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!
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.
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
What about people on non-QWERTY keyboards? Can you create a user option for what key does what?
The story tag is to distinguish stories from submissions and comments.
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
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.
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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!?
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?
A browser bug? Firefox extension? I don't see these.
Articles get tags. What decides which of the *many* tags that people probably give to it, appear on the front page below the article?
Seems to be the most popular n tags. I have no idea what the value of n is.
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?
Tag spamming. Watch for comments that say "tag this article mrsuffleuffogus". Sometimes others will comply. In addition, some people, like this guy have sock puppet accounts. Also, I've seen /.ers collaborating on IRC/Twitter/etc. to get articles tagged a certain way or to attack a particular user.
My blog
The story tag is to distinguish stories from submissions and comments.
Among other datatypes. The firehose is our content delivery tool and pretty much any page is just becoming a filter on the firehose to display whatever data you are asking for. This allows us to do a lot of really cool things (both now and in the near future) and get some performance hits back soon.
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.
For that matter, wouldn't it be more in line with the spirit of the site to use HJKL for navigation?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Yes, it has been a painful migration. However, a complete rewrite of the FAQ is coming soon (with context-appropriate linkage from the rest of the site) along with a much more intuitive interface that allows for easier firehose use. You have already seen the very tip of the iceberg with this post by Rob, expect to many more things like this making the site easier to decode.
I know it hasn't been easy, but hang in there. Slashteam has some really cool stuff on the way.
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
I don't think the original poster correctly framed the spirit of his question....
Why doesn't the front page filter out the display of the 'story' tag?
(Can't help but stick this in here: Why did the horrendously buggy and unusable new default user page go live? A lot of the stuff on there just seems random. Is the number in the speech bubble at the top the number of total comments in the thread the user last posted in? Why? Why the terrible CSS for the top item? Why are the comment titles formatted differently there than everywhere else? Why the redundant 'comments' slashbox on the right with the same content as the left half of the page? Why remove the menus that are on the right side of every other page on the site?)
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!
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.
There is nothing wrong with AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff, but Slashdot seems to have completely missed the point in its implementation. If done right it should improve the user experience, but here it mostly doesn't.
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
well, then among the many "cool" updates on the way you will appreciate the work that is currently being expended to make low-bandwidth, small screen, iphone, etc, interfaces much less buggy and faster-loading. :)
Nothing wrong, except where it adds no value. I want a list of articles, grouped by category, that I can browse, then hit either a link to the article, or the comments.
I don't need tags, AJAX, redraws w/o page loads, blah blah blah.
There was nothing wrong with good old 'rn'.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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?
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
Not to be cynical/snarky, but is there an expected timeline for this?
:)
I mean, it's not that I don't appreciate the work expended, but I'd appreciate the finished product much more
Even a tentative schedule (while probably a bad idea to commit to showing to users) posted somewhere might give us a better idea of where we're heading on slashdot, and why we have to put up with so many strange UI tweaks (like most of us, I prefer to stick with what I know).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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?
There is nothing wrong with AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff, but Slashdot seems to have completely missed the point in its implementation.
But the ability to do that is the main thing that's wrong with AJAX (and JavaScript and ...). What's wrong is that these things allow the web page to override the browser's basic behavior, so the user get surprising (and usually incomprehensible) results when they hit keys. It's especially wrong to break things like the Back button or the space bar or the pg up/dn keys. This effectively destroys one of the main benefits of a browser, which is a consistent way of doing things regardless of what site you're looking at.
I find it especially annoying when a site takes away my ability to use CTRL-click to open a new page in a new tab. Gmail does this, for example, preventing me from seeing two email messages at the same time, making it a rather crippled email reader. /. also did this to me when I tried the beta, and it was one of the things that quickly persuaded me to go back to basic.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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 :( ).
Get your own free personal location tracker
Yes there was, that's why trn was written.
(Oh I wish I still had a newsfeed... I guess I should try out one of those free newsfeeds some day..)
>> What I would really like is a way to block sites from doing this by default and allow a white list of sites that use the ability to use the more powerful aspects of AJAX responsibly. This probably exists and I'm sure could be created if not.
It's called NoScript, and it is a Firefox extension. You can white/black-list any site and allow or deny them from executing JavaScript. When blocked from executing JavaScript altogether, most sites fall back to a plain HTML functional state (Slashdot included, believe it or not). And those that don't, well, if they really interest me, I'll consider allowing them to execute JavaScript; otherwise, it's good riddance.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost