In addition to testing and checking out the post system, I wanted to also share some initial thoughts about Weasyl.

The first thing that strikes me is that the UI is a little clunky and there's entirely too much clicky and client-server back-and-forth going on. When I want to view someone's gallery from seeing their name someplace, I want a hover-over menu with relevant links to various aspects of the user's info/account. Having to go through their Profile page to get to their Gallery or Journal feels wasteful for such a modern website.

I'm also completely thrown-off by the mix-up between "Submit - Journal" and "Compose" - it seems like these are juxtapositioned from how it should be. I'd think that submitting a story or written work would go under "Submit - Text Blob" and "Compose" should be specifically for your blog. Blogging on a social media site like this is very, very common and deserving of having a header menu entry; whereas the very, very few folks who actually write furry fic or stories are getting quite an upsell by having that fancy met instead. When I want to blog, I don't think of it as a 'submission', because it's not artwork or media of one sort or another - it's a post (which one might 'compose'). This just really strikes me as odd.

The next issue now that I'm hitting it already in this post is that the auto-expanding text entry area has a height limit, and when it hits that you can only scroll with the caret and there is no scrollbar and no mousewheel event hookups to scroll with either. For an HTML5 site, this seems like a gross oversight.

The next thing is that little shade window that tracks your mouse around in preview thumbnails in gallery and submission listings. While a neat little feature in CSS/jQuery, I find it visually distracting at best and intrusive at worst. The animation pulls my attention away from what I'm looking at/for, and then it hides the art I'm looking at (which I naturally tend to hover my mouse on as a fairly instinctual UI/UX habit). I think a better implementation for this would be a 0.5 to 1 second delay before fading in the overlay, and maybe making it a little more opaque at maximus. That would also remove the distraction element as your mouse flies past thumbnails as the delay would prevent overlays from appearing in the time it takes to transit.

The navigation in general feels a little ... unintuitive. This is likely (hopefully) something that will get resolved in time. While I've rarely had trouble in actually finding something, it wasn't as direct as I'd expect from a modern website.

I've noticed an overall lack of clearly communicated results of actions, too. Like uploading your Avatar or Banner art. Or when you create a new Character. The screen I'm taken to upon submitting those forms doesn't seem to indicate that my form submission was accepted successfully in some way.

All that said, though, it's a fairly clean site and utilizes lightweight CSS mechanisms to deliver crisp content without going crazy on the HTML/JS/CSS payload. I think there are a lot of improvements that can be made, and hopefully my thoughts will be of use to someone.