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We Recommend is one flat list of twelve, and it has already drifted from the README #544

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Description

@thcp

What goes wrong

The "We Recommend" dialog presents twelve unrelated entries as a single undifferentiated list, sorted by nothing a reader can perceive. A guitar builder, a pedal manufacturer, a large retailer, a karaoke app and a camera-tech channel all sit side by side with equal weight. There is no way to skim it for the one kind of thing you care about, and the list only gets harder to read as entries are added.

The descriptions compound it. They run to full sentences of varying length, so the cards are ragged and the eye has nothing to anchor on.

The drift

The same list exists twice, maintained by hand in two places:

  • FRIENDS in static/js/catalog.js
  • the "We Recommend" table in README.md

They already disagree. r/bass is in the README and absent from the app. Nothing checks that the two agree, so the gap went unnoticed, and any future edit to one is free to skip the other.

Who it affects

Anyone opening the dialog, which is the only place in the product where these people are credited. A list nobody can read is a poor way to point at them, and it undersells the work of everyone on it.

What a fix has to handle

  • Grouping the entries by what they actually are, so the section can grow without becoming unreadable
  • Descriptions short and even enough that a card is scannable at a glance
  • Bringing the app and the README back into agreement, including r/bass
  • The category labels are new user-facing strings, so they need keys in all ten language tables in static/js/i18n.js, per .claude/rules/i18n.md
  • The twelve description strings are hardcoded English literals inside the FRIENDS array today, so every non-English user reads them in English. Anything that rewrites them should move them into the i18n layer at the same time rather than re-introducing the same problem in new words.

Activity

  1. thcp commented on Sep 1, 2026

    @thcp
    CollaboratorAuthor

    Fixed in 0.16.1, which is now on main via #541.

    The dialog is grouped into five categories now: Artists & Creators, Instrument Builders & Repair, Music Gear, Music & Karaoke Technology, and Media & Community. Descriptions are cut to a line each so a card is readable at a glance.

    r/bass is in the app, so the two lists agree again, and the README table carries the same categories.

    The twelve descriptions were hardcoded English literals inside the array, which meant every non-English user read them in English. They are i18n keys now, translated across all ten language tables, with ptPT overriding only the words that genuinely differ from Brazilian Portuguese.

    One thing that came after: five sections stacked in a 420px column was taller than the dialog on any normal window, so the list scrolled and the people below the fold were never seen. It is two columns with a rule between them now, in a wider card, and it does not scroll on a normal window.

    Landed in #545, with the two-column layout following in b18dbff.

  2. self-assigned this
    on Oct 1, 2026
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