Slashdot Mirror
Experience the New Slashdot Mobile Site
After many months of effort, today we've brought the new mobile site out of beta. Featuring an interface optimized for touch devices, we think it's a huge improvement over the old mobile interface. You'll find comments easier to navigate, the most popular stories highlighted at the top of the page, and a surprisingly pleasant interface for navigating old polls. We've also spiffed up user profiles, resurrecting and improving the friend/foe system in the process. And that's not all: we're pleased to announce that you can login to Slashdot in general using various social media accounts, so if you use Facebook or Google+ there's no excuse not to enjoy the benefits of being a registered user, without the hassle of creating yet another account. Our weblog has a few more details. As always, if you encounter any issues let us know by mailing feedback@slashdot.org.
No thanks. It's pretty terrible. Can you also stop the chooser popup please? I want to use the classic site without constantly bombardment with a popup.
Doesn't do anything on my phone. The "loading" bar just sits there loading, and no articles ever come up. Perhaps this was announced a bit prematurely...?
I don't respond to AC's.
Every time I have tried the new mobile site my experience was not good.
I can't even scroll down easily and when I do it jumps into an article that I didn't select.
And it doesn't look good.
Maybe it's opera mobile's fault. Maybe you need to think on this some more.
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
There was a mobile site. It only differed slightly from the desktop site so it wasn't too much of a shock.
I was thinking the same. If this is what our new overlords think we want maybe it's time to create something new.
Forget mobile, I'm still waiting for Slashdot to have a AAAA record.
But that would require actually expending effort to fix things. That's never been the Slashdot way. They couldn't even fix the pagination bugs in the version before they did the whole discussion overhaul. They want to chunk out new code, not do "boring" software maintenance.
I hate it and it's terrible and it sucks and I hate it and it's different and why did it change and it's terrible and it's different and it's not working on my obscure phone so it's useless to everyone and it sucks and nobody should ever ever ever ever ever use it ever again and I don't like it. It's stupid. I'm a nerd, so I know this sort of thing. I'll click the link later when I've got time to look at it.
"we're pleased to announce that you can login to Slashdot in general using various social media accounts,"
Why would I want to do this? On Slashdot, of all the sites on the internet, people value their privacy. Perhaps we don't want the data-miners at Facebook to monitor our slashdot usernames, cross-correlate post times against estimated work hours and calculate our estimated slacking-off coefficient to better target advertisments? I'm entirely happy to have lots of seperate accounts - it beats 'One Account to Rule them All.'
You guys did something wrong. In mobile Safari when I try to scroll down the page, it often detects my touch as a click and opens a story I don't want to read. This isn't a problem with the browser because it doesn't happen on any other mobile site. It seems to be a problem with the size of your click-able regions. I'm not sure what kind of beta testing was done, but it obviously wasn't enough.
You IGNORED every constructive comment that people made regarding this mobile interface. You INSISTED on doing it the stupid way.
Nobody is going to use your mobile interface when it makes browsing slashdot MORE WORK than before. We can't even get full article summaries on the front page! What kind of bullshit is that?
And I think it's just wonderful how every mobile user gets a banner suggesting they switch to the much more heavily ad-strewn mobile interface. Congratulations slashdot, you've managed to create a mobile interface that is WORSE than the full site on just about every level. way to ignore your customers.
It has one disadvantage: I have to click away a popup which asks me to use the new site, time and again...
--frank[at]unternet.org
The mobile site lags badly while scrolling on an Android device using chrome. Any chance of fixing this?
When following a link to /., if I answer Yes to the pop-up prompt, i get redirected to http://m.slashdot.org/ and NOT the story I was linking to
The old mobile site wasn't really mobile, so I guess anything is better, though it's a pretty slow and heavy site it seems. It looks to be working in Firefox for Android now, that's an improvement over the last time I used the beta.
So how long until /. wraps up the new mobile site in an app wrapper and advertises a "mobile app" for iPhone and Android like seemingly every other website out there?
And yet Slashdot is still incapable of handling nonASCII characters. Unicode is over 20 years old, guys.
Is there any reason why this was done as a separate site and not with a responsive design? Separate mobile sites are the old-fashioned way of doing things.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Finally, get ready for... [rant mode on]
I am sick of having the message "would you like to try beta or classic" every time when I browse Slashdot on my Chrome browser under my Nexus. I want the *regular* site, or something as close to it as possible. I even cannot click on the "classic" button... First lesson for new designs: if someone says *not for me* then leave them alone or they will leave your site alone.
Why should I have to press "request desktop site" each time I simply want to read an article ? This is not a PALM III where I zoom in with the Plus and Minus keys: my browser is more powerful than a Windows IE6 browser (feature wise), faster than many regular old Pentium IV's and pinching is good enough to get around the site.
[rant mode off]
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
When I click on something it takes forever for the UI to respond. There is no visual feedback so until I realized that the new UI was just 200x slower than the old one I clicked on the things 5-10 times thinking the clicks just didn't take the first n-1 times.
I've obviously switched back to using the desktop site on my mobiles, but there is a popup on every page load asking me to try the mobile site! Sheesh!
You need to fire the contractors involved and hire some people who know what they are doing.
I jused the (new) mobile site for the first time on an iPhone 4S and had no issues whatsoever. Although I like the overall look and feel of the site I don't think a redesign was all that necessary. Sorry, devs :) But don't listen to the haters, they wouldn't like it no matter how it had turned out!
What the fuck were you guys thinking?
An, in general, what the fuck is going on with people designing user interfaces these days? It seems everywhere you go there's yet another abortion of a user interface.
Seriously...
And it's making it difficult to navigate the site. Plus, there doesn't appear to be a way to get back into classic once you're in mobile. Looks ok, just needs functional work
BOOP!
I browse /. on my Nexus 4 and iPad, both of which display the full /. site perfectly. The layout of the site downscales rather nicely, and I've never had an issues with it. The "mobile" site, on the otherhand, is not my cup of tea. It just doesn't feel very slashdotty.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
The new site is terrible. I really tried to use it for a couple weeks but had to go back (iPhone 4).
The new site is significantly slower first of all, which essentially kills it right off the bat. Speed should be your #1 feature. If you can't make it faster on mobile, don't bother with the redesign just tweak the existing layout.
It's also very glitchy as others have pointed out.
- Scrolling down often results in a click.
- After the page loads it jumps to the top again if you scroll down too fast
- transitions are glitchy and slow. Don't use them they don't add anything.
As for the announcement it is just full of fail.
>> We've built this new mobile interface optimized exclusively for your touch smartphones and tablets.
Why? The revolutionary part of the iPhone was that it could handle regular desktop sites and we could do away with WAP. Now we suddenly need a special site again? Just make sure that the layout scales well and you're done for mobile on a site that is purely about content. It's a different story if you're something like an online retailer where people want quick access to a few key functions (search, store locator, inventory, my account, etc).
>> Read comments and stories in a mobile-friendly view (no more squinting!)
Never had to squint on the old site. what's the problem?
>> Most popular stories shown right at the top
If I passed by a story earlier in the day what makes you think I want to see it again?
>> See beautiful achievement badges
I have no words. This is so stupid.
>> Show off your latest Gravatar
Yep, that's why I'm here.
>> We built this app using the latest technologies and frameworks such as Backbone, Zepto, Underscore, Hamstache, Jasmine, and Sass.
So you jumped on the bandwagon of stupidly named frameworks and used all of them because that's the thing to do these days. Surprise surprise, the end result is too heavy.
>> Since there are so many mobile devices and capabilities, we targeted webkit browsers, and Android versions above 2.3.
Sounds like browser support got worse then. Say it like it is.
>> We didn't start sketching the blueprints based on what we thought a mobile experience should be - we asked YOU.
Ah, that's the problem then. Design by committee and it shows.
No thanks. It takes forever to load, it looks like shit, and its generally terrible.
Now take that stupid popup thing that tells me to go to the mobile site. If I want to see your shitty social-web2.1-scalable-turnkey-webdesigner-solution I'll go to the god damn site myself. Whoever wrote this should be ashamed.
I still use the Classic Discussion System (D1) and have my Threshold set to 2 (sometimes I reset to 3 or 4 as well). How can I have the mobile site honor that preference?
I'm using it right now (though posting from my desktop). Honestly, it's a lot faster than the old site, and navigation is more friendly to touch devices. Most importantly, comments load better than before. With that said, two things bother me about it:
1. The aesthetic is completely different from the desktop site, to the point that I wouldn't know it's Slashdot if it didn't say so at the top. This isn't a huge deal, but brand recognition is important.
2. The article summaries are shortened on the front page, and you have to tap the headline in order to load the whole thing along with contents. This breaks up the site's flow and makes it harder just to peruse articles. Take, for instance, the following excerpt:
Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have published a paper arguing that the American patent system...
The shortened summary offers nothing of value to me; the headline is actually much more informative. What I think needs to happen is either enable full, unshortened summaries, or write a summary of the summary for mobile devices. One of those options is silly, the other is reasonable.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Posting from my phone. Works ok with android!
Yeah. We could call it Reddit and then...
I really wish slashdot had an api to access posts so we could calculate the exact turning point. Definitely 2013 is when the tide has shifted.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I have windows phone 8 and the browser is not recognized as a mobile device, so no annoying popup for me!
Try it! Library of Babel
Go to the Play Store and get Firefox. You won't look back.
Yes you will, or at least I did. I have no idea what causes this, but I've had several pages where when you scroll below the currently visible content, the newly displayed stuff turns fuzzy/blurry. If you only scroll half a screen you get a clear top half and messed-up bottom half. I can't imagine what causes this, but it was annoying enough that for now I'm trying other browsers... Dolphin seems to be doing well, but I miss my extensions. :(
Please, please, please let me know if a group comes together to make a new Slashdot. I'm a professional web developer, mostly backend PHP but I know Rails, wouldn't mind learning Python, am actively learning Node, and I'm very experienced with frontend stuff (jQuery, HTML 5, CSS 3, etc. etc.)
I'm thinking keep the karma system almost exactly the same if not exactly the same, and shift to more crowdsourced article posting. Keep editors, but their job wouldn't be to choose the articles to post, their job would be to, well, edit the submissions for clarity, spelling, grammar, etc.
Maybe even open source the base code? I know Hacker News did that, keeping a little bit of the secret sauce back (mostly anti-voting ring stuff). That would let us benefit from the open source community at large (which would fix problems in this new mobile site pretty quickly I would imagine).
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I ran it through this software I have at work called "Mobile Internet Testing Environment" and it got a "MITE score" of 68/100. It's based on best practices for performance of a mobile site. The slashdot mobile site got penalized for things such as not having the JS at the bottom, for having iframes, not combining css/js, one http request error, no alt tags for images, and others.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
The mobile site is designed to work on Android and iOS browsers only. We haven't tested it much on desktop browsers, so I wouldn't expect it to work there. You'll see the best experience on the latest version of mobile Chrome/Safari, but it also should function in the latest mobile Firefox and Opera.
If you really want to use the mobile site in desktop Chrome you can check "Emulate touch events" in the web inspector, but it isn't officially supported so expect to see some oddities.
Overwhelming negative response. It makes one wonder what the design criteria were, or the Q/A strategy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
oh please ... Reddit is the bastard step-child of Slashdot and Digg.
That is not to say Reddit is all bad -- at least _some_ of the sub-reddits are great like /r/LucidDreaming . However, others are a just a constant circle-jerk like /r/atheism /r/politics where it is impossible to have a civil discussion without getting down-voted into oblivion simple because you refuse to spout the fan-boi's dogma and want to look at things objectively. /. may have jumped the shark a while back but at most of the trolls have moved on from /. to the latest news-fad-site and that only helps /. :-)
I'm confused why anyone - especially a technology-driven site like Slashdot - would create a "separate but equal" website just for mobile devices. It doesn't make sense these days. What's better is to build a responsive web design that scales down appropriately to the device. Then we don't have to visit a separate website with different branding to get to the same content on a mobile device.
In a responsive web design, you might still choose to detect a mobile browser, and then set the comment browsing level to "5" or maybe "4". That's arguably the only thing you'd need to do that requires knowing the type of the client device.
I know this doesn't help you, but I have none of those problems here. I'm running Mobile Safari/Chrome on an iPhone 5.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
That bug might only be present on Android then. I have the same problem as the GP and it makes the mobile site practically unusable.
I'm using the Android browser on 4.1 JellyBean (Galaxy S3 - not exactly an obscure or underpowered device).
Whereas Ars Technica use responsive design instead of a separate site and its almost a joy to read on a phone.
YES
If the mobile site still LOOKED like Slashdot I think people would be more open to it.
But it looks like any Generic news site ...
I remember when they redesigned Slashdot 5 years ago ... and the new design retained the "feel" of the old design. The mobile site does not retain the Slashdot feel. Even hardcore old school Emacs guys have a certain affinity towards the way things look and feel here. So don't mess with that.
I assume a third a third party was hired to do it and that's why they opted not to follow the theme at all and go with something completely different and didn't care enough to make it work on desktop browsers even if really it doesn't have to.
Hi, I see a lot of you are having trouble with scrolls in the app being detected as clicks on stories. The team here has been trying to reproduce this, but failing. Here's a list of device / browser combinations I've tested:
The concern here is that there's some kind of common scrolling motion we aren't doing that's causing them to get interpreted as clicks. Are you holding your finger down longer? Pausing somewhere in the scroll? Is there horizontal motion in there? Is your scroll more of a flick? We've tried all those things and haven't seen it, so if some of you experiencing the problem would be kind enough to record a video of yourself making it happen (preferably on one of the above devices so we can reproduce it too), that would be great. There is no Slashdot Mobile QA team and our dev team is tiny.
Yes. I don't like the article "snippeting" on the main page either. It's the main reason why I didn't explore the beta very much; reading the articles so I know which ones I want to load the comments on is a core function.
If all I wanted was RSS snippets, I'd read Google News instead.