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Dilbert Goes Flash, Readers Revolt
spagiola writes "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."
I have flashblock and noscript up. I tried temporarily allowing just a few things to let me view the site, but when that didn't work, I gave up and deleted Dilbert from my bookmarks.
It's funny, but it's not worth it. He also has an irrational love of Microsoft at times, such as when he thought that Bill Gates would make a good president.
Because, you know, it's not like the rest of the world minds having the USA push them around. And it's not like Bill is known for being good at that kind of business, or anything like that...
Suffice it to say, I didn't feel like it was worth the bother to continue reading it.
My award for "sticking with what works" goes to craigslist.org.
Am I the only one who thinks Dilbert stopped being funny back in the 1990s? The last collection I enjoyed was Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy . Since then, Adams has just been going over and over the same handful of gags. And even though corporate culture in America may have changed to some extent, the Dilbert office seems the same early '90s environment that inspired him to turn the strip towards a parody of office life.
Don't these PHB clowns realize that it's content that draws people to a site, and excessive bandwidth, insecure plug-ins required, inane registration requirements, and slow downloads that drive them away again.
Scott Adam's personal e-mail address is well-known (remember to put 'Dilbert' in the subject line to slip past his spam filter). One can still complain to him directly.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And try going to the next strip....
No previous or next button on any of the pages...
BRILLIANT!
That's OK, it's just a genreational change.
Each generation is arrogant enough to ignore the collected wisdom of what's gone before, so it makes the same old mistakes. Hence Dilbert is just as popular with the new "breed" of readers as it was with the last lot. The reason is they get just as frustrated with the same bosses making the same mistakes as their forebears. No doubt in 100 years time, people will still be grousing about the incompetence of their superiors and Scott Adams, or his grandchildren, will still be making money out of it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
SO, this website redesign proves that Dilbert has become the PHB. A design not help the customers or users, but to help the bottom line. How does it hep. Well, for one, it put Dilbert on the front page of /. after I don't know how long. It is an marketing gimmick, nothing more. Dilbert is irrelevant, and when one is irrelevent, there is little else to do but employ gimmicks. OTOH, I am sure it will work. Admas will sell some of his collected blog entries, people will reminisce about the good old days, and many will complain simply because they cannot understand that a business must generate a good profit.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I don't care whether the feature was there before: it should just work. And I actually even don't care that much about using flash (although flash does have a tendency to hang my browser, so static pages are still better). It's the "we don't support Linux" thing that really p*sses me off.
Linux user since early January 1992.
The 1990's called and said that it wanted Dilbert back.
Look, Dilbert blows. It's as cooked as The Far Side. Let it go. Just let it go.
It is fairly common for people who have no clue about how to design with standards complient html/css to use flash to make a wiz-bang menu that doesn't work with many browsers, takes longer to load, and is completely hostile to the sight impaired.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Its not that we hate new technology. Its more that we hate when simple technology that is accepted as a standard is replaced by complex buggy technology that isn't as widely available yet performs the exact same function. With the exception of the animated strips, there is absolutely no need for Flash to be used on this site--all Flash does in this case is make the page load slower and increase the chances that the page will not render correctly (ie, if the client doesn't have Flash).
Now, that being said, the Dilbert Archive is, of yet, unchanged.
And the Slashdotting will no doubt result in a similarly positive jump in pageviews. Complete success!
``(It's not like I am still expecting it to work in Netscape 3!)''
On the other hand, why shouldn't it?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's one thing to not support Linux, but to actively block it...that's absurd.
They may have switched to Flash to make it a little harder to link to their content and to copy the images.
Who cares if it's in black and white or color? It's not in color in most of the dead-tree versions, so why care about it on the web?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
FYI, the whole site works on Linux, just use the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox and spoof yourself as IE7 on Windows. The animations portion works fine.
On a side note, this is what is extremely frustrating about this really, the fact that they didn't limit it to Windows and Mac because of technical reasons, they ARTIFICIALLY limited it. This is actually worse in my opinion.
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Global warming has a sound scientific basis.