A new "Browse" by pictures beta version got public tonight (UTC). Please feel invited to give here your feedback. Thank you in advance for any positive, critical and constructive voices.
[box title=History and Purpose]
History
The idea of the picture browser grew from the members feedback about improving the descriptions, where many members said to use the pictures rather than the descriptions to decide to download a torrent.
As a first result of that feedback, the "Browse" and "Search" result list pages were amended to show "tooltip" tumbnail previews when hover with the mouse over. As a result, some members were started to speak about browsing pictures when going through the torrent list.
Another aspect are the complains about torrents being not downloaded after having completed the download, thus not generating upload. Indeed with some hundreds new torrents daily, many torrents get out of view back many pages already after a day and the download concentrates very much on the newest torrents on the first pages, where no torrent stays for long.
There is as well a certain inspiration from picture hosting sites blogs like seen on tumblr or the picture search results on Google picture search.
Purpose
The picture browser is meant as an alternative approach to find torrents, not to replace the "Search" result list list, by scrolling through randomly presented pictures, get attracted by one and look to the torrent it belongs. This way it is hoped members will discover torrents, studios or models they would otherwise have ignored.
It is not meant to search for any specific content (e.g. by date, studio, titles or models). It relies on the pure attraction (or distraction to scroll over) of the pictures.[/box]
It was decided to go live with an early version, after only a few days of internal testing in order to gather quickly a wide feedback from the members for further improvements and to test it under real usage server load.
Therefore the desired feedback should not be "It sucks" or "Wonderful new toy", but providing arguments why. For example in describing what doesn't work well, ideas for better functions, etc …