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.
I was sure there'd be ponies in the new design.
wayyyyy too much white space and low-contrast text on white.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Nice job on the redesign
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
Why is it so much smaller now than before? Are you hoping we'll think we are reading a different site?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How about Unicode, do you support that yet?
In Safari on my Mac, the lefthand navigation covers part of the left side of the center pane. Please fix, and then I'm sure I'll learn to tolerate it :)
Oops.
Good job! It's a little heavy on white space, but not too bad..
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.
No new content.. More whitespace than before. Lame.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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.
The absolute first thing I noticed was the prominence of the feedback link. Slashdot was unique in being one of the only major sites without an easy-to-find link to give feedback on the site. More than anything, that was very well needed. Thank you.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
I have to say I have always generally been impressed with the /. redesigns and this is no exception. Well done team, thanks again not just for a great site but for continuing to make it look and work better for all the users.
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.
Is shaving off the left edge of every article part of the plan, or just a bonus?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
- Too much whitespace.
- Posts and comments need better separation(green line or something)
- Noticeably slower in Firefox 3.6.13 on my Core 2 Duo 1.667GHz laptop w/ 3GB RAM(minecraft is running in the background though).
- Comment text box is way too small.
I think the overall direction is good though - I hated the last layout and had turned a lot of the fancy stuff off.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
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.
I, for one, prefer to go up and down a page bu using Page Up and Page Down. For this reason, I generally despise any toolbar/style bar/whatever the hell you want to call it that refuses to stay at the top of the page where it belongs. I'm rather annoyed with the new design, too. I prefer simplicity to fancy graphics; it seems to me that this is simply unnecessary.
I can get a tan while sitting in front of my monitor.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The design isn't bad, but why did you use HTML5? Maybe you haven't checked slashdot recently, but that isn't a valid standard, yet.
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.
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.
Overall I like it. But it wouldn't hurt to throw in a few ponies around the page. And maybe a little bit of pink wouldn't hurt.
Homer no function beer well without.
I can't tell if the new Microsoft icon is more or less creepy... http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/microsoft_64.png
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
Why can't I select the classic discussion system (D1) any more? Please don't say this has been discontinued :(
:/- spoon(_).
When I click on my username and choose comments I get a list of my recent comments and their scores. So far, so good. However, when I click on a comment to see the replies and that comment is deep in the thread, I get the top level posting instead of my comment.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes. Scrolling is now noticeably sluggish here.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
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
I second the comment of too much white space, not enough contrast. In addition: Overall the whole place now looks "flat" for lack of a better word. I don't like the fact that the side pane doesn't scroll with the rest of the page. I prefer the single page that moves as a whole model rather than the current layout, which just reminds me WAY too much of bad sites in iFrames. Finally, here's the weird one. Everything appears right until I log in. The the main pane is shifted about four character spaces to the left, sending the text at the beginning of every line "under" the side pane and out of view.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Interesting...
We'll have to wait for the initial weirdness to pass but it seems promising.
I'm going to have to test it on my phone too, to see how it feels.
1) Lack of left menu toggle... Is it intended?
2) Lack of shadows makes it a bit too flat.
3) I'm liking the slider. I'm not quite sure if it's new. I just never saw it before.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Validate -> "94 Errors, 14 warning(s)"
Some things never change. :/
I browse slashdot by going to the main page, scrolling down the list of stories, and opening any interesting ones in new tabs. I never browse by category, so I never expect to use those links on the left that sit there wherever I am on the site.
How about giving me the option of using that space to notify me of stuff? Stuff like new stories being posted, replies to my comments, my comments being moderated and comments being posted with split infinitives (so I can mod them into oblivion) . Being optional, people opting for a low-overhead (and poorly grammared) site don't have to worry about it.
I'm aware the most popular suggestion for changing that left bar is "remove it", but I'm on a wide screen so that would just give me more white space and nothing useful- I expect I'm not the only one. So, anyone else have ideas for something useful to put over there?
My webcomic
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
harder on the eyes, too bright, text is harder to read.
I feel like I am being stalked. Also, too much white. Overall, re-design looks and works great.
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.
I'm afraid I'll go snowblind....
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(_).
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...
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.
Just sitting idle with this article open has both of my processor cores running 25% higher (using Chrome on Windows 7 64-bit). If I close the tab with Slashdot in it, my CPU load immediately drops.
Also agree that there's way too much whitespace. I don't really like the left-hand nav bar either. There doesn't appear to be any obvious reasoning behind their grouping. I can see why stories/recent/popular/userID are grouped together, but why are ask slashdot/book reviews/games/etc. grouped and alphabetized separately from cloud/hardware/linux/etc.? Is there some logical reasoning behind that? Maybe put a line some other more obvious separation if they really belong separate.
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.
The old design didn't keep my CPU pegged at 10-12% for just reading a single page. With 5 tabs (opened at random from the front page) Chrome is now running at 25% of total processing power on my Phenom II x4 965 (3.4GHz). This makes no sense whatsoever, since I'm just reading text, and all the useful widgets have been replaced with a simple static menu.
The old-old design (which worked perfectly well) was lighter still.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
All in all, the look is good but there are some minor tweeks the new slashdot could use:
1. Not enough contrast in the links in stories for them to be easily visible. That makes a big difference to old guys with deteriotating eyesight (like me).
2. No way for a story submitter to attach a link or email address to his username when he/she submits a story.
3. The story box is too small when making a story submission and makes it difficult to submit stories from an ipad.
4. When I look at popular in the firehose, I don't see the colors indicating their popularity anymore. This was really useful.
5. Please bring back the story rejected/accepted page that used to show up when you submitted a story.
6. The good - that you have retained the ability from the classic view to look at stories nested, flat, back to front etc.
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)
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?
That is insane. It spikes up to 50% CPU usage on my dual core machine when I am scrolling it. That is the kind of CPU use I normally see bad facebook apps use, for a text based site it is unacceptable. And if you open up a bunch of tabs it is even worse. I have six /. tabs open and Firefox is fully using one of my cores! I opened Minecraft and it uses less CPU (30-40%) then my normal /, usage.
At least the main page seems to be optimised and doesn't put Firefox on the top of the CPU use chart.
Are the site designers being paid by Intel/AMD or something?
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I prefer the previous layout because... 1. The page scrolled much more smoothly when it wasn't sectioned off, and the whole page scrolled as one. I think this is because it allows HW acceleration to work. 2. There is a button at the bottom of the page "Many More". I press it and get a circular busy type animation, then it goes back to showing "Many More". Nothing else seems to happen. 3. There are some collapsed articles, which show only the headlines. Yes I have been through all of the options tabs, and set everything to "Full Text", but there are still collapsed articles such as "Nvidia Unveils New Mid-Range GeForce Graphics Card". This will not show on my Android browser for example. 4. On the main page, it no longer shows how many comments there are, unless go into it by clicking on Read. Why? 5. The "Feedback" link doesn't work (hence I'm posting a comment instead). I can only dream as to why this would be. Over all I am really disappointed by the changes. I appreciate the effort put in to trying to improve things, but I can't help thinking they've over engineered it this time around. Please please deal with point No 3 so that it can be viewed properly on my Android phone again! (Using WinXP Pro SP3 32bit, Firefox 4 Beta 9, and Firefox 3.6). Regards, Toonie. PS. Is there a link available to the old layout still?
Oy, what happened to "yesterday's news"? I can't filter by date any more?
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.
Today I was reading the news of 2010-12-10 (yeah, I have a lot to catch up with). When I clicked to get the news from 2010-12-11 I was redirected to today's news and for the life of me I cannot see how I can get back to that date using some on-screen control. I hope I have missed something because if this option is not available then I'm outta here. The "Many more" button link at the bottom of the page shows how you can get articles from a specific date but you have to type this yourself. And from there you can't move to the previous or next date without retyping the url. That's not right surely...
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.
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.
Frankly, it sucks. I never liked the intermediate one with the collapsed stories and frankenstein threading, so I compare to the classic layout:
The new one is a horrible step backwards. In pretty much all respects. My input window for this posting is so tiny, I wonder if you even want people to comment anymore. Threads look horrible, footer texts have massive linespacing, buttons that belong together are broken up by linebreaks, there's useless information taking up space all over the site (yeah, I really need the number of comments in a huge grey font, it is so important to me).
The user page is a mess. In the list of my own comments, the headers are now the same background as the comment lines, which makes it hard to see which comments belong to which story.
Frankly, please someone tell me there's a way to get back to the classic layout. This one is a failure. Don't force me to beta-test it if it isn't ready. Take it back to the drawing board and don't come back until it's done, and actually an improvement.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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
Lucky you. I'm stuck with a 2 GHz Celeron and 768 megs of RAM at work, and the site is barely usable on Chrome. When I try to scroll down with the mouse wheel it actually takes two or three seconds to do anything.
I'm sorry, I only accept criticism in the form of sed expressions.
The old slashbox Old Stories that used to display on the bottom right side and showed the story headline and number of comments will not display. I made sure to check that box in my slashbox preferences, but no matter what I do, it will not display in either IE or Firefox. I did send an email to feedback on this but have heard nothing. This was a great slashbox as it usually displayed 2 days worth of stories that you could quickly browse to then read or comment on. Hope they can get this fixed quickly. I did check and uncheck other slashboxes and they seemed to work correctly, i.e. either showing or not showing.
In FF 3.6.7 on XP SP2, I'm getting the long running script dialog when viewing this very story.
Also scrolling up and down is a pain... slow and jaggy. I'm on a 2 year old dual core AMD with 2GB... the v2 site didn't do that.. not a lot of other sites do that....
Huh?
Second!
1) Lose the floating headers at the top and side of the screen. Really, really, really DO NOT WANT.
2) Weird bug: On the front page, if cookies are disabled (I'm not logged in): "Read the 1341 comments". If cookies are enabled (I am logged in), "Read." No, really, <span>Read </span> instead of <span>Read the </span> <strong class="comments">14</strong> <span>comments</span>
3) Annoyance: The box into which I'm typing my reply is... too damn small.
4) Annoyance: Ricockulous amounts of whitespace and humongous font. Easily shrunk down.
Slashdot 3.0 sucks less than Slashdot 2.0, but I still miss 1.0 I was running in classic mode. But at least it fails gracefully in that I can read threads (modulo the stupid floating headers/sidebar burning their way into my retinas) without Javashit bogging down a core or two.
Given the option to revert to 1.0, I'd sill take it. But 3.0 isn't so bad as to stop me from coming here. (At least, it won't be once I figure out how to force every browser on every machine I use to hide the assinine floating elements.)
Still no UTF-8?
And why the <meta charset="utf-8"> followed by
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> ?
My first name is José, that is, Jose with a diacritical above the "e", which Slashdot still refuses to handle. Well, the new design is beautiful at least.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
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.
Number one good thing is that the reply box is no longer in the eye-killing monospaced font.
The "Re:" detection on collapsed replies is a good idea.
Idle no longer has broken CSS/Javascript that causes page loads when you try to un-collapse a reply, but I think that was simply a result of bad version control leaving a broken version in one sub-domain.
Generally it's good, but there are a few problems:
I want to see the moderation score on collapsed replies, so that I can know which ones are worth reading, and which ones were modded (-1, Troll). This is done for root comments, but not for replies. But at least now I can see more of the reply, thanks to the "Re:" detection. The name might be good too, so that I can see who is who in the replies to follow a thread.
I also want to see how many sub-replies are in a collapsed reply! !11!!!ONE!!!!!!ELEVEN!!!!11!! Seriously, once you've collapsed a 100-reply thread, all you see is a single gray bar with not even a hint of how much it hides. Bad bad bad design.
MINIMUM PAGE WIDTH. This is a new web design meme which I really don't like much because when I zoom in with a Mozilla browser, the page becomes wider than the window. On the other hand, there is some white space to spare on the edges (thanks to the category links), and on the main page under the old layout, the article text column ended up too narrow because of the fixed-width fields next to it. Anyhow, I'm sure this must be fun on a mobile browser. Remember, not everyone runs Windows with a big screen, and their web browser window in maximized mode.
It's also harder to read the collapsed replies while they are collapsed because of the (66%?) gray of the text on the light blue background. Please don't make them quite so faint. This is still not as bad as not knowing how many replies are hidden behind that bar.
Why were underlines hidden for web links? That plus the faint blue color makes it MUCH harder to identify links when scanning over text. And it appears that "previously seen" links are the exact same color as plain text! Quick, tell me how many words are in the first link in this paragraph!
The goal should be readability and identifiability, and while the layout changes in general help this, the gray-on-blue collapsed text impairs readability. And the hidden reply count and score and faint web links impair identifiability.
On the positive side, at least the "body text 85% size 85% gray" web design meme that has been so popular with other website re-designs wasn't done. Body text is still 100% size 100% black for maximum readability. That boring stuff at the bottom of the page is in gray, which is cool, because I don't come here to read that. It might be nice if the Preview/Options/etc. buttons had blacker text, though.
Oh yeah, and Unicode support still isn't fixed?
More: it would be nice if someone could move the "no karma bonus" checkbox out of the Options box. That is more of a per-message option, and it's a pain to change it for just one message. But I can live with it like it is. Also, (using Firefox) I clicked on the Options button, closed the box, then the browser window scroll position changed to the top of the page.
When I click on the "Preview" button, the new buttons are: Submit, Continue Editing, and Preview. Wait, Preview? Yo, dawg? Clicking on it does nothing, presumably because I'm already in preview mode.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
Slashdot supports Unicode. It just has a strict whitelist of what codepoints are allowed so that control characters (now known or hereinafter created). See my previous comments on the issue.
You can still use the classic comment system under comment prefs, thank God; the ajaxy comment system bothers the hell out of screenreaders. Doing that will probably speed up your pages and get wget pulling all of your comments again. Slashcode is the only system that manages to screw up something Wordpress, Drupal, and everyone else in the world got right. I've found sites where I couldn't post comments for accessibility reasons, but slashdot is the only one where I can't read comments without a settings change. *sigh* Anyway, my ranting aside, once you go back to the classic comments system, the new layout is really nice, fast, and uncluttered.
tired of online ads?
Wasn't new coke some old people thing that happened before the web was invented?
ROFL! Now go piss off you young twirp.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
Holy crap, they actually fixed it. Thanks, guys.
Now just get the comment linking to work as you'd expect (and as a subset of that, having the score slider thing also work correctly) and I'm a happy camper.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I read slashdot a few days behind. How do I go to http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20110117 without clicking "More" many times? Also, I magnify the page, and your left and top headers cut out some information in the comments. I would refer those guys not to stay on screen all the time.
No, this is not a good layout. The javascript is lagging the crap out of my computer, and disabling it makes the site look even worse. Seriously, go back to version 1. Do you even understand who is still reading your site? We don't need or want fancy javascript. We are terminal monkeys, we want content, not bells and whistles.
Oh wait, I've got used to it already.
Congratulations.
1) Launch Firefox
2) Go to home page.
3) Ctrl-+ 5 times to make body copy large and bold enough to actually read on 1024x768 12" laptop screen at age 45.
4) Note that, as on so many other websites, page flies apart in pieces, left topics sidebar *covering the body copy*.
Come *on* people. I expect this stupid horseshit from CNN or the Superficial.
I do *not* expect it from geeks.
GET THIS FIXED. PROMPTLY.
That is all.
Try navigating through the threads by the s and d keys. It does not work.
The first thing I look at in the morning is Slashdot. I honestly thought your site got hacked and someone was totally screwing up the look of the site my messing with the CSS data. But, to my surprise my worst fears had been confirmed, the new look was intentional. Just can't find anything aesthetically pleasing about the site now. The over abundant bright white against an almost black dark green header with vast amounts of white space that almost strains the eye. If you guys tested this on a control group or something, I don't think they gave you good feedback, especially given all the criticism that I see on the posts above mine. The last time you did a look/feel change you offered the users to "test" the new site before it went live. I would have hoped you would have learned from that experience that doing a trial run can give a huge amount of feedback both positive and negative from the very users that rely on your site. Let's hope you can quickly rectify what I think is a huge step backward in usability and aesthetics.
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.
I have visited slashdot several times a day for years, but I'm switching to RSS, the new layout is too annoying. I actually took the time to look for a setting to fix the appearance, but there is none. Too much whitespace, not enough contrast, annoying bar at the top, the more stories button messes up constantly, reading a story in a new tab scrolls down automagically, rather than starting at the top. Just so awful. FAIL.
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.
...using all kind of state-of-the-art HTML/CSS, by dozens of people, writting thousands of line of code, my login name which is Frédéric is now displayed Fr?d?ric in the header and on my control panel, because I guess it is too difficult, in 2011, to display accentuated characters...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Way too much whitespace, and extremely sluggish all the way around. Harder to navigate. Site lags badly when I try to use the scroll wheel to scroll down (Firefox 4b10 on WinXP). I've resorted to reading /. on an RSS reader because the site is so unusable.
Took some hunting, but found it eventually:
1. Go to the front page, find your Account link on the right hand side - you can't use those stupid ajaxy boxes, there's no option there. That should take you through to:
http://slashdot.org/my/preferences
2. Under "Discussions", click "Viewing"
3. Click on the button saying "Switch to classic discussion system D1"
Hope that's helps!
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.
Mousing over the "?" icons in the prefs page -- which I was on because a notice at the top of the comment page was bugging me to go there and switch on classic mode which I was already using -- I expected at least a tooltip. And so I got one: it reads ".ui-icon-help". Very helpful.
Just noticed the preview/submit buttons no longer have a tab-focus highlight in chromium too. Nice.
Visit an article like this and see for yourselves:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/14/1533230.shtml
Previously, for every story on the front page the total number of replies was listed. I thought that was a nice popularity indicator and I used it when deciding if I would read a story or not. In the new design it only says "Read the comments". I did not find a setting in the "Options" that would re-enable this feature. If I overlooked it, please enlgihten me, if it's just not there then please add it...
This is madness! For some reason, the comment count for each story in the front page is missing! Am I alone? How do I fix this?
w00t
So I've noticed something I consider an issue, and detrimental to the commenting process. Highly rated comments, even rating of 5, are not showing immediately if they are not a parent comment to the main story. Any time someone replies to a comment, unless you drill down into that comment, you can't find the replies. This is a major problem for a reason reasons.
First, as a reader, I am going to obviously be most interested in comments rated at 3, 4 or 5. I may not have time to read every comment rated at 1, so I may miss tons of highly rated comments because I didn't expand EVERY single comment on there. Why this is a problem should be self explanatory, not presenting readers with the best comments first and foremost is going to be bad for readership in general.
Second, as a commenter, knowing what I just stated, it makes me less likely to want to reply to a comment, rather than make a parent response to the topic itself. If other commenters believe the same thing, it will lead to a disorganization of ideas. If more and more people post comments in the hope of being notice and modded up as a parent and not a reply, we'll have a situation where no one wants to reply.
Finally, as a moderated, knowing what I mentioned above, I feel less inclined to moderate up replies, even if they are the best comment on the site. I feel less inclined, because despite a moderation of +5, many people may not see the comment for exactly the reasons I outlined, which would mean I basically wasted moderation points.
All in all, I hope that this can be changed in some way. A +5 moderated comment should always appear without needing to drill into other comments, IMHO.
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?
Please, I am begging, fix the "many more" feature so that it goes back more than 10 days. I hit a wall with many more and it no longer shows dates or days as links and if my browser closes or I click another link I have to click that "many more" button dozens to times to get to where I was.
"A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic