Visualised ratings on posts seen outside BookWyrm

[nerdteacher]

Apologies if the title is confusing. I couldn't think of a shorthand way to frame it. (Also, apologies if this is already here. I did try searching but didn't see it.)

Anyway, since I follow myself on my Mastodon accounts (since that makes it easier to boost/share posts), I noticed that the visual of the book provides an overall rating. This is kind of confusing (unless you're the only person to rate the book) because you might have a review that's either really good (5 stars) or really bad (1 star), and that's in the post! But then the image itself looks jarring, especially if people don't read the text before the bookwyrm link.

Case in point:

The text and the image are, to me, visually jarring and confusing. It'd be cool if the images used our own individual ratings on post instead of the book's overall, if that's at all possible.

(This isn't something that needs to be dealt with immediately. Just something for future thought. <3)

[mouse-reeve]

This is a good point! It isn't feasible to show the specific user's rating of the book in the preview image; it would have to either show the aggregate rating or no rating

[darcydriscoll]

This is a good point! It isn't feasible to show the specific user's rating of the book in the preview image; it would have to either show the aggregate rating or no rating

I'm curious as to why this isn't feasible? :) Is it too technically expensive to generate a custom image based on the user's rating?

[mouse-reeve]

Right now we store one image per book; if it was custom to the user, you'd have to store one image per book per user, which is massively more images (even if you limited the custom images to users that rated the book). So it's just a practicality constraint on how many images you'd need to generate and host.

[darcydriscoll]

Ahh, right, I get you now. Thanks for clarifying. Since the images don't have any user information, would an alternative be generating and hosting one image for each star rating? This would be at most 5 images rather than n images.

Admittedly I have zero experience hosting large amounts of files, so I don't know how expensive it would be to store 5 times the amount of images. Even if they are in the tens of kilobytes I imagine that would add up.

[Minnozz]

Is it an option to generate the personalized image on-the-fly (with optional caching) instead of storing the image?

[Minnozz]

Another option to clear up confusion between the user's rating and the aggregate rating is to add the amount of ratings the average consists of to the image.