A few suggestions re admin UI

[verfluchten]

Hi all,

I have been a very active user of several *NIX routers, over the past 20 or so years.
Recently, I migrated my Linux-based router that had grown to have some issues, to OpnSense, having chosen the latter over pfSense, due to many advantages that I found during the R&D. Thank you, team, for this great product!

However, there are also some annoyances that I discovered as I have been setting things up.

1. The firewall rules screen is the major one. You have checkboxes for the movement of rules but not for any other action (unless I totally missed that). When there are hundreds of rules, which is usually the case, it is a huge pain to enable/disable or log/not log many of them needless to say edit. Could you consider adding the enabling/disabling of checked-off rules as well as turning the logging on or off? Clicking hundreds of tiny icons is excruciatingly painful. The checking of boxes is not going to be the same effort because quite often such actions have to be taken on 'all but a few' rules which is achieved bu checking off all and unchecking of a few.

2. The netmask drop-downs present another huge annoyance. They are too tiny and too dumb. They initially open in the wrong spot (bottom-most if I understand it correctly). Usually, IP addresses to block/allow come in the form of IP/Netmask, but the UI does not support that even though it could have. Could you either make the drop down for netmask much, much taller (ideally to show all 32 bits) or support the 111.222.333.444/xy syntax in the address fields?

3. The lack of import. It is excruciatingly painful to create many rules which is often the case. If you could allow to copy/paste a list of IPs into a clone action, that would have made the UI way, way more user-friendly. I ended up manually editing the XML files during the migration, but even going forward I would have to import several IPs at a time quite often.

4. For the love of God, please do not shift the UI from under the user! Here is what I mean: you add a huge 'Apply changes' banner after each change. That shifts the UI and requires scrolling back and forth instead of allowing the user to keep going. If you could find another way to indicate that changes have to be applied, it would help immensely. You already have a banner with Firewall: Rules: XYZ, Select/Inspect/Add controls. Just plop the 'Apply' button next to them, do not grow the banner vertically because it shifts everything below. You already do this in the Lobby/Dashboard with 'Save settings'. Just replicate this behavior. Same goes about 'Changes saved' blue bars. They appear and shove the UI down, which yanks the controls from under the user.

5. The log/do not log icons are virtually indistinguishable on some monitors. The gray and blue icons look so similar it is hard to tell which shows. I can provide you with a negative of the current gray icon, which is going to be glaringly obvious on any monitor, with any brightness/contrast setting.

6. The 'Add' button is inconsistent between screens. On some, it is a square orange button up top, on others it is a tiny plus sign at the bottom. One example is firewall categories. If you could standardize them it would be awesome! Now, users have to stare at the screens wondering where the heck the add button is when it is not the standard orange one.

7. The process of figuring out which rule blocked a connection is too involved. One has to ssh in and run commands to find out which rule it was. Could you create a function to block/allow from a live log? Alternatively, output rule ID in the 1st column of the rules screen. Ideally, both.

8. Lost of space is wasted, which extends the screens vertically and requires lots of scrolling. Everywhere I put a blue bar on the attached screenshot is essentially a waste that is unhelpful because it prolongs the setting of things up. Could you squeeze fields closer together?

Thanks for reading through this rant.