Mailbag (Later 2023-Jan 2024)

 I was sifting through recent user feedback in the last couple of months, and have received a decent bit of feedback.

From Dragodraki

Dragodraki continues to be a star bug reporter! I've been able to fix many issues with international support due to their reports. Recent release 3.3.6 features another fix related to proper charset handling of Windows-1252.

From Ayaya - Cyrillic

Ayaya sent in feedback that Cyrillic was still not working fully correctly. See issue https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/201

From SplinterCell

I got some constructive criticism from user SplinterCell mixed in with some other positive feedback (slightly edited for clarity):

1.  It is unclear to me what the numbers mean on the images
2. Why is there no option to blur images - this way users can recognize false-positives more easily
3. The UI is ugly and it is not as self-explanatory as you think -> Do the buttons work per site, per browsing sessions, what do the buttons do, etc. it's wholly unclear. 

Good questions all, so I'll take a bit of time on each.

First, the numbers relate to the score that the image filter model returns. Basically, the higher the number, the more likely it is to be an NSFW image. This isn't quite the same as saying that it's a more NSFW image if it's a higher number, but there is often a correlation. For the technically-minded, it finds the model's confidence score, maps that on the ROC curve and returns 1.0-TPR at that point; not the most well-founded way but a confidence indicator.

Second, regarding blurring - there are a couple reasons. The first is that I try to think through the psychology of the addon a bit as well, and while blurring images allows false-positives to be picked out more easily it also also allows true-positives to be observed a bit better as well. Could it be an option for some? Yes, but probably not a default. The second reason is that blur effects are fairly computationally expensive, and I've tried to avoid incurring that cost so that pages with large numbers of images will still be speedy. In practice, it could be that this wouldn't be an issue. So - head on over to GitHub if you feel strongly about it and enter an issue.

Third - yes, I agree the UI is ugly and a bit clunky. As the main developer on the project, I have to choose where to put my time and this just hasn't been a focus. Here are a few notes:

• Image filtering currently works at a global level, so the buttons are not per domain or per web page. However, this is something I've pondered changing.  (See related: https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/184 and https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/168)
  
• The basic way that it works is there are different zones based on how sensitive the model is configured to be: use Trusted for sites without much chance of bad content, Neutral on sites where there's a chance some questionable content will pop up but rarely, and Untrusted on sketchy sites. You can switch between the zones to kick it into manual mode, otherwise it'll try to flip back and forth automatically when Automatic is selected.

 Whitelisting

A couple users (Opensourcerer and happydev) wrote in regarding a whitelisting feature. This is being tracked but hasn't seen action in a while - see https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/184 from above.

Mobile - Future?

I got an unexpected PR from one ArthurMelton that helps support use on mobile. The addon doesn't officially support that, but this pushes it closer! Thanks Arthur!

Conclusion and Next Steps

Thanks for the feedback! Lately I've been working on reviewing machine learning research over the past 2 or so years to check for possible advancements to improve the base model, particularly those related to the explosion of growth brought about by the cross-pollination of transformers to image classification. You can see some of the experiments here: https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/model/issues/7