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nucypher / nucypher-monitor

NuCypher network intelligence crawler and web dashboard
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Fleet state icons look mysterious and uninformative #27

Open KPrasch opened 4 years ago

gaia commented 4 years ago

I might have some suggestions if I know what the possible states/icons means. But IMHO we should keep it in text, with diff cell BG colors

KPrasch commented 4 years ago

The docstring is pretty thin, reading "A representation of a fleet of NuCypher nodes."

Fleet state is constructed by deriving a deterministic and unique hash from of a list of all known nodes (hesitant to call them peers, since they may or may not be online in this format). The fleet state hash is mapped to a symbol and color for human recognition when comparing two nodes to see if they share the same perspective on the network. If two nodes have the same state: they know exactly all of the same nodes. When discovering each other "in the wild" it is used as a signal indicating are no new nodes to learn about from the current teacher, and to just move on to another teacher without any data exchange.

What is the drawback of using the symbols on the webpage - (we tried to choose "safe" unicode characters)?

gaia commented 4 years ago

the icons are really small. also, they are hard to tell apart. I'd rather see a random string with the same BG color when two nodes have the same state.

as is, it is like asking people to learn a new alphabet. reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think

how many possible fleets could there be hundreds? thousands? if it is in the hundreds the words could be country names. thousands? use people names.

or better yet, use random words from https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt