Slashdot Mirror
Designer on Slashdot Overhaul Plans
EdwardianDandy writes "Web designer Khoi Vinh, whose firm Behavior is responsible for the redesign of the Onion, argues on publish.com that an upcoming contest to overhaul Slashdot's look will yield interesting results, but the outcome will suffer because the underlying architecture is off limits." Normally I don't post stuff "About" Slashdot here since I find meta naval gazing very boring, but this article has many good points about architecture and design, even if his whole premise is based on a contest that we haven't spent more than about 5 minutes thinking about, and is mostly just meant to be a fun way for users to contribute themes to Slashdot. If Khoi wants to enter the contest, we'll consider his designs along with everyone else's. (I'm sure we can't afford him tho). And if he (or anyone) wants to make changes more substantial than cosmetic CSS, I'd consider them too. The upcoming Slashdot Redesign contest is intended to be more about design than architecture, but good ideas are good ideas.
A small request: whatever we finally decide to do, let's keep Slash Light.
"it's now possible for any enterprising designer to develop a new, production-ready (or nearly ready) 'skin' for the site completely on her own."
I told you guys! Once we shaped up and went CSS the females would be all over us! I'm talking SKIN!
Mind showing off your work-in-progress?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
How old is the current design? Is this the originial design from whenever this site started? Enlighten me!
I find the new Onion design too busy and hard to navigate. The old design was simple, clean and the Infographcs and American Voices were easier to read. Maybe that's just my opinion...
When did the Navy get involved with Slashdot?
I hope this guy keeps his hands off of /. because the new Onion design gives me a headache. Swapping a clean, streamlined design for a USA-Today ripoff isn't my idea of progress.
Seriously, this guy needs something else to worry about.
As I see it, the founders didn't decree anything: There are rules to any contest. And given how much backend work el founders probably wanted to do ( ie: none. If it ain't borked, don't fix it ), this makes perfect sense.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
So he's the one responsible for befouling my precious Onion.
:(
I realize the debate over homogeneity and efficiency of content/ad presentation is one that will never die, but there's something to be said about the sentimentality attached to site layouts. It's like that old pub you love going to getting remodeled with gear from Ikea or something. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it also doesn't feel right, either.
When I stopped being a nub and actually edited my prefences and figured out what everything is, I made /. good for me and now I have no problems or confusion. :)
In effect, the site's information architecture *IS* up for redesign? possibly? thus negating the limiting factors of the original contest announcement? I agree with the article for the most part, in that good design is generally reliant for usability upon a solid foundation of content structuring underneath, but I think that in Slashdot's case, a hell of a lot of good could come from just scrapping and rewriting the "look and feel" from the ground up. Setting aside complaints about timeliness and originality of content lately, I think that Slashdot's main problem is that if anything, the information it contains is TOO categorized and divided. You could spend an hour just familiarizing yourself with all the various "sections", and that's not even considering shit like "Ask Slashdot" and other regular types of submissions/articles with their own special little names that would confound a newbie to the point of exasperation. There's no good way to simplify a juggernaut like slashdot, there is simply too much out there, and it has too large a community for any 180 degree changes in how it works. I think the best that can be done is a dramatic re-think of the UI, and a reliance on site search to get at the older innards.
This brings many things into sharp focus. Lack of ethical caching of small sites. Lack of basic story duplication review. Lack of basic grammar review. Lack of basic journalistic fact-checking. Troubling comments that charge karma backlash to those who defy the editors. Lack of awareness that Slashdot is expected by its subscribers and would-be subscribers to behave like the professional corporate concern which it is, and not an unpaid hobby blog which it may have been in the distant past.
Come on, Taco. Some regular "navel gazing" is how things improve over time. Is Slashdot worth so little to you?
[
One of the things I like about this website is the simplicity in viewing it and I really wouldn't want to see much changed. The only thing I would say to change is to kill some of the white space between posted articles and user comments, but that is really a minute nitpick... Slashdot has enough of a following that changing the site won't hurt numbers of visitors IMO but hopefully if they decide to go with a new spread it won't wind up being visually unappealing...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Here I am posting a comment and I can't view the story I'm commenting on. That's ridiculous. And it takes too long to learn how to use Slashdot because the most important information is buried among a lot of trivia in the FAQs.
If Slashdot were a person it would wear taped together glasses, a pocket protector and floods.
News for nerds indeed.
Insert witty sig here.
So yesterday I was at home trying to post a comment and I got the following:
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has
temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the
timeout corner . If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down.
If you think this is unfair, please email moderation@slashdot.org with your
MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "fbc83eaaddf909965a32494c3cf14021" and "
0681b6883c7b099b59889c08cb34313a" and (optionally, but preferably) your IP
number "68.xxx.xxx.xxx http://68.xxx.xxx.xxx/>" and your username "SumDog".
So I emailed them telling them the problem. I was a subscriber, with decent Karma and I don't troll (although I bet this will be modded as a troll sadly). The response I got was:
> On 10/17/05, Robert Rozeboom wrote:
>>
>> It looks like you share this subnet with a troll, sorry.
The next day, I am still unable to post from home. I have to ssh into work and use lynx to post a comment. I e-mailed him again and got this response:
I;m sorry but I can't unblock your subnet.
Again from Robert Rozeboom. I actually support slashdot, bought a subscription (yea I know it's only $10) and I can't post from home because someone who uses a Comcast cable modem is a troll?! What the fuck?!
They don't bother to check the individual user, but instead ban an entire sub net. There were several comments I wanted to post yesterday but couldn't, because I didn't want to sit with a damn ssh terminal in lynx retyping my user name and password for each comment (I had cookies turned on in Lynx, but it didn't remember my authentication).
If I had done something wrong, I could understand. If there was some way I could fix the problem I would. But even if I unplug my cable modem and get a new IP, it will still likely be on the same subnet. I can't change providers, I don't have DSL or any other broadband in my area (not to mention the reconnection and setup fees are insane unless they're running a special offer)
Before slashdot worries about polishing up the look and feel of their site, they should go back and fix underlying problems with the code, maybe even add spell-check and require users to type in words from images (a.k.a reverse turing test) to prevent abuse from bots.
Notice all the "we"'s in the replys. People feel like they own or are a part of Slashdot. You can't buy that kind of loyalty and letting stakeholders play a role (or think they're playing a role at least) in determining the direction of the site is a small price to pay.
It may be a business, but they're the keepers of this community. If they lose their way and get all evil and shit, Google will start their version and all us fan boys will run over there instead to bad mouth MS and warn everybody about the latest Firefox hole.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
They call themselves "the definitive authority on web publishing and print", and yet their own site uses teeny tiny 10px fonts? Free clue: design is about balancing form and function. When you use tiny fonts, you sacrifice function. If you forget the balance, it's not design, just art wanking. A 10px font size for the main body of text is not acceptable for something to qualify as well designed.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The ASCII-goatse guys need to be IP-banned for life. The GNAA guys need to get a life. The "overrated/underrated" metamod loophole needs to be closed. Storys need to be checked for duplicates, at least a week back. Summaries should summarize. Third grade rules of grammar and spelling should be observed in summaries. Storys should be assigned to the category they belong to. Corel cache links should be supplied for sites that obviously can't take the strain - particularly if they have shown that they can't in the past. Roland Pipaquele (sp) and the Amazon recommendation link trolls should be executed. Storys should be accepted/rejected in a timely manner, and we shouldn't be seeing people posting "I submitted this 20 hours ago, and was rejected".
I could go on, but I'm sure I've said enough already to be scored a troll-for-life, so I'll quit now.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Agreed, I used to read The Onion religiously, but now I don't bother anymore. The new site is a disaster, and it's all about generating revenue through obtrusive ads. The "new" Onion is a corporate shill. I'd be ashamed to be associated with that site, let alone advertise that I created that trainwreck of a perfectly good (great!) site.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
No. XML is a set of syntax rules, not a document format itself. When people say "XML" when the context implies a document format, they invariably mean "an ad-hoc data format I've just made up on the spot that uses XML syntax". It's meaningless data. <myspecialheading> means nothing to anybody but you. Everybody knows what <h1> means though. Do Google apply XSLT? Do all browsers? No and no. They are left with the XML, which means nothing.
If you really want to manipulate your pages with XSLT, publish XHTML so that at least there's a decent fallback and your documents actually mean something on their own without being translated into whatever format your XSLT produces.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Anyway, regarding TFA, that was the biggest load of "Web Designer" horse crap ever shoveled into HTML. Slashdot has been ASS UGLY since 1997. Yet, it's been hugely successful. Why is this? Gosh, it COULDN'T be because of the CONTENT--could it? Not only has Slashdot continued to provide what it's here to provide, it's remained remarkably stable, UI-wise.
"Rethinking" the architecture is daft. Slashdot has a codebase built to encourage good comments and hide bad ones, but to accept everything that's not scripted spam. That's the architecture. "Rethinking" that is like "rethinking" the design of the nuclear reactor in a submarine while crusing at 20 knots 800 feet down.
Please keep your Web Designer hands off Slashdot, thanks.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
The Onion makes my eyes water.
*bdumTSH*
Rollover effects aid usability by giving instant visual feedback the moment the user can activate the link. It has the greatest effect on people who aren't that comfortable using the mouse (newbies, people with arthritis, etc), but it affects everyone to some small degree.
Not true. I can spend all day listing stupider things that people do.
Why the special attention to the underline? The user already knows it's a link, they've already navigated to it with the mouse and are geetting ready to click it. It's not the same as removing the underlines when you aren't hovering over the link.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Slashdot needs a theme that is very neutral... and looks like a legitimate business website...that an IT person might visit. this turquois stuff really stands out at work... shooot... here comes the boss....
Probably because I'm an amature but the articles linkage between 'skin' and information architecture is unclear. Without mentioning the functionality he'd like to play with, he comes off like a graphic designer who dips his toe in php every now and then but wants to be running the show. Which reminds me of half the graphic designers I've worked with. The job is, for instance, a shopping cart - and they've done some serious thinking about SQL (or scarier, Actionscript or OOP) so there's an hour or two wasted as they pontificate and then I go home and figure it out. I think it's bred in ad agencies where everyone is trying to build an empire.
I wanted to pay a guy back by waiting till the end of the project and then saying 'I have some ideas about the fonts' but I'm too nice (lazy)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Being able to view submitted and pending stories and able for the comunity to vote for them. I don't know about the rest of you but there were many times when I posted a story that got rejected that the next week it was accecepted by someone else and it was a major thread. Also we will be able to find dupes quicker.
Secondly being able to edit your posts after you post it for spelling and grammar mistakes and just have the gammar nazis just send you a private message with the spelling and grammar mistakes for you to change if it makes sense.
Third More moderation options with different values. Like Over and Under Rated should have 1/2 point taken because it slips threw the meta moderation.
Common non moderators can put points on a message to so moderators can see what other people like or dislike and they can make a decision based off of that.
Moderators should know what metamoderators did to their moderation so they can reevaluate their actions.
Mod points shouldn't have a limit (while karma does) but the amount of moderation should go up logarmithicly. So you can get moderations of 6 and 7 but the higer it goes the more moderation it will take to get that high.
Over and Under rated messages should not be an option for unmoderated messages. Because they were not rated.
The point of most of my suggestions is to incorage positive posting and not rusing to get first posts early. Many time the comments are worth more then the stories but they are treated like they normal static to them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Rob - you are right that "navel gazing" is bad. But looking down and saying "Dayum - I need to lay off the beer and do some sit-ups" is not.
/. servers could see from that.
Being so focused upon your navel that you DO NOTHING about it is bad. But stepping back once in a while and saying "now, how can I make things better - anybody have any good advice", then implementing that advice is the only way to improve.
For example - what if you added extra CSS classes to comments, reflecting the moderation adjectives applied and the moderation level - such as
<li class="comment, level_5, karma_bonus, insightful, interesting, overrated">
Then, without a server fetch, I could change my displayed comment threshold just by changing my CSS. Think about how much savings the
You could even add the zoo modifiers, then I could have my friends posts highlighted by changing the background, again, without a server fetch.
In short, Rob - if you put more of the information the back-end has into the generated HTML, then that would increase the amount of cool stuff WE can do at the browser end.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Aha...you have found us out! Quick, while the still don't suspect us, all the boat schoolers on ./ should...oh hell, I've been retired too long; I can't come up with a plan. Any USNA ./'ers class of '85 or later, just grab this and run with it.
Web designer Khoi Vinh, whose firm Behavior is responsible for the redesign of the Onion,
And what a horrible job you did:
1. Smearing ads all over the place. I remember seeing not one, but TWO banner ads toting NBC's "The Office" on the same page. you know, in case we didn't see the first one. It's IGN or *insert video game news site here* bad.
2. The oh-so-classic time-honored tradition of putting ALL the links humanly possible on the main page. If i have to hit Ctrl+F to find something obvious, there's something wrong.
3. Very little new content. A lot of the bottom of the main page is just links to older content, none of which is available to free users.
4. Inconsistent overall look compared to the older site.
Can websites jump the shark?
and, of course, it was rejected. I archived to my Journal, but here it is...
I have found my self wondering of late whether or not the Moderation system of Slashdot (meaning, this site in particular, as opposed to the underlying implementation in Slashcode) would be more effective if a few changes were made.
For instance, it seems to me from my own experience, that readers are more likely to post in stories that cover a field in which the reader may have a particular expertise, yet the moderation system disallows those same posters from moderating any posts under the same topic. Would it not be more effective to allow moderation to all posts but one's own? Why isn't the moderation system open to all logged in users at all times? Why are we limited to five moderation points at a time? Why is the moderation scale limited to -1 through +5? Why are we limited to single point changes?
Personally, I have my preferences set to display +4 and above, and most of my own moderation tends to be downward, as I personally feel it is of more value to the community for me to down-mod those posts which I feel do not deserve a 4 or 5 rating. I take my moderation very seriously, and I do not mod on a whim. In fact, many times when I am awarded moderation points, I end up allowing them to expire because I do not feel any affinity for the topics currently being discussed, I do not possess enough expertise in the topics being discussed, or I want to particpate in a debate. Again, those discussions I join tend to be those in which I have particular interest or expertise, and I suspect that many posters here would tell similar tales.
I submit that changing the moderation system to -2 to +10 would result in a more accurate characterization of the relative quality level of the posts I see. I also think that we need a "-2, Incorrect" moderation type for posts that contain information that is just downright wrong, and perhaps a "+2, Definitive" moderation type for stellar examples. Perhaps other new moderation types would also help. Could we not open the moderation to all users at all times and do away with the five points at a time limitation by simply not allowing a particular user to moderate a particular post more than once?
I've read the FAQ section on moderation many times, and it still leaves me a bit disappointed. As a 5-digit UID Slashdotter (just a little way over 15 bits at #33785), I've seen Slashdot go through many different phases, and I'm wondering:
Where does the Slashdot community stand on these issues in 2005?
The new site is a disaster, and it's all about generating revenue through obtrusive ads.
So a couple years ago I was working in London and I was given a laptop to use by my employer. I decided to download the onion to read offline while riding the train home from work one day. Turns out the page wouldn't render because of a reference to a 3rd-party adserver graphic I hadn't downloaded. To fix it, I opened up my editor and was removing these ad tags from the code. Next thing I know, a man grabbed my laptop off my lab and bolted out of the train.
Apparently, the Onion REALLY wants you to see those ads and has implemented some pretty excessive means of enforcement.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
No, by far it is not. I share a network connection with an off campus communications provider where there are plenty of people who visit and post here. There are a few trolls and since we all share the same outgoing IP address, I get blocked as well.
I have a subscription, I get downmodded for my "unpopular" views unfairly at times, but the majority of them are just fine. My karma is still Excellent! so wtf?
They better start changing some of the ways things work around here... I had to use an "other" isp, my neighbor that wasn't on the lame network, to post here even!
My biggest complaint with slashdot is that you can't hide a rathole.
Say there's a topic on space travel and someone chimes in about their breastfeeding theory and soon there's 85 replies: each one regaling us with a delightful and witty breastfeeding story that I'd just rather skip over. A collapsible outline format would allow the discerning reader to simply close irrelevant threads and subordinate branches.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Yes, I usually reserve my design spite for people who DON'T underline links in the first place. Esp. when they just display the text in another color, and they use that same technique for emphasis. Like I'm supposed to know that when text is in orange it's a link, and when it's in blue it's just to make a point. I'll be damned if I'm going to go hover over every odd-colored word just to see if my cursor changes.
Just junk food for thought...
ummm.... actually no. most of those enterprise CMS's now use CSS to manage how the content looks. The CSS may be generated and managed by the CMS and stored in a database but it is still CSS and thus subject to all the wonderful things you can do with it. Wordpress, Typo3, movable type, and many other CMS applications all use CSS to style their content. And HTML/XML to structure it. So your rant just shows you really don't know what your talking about. Large operations don't approximate the functionality of XML/CSS internally they use the functionality of XML/CSS internally.
As someone who develops custom CMS solutions on a regular basis for customers I can tell you I'd much rather use the prebuilt functionality of XML/CSS in my app than to have to use old style table based layouts.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
The Iron Law of the net states that if you post a spelling flame you'll inevitably make a spelling error in it somewhere. It's been that way for decades.
It's still a good point. A spelling error can jolt some people just as badly as a ringing telephone interrupting a coding session.
If you want to see an example of bad site design, of what Slashdot should avoid looking like at all costs, just look at publish.com, the site on which the article was posted.
Click on the link to TFA, and see what a bad web site looks like:
formatted
in such
narrow
columns
that only
one or
two words
per line
can fit
in the
space
available.
(This is not the same thing as links to other pages appearing within the article text, which is perfectly acceptable.)
There are actually no pictures on the page at all that have anything to do with the article itself.
Contrast this with Slashdot's current layout:
- There is a narrow bar at the top with links to other sites.
- There is a narrow column down the left side with a bunch of links to other areas of the site.
- There are a few (very few!) graphics near the top that link to related topics or sections, and the graphics are halfway decent looking and are actually somewhat indicative of the corresponding link (as opposed to the links on publish.com, many of which are photos of people that I don't know, and in whom I am not the least bit interested).
- There are several links to external pages, and some of them are to commercial sites, but they are all at least somewhat related to the main article.
- There is at most one, only mildy obtrusive, ad between the article and the comments.
- The comments section, which is the main section, takes up over 90% of the horizontal space, and is uniterrupted by ads, extraneous links, and other distracting garbage.
There is no doubt which site is better.IIRC, you can turn this bar off in your user preferences.
I highly recommend that C.T. not listen to the "pros" and "experts", who seem to be responsible for a large portion of the crap commercial web pages infesting the World Wide Web.
A few other recommendations, not covered in the above:
- Please let your users pick the color schemes, or at least give them a choice of schemes, so that they can avoid the games.* and it.* color schemes and the like.
- Please avoid using any Flash or ECMAScript/JavaScript/AnyScript, or at least provide a non-script fallback for those of us who have all of that crap disabled.
- Allow us to use more character entity references (such as °, ½, etc.) in comments.
- Don't count markup in sig lines as contributing to the 120-character limit.
There are probably some other things, but I can't think of them right now.Also, increase the limit to 160 or higher, but don't allow any more than two or three newlines in a sig.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
The front page of the onion looks like a bomb went off in the middle of some content. You have stories all over the place.
The Onion is laid out like it is because it's a news parody site. As such, it would make sense to mimic other news sites (CNN, ABCNews, CBS, etc) with a featured story on the left, shorter summaries on the right, nav bar to the far left, and so on.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Actually, I think it is: comparing the typical Mac fonts (Geneva and the like) with the typical Windows fonts (Arial and the like) at the same point size, they certainly look significantly different to me, with the Windows fonts rendering significantly smaller on average. I've always assumed this was something to do with Macs historically using different physical screen resolutions, though I don't have any numbers to check whether that makes sense.
This is a very good argument for what we all seem to agree on around here: the main body text of a page should be set to the default font size configured by the user's browser, not x-small, 90%, or (God forbid) an absolute pixel value like 10px. This is usability 101 stuff, and any professional web designer who's still getting it wrong doesn't deserve the title. Setting text in a small font that many users can't read isn't stylish or clever, it's thoughtless and inconsiderate.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.