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.
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?
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.
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 can get a tan while sitting in front of my monitor.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
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(_).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Visit an article like this and see for yourselves:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/14/1533230.shtml
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?