Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Launches Re-Design
Today we are pleased to announce the launch of the third major re-design in our 13.5 year history, and I don't think it looks half bad.
The new theme represents a serious gutting of the underlying HTML and CSS, as well as all-new graphics. There will be many design wiggles, bug squashes, and compatibility glitches that survived testing, so bear with us for a bit.
Please direct your bug reports and feedback (good and bad!) to Garrett Woodworth who is currently
in charge of such things.
Thanks to him, Wes, Vlad, Dean, Phil and Tim, who have each worked hard to get this out the door. Juggling the needs of users, editors, and various business functions is a hard job, and you guys did good.
Hey, all I care is copy/paste in Chrome seems to actually work!
And Slashdot has now gotten on the "waste your screen space with bullshit" fixed-position bandwagon. Luckily this is easily solved. Install Stylish and add the following to a new user style:
Now the sidebar/header scroll with the page, rather than remaining fixed in place.
Yep, it seems the the two major long-standing problems (broken comment expansion in idle and no pasting in Chrome/Safari) are fixed, but now it doesn't look like there's any indication of the difference between a long thread and a single comment. Visually I like it a lot, and the fixes were much needed - I'd call it a big improvement, but it definitely needs some top-level representation of the threading to handle the number of comments Slashdot stories tend to provoke.
after getting bitchslapped by sudden release of the new interface, i can say that it causes us to have to one by one click and open all comments in a thread when we attempt to go to a post someone replied to our post, through the message facility.
ie you go to your m essages -> click on the Y at the link that says user x postedm message y in response to your post, you end up at the initial post of that particular thread (yours o r others) and you have to open all the comments through the last post the user made in reply to
also, i think you are not able to reply to a last post in a long thread too. i keep replying to some reply who someone put in response to mine, but my reply goes to the parent post - my post.
Read radical news here
The menu on the top left side cuts off half an inch of text of articles and comments. I am on Ubuntu and Firefox, the latest released versions of both. I am shocked that Slashdot of all websites did not test Ubuntu and Firefox.
Otherwise, it looks pretty good, I have to admit.
Armenian text:
Georgian text:
Hindi text:
Japanese text:
Korean text:
Greek text:
Hebrew text:
Vietnamese text: Vit Nam
Cyrillic script:
Notice how /. scrubbed the text away for most of these (including a single Vietnamese character).
Still broken.
SSC
I need to use SeaMonkey 1.1.19 because the particular oddball OS I primarily use does not have a newer version of Firefox or SeaMonkey available for it.
Looking at Slashdot now, it looks like the entire page has been sent through a blender. Whatever happened to HTML degrading gracefully for older browsers? Slashdot being home to all kinds of people with oddball OSes and gadgets, one would think compatibility would be a higher priority. Is this what we have to look forward to every 5 years if we don't purchase the latest "standard" desktop hardware with the latest Microsoft Windows(TM)?
Heck I remember reading Slashdot in Netscape 3.0 ages ago, and it worked for a very long time too.
When I get an email from slashdot telling me that somebody has posted a reply I follow the link to the new post. But I don't actually see the reply. I have to click on a top level post and follow the tree downwards, clicking to open each post, to find the reply I want to read. So why can't slashdot directly show me the new message?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The funny thing is, from the HTML:
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
rome browser (8.0.552.237) running on Win7 Ultimate.
e menu on the left side is too wide and cuts off the main panel.
rhaps my username has more characters than you expected?
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Another vote for too much white.
Shrink the margins a couple of pixels everywhere.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
No ponies, but sidebar-hides-content seems a fairly close substitute.
Validate -> "94 Errors, 14 warning(s)"
Some things never change. :/
First of all, as many people have commented the text is small and the whitespace is huge.
Second of all, even in Chrome it eats CPU and memory. Why is it necessary for an idle page to consume so many resources? I can no longer have anything else running besides Slashdot. While I don't visit as often as I used to, this will make Slashdot much more difficult to visit.
In order to fix the font size, I tried Shift-Ctrl-+. That did increase the font size, but it broke the fixed left sidebar. The left sidebar then scrolled with the rest of the page. Resetting the page back to my default font sizes with Ctrl - fixed the scrolling problem.
I'm curious. What user interface / site requirements were you trying to address with this new design? A quick look at the generated HTML makes me cringe. Hopefully the back end Perl code is much cleaner.
In short, it seems that there has been a lot of effort spent for very little end user enhancement.
Preview also seems to be slower.
On the topic of scrolling, like in Idle in the old version, the top bar thing breaks the behaviour of page up/down. Usually when you press page down the browser keeps a little of the previous page in view to help you keep track of reading. Now it is the exact opposite, where you actually lose a few pixels when you press page down. I might as well attach a belt sander to the scroll wheel.
When I click on the arrow buttons on the scroll bar it will sometimes use so much CPU that Firefox becomes unresponsive to the fact that the mouse button is no longer clicked on the scroll button and will continuously scroll down slowly for about 4 screens worth before stopping. (It could also be the shitty 2D of Nvidia's Linux driver factoring in, but it hasn't happened to any other pages.)
Firefox is eating 26% CPU (52% of one core) doing barely anything.
Why is there a preview button in the preview? It does nothing when I click on it
Unicode in Slashdot
Try the following:
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
That's the D1 preferences page. As far as I can tell, there's not actually a link to it anywhere on the site.
That preferences page still works and slashdot is usable again. Thank you :D
Also, I've said it before and will say it again: please leave D1 available as an option for those of us who do not feel at ease with the new discussion system and thank you, dear slashdot developers, for spending your time on our good, old-fashioned and trusted D1 keeping it somewhat bug free and usable across all those changes that /. has gone through in recent years. It's greatly appreciated and one of the reasons I vote with my wallet and subscribe to this site.
:/- spoon(_).
"Abbreviated" posts hide their children entirely (previously these were below and indented).
This makes the link directly to a comment all sorts of wrong since you can't even see it until you open up every low-scoring ancestor.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
you could still turn off the ajax crap in 2.0
now you can't
worse still, the design overrides your minimum font size (which is completely unforgivable), and is absolutely unusable on high dpi screens.
One tab of comments is using about 15% of one of my two cores which are running at 3 GHz. Two tabs uses another 15% and four tabs maxes out that core. Which sucks since I prefer to read the front page and open multiple tabs of stories and comments all at once.
worse still, the design overrides your minimum font size (which is completely unforgivable), and is absolutely unusable on high dpi screens.
This is terrible... before I could at least zoom the text, now if I try the columns overlap and cuts off text.
Big suckage.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Looks like I'm not the only one who noticed this, but due to various other UI bugs, I can't read people's full comments. Anyhow, using slashdot is making my browser (Safari) burn massive CPU cycles. Probably some timed event that fires off WAY too often.
I've found that blocking images.slashdot.org, a.fsdn.com, c.fsdn.com, and s.fsdn.com, and using the classic (D1) view with JavaShit disabled, it loads quite quickly (and it should, as it goes from around 300-400K to about 76K to load for the main page). Sure, it looks like crap, but it works and there's not lots of Web 2.0 crap. Though it seems now none of the stories on the main page show the number of comments. Oh well. What do you expect when the world is constantly moving towards more bloated, frilly designs?
Huh. Sure enough, having 3 slashdot tabs open is eating an entire core for me (out of 8, so meh - but still...). Spending five seconds with Chrome's JS profiler reveals the guilty party: adupdate:
adupdate(){
if($("#tophat #fad1 img, #tophat #fad1 iframe, #tophat #fad1 embed, #tophat #fad1 div, #tophat #fad1 table").width()!=728) {
$("#tophat").remove();
setTimeout("adupdate()",0)
}else{
$("#tophat").show();
setTimeout("adupdate()",0)
}
}
So, run this very computationally-intense function (that selector is pretty bad, and the width calculation is disgusting) in a continuous loop. Nice work, guys. The goal of this is what, exactly? Continually scan the width of the banner ad, and if it's not 728px, hide it, otherwise show it? Oooookay....
I could see this as valid to run... once. Even once every five seconds, if there's a good reason for it. But calling itself again after a 0ms delay? *sigh*
Please fix this, guys.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Zooming works perfectly in Opera...
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
This is terrible. 3 tabs are enough to spin the fans up on my MacBook Pro. Where's light mode gone?!
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Just a shame they didn't bother to use modern design practices to accommodate mobiles. And failed to consider people who use page down to go through the page - there is nothing I hate more than a floating title bar.
Still at least they have some nice gradients on their buttons...
Yikes! You're right.
Just idling one Firefox window on this page shows the process at about 13% CPU usage. No other browsers open, not even an animated ad this time.
I open lots of Slashdot stories as tabs and get to reading them when I get to them. I guess I'll have to stop that.
I usually start my day browsing the front page and opening interesting stories into tabs. Those I read one by one during the day.
This is no longer possible. After opening 5-10 stories, Firefox is consuming 100% of one core. This makes the browser extremely unresponsive and not possible to browse anything else.
I lost my sig.
As far as I can tell, there's not actually a link to it anywhere on the site.
I found it : click the gear icon next to your username on the home page, then select the Discussions "tab".
There you can choose between D1 and D2.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
As others have noted, javascript burning down the house:
A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.
Script: http://a.fsdn.com/sd/all-minified.js?T_2_5_0_306a:20
I'll agree with this critique in particular. I always liked to see the score attached to nested comments. It aided in navigating through comment threads to filter what was worth reading and what wasn't, and it also made it easy to spot moderation abuse and unfairly low-modded comments. If there is one thing I would request, it would be to list the comment score next to the comment title in nested comments.
Actually, I have one more edit, when browsing with Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP, the pop up boxes from clicking on certain things (like score information, or the options button when replying to a comment) return you to the top of the page when you close them. That's a major hindrance. (And why the hell are the comment viewing options only accessible under an 'options' button that is only visible when you reply?)
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
The comments section of your own account... the top level still looks fine: you see a list of your comments with their scores and number of replies. But when you try to click one of your comments, you get... a link to some other comment. I use this section of Slashdot all the time to see who's responded to my comments and possibly reply. That no longer seems to be possible, which is a major downer.
I do really like the new look, though.
Ahhh, I figured it out - if you click on "Account" from the main slashdot.org page (not "Options"), there is an option under Discussions to switch between D1 and D2. I assume D2 still sucks as much as it always has, and brings anything less than a Core i7 crying to its knees, so I'm sticking with D1 until somebody tells me otherwise.
Loading a page like this - http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=YYYYMMDD - used to retrieve all of that day's (in your timezone) stories at once.
Now the best you can do is call up http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?index=1&view=stories&startdate=YYYYMMDD to get about a fifth of the stories and then browse through up to four more pages for the rest of the day's news.
I can imagine you're desperate for clicks like any other commercial web site but surely you can't be serious with suddenly making yours *that* user-unfriendly?
Also, about half of the stories seem to be headline-only instead of Headline, Author/Date, from the x-y-z dept. & Summary. Both 'Options' and 'Account' seem to offer a chance to change that behaviour but I can't seem to get all the stories to display fully.
I am in the same boat as you. Though I am a bit more caught up (I was reading 2011-01-08 and wanted to move to 2011-01-09). I've spent almost an hour trying to find archived stories that I can read, with no luck. Anyone find a workaround?
I too think there's way too much white space and the text is designed for 10-year-olds' vision, not adults'. The other reported issues on the AJAX stuff is also true: the submission text boxes are too small, and there's weird behavior such as when i tried to zoom using Command-+ this window simply went away. And they often load slowly on my three-year-old MacBook Pro.
But more than the poor design and problematic technology, Slashdot has lost its sense of dynamism and community -- its soul. The color rankings are sorely missed, as they gave a sense of what the community thought of submissions (regardless of what the editors thought). Now all submissions are undifferentiated. And submissions disappear very fast, and who knows how to find them without the old ability to filter by color/popularity. So anyone who wants to explore stories had better check fast and often, because they disappear really fast and who knows why. (Maybe that was the goal: force more camping on the Recent page?) Also, lots of stories can't be voted on -- why?
Basically, the new Slashdot feels like a cold place in which to make a submission in and then leave, not to actually explore or use as a reader.
The main page no longer lists the number of comments.
No 'yesterday' news?
Comments spilling way right off the monitor on the 1600x1200 resolution? WTF?
Slashdot going backwards in functionality.
Visit an article like this and see for yourselves:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/14/1533230.shtml