Slashdot Mirror
Come Try Out Slashdot's New Design (In Beta)
Slashdot's biggest redesign effort ever is now in beta
and you're invited to help guide it. This redesign has been shaped by feedback from community members over the past few
months (a big thanks to those of you who participated in our alpha testing phase!), and we'd like your thoughts on it, too. This new design is meant to be richer
but also simpler to use, while maintaining the spirit of what Slashdot is all about: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Read on for the details of what's included, or read this
blog post. Update: 10/02 19:16 GMT by T : Since this post went live, we've been reading through the comments below as well as your (hundreds!) of emails. These are all valuable, as we continue to implement our current features into the Beta. Keep 'em coming; we love the feedback. Please keep in mind that this is called Beta for a reason; we've still folding in lots of improvements. One important thing to bear in mind is that the images are optional: check out the Classic mode by clicking on the view selection widget (just above the stories) on the Beta page.
What's in the Beta?
- Cleaner, simpler homepage design with option to view stories in three different layouts (Standard, Classic and Headline View)
- More community-promoted content in the All Stories view
- Improved profile pages to give you a snapshot of other community members
- Better, more prominent filters to view stories in different dimensions
- Easier browsing of popular topics straight from the main page.
Please keep in mind that this is a beta and some features are not yet available or fully baked. For features not yet available, you'll see a "Coming Soon" bubble if you hover your mouse over those areas of the site. Here are a few key areas we are still working on:
- Sign up
- moderation
- story submission
- replying to comments
Update: 10/01 20:54 GMT by S : For those of you who would rather browse Slashdot without pictures, click the icon at the top right of the story column, and switch to Classic View.
If you want the site to look like Digg, maybe you should just buy it.
it's fixed now.
but. the new design wastes 50% of my screen.
just make it like it was 10 years ago.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It looks like a cheap ass blog...
Please! leave a way for people to use the old look forever. stayoffmylawn.slashdot.org or some such.
Can we please stop making columnar layouts that auto-margin? I am on an 11" screen and you're intentionally placing almost 3" of that into whitespace. Also, the photo headers are horrible.
Not only are there giant white bars down the sides, but all the useless stuff no one reads (and the poll) are always on the side.
It makes the comment section - which is a large part of the slashdot experience - seem like something tacked onto the end of a news article where people post one line responses.
Why on earth did we spend all this money on beautiful 1920x1080 screens, AND spend so much time developing so called "responsive design" stylesheets and javascript, that we are still suck with extremely thin websites?
How on earth is this even remotely an improvement?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
If you loved the old design, you'll hate the new design...
FTFY.
Pastels, rounded edges, and large whitespace stripes on the sides of websites make me gag.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I am so fucking sick of the "image with rectangle overlay so we can put text on top of it" theme.
If your image isn't indicative of your content, it doesn't belong there. Get rid of the image and just use text for your headline.
If it is indicative of your content, don't cover up half of it with a semi-transparent rectangle with text and icons in it. Put the text above the image.
Furthermore, shoving multiple images together so that they actually adjoin when they represent separate content is retarded. Even if you want to adopt the "flat, sharp, "modern"" style (really, the Windows 8 "formerly-known-as-Metro" style), you should use the space you have.
I've got a 1280x1024 window for you to work with (minus scroll bars). This has been bog standard for a decade. There's no reason I should be looking at a filmstrip of content that's 600px wide and off center, with 3 adjoining images in a 560px wide square, each 50% covered by a white rectangle with text.
Furthermore, the bottom left image links to Story B but the bottom left semi-transparent rectangle links to nothing (it only the text links), and the bottom right image ALSO links to Story B, when it should link to Story C (the text for Image C does link to Story C).
that was the first thing that jumped out at me. 'looks like a couple other news sites I've seen...' I actually like /. the way it is currently. It took me quite a while to get over the most recent change. but I'm used to the way the stories are presented and I don't need pics with the stories on the font page, if I want pics, I'll click thru to the story! I really like the distinctive look Slashdot.org owns in this current iteration. please keep it the way it is. thanks!
I just don't get this "hero" thing. I don't go to websites to see a gorgeous but meaningless photo. Slashdot is a conversation, not a photo scrapbook.
On my 1920x1080 LCD, it looks retarded. There's as much whitespace running down the sides as there is content running down the middle.
It's even worse if you try to read the comments on a story. You know, the only reason why people actually come to slashdot rather than other websites with editors that actually make some effort. At 1920x1080, the comments take up a maximum of about 575 pixels -- less if they're nested. That means that more than 70% of the screen is wasted whitespace.
I have a large screen for a reason. If I want to read text in a narrow column, I'll resize the browser window.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
They're not indented very far and that makes working out a comment's descendants take some work. Most of the value of slashdot compard to any other aggregation site is the discussion so I'm leary of any change which would lessen this sites commenting.
Now, just about any OTHER site in the world taking comments is a different story!
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
The sidebar on the story listing is OK. Please, for the love of God, remove it for the comments. If I scroll down beyond a certain point, it's just going to be blank anyway, which means more wasted space.
Also, on the subject of wasted space: Please make it 100% width and not a center column. Everyone has widescreen monitors now. You're wasting our space. Keeping the center column design discourages people from spending significant amounts of time on the website.
That all said, I'm 99% certain that all feedback in this thread will be completely ignored because your designers say we're all dumb. When Slashdot tragically fades away as a brand in a couple of years, we'll say we told you so.
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
Current Slashdot flows to my display and still looks good. New Slashdot is yet another "cramped canyon".
It'll be sad if Slashdot succumbs to the "looks good on our iPad so it's done" mentality. If nothing else, sniff the screen size and give us the option of flowing to the screen like it does now.
It's probably too much to ask for you to just... you know... fire everybody except the maintainers. If you want to task a bunch of web developers, how about tasking them with something that would be truly innovative--such as a UI that has reasonable defaults (wide on my wide screen, narrow on somebody else's phone) and that lets us hackers out in the peanut gallery configure it a bit ourselves.
That should be your real, new, innovative design principle: Let the user configure it as much as possible.
In fact, that's what HTML and browsers were supposed to do in the first place. HTML was never intended to be a layout language. The view was supposed to be configurable by the end user in a lot of ways. The web strayed from that, so now we get designers fucking over users, forcing them into a one size fits $foo design, where $foo is usually the set of users that are thought to be the most easily monetized.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Seriously, designers; have you ever seen the sheer epic scale of some of the slashdot comments. Not to mention the vast amount of them?
With the small column design, it's going to take minutes just to scroll halfway down.
Also, the boxes around the comments in the old design make it easy to see where it is located in a thread.
Whitespace is great for purely visual design and VERY, VERY, F**KING BAD for actual usability.
One of the things I like about slashdot is that it doesn't try to look flashy, popular and hip but is all about the content. The old design does not waste my precious screenspace nor my time. It doesn't require me to scroll huge distances while half the screen is empty. It doesn't require me to show more comments and it lets me hide threads I've read or don't care about.
Old Slashdot looks like shit, but works great.
New Slashdot looks great, but works like shit.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It makes the comment section - which is a large part of the slashdot experience - seem like something tacked onto the end of a news article where people post one line responses.
This.
Slashdot's biggest selling point, as it's always been, is the conversation the stories generate. If I wanted day-old news with a barely-considered comment section, I'd go to Yahoo or visit the local Gannett affiliate's website.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Please let us keep the old design if we wish. The new design is annoyingly narrow and looks ridiculous on large desktop monitors (the kind used by most /.'ers when we post from work, you know that time of day dedicated to /. and sometimes work.) The new design is passable as a mobile site for phones and tablets though when I browse on my tablet, I request the desktop site and read in landscape mode like god intended. I still use the old comment system layout as well. It works and is easy to read.
*Warning* Cranky, veteran /.'er rant: ./ is one of the few sites that I care to read as its uncluttered, organized and lacking in flashy bullshit that bring nothing to the table but cheap glitter. We don't need giant pictures the width of the emaciated layout to go with each article either. This isn't kindergarten where we need a picture book, we are adults looking for information. Take for example this pile of shit: http://tech-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/10/01/1521222/the-next-big-fiber-showdown-austin What the fuck is the point that picture? Please someone tell me what the FUCK this picture of someone jumping into a pool has to do with google fiber? It does NOTHING besides waste screen real estate and bandwidth. It doesn't catch my eye, it irritates it. Even the ads on the beta site appear larger and more intrusive even though they aren't simply because everything is smashed together. In summation: Fuck the new design up its ass with a creosote soaked telephone pole wrapped in barbed wire and covered in rusty nails - SIDEWAYS.
To be frank: it looks like a shitty blog. This is what your masters at Dice think is hip and cool? They can go fuck themselves along with everyone on the design team circle jerking each other in meetings while patting themselves on the back for doing such a "good job".
Whew! Sorry bout that but I am tired of ohhh lets make it shiny! yay! web 2.0 bullshit.
I didn't think so.
In my years here, UTF-8 / Unicode support seems to have been the most requested site feature, by far. Maybe even the only requested feature. Though I myself have no need for anything beyond 7 bit ASCII, I can't help but have noticed that people want their crazy characters.
So finally, the good folks at slashdot have engaged in a massive site redesign. God only knows how much work went into this effort. The end result?
A giant middle finger. "You want UTF-8? Here's some whitespace instead. You're welcome!"
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Seriously. That fucking sucks. I've been on this site a while ("Look Mom, he has a 4 digit user id"), and that is by far the crappiest design I've seen.
I want lots of news stories all accessible with a short blurb of text. I don't need videos, I don't need animated thingies swirling around, I just want news. News for nerds.
In contrast, most of the other redesigns and tweaks over the years I've enjoyed. This one sucks. It'll probably be the nail in the coffin that sends me over to Ars Technica, who's doing a much better job these days.
----- obSig
giant white bars down the sides
I hate this and I hate every web site that does this. Get it through your thick skulls: my web browser width is different than your preferred width.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
oh wow, flipping between here and there is disconcerting.
The current format is more text-dense. The latter sparse and space-wasting. The beta looks just like every other lame web 2.0 crapapalooza wordpress blog. And it's an inefficient waste of space.
It makes the comment section - which is a large part of the slashdot experience - seem like something tacked onto the end of a news article where people post one line responses.
I hope to hell someone with a say in the matter reads this and understands what it really means. I'll give you a hint:
If you make this change, you will kill Slashdot.
I'm not exaggerating even slightly. Many people spend time here to read and participate in the commentary. By shoehorning the comments into that tiny space beneath the article you're saying "comments aren't important", something which will in all likelihood be soon followed by "comments are a liability" and then "comments now require moderation before being posted". People tolerate the Slash-Bi(sexual) crap now because it takes a second seat to the real meat of the articles and commentary. By reversing those roles you're telling 85% of the active userbase that they're no longer welcome.
Whatever site is left after this change takes effect -- maybe it will make enough advertisement and tracking money to satisfy Dice, but it won't be Slashdot and it won't last a year. Remember what happened to Digg? Yeah, I didn't think so.
By the way, if anyone hasn't gone and looked at the comments section on an article, go look now and then tell me I'm wrong.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Absolutely agreed on the comment filtering. I instantly left as soon as I realized I was reading every inane comment by an AC and couldn't find a way to filter. That's a dealbreaker.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
I run slashdot on the "very" old classic mode. not even the web2.0 mode that is now slashdot default but an even older version. Iknow when I am not logged in as I see the useless web 2.0 interface.
Not only is there huge amounts of wasted space on the sides, but even in the comment boxes. It is like the new mobile slashdot. You scroll and scroll and scroll just to go down 5 comments out of hundreds or thousands.
When you fix something try to figure out what is and isn't broken.
The voting system is broken you can now vote multiple times on the same poll.
For fun goto slashBI. talk about ugly, hard to read, confusing with no delineation between topics.
I really wish slashdot would fire the idiots who think up the new web layouts. none of them are worth my two cents let alone the tens of thousands of dollars they are being paid.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
A-Freakin'-Men. /. is to not have my time wasted (too much) with useless fluff. The new design = all useless fluff.
When I saw it my first thought was, "this is every other new site on the planet." One of the reasons I come to
Agreed. Slashdot is one of the last bastions of proper threaded conversation (I'm glad the "giant list" style of comments is finally evolving a sort of pseudo-threading, but it's not really enough).
If you change the list order, you'll make a return to conversation impossible -- this goes for both designs. With this design, you make First Post critical and basically the subject of every subsequent post. Like every blog on the planet.
So I'll go to some other blog, because there will be no other reason to return to slashdot.
Slashdot's biggest redesign effort ever is now in beta and you're invited to help guide it.
Yeah, whatever.
This is so visually insulting that the only criticism I can give it is "start over." That's not even getting into the page navigation. I can't navigate to the message number from my ~bmo page to catch up on replies? That really leads to intelligent conversation about topics, doesn't it? Wow, what a POS.
I am reminded of the Yahoo redesign of the Y! Finance fora in 2006. People left in droves, and it's only gone downhill since then, to utter unusability. Because someone somewhere had to "make a name for himself."
I will continue to come here only if certain people come here, but I doubt they will.
--
BMO
Slashdot's biggest selling point, as it's always been, is the conversation the stories generate.
Exactly. And how does the new design reflect this?
On the new design it looks like you cannot link to a specific comment or thread. Check out your user page and look at your comment history. No links to comments, no comment scores.
I suppose comments are simply an unsightly appendage in their new "modern" design (they must clash with all the bullshit social media icons everywhere). Just think of all the "old cruft" they could get rid of if there were no comments: threaded layout, moderation, meta-moderation, karma, all users with a UID less than 7 digits, etc. Replace all that with a flat "top 20" comments listing and a little "Like this on Facebook!" button and it'll be nirvana.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Additionally there was less content on the initial screen than there is on the current design. Much of the time I skim the headlines, if I find one I find relevant I immediately read the blurb. If the blurb appeals then I follow the link(s) or read the comments. This new layout doesn't offer as much content on a given screen, and one thing I learned in design in general, if you don't grab your audience with little more than a glimpse, then you've lost your audience.
This. It took me about 5 seconds to conclude the new design for the front page sucks so much I didn't even bother to look at the comments. If it fails in the most fundamental criteria for being useful, as you so well described, then I can't imagine any real thought went into this design other than "we need pointless pictures" and that for some reason it needs to follow along with the stupid new fad of having an absurd amount of white space.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Old site is better. You should fire you designer because there last job was obviously doing wordpress themes.