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."

Comments

Deleted

[Xenographic]

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.

Can't leave well enough alone

[timeOday]

This seems to be universal among web designers. They just aren't happy unless they're redesigning something to make it more complicated and less likely to work.

My award for "sticking with what works" goes to craigslist.org.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[CajunArson]

s/web designers/designers/g

Wisdom is knowing when to rip out the kludge, and knowing when it isn't really a kludge and to leave it the #$@# alone.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[MindStalker]

As a web programmer I'd say its that managers can't stop demanding new features. I spent half my time trying to talk people out of features my job would be so much easier if I just relented....

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[linzeal]

Look at this site, the reply to this buttons replaced a perfectly useful reply text link. Now the pages are 10% longer than they used to be and take forever to scroll on small screens. Since the change I have been coming to Slashdot maybe 10% of the time I used to. Does anyone know how to get the old slashdot back?

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[Tablizer]

They just aren't happy unless they're redesigning something to make it more complicated and less likely to work.

New PHB managers always want to "make their mark" by making changes. I'll bet that's what is going on. The act of changing stuff is more important to them than the merit of it. It's like a wolf pissing on a log to mark its territory. We're seeing e-piss here.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[hey!]

Most people are quite aware that being able to tell a piece of music is snappy doesn't mean they can write a hit song. But somehow the distinction between experiencing excellence and producing it is lost on people when it comes to design.

Designing something is deceptively simple. Maybe it is simple, and that's what makes it hard. It's easy to do something bad, and hard to recognize something bad when it comes out of your self.

Dilbert stopped being funny a decade ago

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Probably a Consultant

[Nom du Keyboard]

It was probably some outside consultant that convinced them of the perceived need to produce a "competitive" web-site in today's market, and only this garbage will do.

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.

Re:No Linux?

[lorenlal]

And try going to the next strip....
No previous or next button on any of the pages...

BRILLIANT!

repeat old stuff for a new generation

[petes_PoV]

Since then, Adams has just been going over and over the same handful of gags

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.

Come over to the dark side

[fermion]

Most person becomes that which they most rail against. More often than not, these people realize that those they railed against, for instance the PHB, were just doing things that they could not at that point understand. It has been interesting to see Scott Adams descend into the PHB. The PHB that is continuously coming up with new ways to make a profit, and has little concern with quality or application. Be it outsourcing to unqualified labour or redesigning a web site, the PHB is interested in earning, not customers or quality. This is why engineers have such trouble dealing with them. Engineers are taught that their job is to make the world better, and it is unethical to cut corners primarily to increase profits.

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.

Re:Ouch

[rossz]

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.

Re:What a bunch of grumpy old cave trolls

[Javarrito]

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.

Re:uhhh hello...

[Planesdragon]

The environment is changing, in much the same way it has for the past few million years. We're not doing it. The environment is. Wow. So you're saying, in defiance to a wider margin than "a nuclear bomb is feasible" had, that throwing massive amounts of carbon and other pollutants into the sky is having NO effect?

I'm truly shocked by your scientific acumen.

The Climate Crisis is not that the environment is changing. It's that it's changing far, far too fast.

Site works in Linux

[chk89]

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.

Re:uhhh hello...

[jcr]

There is humor in everything in life.

One of the funniest things in life is watching believers get all bent out of shape when you laugh at them. Creationists, Scientologits, Vegan proselytizers, the Global Warming crowd, the 9/11 troofers, many kinds of new-age woo-woos, radical feminists, anti-feminists, and the list goes on and on.

-jcr

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One of those things is not like the others

[Nursie]

Global warming has a sound scientific basis.

Re:One of those things is not like the others

[jcr]

Global warming has a sound scientific basis.

So does global cooling. They both happen, again and again.

-jcr

Re:One of those things is not like the others

[SomeKDEUser]

No. Global warming is an attested fact. That humans contribute to it also.

There is debate on the exact amount attributable to humans, and that is all.

Sound science it is. Statistics are the basis of sound science, and if you think no fact can be construed from statistics, than pretty much all science is bunk.

Why is it experiments are repeated, do you think? for the fun of it? Why are papers littered with p-values and "statistically significant" and error bars and so on and so forth?

Hint: statistics are not a magical way of fudging data. On the contrary.