CivitAI problems March 2025 (rant)
Since most of those problems already been here when I started in august and some got worse, and some new appeared, I decided to just rant whenever I'm infuriated. Treat this post as you would treat your friend venting on his daily life.
At first, I wanted to categorize problems, maybe propose solutions, but categorizing and structuring rant is hard and pointless, so I'll just going to add stuff and mumble.
2025-03-27
Routing
In web there's a rule (sadly, unenforceable) - "Don't break the web". It goes from minor things, like "if user have older browser, your website should still work, even if it looks trashy and non of bells and whistles are available", to "use links for navigation and buttons for actions" (sometimes they are very similar), to "don't reinvent existing HTML elements", and finally to infamous "DON'T BREAK BROWSER BACK BUTTON". Today I'm talking about that one.
Once on model page, you can switch between model versions. You can clearly see that when you do so, URL in your browser changes, which usually means that you went to new page. So, if you press back button, or alt+ ArrowLeft, you will go to previously viewed model version, right? Right? Not on civit. Here, for some reason you will go to wherever you were before you opened this model page. It's frustrating experience. And infuriating experience.
I have dedicated button on my mouse to go back, and use it automatically. I don't think "ok, I'm on this page, and it behave differently from the rest of the internet, so I should be careful and not use back button". No, I think "Oh, great, civit messed up again and I am suffering because of it".
2025-03-24
Notification system
Sometimes when I don't have notifications it lights up with arbitrary number. Sometimes when I have notifications, it doesn't show anything at all. Sometimes ot shows notification number, but category which it shows is empty (all read), but there are actually notifications in other category. I hate it.
2025-03-22
Unhelpful errors
Proper way to addressing errors and exceptions in UI is to catch it, send to some analytics tool, and then make somewhat useful message to user. For example, saying "image cannot be found" in interface where I see that exact image and trying to add a resource to it is unhelpful. I, as user, don't understand what is happening, and have no idea what to do with information they give. It is definitely better than absolutely nothing at all when you try to add generation method and tool, but it's still bad.
Then there are errors that just repeat whatever JS or framework is saying. Those should never be directly shown to user. I don't care about some malformed JSON I have no influence over, I just want thing to work, or to know how to make it work, or to know to wait out for it to work. Maybe I need yo repeat whatever I was doing? Maybe I should send error report? Maybe I don't need to do anything and it's FUBAR? I don't know, so your error message is unhelpful.
Another thing is "toasts". Those are AWFUL to convey even remotely important information, because they disappear too quickly. Never mind that on this site different toasts appear in different places, so there's no way to know where to even look for them. And finally, they cover content. I don't want to see ten "you got some buzz", I want to see whatever is under that.
2025-03-19
Model usage chart
I'm not even going to explain. Screenshot here will talk for me.
2025-03-18
Autofocusing review
When you come to model page that you liked without posting text review (apparently, almost nobody writes review's here), textbox for review will be focused for you. That means that if you already scrolled half the page down, you will be unceremoniously scrolled back up. If you have virtual keyboard it will be forcefully open and probably cover half the screen. If you are neurodivergent, you may forget why you came to that page in a first place.
Autofocusing elements have only one place in the web. It's focusing logically reasonable element. For example, focusing searchbar when I add resources to images is good. Focusing login field on login page is good. Focusing tertiary thing on a page is not good, and I'm not even sure it writing review in text counts as tertiary.
Cover image requirement for article
Yes, again. I just lost everything I wrote, because while I was generating a cover image, my device unloaded page with article from memory, and since draft can't be saved without cover image, it was all gone. I was actually writing about improvement in Civit UI. Well, I'm not writing it again, so no praise for you, civitai team. Your fault!
Article commenting
Commenting on popular article, like official announcement, for example, fill flood your notifications with ALL new comments to that article without any possible way to unsubscribe. Quite awful experience. It should have ability to subscribe to everything, subscribe to threads you start or participate, and ability to unsubscribe.
Notification popover
This is a short one. Going somewhere from notifications should close notification popover. Otherwise on mobile it's unclear if navigation actually occured. Sometimes I press same notification again and again because nothing happens. Then I remember that notification popover for some reason just stays up and covers content.
Resource picker
About seven years ago I encountered "interesting" problem. Whenever user pressed key on their keyboard, their cursor moved to the back of an input. Not a big problem, when you type in a field you actually want cursor at the end, right? Well, not always. Sometimes you want to edit somewhere in the middle and in that case bug was beyond annoying. Technical reason for that bug is of no importance here, but generally speaking, I was using Reactjs, popular frontend library, incorrectly.
We fixed that bug in half an hour. Civit have very similar bug, with very similar reason for multiple month now. When you upload your image and try to add used resource to it, you type in the field, and it sometimes delete some letters you got into input. Which is silliest mistake that can be actually fixed in a day at most by somewhat adequate frontend dev. Well, unless your code is a hot mess, then it may require A LOT of work, like complete rewrite of certain parts of an application.
Anyways, as a user, I hate that. It's inconvenient and infuriating. And as a user and a dev, I hate it twice more. This is stupid error with trivial fix. It's easy to catch during QA phase. It should never make into production, yet here we are. Considering that search itself sometimes extremely slow, it's very tiresome to add used resources to all images in the post.
2025-03-17
Model description
I spent considerable time writing description of my new LoRA, prepared some grids to show differences in results between checkpoints and weights, and such, added those grids (well, just one), and then found out that Civit shrinks it to the point where you barely can see an image. I'll try to move that to the article, since posts are absolutely useless in terms of written content - you can't see it unless you specifically press "view post" and then scroll down to the very very bottom.
Lack of alt text
Another thing that I really really want is ability to write alt text. Alternative text is really important for accessibility (I bet Civit is awful from that standpoint in general, but you gotta start somewhere), and alt can't be just collection of autogenerated tags or prompt. Alt have contextual meaning and should be written based on context.
Article editor markdown support and cover image requirement
While ranting here I found out that article editor here kinda supports markdown, but not really, so it's a bummer when you make a link and it suddenly not recognized in a same way as headings. I'm accustomed to writing markdown by hand and don't really like Rich Text Editors. Would be nice if we could pick mode ourselves.
And requiring cover image for an article is something weird for me. I didn't even notice it first time and was confused when I tried to post my TODO List. And you can't even save draft without it! PREPOSTEROUS! IT'S A DRAFT!
Hoarding of device resources
I think that whoever develos their frontend doesn't deserve computer they develop it on. They need way less RAM and CPU power, and no GPU acceleration. Maybe then tis site would actually work properly. I'm on the end of my battery on mobile an turned "stamina mode" on, so now this site barely working. Just to clarify, normally made sites work properly without freezes. Once (and if, of course) they release public API for authorized zone, I'm going to make my own frontend with proper fast and accessible UI.