About the Black flashlight item

Published by Vlasta about 4 hours ago.

So, I am working on some minor changes to spray paints and related stuff and there is this problem with the black flashlight...

The Black flashlight item was introduced after the first dark wallpaper was created by one of the veteran users of this website. The wallpaper, being very dark, caused minor problems with users, who had the black spray paint applied to their usernames. The black flashlight was supposed to help those, who activated the dark wallpaper, by giving them the ability to illuminate names of other people with the black spray paint applied

When you used the black flashlight, you were able to aim it at anyone, who had a spray paint applied to their name. This was weird, maybe fun, but mostly not used. Majority of people, who bought the flashlight, just aimed it at themselves giving their name an azure glow.

There were also visual glitches related to the black flashlight - when multiple flashlights were aiming at the same user, the database field holding their css-style could overflow and the style definition was cut making it partially invalid.

Right now, in the middle of the redesign, the black flashlight can temporarily be only aimed at the owner of the item, but that is quite boring.

I am not sure how to make it less boring. There is this option to keep the old mechanism and allow aiming it at anyone with a colored name. But since it was not used much, can cause unexpected behavior and it allows aiming at long inactive users, which is relatively pointless, I am not a fan of this way anymore.

What to do instead is a question, I'd like to ask all of you. If you have an original and easy-to-make solution for this problem, please add a comment.

I am currently considering 2 options:

• allow aiming at other people, but use a different condition - instead of allowing to aim at anyone with custom color, allow aiming for example at people subscribed to you, or at people who sent you a PM or to people who commented on your profile - this way the interactions will not be random
• only allow pointing on yourself or to everyone - in case of the second option, all usernames would be illuminated, but only you would see it

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