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.
wayyyyy too much white space and low-contrast text on white.
Ice Cream has no bones.
It'll take some getting used to, but I don't mind the new design. Change != bad
It's better to burn out than to fade away
How about Unicode, do you support that yet?
Good job! It's a little heavy on white space, but not too bad..
Looks like crap. Fonts are too small. I hate change.
My already overtaxed old Powerbook can't handle the new site's layout, and it looks like I'll have to either avoid Slashdot, one of my daily religious reads for over a decade, or buy a new piece of equipment just to read a text format site. Seriously? It's text, wtf was so important that it's got to be redone to look fancy? Why not some flash animation while you're at it? Can we switch to an html view? I'm glad you felt the need to flash the place up, but this is pretty stupid.
What is the obsession with obnoxious floating headers that always stay at the top of the screen? Whatever utility they provide is outweighed by the fact that it screws up the paging behavior when you hit the spacebar to scroll. It's annoying to have the bottom two lines of text scroll behind the floating bar--not everyone reads to the absolute very, very bottom before hitting space.
Could we get a search function for slashdot that actually works, too? I would have been happy to keep the old design but have a search function here that was at least as good as infoseek was back in 1998. Some of us recall a short period a while ago when you actually allowed us to just use google to search slashdot, which was a huge improvement over the slashdot search function that came before and after that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
See subject. Please do not fuck these up - revert at least these two to the original. I don't wanna waste my time with user styles for now.
its not bad. much better than v2. of course, v1 was the best without all the web2.0 crap. crap makes sites slow.
Actually, I could get used to just the look of it.
But make the fixed "taskbar" on top go away. Just let it scroll up with the rest of the page.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The basic look is pretty nice - but I'm surprised you didn't think about your users, who are one of the last bastion of Internet folks who still believe in function > form!
Ie. the style seemed to come with a big decrease in density of useful data in the given space. For most random sites that may be a good thing as to keep from overwhelming the users, but on /. it's a big step backwards - these are people who are still using VT emulation and have memorized the most obscure vi or emacs commands to be more efficient, and you are trying to tell them they need 12-14 point fonts and an extra 5 points of whitespace between each line??
Oh well... it's just CSS, you still improve it, right? ;)
So, is slashdot moving away from the reply and focusing on highly rated OP's only, or is there a good way to expand out threads without moving to a new page?
Windows 7 x64 and FF 3.6.13
They let you select the classic Slashdot style before, instead of the awful and slow abomination that replaced it...if they're getting rid of both for this pile of crap,with no way to select the classic classic, personally, I'll be finding some other way to get vaguely sane/interesting news. .-. That's rather depressing, since the first thing I've done for the last decade (at least) on installing/reinstalling any browser is switch the homepage to slashdot.org.
It's depressing to know that most 'web designers', at least those of the '2.0' variety, have absolutely zero sense for aesthetics or usability.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Well, I've been looking for an excuse to stop using slashdot.... it's the same bullshit over and over, and the few gems that do crop up have gotten so rare that trawling through the shit spewed by consumer-capitalist apologists is just too much.
I do not use javascript, and will not spend any effort on making this site work without it. I discovered with D2 that if you have D2 on in you prefs, set the threshold to -1, and use /. without JS enabled in the browser, you get a better experience than D1 in one way - all the comments load on 1 page. But without JS you couldn't mod, nor look at mod histories, without opening the comment in another tab and allowing JS temporarily.
What I got on the /. homepage just was a huge white position:fixed box thing floating over the content, blocking most of it. Presumably that box is hidden when JS is on, but I am not going to fight with another site that is trying to be a "web application" just for.... fuck knows why. Bandwagon jumping, I'd say. Perhaps /. think they can get 500mill out of Goldman too, if only they appeared "trendier"?
I've got 1 mod point, I'm gonna go mod taco a troll or something, and that's it.
Car analogies break down.
If it helps, it looks like the designers have mastered the art of writing cross-browser hacks that don't render right anywhere, but at least they don't render right in the same way. On your screenshot I see Firefox running on Linux; I see the exact same bug in Chrome on Windows.
Using a browser's find-in-page feature (Ctrl+F) still breaks the layout. I recommend making the entire grey area a hit target for expanding a comment.
Otherwise, I'm mostly fine with it, but have two more minor criticisms:
1. I couldn't find "More Comments" at first -- I'd consider putting them in the same place as all the other comment controls, below the story but above the comments. Or give logged in users the option to always load all comments. I know the performance sucks but I don't like dealing with truncated comments.
2. I can't see the full expanded threads unless I lower my abbreviation threshold to 0. That's something I liked about the previous one. I get that it sucked in that it was difficult to figure out when you didn't have all comments loaded if you had thresholds hiding comments or there were more than 250 loaded, but I could otherwise understand up until the thread got so long that it did the flat listing. Part of what makes me look at a comment is not just the moderation but the number of comments it attracted.
Same problem, here. It's also sluggish. The only "cure" to the sidebar overlap, is to reduce the size of the text to "microdot" and use my jeweler's loupe to read it. :P
Seriously, WHY do so many sites default to a 5 point font size? The site should allow users to enlarge fonts, and the formatting adjusts... like it did when we had PLAIN HTML.
Willie...
My Core 2 Duo P9500 / Firefox 3.6.13 combo isn't fast enough to handle the excessive javashit in this design gracefully. The CPU is constantly at least 30% even when not doing anything, and the laptop fan is constantly in turbo mode. That's in low bandwidth simple graphics mode.
In addition, scrolling is dead slow.
And no, other sites don't have this issue.
In short, this is a disaster, and unless there are some major changes real soon, I won't be able to use the site.
Bad HTML design, K-Meleon and older Opera render the site completely unreadable (total mess) can't even line buttons well or see the text... have to launch Safari to reveal the page. This is terrible. Also the logo is degraded, too small, this is major design error. The static frames are not very good idea. iPad version on the other hand looks satisfactory, clearly, the designed runs OSX and iOS, but the community around Open Source use other browsers. Please polish.
This is the biggest problem I have with the redesign. There's enough CSS in here that I can fix it with Stylish - and have to some degree. But now if I leave a Slashdot tab up, especially if I go work in another tab and forget it, it will still be eating a large chunk of my CPU.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
As for turning off "the ajax crap", well, we'll all just get off your lawn now... but I doubt the rest of the internet is going to oblige.
If slashdot -- the largest website specifically for the kind of people who do care about the potential for the security blowback of using javascript -- doesn't understand their core userbase enough to make their website functional without javascript, then they can pretty much count on losing that core userbase and ultimately becoming irrelevant.
99% of the time javascript is form over function (or worse, developers over-engineering because they never learned basic design principles) - there is nothing about Slashdot's functionality that could put it into that 1% where javascript is essential.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This re-design = New Coke
It is *incredibly* slow and heavy for no good reason and they pushed put it out way too soon (hello major display bug).
I'm sorry but this is fucking terrible.
At least give us the option to turn most that crap off and go back to the old design.
And yet the comment textarea itself starts out at an idiotically tiny size. Ten rows? Okay, I can deal with that. But 50 columns? What the fuck, guys? Ever heard of CSS? Can you make the textarea flow with the size of the page, so that on my huge 1900 pixel wide monitor I get more than a measly 300 pixels of width for typing a reply? Since typing a reply is, you know, the *only thing I am doing* on the reply page, you'd think that maybe I'd want most of the space taken up by the box I type in to and not by "empty."
I want my Cowboyneal
Firefox with one /. tab open pegs at 75% on an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz. If I dare open two tabs utilization jumps to 100%.
Way to go "designers". This is a fucking disgrace, seriously.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
It's nice that you can set preferences, I'd forgotten that, but that's a silly kind of preference to have these days. I don't always browse on the same computer at the same resolution and it would be nice if my comment box would adapt to available space using some kind of Space Aged Technology like CSS.
I want my Cowboyneal
Zooming works perfectly in Opera...
If, by "perfectly", you mean "zooms both text, graphics and other elements, so you have to blow up your browser full-screen or scroll horizontally", then yes.
If you mean it zooms text and flows it into the available space, so you can keep your browser window the same size, and not lose even more space to blown up graphics, then no.
I think it's a nice, clean look. Most people are complaining because it's different than what they are used to. OTOH, I don't use all the extra's that some people here like to use like zooming fonts and what-not. I read everything at a resolution my old eyes can handle.
All in all, good change.
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This comment will get buried among the 1000s of others, but I wanted to add my positive-karma to this thread for the Slashdot team.
The new design is simple, sharp and just... well... great! I have absolutely no modifications to suggest. This isn't one of those "Hey this looks great, EXCEPT I hate it for these X reasons..." types of posts, I literally love every aspect of it.
It seems to me that to get such a polished rollout, including all the redone story-topic graphics and all the admin pages/account pages/etc. all polished up like this, you guys must have been working on this for damn near a year.
If you weren't, then it sure looks like you were because I could lick it.
The refresh is a great experience and as a reader I sure appreciate you taking the time to roll it out!
How the fuck can I turn on the classic Slashdot look and feel? I don't care about what changed under the sheets, but I can't find shit on the pages anymore, and is a PITA to read easily.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I recognise that developers are always up against people who are resistant to change.
However, in this case some things are a definite improvement for the worse. A case in point that I found straight away is that it is now really hard for a logged-in user to keep track of replies to his comments. Clicking on the comment in in your summary page delivers you at the beginning of the thread, and you have to repeatedly click to get to your own comment and view replies.
The earlier design (Classic or not) led you instantly to replies to your posts. Seems to me that the new interface was implemented with minimal testing. Leaving an option to return to the "Classic" viewing mode can't be that costly, and it at least leaves the user with options.
Another very major failing is that there is still no recognition of basic HTML tags like subscript or superscript in posts. Given that this site is nominally directed at nerds, that is just not good enough. If Slashdot really wants to follow the path of form before content, there should at least be an explanation.
This was my first question too. I get behind in reading slashdot and like to go back. Now I have to keep loading stories until I get back to where I was. When I get months behind, that's just crazy. PLEASE create a way to easily read old stories!
I've tried to be positive here and waited a bit before bitching, but I'm sick and tired of developers thinking they know what's best for me, and overriding my choices. Also, Slashdot is now yet another site where the text boxes are white text on a white background, because I dare to use a different GTK+ style than everyone else. Another site where I have to compose posts in a text editor and paste into forms, or keep dragging over my text to highlight it so I can see it. It's more trouble than its worth to post here now.
Webmasters of the world: Don't hard code colours! Let the client decide what the normal foreground and background colours are going to be for text, especially in forms.
This new design has ruined the comment threads. Something insightful often isn't said until a few layers into a thread, but even if they've been modded up you don't see their comment unless the previous comment has also been modded up.
What about people asking a question? They don't get modded up because it's not interesting, but the answer is, yet because the asker isn't I don't see the comment.
I don't mind the ajaxy stuff, it generally makes things easier for me. The rest of the redesign I couldn't really care less about, it's the content that matters. But you've somehow managed to screw that up by destroying the threads. Thanks.
Who need's speling and grammar?