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.
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.
Of course not. Doing useful things like adding Unicode support is apparently less important than adding more Web 2.0 junk to the site.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Why can't I select the classic discussion system (D1) any more? Please don't say this has been discontinued :(
:/- spoon(_).
The funny thing is, from the HTML:
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
While I agree with that for the most part, one of the things I've always liked about threaded discussions on Slashdot is that, because of the moderation system, really great discussions could be seen and take place nested 4 or 5 threads under the original post. Since 3rd-level comments and above aren't visible in the redesign without clicking through, it's now much less likely that discussions beyond 1st or 2nd level will even be seen.
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
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.
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...
Have you seen where the "Show X More Comments" button is? I hope there's some way to just get all the comments without having to scroll all the way down again and again (if there is, I haven't found it yet).
It's especially silly because there are now two non-scrolling fixed panes (sidebar and topbar), but they're filled with relatively useless and redundant links (and lots of empty space), whereas the two controls that would actually be pretty useful if always available -- the "show more comments" button and the "minimum score" slider -- are relegated to inconvenient positions at the end/beginning of the scrolling page!
My impression is that the person who did the redesign is not so bad at graphical design (it's fairly clean and polished looking), but isn't very experienced with UI / usability issues...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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?
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...
Since 3rd-level comments and above aren't visible in the redesign without clicking through, it's now much less likely that discussions beyond 1st or 2nd level will even be seen.
Yes, this is definitely a loss of utility for the site. I wish I could mod you higher than 5, to bring this to the developers attentions...hello? Anyone paying attention out there?
I know when I get a fistful of mod points to spend, I enjoy looking through some of the 'low-level' discussions (or, I guess it would be 'high-level' if it's 4th level or above, whatever) for particularly insightful or informative posts, and often that's where I find some hidden gems.
Unless Slashdot is trying to get people to start a new thread every time they want to reply to someone else's post? That could get real old, real fast...we already have quite enough redundancy when people fail to scan the comment history before posting their 'unique' insights on the topic at hand...
btw, could someone please post a quick 'hello world' response to this, so I can see how notifications have changed? 'k thanks!
(oh, wait, I'm in the dreaded third level! oh well, maybe I'll go re-post this as a new thread...;)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant