could mouse over it and immediately see its stats rather than going to the wiki and letting it load 26 videos on the page just so you can see that an item has 70 AD rather than 60.

But wait, it gets worse! Not only is there no fancy tooltip with champion stories, item stats, etc., there isn't even a basic alt-text tooltip (the HTML "title" attribute) to tell you the name of this thing. What's {{summoner:35}}, you ask? Well, I'm not telling you, and you'll have a really annoying time figuring it out. Hint: it's totally different from {{summoner:33}}. :)

Are you ready for it to get worse? Well, get ready, because it will. There isn't even a tooltip with the object's category and ID. If you want to use a resource like this JSON file to look up the ID and find the thing, you'll have to quote the post to see the ID... and that's if you can even do that. If the thread has been locked, you now have the incredibly fun and exciting task ahead of you of viewing the page's source, locating the post you were reading, and finding the object ID you were interested in in the first place. Fantastic. Everyone instinctively knows to do that, right?

Fortunately, those were all the problems with posts that use this feature that I could think of off the top of my head. However, I haven't gone into the issues involved in creating such posts. Happily, I only have two complaints in this regard.

First, the interface that allows you to select an icon to insert into your post gives you a flat list (1D vector) in alphabetical order. There is a search field to filter the list, but that doesn't quite help when someone's complaining about Mundo and you remember Executioner's Calling which is but didn't Riot give that item an upgrade path so you weren't stuck with a garbage item just to counter a handful of healers? It's , but you'd have to either remember the name or leave Boards to look up Calling on some other site (or open the LoL client, because that doesn't hog CPU for no reason) to see the build path. I'm not asking to be able to explore item build paths within an icon chooser, but... well, I guess I am. And champions are a flat alphabetical list as well, with no facility to sort or filter by role, release date, and so on. This single flat list sort of works more or less enough, just like the Macbook Wheel.

Finally, you're stuck with this interface unless you memorize champion, summoner, and item IDs. Not even I want to do that. I'll remember numbers like ' for a single quote, ) for a closing parenthesis (which comes in handy when you want hyperlinked text at the end of a parenthesized clause), 4 for the syscall to print a string in MIPS, license plate numbers for all of my family's cars going back to when I was a kid, my driver license number, my boss's office phone number, and more, but I do not wish to memorize several hundred more numbers just to bypass a basic interface for a problematic feature.

I've gotten through all the bullet points from the top of the post, so perhaps you thought I'd be done at this point.

Nope.

I have some suggestions for how this feature could be improved.

First, how about giving each user the option to disable this feature if they can't stand it? I don't like the uneven line spacing, and I don't like the "rebus story" look, so it'd be nice to see the name of a champion, item, or summoner spell in place of its icon. This wouldn't be limited to "set and forget" use for people who never want to see icons; a user who usually enjoys the icons might want to see text names temporarily so they can search the page with Ctrl-F.

Second, the most egregious problem here is probably the way these icons cripple search engines. Switching from numeric IDs to a more descriptive string, like {{champion:azir}} rather than !Azir, would allow people to see more useful results from Boards when Googling a champion, item, or summoner spell. I cannot stress enough how deleterious it is for so much content to be hidden in secret code that only gives a hint about its meaning when rendered and displayed to a user who already knows what those things are. Not only would this change make Boards more indexable, it would also improve mouseover previews as well as allow people to simply type the markdown directly (e.g. {{item:zzrotportal}}) rather than needing to use the selection interface every time.

Third, how about giving these things some tooltips? The ID is less than the minimum, the name is the minimum, and a full description like we see when we're selecting one of these icons in the first place would be ideal.

Finally, improving the selection interface for better sorting, filtering, and navigation (group champs by class, navigate items by build path, etc.) would be nice as well.

To summarize:

These icons replace clear, readable text with secret codes that resolve into unlabeled icons that add no information or anything else of value but do break several basic tools (preview, search in page, and search engines). The icon chooser interface is also quite primitive and lacking in organizational features we've come to expect when browsing items and champions. We would greatly benefit from adding an option for users to see text names instead of icons, using descriptive names instead of numeric IDs for the codes, giving icons useful mouseover tooltips, and improving the icon chooser interface.