Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Keybindings, Dynamic Stories
We've been working hard on the new dynamic Slashdot project (logged in users can enable this by enabling the beta index in their user preferences). I just wanted to quickly mention that there are keybindings on the index. The WASD and VI movement keys do stuff that we like, and the faq has the complete list. Also, if you are using Firefox or have Index2 beta enabled, you can click 'More' in the footer at the end of the page to load the next block of stories in-line without a page refresh. We're experimenting now with page sizes to balance load times against the likelihood that you'll click. More features will be coming soon, but the main thing on our agenda now is optimization. The beta index2 is sloooow and that's gotta change. We're aiming for 2 major optimizations this week (CSS Sprites, and removing an old YUI library) that I'm hoping will put the beta page render time into the "Sane" time frame (which, in case you are wondering, is several seconds faster than that "Insane" time frame we're currently seeing).
Because I'd personally be more tolerant of pages taking a few seconds longer to load everyone's comments up than the usually 5-30 second delay on previewing and submitting my own comments.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
lucky the beta index isn't linked in the summary, otherwise it would already be slashdotted
What about a button that causes Kdawson to be kicked in the crotch? You can call it 'Kickdot', as a sleight against the size of his man-spheres.
Show a counter next to it, it'll be great. It'll be the first virtual button ever to get worn out from overuse.
Just don't break Lynx support.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
One (small) issue I seem to have is with the auto-updating feature. Often, I'm connected over a (relatively) slow cell phone link. When I'm using this slow link, I'd prefer to not have Slashdot query the server for updated stories. I know I can press the "pause" button, at the top to stop the auto-updating, but if I forget to do so, then I'm annoyed by some other app responding slowly. Is there plans to make this feature configurable? (Note: Each time I load /., I need to remember to hit the "pause" button...the previous state is never saved)
Doh!
Hi,
There are a lot of questions I have about slashdot, can anyone answer them?
The tags: in the past if you clicked on one, you got a list of articles with that tag. Now it appears that if you click on one, you tag that article with that tag! Is this the intention?
On one computer, slashdot takes a long time to load a certain script, making the whole browser hang for 10 seconds. It doesn't happen on any other computer I know. What script is this?
On some computers there is, and on some other computers there is not, a flashy green thing on the top right that has the text "green" in it. What is this?
Articles get tags. What decides which of the *many* tags that people probably give to it, appear on the front page below the article? Sometimes there are tags that are so strange that I can't imagine multiple people would by chance pick that same tag, how comes it that those get picked by so many people anyway?
Thanks :)
The beta page is a perfect example of why I hate the new slashdot features. There are buttons all over the place with randomly coloured backgrounds and the like; it's awful. I hope none of it gets live.
*Runs off to learn the shortcuts* :-)
Would you hire a great UI designer and make a brand new layout or skin that is easier to read and navigate?
I have my preferences pared back to skeletal for readability - but makes the site look painfully ugly
The biggest issue I see with the new Index2 beta (which is sadly the default for those not logged in, as I rarely actually bother to log in) is that in Opera, it is nearly impossible to click the story title to see the comments, except for a tiny sliver only a couple of pixels wide at the very tip of the words. In face, it seems that it is impossible to click on the title of the stories posted by samzenpus at all (which may be a blessing in disguise). This doesn't stop me from reading the comments, however, as I am fully able to click "Read More..." or the number of comments next to this. Regardless, it is still annoying.
I may have to start turning off Vimperator when using slashdot...
What about people on non-QWERTY keyboards? Can you create a user option for what key does what?
Please fix the user pages. The new way of doing it where our comments are buried several clicks in is irritating. The only reason most of us go to our own user pages is to see if anyone's replied to our comment.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This website seems to get worse every day.
Good thing you are working on new stuff instead of breaking the old stuff that at least worked correctly.
Which is easily translatable to "I'm more interested in speaking than reading what other people might have to say on the issue".
If I load the front page, all the content appears nearly instantly. Then the whole world freezes for about two seconds before the new bright green search button appears next to the search field. I can't scroll or do anything with the page until the godawful javascript decides to finish whatever it wants to do. True for my versions of Camino and Firefox. Just because Chrome has some fancy-dancy new speedup for JS doesn't mean we all have that browser, nor should we fill up pages with new heavy features with little benefit to users.
[
While you're working on the site, will you please fix meta-mod so we're *actually* modding the mods? I can't see that the current meta-mod does anything whatsoever. It doesn't mod mods, and it doesn't mod comments either. Just + or - for no particular reason, not used for anything at all. Reminds me of voting in US elections...
Caveat Utilitor
I'm not fond of the new beta index or the new user page system. Can they be turned off?
May the Maths Be with you!
Which is even more easily translatable to "It's less disruptive for a page to load comments over time while I'm reading through them than it is for me to need to wait a minute or two just on previewing/submitting something I've already typed".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
So, when are the emacs keybindings up and running?
Agreed. WHY does it take so long for my preview to load? Sure I can understand taking a while for comments to appear on the static page, but when I click Preview I want to see the fucking preview instead of wondering if some javascript somewhere crashed and nothing's about to happen.
Edit: you vile bastards, you've changed the delay on purpose while I was typing that first paragraph didn't you!?
Yours truly
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Do people really use WASD for navigation and games? I know that's the default configuration for a lot of things but to me it seems very unnatural, unless you hitting the W with the ring finger and even that it strange. Using ESDF if a much more natural since your fingers are at home position and the middle finger is appropriately used for UP.
What's the history behind the silly WASD choice?
-- ZeroZenith
Is there any way to see a user's total number of comments? The old comment page would display the last 24 of X, where X was the total number of comments from that user account.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Agreed. WHY does it take so long for my preview to load?
Indeed. Why does it take so long for EVERYTHING to load?
My solution is simple: go into your preferences and enable "classic" mode. Aaaah, relief. No more cruft and bloat.
slashdot still purpousfully broken in IE...
portfolio
The first thing I do whenever I can on a new game is to remap the standard WASD keys to ESDF, and then remap everything else accordingly. It allows me to keep my hands on the home row and still use my strong fingers - avoiding use of the pinky on the A key. So in order for this functionality to be of most use, will you allow custom keybindings?
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Thank you for making a simple "news for nerds" site more and more bloated and dysfunctional with any new release.
as long as they keep the classic mode, there will be no problems. I also use GMail in plain html mode and all the bells and whistles don't bother me a bit.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
I really don't understand why slashdot's Ajax is so slow. Often, it takes longer to load a bit of /. ajax than it did to load the page in the first place. I have a site that loads comparable amounts of information with ajax, and it is much faster than a page reload. Why is this I wonder?
The comment thing is just silly. This is really a piece of html that should be coded straight into the javascript if it takes the server so long to respond to requests. Seriously, the comments box is what, 8 html elements?
Finally, why is it that slashdot's js is so damn heavy? I have firefox+debian running on a P4 with a gig of ram. This should be plenty to run a website with a message board, but /. takes over a minute to load a page and run all the javascript.
Please, devs, get a grip on reality.
D2 and the beta index are working great for me, aside from the hiccup with the comments pane a couple of days ago.
I would like to see meta-moderation revisited, as this is the only way to mitigate coordinated group mods. Since the old mm system was dropped, I've seen an uptick in bizarre moderation.
I know my karma is going to take a hit for this, but I had to say it. Taco, you're doing a fine job. KDawson, I don't hate you. We understand why you have to do Idle. All in all, Slashdot is pretty great.
Often /. takes as much as 5-10+ sec to load. On a dual xenon workstation. It pretty much killed the site for me. Went off to faster-loading compei
I think keyboard bindings and some useful dynamics are nice. But there still are many ways to read the site without any JavaScript.
One of them is the RSS reader included in Thunderbird. The whole "I want to have the highest rated comment on the top, and the rest cascading (not flat)" is not working anymore since that crappy new system. Even on links from Thunderbird that open in Firefox. I still get old input boxes in old styles.
When will you finally create a way to detect what comments are on the same depth level, without having to open the thing in Firefox?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Get off of it.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
My browser is already set up to use the keyboard the way I want it... PLEASE do not try to be "cute" and override them. I want a nice static web page that navigates the exact same way that every other web page navigates. I don't want a web page that updates dynamically -- that's why I turned off the freakin' television. And I don't want to have to learn new keyboard bindings for every web site with a clever hacker at the wheel.
Now, when are you going to get around to doing something with the /palm (mobile) portion of the website?
You're only about 6 years behind in development on it.
Even FOX NEWS (http://foxnews.proteus.com/) completely blows /. away in mobile web page functionality. /palm is a joke and should be retired.
and which button switches weapons? /sarcasm
As a WASD gamer this definitely makes me happy. My left hand usually rests on those buttons anyways. So far I havent had and issues with it and it seems to load the main page a little quicker then the standard index was loading but perhaps thats just me.
scrolling up and down with that new comments dealie makes firefox lag super hard. not to mention flash 10 is broken and buggy as all hell, which compounds the issue when viewing sites like youtube.
I hate to sound a complete noob, but:
"how I mien classcic mode?"
(also, could somebody set /. to actually follow our choice of fonts when in "basic mode"? It looks hideous with this tiny serif bullshit.)
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
I find a lot of these new features interesting, I like how stories seem to pop onto the page in near-realtime. Hopefully this will develop into the future of news sites. I can't wait until comments pop into threads in near-realtime as well.
Just wish these enhancements were implemented as user-selectable "themes", though. A lot of these tweaks obviously break distiller scripts and user interface habits.
Is there a version of slashdot for mobile users (other than the rss feed?). I think AvantSlash has stopped trying to track all the changes, which has made the format less accessible to plucker and avantgo users.
Anyway, still a fan, and /. is still my primary news site.
How about updating the front-page to work with IE8 now it's all standards compliant? It clearly doesn't think the page is standards-compliant so offers the "compatibility view"; both produce JavaScript errors and neither renders correctly.
Ahhh....
You hear that?
That was the sound of a thousand geeks exploding in rage at once.
*dons flameproof jacket and awaits IE rage*
throw new NoSignatureException();
Which is easily further translatable again to: I have a Slashdot account .
To be fair, if the guy has a clue, he would be more interesting in posting than reading, and he would be right to have the preference. For example, take your post. You missed major computing concepts like batch processing and time slices. The guy just wants one big time slice to load large amounts of data, and one small time slice to post small amounts of data. This is called intelligent system design.
How much should he be interested in reading your post? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader(s).
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
A while back I wrote a GreaseMonkey script to switch the User page back to the old behavior. With this script installed, when you click on your username you go immediately to the comments list, like how it used to work. Try it out and send me feedback if it works/doesn't work for you.
BTW, IMHO this whole effort to "modernize Slashdot" has been a total disaster. I have all the new Indexes turned off, but the UI is still much worse than it was before they started playing around with it. The old layout plus the Slashdotter plug-in did everything much faster and more smoothly than the new code has ever done. Please, PLEASE Taco et al ... just give it up!!
Breakfast served all day!
Am I the only one? I'm guessing it's a lethal combo of AdBlock (I know, shame on me) and NoScript. It seems to bog down when attempting to get an ad from google-synaptics-something, for example.
Can't even switch to my other tabs while slashdot is 'booting up'. It's annoying me no end. Any tips would be appreciated.
What I strongly dislike is the disproportionally wide right slashboxes column. I guess that's so you can display big-image ads without breaking the layout, right? It's a shame that Slashdopt goes to such a low to make BAD DESIGN DESICIONS in order to just display slightly different ads (it's not that the there are no other ads which worked just fine on the homepage without breaking the layout).
The big right column takes away to much from what it the one thing I visit slashdot for: The stories. The difference between the left and right column also makes for a very unpleasant optical design.
Please restore the original size of the right column (and just refrain from showing big-image ads there)!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What's with the rainbow colours? Each story has a little flash of colour on it, and then top right there's a dropdown with some colours on it, and if I choose a colour the stories all seem to dance about a bit and shuffle around. What. The. Flip? And then on the top left there's an 'Edit' box which has - amongst it's other unexplained options - another colour selector. Which does what? I have no idea. Is it some kind of quality thing? I don't have a map of quality to colour in my head. This is meaningless. And don't try and explain what it all means - I'm trying to read the news here, I don't want to have to read a manual. I'll go elsewhere.
And what do colour-blind people think? At least if you are playing with colour be smart and use Color Brewer palettes.
Honestly, I think slashdot looked pretty good enough in 2002:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020806091841/slashdot.org/
- go back to that, change the fonts and colours a bit, perfect.
Another recent example of a design-gone-bad - www.freshmeat.net - is the current new implementation:
http://www.freshmeat.net/
really better in terms of ease of use than 2002?
http://web.archive.org/web/20020603034258/http://freshmeat.net/
Raaaaage!
B
I'm more interested in a JavaScript-free /.
Come on, it's the least you can do. ;)
remapping keybindings effectively creates a "hidden mode" where the response to input change unexpectedly and for no clear reason. This undermines the users ability to understand and predict what the application is going to do and is, in general, is a poor UI design choice.
This is "news for nerds", not "I can't believe it's not gmail".
I had set my Slashdot options tuned down until I had a nice clean low-graphics high-content interface with a minimum of surprising keystroke stealing. Every update to Slashdot has made it mankier and flakier. How about a Slashdot lite classic mode that backs things up to about 2002 or so?
The only good thing to come of the makeover has been the shift to CSS. In theory, this is all we need...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sometimes, I won't read /. for a couple of days. Then I'll bring up the site and start reading through stories. After I've read (or scanned over) several stories, I might need to go do something else, and so I close the page.
Now a few hours later, I come back. There are a few new stories I haven't seen, followed by a big chunk I have seen, followed by another chunk I haven't seen, going back to whatever story I read last two days ago. Trying to figure out my place is a pain.
I'd love to see a personalized index in which I check off stories as read, and they disappear. If I close the page and come back later, only those stories not marked as read would be listed.
I know you can do something like this with an RSS reader, such as Google Reader. But I really prefer to read stories directly on Slashdot.
Haha, you just figured it out without knowing it!
In my experience, it only takes long for the preview to load the first time. After that, it's instant as expected. My guess is that it has something to do with the ping-back thing I've heard of that checks if your post is coming from a shady place.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Still no UTF-8? Oh well...
I don't think we need images in comment titlebar's also (even though I overwrote it with UserCSS but still).
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
Has anyone looked at Freshmeat lately (owned by the same corporate overlord as Slashdot)? It was a great site and now is completely unusable. Can Taco save ./ from this fate?
Umm, the vast majority of slashdot's visitors are lurkers.
AND
"For example, take your post. You missed major computing concepts like batch processing and time slices."
What in god's name are you talking about? Did you take a hit of LSD this morning, trolling, or are you talking about the wrong parent post?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
as long as they keep the classic mode, there will be no problems.
Oh, I dunno about that. For example, the logo/etc bar at the top has text that's dark blue on a dark green background. This is pretty much illegible on this screen in most lighting conditions. Is there any way to fix this other than totally overriding the colors for all pages of all sites? It would be really /. would send just the text, without any color attributes, so I can get whatever colors are most readable on whatever screen I'm looking at.
handy if browsers had a per-site color override, but I don't know of one that does this. Even better would be if
Another problem is that even with classic mode, the window is forced to have a minimum width of around 400 pixels, or you get a horizontal scroll bar and the text runs out of the window on the right, so you have to scroll left and right to read it. This is a hassle on small screens, and an annoyance on bigger screens. And even at the 400-pixel width, the main page only less than half the width for text, and the rest is blank except at the very top. This forces a huge waste of screen space. Some of us do use our computers for more than reading /., so this is all a bit of an annoying design.
It'd be much more reader-friendly if there were a mode in which the text used the full width of the window, without any width= attributes, and re-wrapped the text when the window is resized. This is, of course, the default behavior of most browsers, and it's annoying to see the /. "design" going out of its way to defeat it and waste screen space.
I'm considering getting a google phone, and I'm wondering if /. will be readable on its small screen.
I gave up on the beta pretty quickly, because on this screen (FF on a Mac Powerbook), there were just too many cases of text disappearing behind other stuff or overlapping to get things jumbled together. Tweaking my settings didn't fix anything, so I went back to classic. I also tried Safari and Opera, and they had the same problems.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
At: http://news.slashdot.org/palm
In so many ways this interface is all it needs to be for 'read only' access to slashdot.
- Most recent articles: Check.
- Article with relevent links: Check.
- Top five comments (as moderated): Check.
It could be considered over-simplification, but over-simplification may be the best alternative to over-engineering.
Agreed. WHY does it take so long for my preview to load?
Because they're portscanning the IP you're coming from. Set it to REJECT rather than DROP from Slashdot's IP/range, and you'll find it almost instant. It's pretty annoying though for those of use who've been posting for years (yeah, I know my ID isn't low - I had one that was, but stopped posting for a while, and forgot it :( ).
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I read /. on my G1 these days... and while the page renders flawlessly, that stupid javascript box always pops up and covers have the screen content, and cannot be turned completely off without logging into the site. Very annoying indeed.
Some of us prefer Emacs, you insensitive clod!
The posting load is slashdot doing an open relay check against your IP, the next time you go to post (if greater than the warning time and less than the relay timeout) should be fast.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Are there any plans for fixing bugs introduced by the updates? The last several times I've reported bugs via the sourceforge page for slash, they've sat there and been ignored--the last one was only fixed after I emailed Rob and reported that the bug had been reported as long as three months previously and still hadn't been fixed.
Another problem is that even with classic mode, the window is forced to have a minimum width of around 400 pixels, or you get a horizontal scroll bar and the text runs out of the window on the right, so you have to scroll left and right to read it. This is a hassle on small screens, and an annoyance on bigger screens.
on small screens (my phone) I read this version. on big screens whenever the CSS from a website pisses me off I just turn on author mode (no styles) in Opera and fit to width if needed. a perfect example of this is the E-O forum, which I constantly read but its so fucking eye gouging that I always have to turn plain text mode on.
Opera is especially helpful for this because some idiots still embed font and color attributes in HTML instead of using CSS only, and the author mode strips everything off.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
I don't have control over this part of the firewall, neither at work nor at the uni.
I've always used WAXD, feels a lot less cramped. Or maybe my fingers are just too big...
/. the WASD navigation is more of an annoyance than a feature. If I alternate between several windows and accidentally have focus on the Firefox window (with /. open) when I start typing the result is always a lot of cursing and scrolling to get back to where I was previously.
The difference between WASD and ESDF isn't usually that pronounced as there's rarely need to alternate quickly between normal typing and the gaming position.
As for
How about a preference to disable the WASD navigation completely, pretty please?
Noe of the above, but if you know where I can score some Owsley ... ;-)
I was referring, correctly, to this (GP) post.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So you'll have to put up with it, I'm afraid.
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