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.

Comments

Link broken?

[Samantha Wright]

For some bizarre reason, https: on the link redirects to the current home page.

Who wants to start making tongue-in-cheek remarks about the current layout instead of the new one?

Re:Link broken?

[djupedal]

If you loved the old design, you'll love the new design...

Re:Link broken?

[gl4ss]

it's fixed now.

but. the new design wastes 50% of my screen.

just make it like it was 10 years ago.

Re:Link broken?

[Sporkinum]

I got the link in an email, went to it, and the site is broken for me. It did the same thing when they did the alpha as well. I sent them a screen shot.

Re:Link broken?

[intermodal]

Going back to a design from 10 years ago would give them less opportunity to hide adverts and trackers in the code. It's much easier when the site code is needlessly complex and hard to analize.

Re:Link broken?

[i kan reed]

Going back to a design from 10 years ago would give them less opportunity to hide adverts and trackers in the code. It's much easier when the site code is needlessly complex and hard to analize.

That is absolutely part of it, and part of it seems to be the %of screen that is ads. More real estate=more eyes=more mind control=less reason to ever visit the site.

Re:Link broken?

[muttoj]

All new is per definition bad or evil.
I will stay with the old and trusted design, thank you very much.

Re:Link broken?

[Ksevio]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[torsmo]

Yes, it works quite well on my text browser.

Re:Link broken?

[ArcadeMan]

There's a limit to how long you can make text lines before it becomes harder to follow and/or people stop reading them. That's why newspapers use columns instead of the full width of the page.

Re:Link broken?

[ColdWetDog]

Still don't work for me. Oh wait. Maybe it is is working.

Ouch. My eyes! The goggles! They do nothing.

(Slashdot devs - don't quit your day job.)

Re:Link broken?

[Sporkinum]

After checking in IE, it is borked as well. I am guessing a bit of tracking code, etc, is being blocked by the ironport here at work. No issue with the old page though.

Re:Link broken?

[CanHasDIY]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[nullchar]

At least let me resize the main comment column so I can make it wider or narrower!

Re:Link broken?

[i kan reed]

There aren't any slashdot devs anymore, remember the CmdrTaco designed much of the original himself. This is clearly a styling to match dice.com, which means that it's likely their own devs were moved over to a project to perform this particular stylesheet murder.

Re:Link broken?

[TWX]

I opened it. Unlike the current design, it did not scale to fit my 1400x1050 screen, leaving large whitespace borders on both edges. If that's what it does on a 4:3 screen with a narrower horizontal resolution than many modern widescreen "high definition" displays, then this is a bad thing.

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.

I did design for some ads for some fandom events, and within the form factor of the ad I had to answer who/what why, and when, and to a lesser extent, where. I had to name the event, give the viewer a reason to go to the event, give the date for the event, and for events that weren't in the normal venues or where the venue itself was an advantage, name the venue. All of this information needed to be conveyed in little-more than a snapshot.

While Slashdot or any bulletin board system is not the same as an ad, it is important to present the frame of the discussion in a format that allows the casual browser to see the important stuff pop out instantly. The current layout, with different presentations, reverse colors for somethings, etc, works to do that. The new format didn't give me the impression of being well organized in that regard. One needs the headline to convey the important "grabber' in a way that actually commands attention. The new system didn't do that for me.

Re:Link broken?

[Art Challenor]

Part of the problem with the comment is the huge amount of horizontal white space. The text looks as though it's double spaced and every break looks to be at least two lines. If you look at the current design it's compact. There isn't much space between the comment and the "Reply to This... " line.

Re:Link broken?

[Spazmania]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[dgatwood]

Speaking of text, in Safari, I have to increase the font size twice before the "Most Discussed" heading on the main page appears in the same row as the rest of the buttons.

Also, when they chose their color scheme, did they actually test it on even one Mac laptop with the standard Mac gamut? Because all those near-white colors are completely indistinguishable until I tilt the screen by about ten or fifteen degrees. They're way, way too subtle. I can't even tell where one story ends and the next one begins. The site borders on unusably hard to read as a result.

Re: Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The comments section is much too narrow, and there's way too much white space between them. And I know that the wave of the future is to get rid of unnecessary borders (a la the borderless buttons on iOS 7), but they helped to track the comment nesting.

Re:Link broken?

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[Incadenza]

I set it to "classic" which goes a significant way to fixing the problem (gets rid of the giant images), but the title text is still gigantic and there's a lot of unnecessary white space and margins.

And all the body text - where all the frikkin content is - is smaller and thinner, and thus harder to read. Helloooooo designers, even heard about legibility? You do know that that is something you can actually measure, and not just an opinion?

Re:Link broken?

[steelfood]

I was going to say, it looks like every other blog out there. That and it doesn't work on Firefox 3.6, which is what I primarily use. It also works poorly on IE, though the layout IE is showing is probably better than the layout Firefox 23 is showing.

My opinion? Kill the fancy graphics and the fancy Javascript/CSS/HTML BS. Just make something that's simple and will work irrespective of browser. Typography issues are more important than adding useless pictures.

tl;dr: Go back to the serif font from 10 years ago, keep the current layout.

Re:Link broken?

[KiloByte]

And that's why screens with aspect ratio of 16x10 or worse are not good for any productive use.

I tried using a 32 inch 16x9 as two 8x9s, but at least the monitor I tried was made with the assumption it will be used only for movies and movie-like games, resulting in unusably low quality at viewing distance used for working with text. Smaller 16x9 monitors are in turn unusable because of being narrow strips that are of no use in either landscape and portrait.

Re:Link broken?

[gl4ss]

just to ramble some more.

the "classic" view in the new view is anything but classic. it's a fucking joke to call it classic. JUST FUCKING MAKE THE PAGE EXPAND TO BORDERS or add a tickbox for it if you really think looking like any other crappy blog is the way to go.

ALSO: VERY IMPORTANT: OBS! HUOMIO!:
don't let your graphics guy design this particular site with lirum larum obsum dopsum. use fucking real comments and real stories, real threads. also fire the bastard, out of an internet cannon. if you use lirum larum and fake comments etc you'll end up making a site for fantasy content and not the kind of content slashdot has! occasionally there's very relevant comments that take full screen of space and unless you use the whole screen you'll run out of space to separate threads in three comments and it becomes impossible to sort through - many of the comments make no sense at all unless you can follow the thread.

(the new design also uses different sized fonts in fucking stupid way).

yeah I'm just some random reader but fuck this is how most people who frequent the site actually use it, without the comments I could just as well go read bbc and the register and on neither of those sites would my comments including words like shit fuck and fucking stupid get any moderation up. you're just trying to make the site tablet friendly and move elements from your "mobile" site(which is heavier than the non-mobile go figure..) into the desktop site. it's a shit strategy. also the fucking pictures, they do nothing! the pictures break the flow AND someone has to do a really good job on selecting(and creating) the right picture you can use for the stories - submissions don't have them.

just stop with the original video material. just stop with trying to make the site web5. just focus on making the commenting system better - and by better I mean creating better threading, not worse.

Re:Link broken?

[CanHasDIY]

Yeah. Conversation.

Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!

Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I'm not going to just stand...!!

OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse; you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.

Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.

Not at all... stupid git...

Re:Link broken?

[qubezz]

Not necessarily kill the fancy graphics, destroy the useless big pictures. I get very irritated at the wordpress blog sites that have to Google for some barely-related huge picture to stick at the top of a story; do that and you've started down the path of making Slashdot just another blog with comments. On Slashdot, the comments are the content.

There should be something for a 2540px wide browser to do, maybe like another site, use multiple columns to display stories, or at least show "most commented/hottest stories of the day stories" or replies to a user's posts in the sidebar instead of a poll.

Re:Link broken?

[JMJimmy]

Mod up.

I hadn't gotten as far as the comments section cause I hated the design so much. It's completely unreadable in that format.

Re:Link broken?

[peragrin]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[TubeSteak]

My opinion? Kill the fancy graphics and the fancy Javascript/CSS/HTML BS.

https://slashdot.org/prefs/d1
  Choose your discussion system:
( ) Interactive Discussion System (D2) (x) Classic Discussion System (D1)

Re:Link broken?

[Walzmyn]

A-Freakin'-Men.
When I saw it my first thought was, "this is every other new site on the planet." One of the reasons I come to /. is to not have my time wasted (too much) with useless fluff. The new design = all useless fluff.

Re:Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

While Slashdot or any bulletin board system is not the same as an ad. . .

Herein lies the point for me. For ~15 years, I have been reading Slashdot as a bulletin board system. Not a "news" site. Not a blog.

Ideally, the front page would only be headlines with expandable summaries. Unfortunately, manipulative, click-whoring headlines have become the norm, so it is more useful to see summaries even though most end up being wasted screen space.

But I digress. . . .I don't know what Slashdot wants to be in the future, but they haven't made a compelling move away from their original intent, and as such, these layout changes only add confusion and reduce efficiency.

Re:Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

And where are the UIDs? How can I make snap judgements about other people's comments based on when they joined?!?

Re:Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[Jane Q. Public]

"but. the new design wastes 50% of my screen."

It's terrible. The text area is 20 pixels narrower, and the sidebar is 60 pixels wider! Yes, it eliminates the left-hand sidebar but the resulting space for actual posts and replies is still SMALLER than before.

BAD idea, Slashdot! Even worse than your other recent ideas.

Give people MORE space for reading and typing, and LESS space for bullshit. Not the other way around.

Re:Link broken?

[mdsharpe]

Seconded. The comments and discussion are the main reason I visit Slashdot several times a day. The new design is an absolute nightmare for reading comments, as they are squashed into an extremely narrow column.
Simply put, if the new design becomes the norm and there's no way to fall back to the current (non-beta) design, I will be visiting a lot less, and will consider it a great loss.

Re:Link broken?

[gagol]

I much prefer the current look. Please dont change it, or keep a historically accurate look as an option, would be real nice.

Re:Link broken?

[qubezz]

You mean did they test it on improperly calibrated monitors with blown out whites? Go to this site, and reduce your lcd contrast controls until you can see the various grays, because it looks like one would expect even on my adobeRGB wide gamut calibrated display and with Firefox color management mode turned on.

Now, how does it look on a braille reader or links?

Re:Link broken?

[KiloByte]

it did not scale to fit my 1400x1050 screen, leaving large whitespace borders on both edges. If that's what it does on a 4:3 screen

It's no good on 4:3, too. The current layout uses almost whole width for comments, save that useless left panel (trying to disable it in Options has no effect). In the beta, it's around 40%.

Re:Link broken?

[Kjella]

Well that's true but a newspaper can either have one ultra-wide column or two narrow ones, either way the same amount of text fits in the same vertical space. With the new layout I felt the information density dropped to half, I have to do at least twice as much scrolling to glance through the comments. Compared to that I very much the current compact format instead of the long and narrow.

Re:Link broken?

[steelfood]

Going slashdot via https has always redirected to the unencrypted http://slashdot.org./

Re:Link broken?

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[Oligonicella]

No. Newspapers in 1811 had two (or more) columns. It highly doubt any metrics were taken and analyzed back then.

Re:Link broken?

[qubezz]

Also just noticed that the "slashdot user" page is useless. I already know what I posted; the new page lists only the contents of my posts, andt is missing links to the post inside the thread so I can see replies or the post score. There are achievement icons, but no text describing what the picture might mean? Do I need a big picture and 250x250px of screen real estate to see "karma: excellent"? ... Not happy.

Re:Link broken?

[Beardo the Bearded]

This, plus get rid of the pictures. They add nothing but a waste of bandwidth. /. looks like it's work related. Don't make it obvious that we're fucking around.

Re:Link broken?

[m6ack]

Yes, gl4ss I'm of the same opinion... that the best design was the simple original... The more this moves away from simple and toward candy, big graphics and open sidebars, the more time I will spend at http://news.ycombinator.com/

Re:Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry - those gaps will soon be filled with Ads :(

Re:Link broken?

[The Cat]

Get it through your thick skulls: web browsers SUCK ASS.

Making a web site that does all the thinking for you is like trying to build a jet aircraft out of peanut butter.

Re:Link broken?

[Luthair]

All the limitations of mobile, now on your desktop!

Re:Link broken?

[ultranova]

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.

Ditto. But do you know what would be really awesome? NNTP interface. Slashdot already allows disabling advertisements (at least it offered the option to me), and the discussions are thread-structured, so why not offer them up via Usenet server? Every section would be its own newsgroup, articles would be top-level posts, and filtering could be handled by having multiple newsgroups with different tresholds for various topics.

That way, you could have Web n+1.infinity for the ooh shiny -crowd, a program of their choice for hardcore users, and a good API for mobile access.

Re:Link broken?

[pspahn]

They've kept their breakpoint rather wide, I am guessing they are only worried about two, "desktop" and "mobile", instead of breaking "desktop" into two breakpoints (small screen, wide screen) and "mobile" into two breakpoints "tablet" and "phone" (and, incidentally, small screen netbooks, etc).

Re:Link broken?

[Nerdfest]

I would actually prefer if the information density of the existing site could be increased. There's still a bit more vertical whitespace than is required t make it readable.

Re:Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a limit to how long you can make text lines before it becomes harder to follow and/or people stop reading them. That's why newspapers use columns instead of the full width of the page.

That's what a window manager and web browser are for. It is not for some web designer to decide for me how wide my text "ought" to be because he blithely assumes I have the web browser maximized on a tiny 1024x768 screen. Maybe I've got the web browser at about 800x600 - on a 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 monitor.

Ugh. I've remained with D1 classic mode over D2. The 2.0 design was foul, but this is beyond unusable and unreadable. They kept me as a daily reader due to D1 (I almost got my 1024-day achievement for it!). If they drop D1 in favor of what "classic" means in this redesign, I'm out. I'll see you guys over on HN.

Or to put this in terms the /. UX redesigner can understand:

Hands off my workflow,

wannabe UX gurus.

And sometimes too much

whitespace just ends up

looking stupid.

Also, black-text-on-white

is more readable than

black-text-on-grey,

which is unreadable.

If I wanted your stupid

color scheme, I'd turn down

the brightness on my

monitor.

Your UX is bad, designer.

And you should feel bad.

Re:Link broken?

[Darinbob]

Right now, even with a smaller window much of the space is taken up bit a large side bar of junk. Even when looking at an actual story (I never go to the main page). Ie, Slashdot poll, list of job openings ("powered" by Dice), etc. Scroll down past all that stuff and you still end up with only 5 1/2 inches wide for a top level comment. That's 14 cm for our scientifically literate friends, or .31 cubits for everyone else.

There is no "classic" view for the individual stories.

Re:Link broken?

[ultranova]

Many people spend time here to read and participate in the commentary.

Seconded. Slashdot is a debate club; the articles exist only to get things started.

Re:Link broken?

[Soulskill]

I hope to hell someone with a say in the matter reads this and understands what it really means.

We're reading, and we understand, believe me.

Thanks for the feedback.

Re:Link broken?

[Darinbob]

If there is a limit, then the beta Slashdot is not even close to approaching it. And it also makes the fonts larger so that it further reduces the amount of available information. It's far too narrow.

Further, there's no one-line summary of comments, they're all expanded inline so that this eliminates the easy browsing of comments and is instead replaced with lots and lots of scrolling (and no slider bar seen for controlling the browsing level).

Really, there are print media web sites with more usable web page designs.

Certainly, if you think 5 inches is just the right size for you then this should be an option. However don't make it the only choice. We're techies and we love options, we should not be treated like the typical illiterate computer user.

Re:Link broken?

[Darinbob]

I think the choice was about fitting more story headers onto the front page. Compare to a tabloid style newspaper or some magazines, many of which use wider columns.

Re:Link broken?

[jackb_guppy]

It looks like apple ios7 - unreadable. I had to turn on the invert display just to read. It the sames as this white box white on gray YUCK!!! Make things readable!

Re:Link broken?

[TapeCutter]

That's the entire problem for me, it's like a newspaper only printing a single column down the center of the front page, why would you do that?

Re:Link broken?

[bmsleight]

I can even think how to comment on the new beta. If you dont get how important this comment are - how this should not even have got to Beta without the comments working. Than /. is doomed.

Re:Link broken?

[khellendros1984]

I've got 2 24-inch 16:10s in portrait mode next to each other. A single 16:9/16:10 screen is difficult to use for code. In contrast, using dual wide screens in portrait mode is very pleasant (and gives me 4.6MP of display area).

Re:Link broken?

[RussR42]

I would love that! I have yet to see a web based interface that is a good as newsreaders were in 1998.

Re:Link broken?

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

Re:Link broken?

[ConceptJunkie]

So Slashdot wants to turn itself from a place to get into a good argument into something that just gives you abuse. Insightful comment. :-)

Re:Link broken?

[Grishnakh]

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.

Unfortunately, the design seen in this new Slashdot Beta is extremely similar to the design used in all new web-based stuff; just look at Google's stuff for instance. All the web designers have drunk the kool-aid.

Re:Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like almost all websites I browse slashdot with CSS turned off so I can read the text in my own prefered font and colors. I don't see the ads either and always comment as AC, so I'm probably lowest priority but...

In the current slashdot the comments are very readable, with replies indented through ul tags. In the beta design the comments are flattened, so impossible to see what's a reply to what.

Re:Link broken?

[Grishnakh]

One problem I've seen with sites that try to accommodate all screen widths is that it does some wacky things when you try to embed images into the text. I think that's why a lot of websites do this.

Re:Link broken?

[zippthorne]

No, that site is garbage. It's a multiple column newspaper in a window. It sort-of recognizes a part of the problem, but it is a pretty dumb solution.

I'm not sure it's possible in a web page, but I think the proper way to do multi-column might be this:

1) only allow vertical scrolling
2) each column is continued on the next column in the same screen. No scrolling down then back to the top then down again to keep reading
3) scrolling works per column, each column flowing up/down and into the column to its left/right.

I think it would look weird at first, but would really be the proper way to go.

Either way, the beta does make the following improvement that I really want to praise:

It wraps text at the browser boundary. I can finally make my browser as narrow as I want and not have to 2D scroll all over the place (or change my user agent to iPod....) to have a nicely formatted column of news and comments to read while I do other stuff on the other side of my monitor.

Re:Link broken?

[Art Challenor]

That's the vertical whitespace, the horizontal whitespace is also there. You can get more stories and, importantly, more comments per page with the current layout. The delimiters are also better (green and gray bars). A fine, light-gray line with lots of space around it is not as clear a visual divider as the colored bars.

Re:Link broken?

[rsborg]

There's a limit to how long you can make text lines before it becomes harder to follow and/or people stop reading them. That's why newspapers use columns instead of the full width of the page.

This is what multiple columns are for. Look at theverge.com or feedly.com (where I skim most of the /. titles anyway, now that Google Reader is dead). Proper multi-column views.

I disagree that pictures are a waste. I wouldn't mind if slashdot stories had appropriate title images so it tiled appropriately nicely in flipboard or feedly when read as a feed. Not sure how the latest linux kernel update would have an interesting unique picture though.

Re:Link broken?

[ConceptJunkie]

Maybe the design is targeted to an iPad in portrait orientation? Because I'm _sure_ the majority of people read /. that way.

Re:Link broken?

[Jmc23]

Perhaps you should yell at the people that make it hard to make resolution-independent designs.

Hint: It's not the web design people!

Re:Link broken?

[Anubis IV]

Bingo. And I actually fear that the danger may be more insidious, since a narrower comments section not only makes it harder to read, but also implicitly encourages commenters to leave shorter, more trite comments. I'd expect that a load of users who would have others left a +5 Insightful/Informative/Interesting comment will instead just leave a quick quip. And while I love the +5 Funny comments we have, I'd hate it if we had a design that essentially encouraged them to the detriment of the others.

The current design(s) do a good job of supporting long-form responses, while at the same time encouraging the user to make their point clear from the get-go by having only the first line displayed when the comment is initially collapsed. The comments need to use the full width of the page, or darn close to it. As it is, the beta comments section looks like a standard Disqus-style thing, and I don't exactly associate sites that use Disqus with places where quality conversations can be had and reasonable people can be reasoned with. In contrast, I do expect that of Slashdot, and I too see that as its biggest selling point.

If they neuter the conversations, they'll strip away the most defining aspect of Slashdot, since I'm entirely with you: I can find my news elsewhere and faster with better signal-to-noise ratios.

Re:Link broken?

[dltaylor]

I agree 100%. The comments are more important than the articles to which they are attached; there is more often useful information in a couple of the comments than the summary or linked article.

I still use the "old mode" to skip the noise, and this is even worse. WTF, FLASH!? If this is the new slashdot, I'm outta here.

Re:Link broken?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Agree. 100%.

The comment system is the only reason I come here. If I can no longer trace a conversation, if reading comments becomes tedious or difficult in the new interface, or if the moderation system is modified so it no longer works as well as the current model... well, yeah, I'll never be back.

Don't break the comment system. Don't futz with it too much. Don't make it seem like an "afterthought." It's central to this community. Without it (and the kind of users it attracts), this is just another crappy tech blog.

Re:Link broken?

[TWX]

the news.google.com site looks loads better than this new thing.

Come to think of it, news.google.com looks a lot like the current Slashdot main page. A narrow, plain nav column on the left, a large body column in the middle, and a 25%ish column on the right.

Re:Link broken?

[bunkymag]

Just adding a +1 to this. The reason I continue to come to slashdot amongst all its competitors is not as a news aggregator - there are plenty of those across tech / science / politics / everything else covered here. The reason I come back is for the comments section.

We all joke about the quality of it all frequently and sure there's chaff amongst the wheat but the truth is it's rare to get a place where insightful discussion of these topics takes place on such a regular basis.

The new design looks like every other site and I think if the switch is made I'll be far less likely to return.

Re:Link broken?

[TWX]

Yeah, I kind of like the classic, large-icon image on the corner of some stories, if anything is included at all. I don't see a need for pictures for the bulk of stories, it's like the use of stock footage on the evening news when they have something that's important but not visual.

Re:Link broken?

[H0p313ss]

So Slashdot wants to turn itself from a place to get into a good argument into something that just gives you abuse. Insightful comment. :-)

We've always been coming here for abuse. (I was trying to fit "Eastasia" into the comment but I have failed... for now...)

Re:Link broken?

[Push Latency]

I had a very unprofessional moment at work today when I clicked the link to see the new design and heard myself yelling "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" several times with great volume.

Re:Link broken?

[pathological liar]

Surely the same criticism came up during the alpha? I know I gave almost the same complaint (minus the Digg threat) in the survey, and other than being a bit more feature complete, the layout looks almost the same.

Re:Link broken?

[dryeo]

I don't see any way to change the styles, or remove the pics. I use my browser in windowed mode, at about 420x260 resolution so I can read a story while waiting for my IDE to finish building a project but not look like I'm goofing off all day. At that resolution, I don't see any controls except the four horizontal bars in a square, which only allows me to login when I click on it.

I don't see anything across the top besides Slashdot, News for Nerds and an icon for mobile on my usual sized window, probably a bit larger then yours. Clicking maximize (1280x1024) I get the usual menu across the top but still no way to change to classic mode.
The beta is really a killer for those of us on dial-up.

Re:Link broken?

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

It's worse than it looks. The current CSS changed dramatically about 2 days ago, and broke the simple userstyle I'd written to widen comment areas & ditch the white background, so I tried to update it...after several hours I managed to get the colors fixed, but when it comes to placement of elements, it was so nested & convoluted that it feels like someone used Microsoft Word to create it. I'm getting a headache just thinking about it... >:-p

Re:Link broken?

[turning in circles]

Ow. I was happily reading the comments without heading over to the Beta site because I'm a chicken, but I clicked on your link and now I think I'm going to puke.

Re:Link broken?

[C18H27NO3]

Agreed on it not taking advantage of space on the left and right, rather wasting it. I went to my graphics settings and rotated the display 90 degrees and it actually looked perfect that way. But alas, we don't read that way normally.

Re:Link broken?

[gullevek]

Agree. Most visible in the comment section. It is now a condensed block like on all the other web sites out there. Really more harder to read, especially when you see the whole whitespace wasted on the right side.

Re:Link broken?

[Joska]

This fixed width rubbish is very frustrating for anyone lacking a tiny monitor or a scrolling fetish. It's tempting to be sarcastic and complain that it's still too wide for my new workstation, a smart watch, but I fear the joke might be lost on whoever thinks Slashdot needs to become just another blog. I've checked it daily since the late nineties so it's close to my heart, to say nothing of useful and informative. Seeing it ruined would be a great shame.

Re:Link broken?

[Therad]

Not at all... stupid git...

That's right! Finally someone speaks the truth! REAL programmers don't need no stinkin' revision control.

Re:Link broken?

[houstonbofh]

All the limitations of mobile, now on your desktop!

I guess it makes sense, as that is how they are dsigning desktops these days. Idiots...

Re:Link broken?

[Konowl]

I'd leave if that was permanent. That's horrible.

Re:Link broken?

[houstonbofh]

One problem I've seen with sites that try to accommodate all screen widths is that it does some wacky things when you try to embed images into the text. I think that's why a lot of websites do this.

Well it sure as shit does wacky things with the text when you try to view it in a window and not full screen.

Re:Link broken?

[houstonbofh]

Just to tag directly to you... Along with all that is mentioned, please let us collapse comment threads. It is the only way to work through a long discussion. Sometimes it goes down an odd rabbit hole and you can just collapse that line. (Or close the browser...)

Re:Link broken?

[CamD]

This is clearly a styling to match dice.com

Yikes. You aren't kidding.

Re:Link broken?

[CRC'99]

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?

It doesn't - but it does make me want to stab someone in the face for turning neat and functional into flashy and useless....

Maybe someone got fired from the Gnome 3 team and picked up a gig at slashdot hq.....

Re:Link broken?

[CRC'99]

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.

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.

Oh god. I really thought "It couldn't be that bad" - and then looked at the page linked above.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

I've been around here a long time, and this has got to be one of the most braindead ideas I have ever seen on this site. You may as well convert slashdot to run on phpBB instead. At least then its still about the community and not the (limited) articles...

Re:Link broken?

[dgatwood]

Sure, I should ideally calibrate my monitor (I haven't had time to calibrate this one yet), but a basic principal of design is that you have to assume that 99% of the people looking at your content are going to be using the hardware with the default calibrations as shipped, and you have to choose your colors accordingly. This design epically fails at that. A 4% difference in brightness does not proper contrast make.

Re:Link broken?

[Kulilin]

but. the new design wastes 50% of my screen.

just make it like it was 10 years ago.

Yes, please. Don't feed us whitespace and pretty pictures that are barely related to the contents of the article. Bring us news for nerds. Bring us stuff that matters.

Re:Link broken?

[hattig]

It is indeed horrible.

The only good thing is that a side-effect of having such a narrow comment area is that each comment isn't very wide, and thus is more readable (which is why newspapers are columnar).

This is just a mock-up running on live data, right? Nothing works like replying, moderating, etc. Individual comments aren't linkable. You can't collapse comments, or entire subtrees of comments. First and foremost the functionality has to be there. This isn't a "beta" in any sense of the word.

Secondly, my monitor is 1920x1080 (yeah, I wish it was higher). If you've gone to the effort of providing three different interface styles, then you can provide one that isn't a fixed pixel width (because it's easier for the web designer) but instead scales. And make the compact style actually make comment threads compact! There's loads of white space.

At least Stylish can be used to fix up CSS, but that means waiting for someone to do it well, rather than making it look "moody" and "dark" like half of the styles on that site.

Re:Link broken?

[hattig]

Yeah, you can fix that on the current Slashdot site by adding:
.commentBody {
        max-width: 50em;
}

to the site, via Stylish, etc. It just makes the individual comments narrower, the comment thread is still nearly the full browser width.

Re:Link broken?

[clickety6]

That's also why I can re-size my browser window to choose the line length I'm most comfortable with...

Re:Link broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more likely just incompetent web designers who don't know how to make resolution independent sites. Nobody who is in their right mind would look at something with so much wasted whitespace and think "that looks good".

This is pure incompetence.

Re:Link broken?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Yeah the only reason anyone comes here is for the comments. If I have to work harder to read them, I have less reason to come here. Seriously, widen the comments section and make sure I don't have to click TWICE to get to something I previously had to click ONCE to get to. Especially if its the only reason I visit. This design will kill slashdot.

Re:Link broken?

[TheRaven64]

When you show the grandparent's comment to your overlords, please take the bolded section and print it in 72-point text. The new design is quite possibly the worst thing I've ever seen anyone try to do to Slashdot and it will kill the site. I'm not as active as I was a year ago due to lack of time, but in your statistics last year I was one of the 5 most active commenters for one or two quarters. I would not visit Slashdot if they switched to this abomination.

Re:Link broken?

[Monkey-Man2000]

Yikes. You aren't kidding.

I knew there was a real reason **OMITTED** left; I'm surprised more haven't jumped ship yet. This new management is going to kill ./ for good.

Re:Link broken?

[AmiMoJo]

Google's sites do at least use the entire screen width, and support unicode.

Re:Link broken?

[Urza9814]

You actually have a pretty decent point there with phpBB. Slashdot isn't really a news site, it's a news *forum*. The layout is far closer to any forum software than any traditional news website...and now some moron at Dice is trying to run that forum on Wordpress.

If this ends up the new face of Slashdot...I'll miss you guys. And I've *just* returned to reading regularly after a year or two of absence, so that'd be a real shame...

Re:Link broken?

[gwolf]

"Biggest selling point"... Right — Probably that's right for us users. But not necessarily for what generates the revenue for Slashdot.

Slashdot's biggest selling point is the amount of eyeballs that, looking for that conversation, end up looking at their advertisements. And, of course, the site admins/redesigners will do their best to have as many eyeballs per ad as possible.

Re:Link broken?

[tibit]

The bigger problem is that the widescreens make a lot of web content unreadable. Long lines are horribly hard to read. If an entire paragraph takes two lines of a couple hundred characters each, filling a wide screen, then that's a problem.

Slashdot needs to switch to two-column mode on wide screens. There's a reason why books are formatted for pages that are longer in vertical direction than horizontal.

Re:Link broken?

[tibit]

Widening it is actually the wrong thing to do. There are two orthogonal issues: 1. Use of the screen real estate. 2. Keeping the line lengths reasonable. The solution has been found a couple hundred years ago, just look in a newspaper. Slashdot really needs a multi-column layout.

Re:Link broken?

[tibit]

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but who the fuck has the time to analyze the source code of a news site they simply read? Sure, if you're in web design of one sort or another you'd want to learn from the others by reverse-engineering, but that's not what any significant fraction of users is doing. I'm pretty sure slashdot could randomly insert links to bank accounts, with passwords, into the html comments, and it'd be missed for a long time.

Re:Link broken?

[tibit]

The stories are nothing but conversation starters. They are usually so badly edited so as to be useless for anything more than that anyway. It takes a truly amazing amount of presbyopia on the part of Dice to presume anything else. Nobody cares much about your lousy stories, slashdot.

Re:Link broken?

[hendrikboom]

Agree! And there are *still* some very good newsreaders available. I have more choice in newsreaders than I have choice in web-based interfaces, so I can choose what works for me.

What I'd like is an interface where most of the text is light on a dark background.

-- hendrik

Re:Link broken?

[Grishnakh]

I think that depends on how narrow you resize the window to. On the ones I've seen, the web page sets a fixed width, in pixels, for the whole site (perhaps 1000px). If your window is wider than that, then it just adds blank bars on either side and centers the site in the middle. Since most monitors these days are wider than 1000px, it looks OK; most people, remember, are using 1024px-width monitors or greater (the widescreen desktop monitors are usually 1920px). Even cellphones are frequently that large (and the ones that aren't set up a larger virtual screen for browsing, so you can pan around to see the whole page). But yes, if you're still using some creaky old 800x600 monitor, or for some odd reason resize your browser window to a 3-figure width, you'll probably have a problem.

Re:Link broken?

[pfigura]

You are 100% right.

This is a huge update that is putting the focus on advertisers more than the content.

You are also right with your comparison to Digg. Slashdot has been a venerated old school tech website since as long as I can remember using the web (mid 90's), but it's not the only fish in the sea any more. Part of the allure of slashdot is the fact that the UI has remained "relatively" the same since its inception. There have been changes of course, but mostly window dressing. *IF THEY GO THROUGH WITH THIS DESPITE ALL THE NEGATIVE USER FEEDBACK, THEY WILL LOSE THEIR TRAFFIC*.

This is a jarring change, and it seems like a change in philosophy too. Be warned.

Re:Link broken?

[Chelloveck]

All the limitations of mobile, now on your desktop!

That was my first thought, too. It looks like the mobile version. At least the comments don't show a huge number of worthless entries that read "Filtered due to preferences." like the mobile site does. (Here's an idea, guys: If a comment is filtered, don't show it at all! I understand that when I have the reading threshold higher than -1 I won't see some things. That's kind of the point. You don't have to tell me about each of the things you're not telling me about.)

That said, I'd actually come here to defend the new layout. I chalked up most of the actual problems to things not yet implemented, and most of the visual mess to just being unfamiliar. But since the reply link is one of those things not yet implemented I had to go back to the old layout to post this.

Wow.

The difference in readability is huge. Compared side-by-side, the old format is much, much more readable than the new format. The new summary does not include the text from the main page, just the "read more" text. Bullets are missing from the list of changes. (list-style-type: none; Really? You went out of your way to achieve this?) I thought maybe the text was printed in a lower-contrast color, but that's not the case -- it's that the font-weight has been reduced to less than normal via CSS, presumably to emulate the skinny unreadable text in iOS7. (At least Apple provided a way to change the default font to bold in the accessibility preferences.)

In short, it's not just that it's new and unfamiliar. It's objectively less readable, by design. Knock it off, Slashdot! Maybe (maybe!) choose a non-default font, but once you do don't try to tweak it to make it look hip. It looks like ass.

Re:Link broken?

[neurovish]

Do you know how many websites I frequented in 1998 that I still frequent? Yeah, that's what the redesign will lose. There are a lot of sites that go through the big re-design, then users complain, then they get used to it, and business as usual. Have any of those sites been around for 15 years though?

Re:Link broken?

[green is the enemy]

While most of the posters here are expressing anger, let me second your emotion of fear. I am afraid that a poorly thought out redesign will destroy the Slashdot community and scatter the comment contributors, never to return. While the layout is an issue, it can be (mostly) fixed client-side. The main thing we have to watch out for are server-side changes. There are many Slashdot features that, if removed, would tremendously reduce the value it offers. The value of these features may not be immediately obvious. This site has evolved over a very long time.

I hope they preserve the server side of Slashdot and only mess with the CSS. What alarms me is that many server-side features are missing from the beta version...

Re:Link broken?

[EL_mal0]

You must be new here.

Re:Link broken?

[skillrod]

Agreed, I'd vote to move the design backwards 10 years. PLEASE, no fancy graphics. tnx

Re:Link broken?

[ceoyoyo]

They're not good for any stupid full-screen use. They're quite nice for productive work using a modern windowing operating system (i.e. anything from the period between 1993 and 2012 or so).

I've got two 27" 16x9s side by side right now (at work) with a bunch of terminals open, some code, some papers (both ones I'm reading and ones I'm writing), browser windows and a spreadsheet (shudder). I can have code generating figures for a paper I'm writing, Google scholar open to find references, the paper itself, and be keeping an eye on processing running, at the same time. Oh, and Slashdot, of course.

Re:Link broken?

[ceoyoyo]

It looks okay on my hardware calibrated screen, but as you've mentioned, virtually no one calibrates their displays so it really should be designed for that.

Re:Link broken?

[houstonbofh]

But yes, if you're still using some creaky old 800x600 monitor, or for some odd reason resize your browser window to a 3-figure width, you'll probably have a problem.

Actually, I resize it to 960 so I can have two pages side by side. Most of my windows default to this. Web browser on one sied, and note pad or spreadsheet or whatever on the other. If you are actually compiling or colating data and not just consuming it, it is damned handy.

Re:Link broken?

[Soulskill]

This is something I'd love, too, and I've been campaigning to get that added for ages. We haven't had the engineering time yet, but I'm hopeful.

Re:Link broken?

[hendrikboom]

Ten years ago? When the world was created onoly 5 seconds ago?

-- hendrik

Re:Link broken?

[TWX]

Heh. At one point I actually had a second monitor turned portrait, and had it not had issues with full-motion video (it rendered it incorrectly for some reason) I may have kept it with that. Thing is though, if the width isn't fixed, the browser is supposed to be able to size it to the window size on its own, if the designer is smart enough to design it to do that.

Re:Link broken?

[Golden_Rider]

I opened it. Unlike the current design, it did not scale to fit my 1400x1050 screen, leaving large whitespace borders on both edges. If that's what it does on a 4:3 screen with a narrower horizontal resolution than many modern widescreen "high definition" displays, then this is a bad thing.

I already complained about that during the Alpha, because the new design looks silly on my 2560x1440 screen - it uses only a third of the available horizontal space, leaving the rest empty. But it seems that is not high on the to do list, or maybe even not intended to be fixed at all. Anyway, the current design is MUCH better on high resolution screens.

Re:Link broken?

[DG]

Agreed.

It's like watching Linux morph into Windows 8

DG

Re:Link broken?

[DG]

Amen, Brother!

Re:Link broken?

[tibit]

I'm analyzing plenty of other code, thank you, slashdot's is very, very low on my list. It might have even fallen off the list :)

Re:Link broken?

[houstonbofh]

It will be a deal killer for many. It is just way to hard to manage large threads without it.

Re:Link broken?

[ConceptJunkie]

Yes, but we come here for abuse from the commenters, not the site itself. Big difference.

Re:Link broken?

[tingentleman]

Most hated job in tech? The guys & girls who get the task of redesigning /. - regardless how good a job they do, it will always lead to the equivalent of being locked in stocks and handing an infinite basket of apples to the monkey cage.

Nice!

[Strange Ranger]

beta.slashdot.org redirects to slashdot.org.

Perfect. The new beta site is going to be just as popular as ever!

Re:Nice!

[NatasRevol]

Here are a few key areas we are still working on:

ALL OF THEM!

Re:Nice!

[omnichad]

Your signature perfectly sums up the issue. Threads aren't enclosed. You can't tell where one ends and the next begins. Visually hugging the left margin is not enough to demarcate a new thread.

Re:Nice!

[nherm]

At least "News for Nerds" is back! The rest will be added soon, I guess.

Do you think a CowboyNeal option in each poll would be asking too much?

Back out the last upgrade

[GodfatherofSoul]

I liked the last design more.

Re:Back out the last upgrade

[raftpeople]

I like the new design more...than AOL...but just barely

Re:Back out the last upgrade

[aaarrrgggh]

Yeah... still pining for the previous round. Hope the adblock filters are easy enough to set up to get rid of the useless pictures on the home page.

Really though... does a website that caters to people that don't have the attention span to read even the headlines really sound like a place you want to spend time..?

Re:Back out the last upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

I HATE the new design. Whoever came up with this shit should be taken out and horse whipped until they apologize for coming up with such complete garbage.

Re:Back out the last upgrade

[radiumsoup]

You'll get over it. /famous last words

Digg version 2.0

[zitsky]

If you want the site to look like Digg, maybe you should just buy it.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[i kan reed]

I have to agree, looking like every other "news" site that provides no news is not a good place to go. It deigns to promote everything except what we come to the site to see above the actual stories, and pushes the stories themselves into a narrow column that limits how many you can fit on a screen at time(presumably to boost ad-to-content ratios on screen). Were it not for the fact that I can adblock the header and the whole right column, I'd leave and never come back.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[Samantha Wright]

The deeper you look, the more obnoxious this gets: try checking the "topics" menu at the top. Off to the right in a corner are the topics people actually care about, but front-and-centre we have the horrible Business Intelligence, Cloud, TV, and Data Center categories that no one cares about. (Okay, so TV turns out a bit of content that's worthwhile sometimes, but it's more usually just nigh-shameless promotional content. Despite all the other pointless and petty blogifications, this off-to-the-side ghettoization of the site's actual content really feels like the biggest subversion of the site's community spirit.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[frinsore]

Try out the comments section before making a judgement.

Slashdot does comments better then 99.99% of the sites out there and while this upgrade may have the same back end the graphical representation of the parent/child/sibling/etc is horrible. It seems that whitespace is the only indication of a parent/child relationship and I can't quickly determine who is responding to what. Following a thread of conversation is gone.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[i kan reed]

Well, they do look utterly unbearable. And that made me go look at the user control panel to see how the comment summary is. It's really wonderful to not be able to see what replies you've gotten on your posts, or get a summary table by story of your posts. That just reeks of feature improvement. This is not a good design, and I can't see myself continuing to use slashdot if they changed over now.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[DadLeopard]

All well and good, but it does have the advantage that you can click on a topic while you are anywhere on the page without having to scroll all the way to the top to get to them!

Re:Digg version 2.0

[Ksevio]

At first glance I saw the big top thing with all the useless links and "topics" and thought "Wow look at that waste of space". Then I looked at the current slashdot and realized all that stuff is essentially there and takes up the same amount of vertical space. Maybe it's just the relative waste of vertical real estate while they limited the horizontal size, but it seems much more obtrusive.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[AmiMoJo]

Ever since Taco left and Dice took over Slashdot has been trying to increase its readership by modernizing. It's misguided and fails to understand the fundamental appeal of Slashdot that keeps bringing us back to it: the comments.

Adding more pictures, jazzing up the UI with Web 2.0 features, Javascript frameworks and the like is all just making it harder to get to the valuable content. Everything of value is text, and some basic layout to show the relation of comments to each other. It may look old fashioned, but there are a million other sites with crappy "blog" style comments and stock photos to break up the content into one or two paragraph blocks.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the current layout, other than a few minor issues like a lack of unicode support (or even European characters). If you want more people to come to the site just do your jobs better: edit the stories. Cut the obviously biased bullshit and present the facts, then let the debate run.

That's probably not what you want to hear, I know. It would be lovely (for you) if Slashdot could become the new hot tech blog, but that isn't what it is and if you try to make it that even more people will just leave.

PS. Buy the PlusFive app and fix the few remaining bugs. Maybe fix the mobile site up a bit too. I'd comment a lot at weekends more if the mobile experience was better.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[linebackn]

And just watch this new design go through mostly as-is just because some really high higher up thinks it looks cool. That's the problem with something owned by a company, can't leave well enough alone and got to screw it up to make it look "new".

Taco had it right back in 1997 when it was his personal blog.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[i kan reed]

Oh, yes, this is absolutely a "beta, so you'll get used to it" not a "beta so we can get feedback". Otherwise you'd see at least a little editor participation in the comments.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[jandar]

And you have NO visual perception where you are in the comment-section. Scrollbars are a concept of the past, WEB 2.0 can do without. This new "design" is retarded.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[synapse7]

I find the current site comments much easier to follow, the beta reminds me of the mobile site where I can't tell what a comment was replying to. Also, the current format allows for more text to be seen.

Further, I can't stand the picture/blog format the beta uses that is similar to giz and ars. I much prefer the predominately text based format. Lastly, I stopped following the prementioned sites due to the obnoxious layout

Re:Digg version 2.0

[techno-vampire]

Ever since Taco left and Dice took over Slashdot has been trying to increase its readership by modernizing.

That might be what they think they're doing, but all they're accomplishing is making Slashdot's corpse look like every other website out there that has comments. The new version is ugly, utterly unusable unless you turn all of those pointless images off and there's no threading of comments. Hell, even the Disqus widget that some comic strip sites use to manage comments handles threading correctly. I don't know what Dice thinks it's going to accomplish with this New! Shiny! Improved! layout, but if Slashdot survives this, I'll be very surprised, and if it's still worth reading, it will be a miracle.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[pspahn]

I guess. That top menu really needs a touch of Javascript (instead of using CSS :hover) so there is a slight delay before the menu pops out. Very annoying to inadvertently pop that menu when you're scrolling way down the page. Sticky headers are often more trouble than they fix.

One general comment about the look that I don't like: the old design is very plain and not much more than a lot of text. This is a good thing. One of the main reasons we geeks like to spend time on here (especially during the day when we should be working) is that /. has a very innocuous look to it. Someone glancing at our screen as they walk by introduces nothing of importance. We're the geeks, not them... they don't know that what we're reading is not related to work...

Once you start plastering all these useless images and snazzy design elements everywhere, now people will know we are goofing off... we'll have to find another site that disguises itself well.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[Darinbob]

Personally, I don't mind a picture at the top if it's relevant. I don't need to see a large picture of Snowden's head, but if the story is about a new type of robot then it's helpful to have a picture of it.

However the comment section in the beta is just abysmal and the overall design needs many more passes.

(it looks ever so slightly better than dice.com though, however that is a very low bar to measure against)

Re:Digg version 2.0

[Garridan]

Indeed. Every webcomic and every news site has the same shit interface. I hate them all and I want them to be more like slashdot. If you guys are going to copy any website, copy a website clearly based on slashdot with well thought-out improvements: reddit. But given my druthers, you wouldn't copy any other website... it'd stay slashdot. Come for the vaguely nerd-related news, stay for the comments.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[jbengt]

I consider that a disadvantage, as I don't want to see the title bar or whatever you call it, taking up space on my screen or, as it does on some sites, mess up the responsiveness of scrolling.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[ConceptJunkie]

No kidding. The new Digg design was so bad I practically forgot it exists. After almost 13 years, I'd hate to forget /. exists.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[CoolGopher]

This. So much this. Get the editors to, you know, edit, and improve the quality of the stories. That's what would make a positive change, not adding tons of white space and eye gouging/candy.

If this new designed is forced upon me, I will finally stop reading slashdot, even though it's been part of my morning "ritual" for the last 15+ years.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[basscomm]

Scroll all the way to the top? Why not just use your keyboard's "Home" key?

Re:Digg version 2.0

[CauseBy]

Maybe. Or maybe they should use whatever good ideas are available to them, wherever they came from. I guess I prefer the latter option. (Personally I've never been to Digg so I don't know what it looks like.)

All in all I say I like it. It's fine but there is one really important thing missing which is the rounded corner at the top-left of sections. That is iconic Slashdot and they should retain it.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[antdude]

Then != Than. ;)

Re:Digg version 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it is at the top of the screen, wasting space, all the fucking time on the beta, on the current layout it disappears when you scroll down. Is it really such a hardship to hit the Home key to get back to the top of the page to use it?

The whole floating DIV is a pet peeve of mine.

I browse long-form content (and comments are long-form content) with PgUp/PgDn, or the spacebar, not by killing my fingers on the scrollwheel.

PgDn without floating DIV/navbar glued to the top of the screen = one page of content. PgDn in this new asinine paradigm = Crap, the goddamn toolbar is in the way. PgDn, and three up-arrows. Every. GODDAMN. PAGE.

Enough with the tablet UX designers who don't really give a fuck about UI, but only about being able to say "optimized a site for mobile" on their resume/CV, and are somehow able to convince their pointy-haired bosses that this actually adds value. I know we can't get you to fire them all, but can we at least ignore them?

Re:Digg version 2.0

[CRC'99]

Make one even better change. Allow comment moderation above +5 -- but only for this article...

Sadly, there is no way to impress upon the Dice morons how much people agree beyond +5 at these comments....

Re:Digg version 2.0

[Zaldarr]

What I want is goddamn rich text. I shouldn't have to do my HTML. What is this? 1998?

Re:Digg version 2.0

[gwolf]

You are right, and you only missed a small but important point: As you said, everything of value (in Slashdot) is text. It may look old fashioned. Right. But it looks the way most of us, the UI-retrograds that make up most of the Slashdot demographics, prefer. I'd be happy to know the amount of /. readers who browse the site with Javascript to the minimum (or outright disabled), with ad blockers, and all that things that make modern website designers go mad.

Re:Digg version 2.0

[halcyon1234]

I found the same thing to be true with the last "redesign" from a couple years ago. Styles to the rescue. This wraps each thread in a border, and indents child threads. Once the new redesign becomes "You will like it fuck you" standard, I'll probably have to write something similar.

li.comment
{
border:solid 1px black;
border-radius:10px !important;
position:relative;
left:20px;
background:white !important;
margin-bottom:5px !important;
}

Re:Digg version 2.0

[mcgrew]

I looked at it at work not logged in... apparently whoever designed that mess doesn't realize that screens have different sizes and aspect ratios. Everything on my monitor was stretched vertically and squashed horizontally. What's with all those giant photographs of nothing, anyway?

Sorry, slashdot, I absolutely HATE your new design. It looks like I'm far from alone, did you guys hire Balmer and Shuttleworth?

Link is broken

[jkflying]

The https version redirects to regular /. Use http://beta.slashdot.org instead.

In other news, I actually like it. Although it will be hell using lynx...

Re:Link is broken

[Samantha Wright]

Actually it looks okay in Lynx for the most part. It doesn't even truncate the summaries in standard mode, which is the most obnoxious thing when using a graphical browser. (Guess that requires Javascript.)

Re: Link is broken

[Samantha Wright]

The new site changes layouts depending on the width of your browser window, actually. (And the truncation of news stories on it is much worse—about 300 characters; short enough so that about half of all summaries get cut off. And no autoloading Javascript was present in the alpha version; to read the rest of the paragraph you'd have to go to the article page. At the moment it looks like summaries are getting cut off in the laziest way possible, with a fixed vertical height that doesn't even match the line height.)

the new DIGG redesign.

[Anonymous Coward]

Goodnight sweet prince, slashdot will be missed.

How about the old design?

[h4rr4r]

Anyway we can go back to 2001 or so with the design?
It just keeps getting worse with every redesign.

Re:How about the old design?

[jerpyro]

I agree. The current iteration on the homepage is bad enough, but at least it lets you expand the page to full width, and doesn't have somewhat related stock photos taking up space on the page. I used to read Fark before they switched to a fixed-width, graphical intensive layout -- and now it's useless. When I go to slashdot, I want it to load fast, be free of BS and give me the latest without having to skip stupid stuff. If I wanted to see pictures and horiscopes and shit I'd set my browser to MSN.com.

Please, less with the attempted eye candy and more with the news for nerds. You shouldn't be trying to appeal to mass-market web designs, half of us still subscribe to USENET for God's sake.
 

Re:How about the old design?

[LoRdTAW]

I can't even remember the 2001 design. Is there a page showing the evolution of the /. page? I didn't even notice (And I can't remember) the last update that pissed people off.

Re:How about the old design?

[JMJimmy]

http://web.archive.org/web/20010302015322/http://slashdot.org/

Re:How about the old design?

[Adrian Lopez]

"Anyway we can go back to 2001 or so with the design?"

Here you go. There's also 1998?

Re:How about the old design?

[QuasiSteve]

Funny.. the 1998 one wastes even more space left and right, yet is still easier to read :)

I suspect I need to hunt down that 'compact' option to eliminate some the whitespace. Make the central column resizable, apply CSS before the page has finished loading (now I see images before they disappear in 'headlines' view), check people's concerns about comments, and I think the redesign is actually not all that bad.
I suspect it's mostly geared toward being more tablet-friendly, though.. haven't tried it on that yet.

Re:How about the old design?

[TheQuantumShift]

They got the page loads back to 20th century times at least...

Re:How about the old design?

[quixote9]

"at least it ... doesn't have somewhat related stock photos taking up space on the page."

And like everyone else says, the articles are skinnied down to newspaper width so you have to scroll and scroll and scroll and etc. And the comment organization is way better in the old system.

If you want the stuff to be all cutesy on a mobile, then just have a button near the top that says "mobile format." Sheesh. You'd think that wouldn't be something that needs saying on a geek-run site. (Or is it these days? Has Marketing taken over?)

So, yeah, like everybody else, one more vote for "Hate the new design."

Re:How about the old design?

[CauseBy]

Really? I don't know, it looks pretty dated to me.

Re:How about the old design?

[akh]

1997-1998: Main page and story

1998-2006: Main page and story

2006-2008: Main page and story

2008-2010: Main page and story

2011-present: Main page and story

Personally I think 2006-2008 version had the best overall usability. That's also the last version that was compatible with pretty much any web browser.

Re:How about the old design?

[h4rr4r]

It was also functional and fast.

I want as little wasted space and time as possible. I still use VIM and a keyboard likely older than you for a reason.

Re:How about the old design?

[LoRdTAW]

Thank you. Wow, what a trip down memory lane. I started reading around 99 or 2000 and registered sometime around 2001 or 2002 just managing to get a 5 digit uid, 288 uids from 100,000, cutting it close. I liked the old xxxx bytes in body count as well as the beta tagging system. Man the hilarious and often vulgar tags made me crack up every time. Then it was cleaned up and now the tags are largely ignored by me.

What is interesting is how the original 97-98 main page was as narrow as the beta site. Even back then Rob Malda knew it was a shit design.

One request

[Sigvatr]

Just let me use the old design if I want to, then I will be happy.

Re:One request

[Spillman]

I agree. As someone who doesnt have the best vision and generally uses Ctrl-+ a few times in web browsers , I can assure, all those layers start to break and it looks terrible. I've been a happy slashdot reader for 12 years, please don't make me somewhere else. Thanks!

Re:One request

[oodaloop]

Bingo

Under settings, I should be able to pick from a list of design options:
1. New
2. Old
3. Older
4. Pink with ponies
5. Cowboy Neal
6. ...
7. Profit!

Re:One request

[Frosty Piss]

Just let me use the old design if I want to, then I will be happy.

Indeed.

I really don't understand why they want to change it. It is now how most users want it.

Adding in all that "web design" and JavaScript is only going to drive people away.

Maybe it's time for Bruce to bring back Technocrat.

Re:One request

[synapse7]

I agree with this, give us choice!

Re:One request

[TheSpoom]

That's not going to happen and you know it.

Re:One request

[Soulskill]

I know this isn't exactly what you want, but we do have an option to switch to 'classic' mode using this icon at the top right of the story column.

Re:One request

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yes, and it looks nothing like the classic Slashdot. Classic Slashdot doesn't have an asinine 625px fixed max width. Nor does it have an annoying floating DIV title bar.

Re:One request

[Terrasque]

8. Add option for custom CSS?

Re:One request

[Urza9814]

But then Dice would have to admit they just wasted all this money on a new design that nobody ever actually uses.

Re:One request

[NeoTron]

This new layout is absolutely SHITE.

Please read the immense amount of comments about it.

Seriously, this site will cease to have readership if you decide to go ahead with this - it's nothing more than the (shite) dice.com layout but green, for starters, and don't get me started on the non-fluid layout.

Whoever came up with this abomination needs a kick in the balls. Then fired. Then kicked in the balls again. Then when they're down, let the rest of the readership at them with pitchforks and burning torches.

Don't do it. I repeat, DO NOT USE THIS PILE OF SHITE.

Re:One request

[neurovish]

Yes. I refuse to read /. unless I can have OMG Ponies!

Blog

[Silpher]

It looks like a cheap ass blog...

Re:Blog

[gbjbaanb]

Fortunately you can go to the options and enable classic view - at least that's what I did when I saw the beta. The pictures were nice, but I think ArsTechnica does it better, and the chap who does them (Aurich) is awesome.

They still load only a few posts per article, and still don't have a rich editor for posting. I don't really see the point in using the new design.

Re:Blog

[camperdave]

It looks like a cheap ass blog...

It looks like a cheap what now?

Re:Blog

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this modded troll? It looks exactly like a crappy wordpress blog, right down to the massive white bars and comments
that are less than ten words wide before they wrap
into unbearably hard to read columns.

Really how are we supposed to have big, long, in-depth [discussion|flamewar]s with column format comments?

Re: Blog

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I want a rich editor.

Re:Blog

[Your.Master]

Problem is it still works if you hyphenate to the right.

Re:Blog

[Oligonicella]

Nice to see SlashDot editors modding down disagreeing opinion into troll.

Re:Blog

[Lunix Nutcase]

Fortunately you can go to the options and enable classic view

Which only looks marginally different and resembles classic Slashdot in pretty much no way.

Oh yea, it's fantastic

[NoImNotNineVolt]

It looks great on my 14" SVGA CRT.

On my 1920x1080 LCD, it looks retarded. There's as much whitespace running down the sides as there is content running down the middle.

Apparently "Web 2.0" involves designing sites for 9:16 devices. I think someone got that aspect ratio inverted somewhere along the line.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[aardvarkjoe]

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.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Oh, I forgot to test out one thing though...

How's the UTF-8 support?

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[jcr]

I agree. It looks as a stupid as skinny jeans.

-jcr

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Thank you for that helpful tip. Now I can clearly see my desktop wallpaper on half my screen, awesome!

I knew there was a reason I bought a monitor with this many pixels. Being able to see my desktop wallpaper while I browse slashdot was well worth the extra cash.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[XanC]

Résumé

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[XanC]

Greek psi:

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[i kan reed]

Well, considering even posting in ASCII is "coming soon", I wouldn't count on it.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[cstec]

This is spot on. Maybe some designer told you that gutters are all the rage, but in an era where almost all monitors are WIDESCREEN, the amount of wasted space is epic.

Never let art students design your website or book. They're called 'coffee table' books because they sit on coffee tables not being read, looking pretty and missing the point.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[NoImNotNineVolt]

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!"

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[wiredlogic]

"Web 2.0" is supposed to leverage the enhanced features provided by HTML5 among which are fluid layout that adapts to different screen sizes and ratios.

All we get here is a half-baked implementation that stops widening paragraphs once the browser is more than half the width of a wide screen. The lamest part is that the main body grows bigger once you shrink the browser enough to remove the sidebars.

At least all the necessary CSS machinery is in place. All it will take is a simple adjustment to the poorly set limits.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[phantomfive]

Yeah. It is so hard to read comments in the new design that I'm afraid I'll just stop trying if this gets released.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[Hadlock]

I asked for strikeout text support. Someone from Slashdot actually replied and said it would make it in to the next release. That was three years ago...

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[PCM2]

On my 1920x1080 LCD, it looks retarded. There's as much whitespace running down the sides as there is content running down the middle.

Even worse, try shrinking your browser window to half of the width of the screen or so, so that there isn't so much wasted space. On my Windows machine, in Chrome, the entire layout explodes. UI elements disappear, images appear distorted, etc. I guess it's trying to switch to some kind of "mobile" view, but the whole thing looks absolutely atrocious when it happens on a big screen. It looks like a child designed it.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[fa2k]

I'm surprised so many people complain about this. I agree that it's too narrow, but it sounds like people with 1920x1080 are actually browsing the current slashdot in full screen mode? Just trying it; It doesn't help me fit a lot more comments, lots of wasted space because people don't write long enough paragraphs. I seem to gravitate around a window width of ~ 1200 pixels, which is less than half the width of this 27" monitor

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[chromas]

The whitespace is where the giant middle finger was supposed to go, except it's a Unicode character.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[Krishnoid]

Apparently "Web 2.0" involves designing sites for 9:16 devices. I think someone got that aspect ratio inverted somewhere along the line.

I have one monitor turned to 1200x1920 portrait mode, and there's still too much whitespace. And the headline fonts are unnecessarily large.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[tlhIngan]

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!"

UTF-8 IS supported though.

It's just that there's a whitelist of allowed Unicode codepoints because people were using various control codepoints to f-up the site layouts. I'd give an example, but it looks like the comments have been retroactively scrubbed so you can't see how badly hosed it became.

http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2769161&cid=39596105

Specifically, can you guess what (5:erocS) meant to do?

In fact, you can probably still do the trick in various web forums for great effect.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[Darinbob]

Actually, a larger screen means I can have more than one window open at a time! Not sure why someone would want full screen web browser except maybe to watch videos.

However with so many applications now being web applications, maybe we'll soon hit the day when all we need on our computer is a browser. Soon browsers will be invented that do more than just have tabs for different pages, they'll put the individual pages into windows, and then we can have a browser full of windows running in a window on top of Windows which is also in a VM window on Windows.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[Darinbob]

That's UTF white space though!

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[Darinbob]

I disagree. Skinny jeans don't look stupid (until they're actually worn).

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[ByteSlicer]

There's as much advertising space running down the sides as there is content running down the middle.

FTFY

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[jrumney]

99% of Unicode characters are not control codes or stacking diacritics that could mess up the layout, but Slashdot's answer is to have a whitelist of about a dozen non-ASCII characters that are allowed.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[Megane]

Apparently it really works now. Yes, there does seem to be an incredibly small whitelist that only includes Latin-1 characters, but previously (at least up to a few months ago), a Unicode character (like the UK Pounds Sterling sign or smart quotes) would also include some other junk characters along next to it.

Re:Oh yea, it's fantastic

[Megane]

I think you're referring to so-called "smart quotes", and they actually work now.

Just in time for this new monstrosity to go live and everybody leaves. Last guy out can just let Soulskill turn the lights off.

can we turn off some of the crap ??

[tibbar]

been reading here for 15 years or more ..
i like simple low bandwidth screens - aka text
your beta isn't ..

Re:can we turn off some of the crap ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Why all the big freaken pics ? Why have pics at all ? Waste of space, Waste of bandwidth, looks somewhat like FB and other fucked-up sites. Please no! Totally stupid design. Don't come to this site to see pictures, it's the content stupid ! no no no no please don't fuck-up Slashdot !!

Make it use full width

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasting screen space, it's using about 1/2 my screen's width.

Re:Make it use full width

[Megane]

The hell with the screen width, what's with these STUPID generic graphics that take up the space of three article headers on the current front page? Yeah, a 300x500 px Half Life logo is really going to make people swoon in ecstasy and give you a lot of web-wanker awards! All I see here is indications of a massive ego of whoever redesigned the front page. And then to make it worse, they do lazy fade-ins of these stupid graphics. Any slashdot redesign that uses fancy crap from node.js or whatever it is is just wrong.

Seriously, if I had to describe the new layout in one word, that word would be WANKER.

*PUKE*

[MetalliQaZ]

So Slashdot goes the way of Ars Technica. Simple readability gives way to stylish nonsense. Oh well, at least both have a way to tone it down and simulate the old format.

Re:*PUKE*

[Pitawg]

Looks like slash will be migrated back to my RSS reader like my Ars did with their last "upgrade". Pity.

Re:*PUKE*

[Kjella]

So Slashdot goes the way of Ars Technica. Simple readability gives way to stylish nonsense.

Well, I just hit the front page of Ars Technica and I'm able to see nine headlines. One "Top Post", one big Review, three "In-depth reports", three "On the radar" and two "Feature Stories". On slashdot beta in standard mode I see all of two headlines and a poll. I'd pick Ars Technica over this any day of the week, if they're going to columnize the site site then at least make several columns and put something interesting in them.

Sigh

[koreanbabykilla]

Please! leave a way for people to use the old look forever. stayoffmylawn.slashdot.org or some such.

Re:Sigh

[__aasehi2499]

^This.

Re:Sigh

[koreanbabykilla]

I have a 4 digit UID as well, I have been coming here every day for as long as I can remember. Without the ability to keep slashdot the way I like I really may stop coming. Hopefully someone that matters reads these and at least leaves me a way to do so. More power to em to redesign all they want for the young whipersnappers, but better leave us old folks some way to use the old way or we will be gone.

Re:Sigh

[oodaloop]

I have a 4 digit UID as well, I have been coming here every day for as long as I can remember.

Which would be, what, Monday?

/ducks

Re:Sigh

[koreanbabykilla]

Prolly about right lol

Re:Sigh

[Darinbob]

stayoutofmymomsbasement.slashdot.org.

Re:Sigh

[Jahta]

Please! leave a way for people to use the old look forever. stayoffmylawn.slashdot.org or some such.

Agreed. The more compact design is way easier to scan for stories (and comments) of interest. Content and reading efficiency are more important than "style" IMHO.

No.

[Programming_Wut]

Nope. Not a fan.

Re:NO.

[HexaByte]

Ditto.....times 10 to the 100000.

This reminds me of...

[dosh8er]

that "flat", pastel, square look. Like, Windows 8. Or new iOS. Heck, at least it's not Skeuomorphic... ... I admit, it is easier on the mobile.

Re:This reminds me of...

[bmxeroh]

You deserve a mod. My first thought was "metro". Also do we really need huge pictures that have nothing to do with the story borrowed from Flikr? Here's a fun exercise, open up Yahoo in one tab, and the new beta in another.

Re:This reminds me of...

[i kan reed]

that "flat", pastel, square look. Like, Windows 8. Or new iOS.

There needs to be a word for this: eliminating functionality in the name of creating a "new" way of doing things.

Re:This reminds me of...

[Atzanteol]

"Metro"

Re:This reminds me of...

[clickety6]

There needs to be a word for this: eliminating functionality in the name of creating a "new" way of doing things.

phukuomorphic

Re:This reminds me of...

[adolf]

"ubuntu"

Re:This reminds me of...

[Monkey-Man2000]

that "flat", pastel, square look. Like, Windows 8. Or new iOS.

There needs to be a word for this: eliminating functionality in the name of creating a "new" way of doing things.

"GNOMEing" something I propose. Kind of like I use "Borging" something up whenever some significant other rearranges the decor for no good reason like the Borg on Star Trek.

Re:This reminds me of...

[ImprovOmega]

that "flat", pastel, square look. Like, Windows 8. Or new iOS.

There needs to be a word for this: eliminating functionality in the name of creating a "new" way of doing things.

I think of it as the PukeUI - in that it makes me want to vomit when I see it.

Re:It looks alright

[Anonymous Coward]

What can I say, I like the more modern design. Now it looks like all of the other sites I visit.

*gasp* Appreciation? Acceptance?!? What are these feelings doing here in Slashdot? OUTSIDER! INTERLOPER! Kill the outsider! Kill! KILL! Throw rocks at the unbeliever! ROCKS! Throw MORE rocks!

Wasted Space

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wasted space

[i kan reed]

Suggested adblock rule: slashdot.org##.lazy.hero

Re:Wasted space

[MobyDisk]

The images will prevent me from reading Slashdot at work. The plain text layout one of the reasons I can read it here without setting off alarms.

Of the images on the page:

Some guy's head adds no meaning or context to the story.

A video game guy with a gun means I better block images or I'll be unable to read Slashdot at work. Which means probably never given my lack of time at home. That sucks because Slashdot is very relevant to what I do. Just today I sent the Microsoft Azure story to our director. I would hate to have to create a separate work account that filters out stories about games.

Re:Wasted Space

[Bogtha]

It's not just a problem for small screens - I'm on a 27" screen and more than half of the screen width is just blank space.

This redesign looks like a shitty Wordpress theme. Get a good, experienced designer please.

Re:Wasted space

[MobyDisk]

Ha! I feel dumb. But perhaps this is a difference between how geeks read news, and the average person reads news.

I see other people browse "news" sites that have a single news area with a blurb of text over a picture. (news.yahoo.com, nbcnews.com, etc.) It remains for a few seconds, then it slides off the screen and another picture + headline appears. I tend to scoff at such sites as being sensationalistic. I want my news to look more like a scholarly article than a TV news report. I look at Slashdot and think that *this* looks like a real geek news site.

Regarding the Snowden picture: There are lots of famous persons I admire, but I don't know what many of them look like. Mark Klein, Bjarne Stroustrup, Scott Hanselman, Carl Sagan. I think if there were pictures of them next to every news article, I would quickly become annoyed. It is distracting - we are drawn toward faces. Here at work, everyone is adding their picture to Microsoft Outlook. It is useful to be able to look that up in case I go to a meeting, but for most of the day, I want that gone so I can read my email in peace.

Or perhaps this has nothing to do with news. I don't like how modern UI design tends to put an icon next to every option. Often times those icons have nothing to do with the option. A flag, a gear, a star. Or how marketing materials always have pictures of people working, or smiling, or talking -- even though none of those people were involved in the product. It's just feel good stuff. It's like white space, but more distracting.

Maybe I'm just old school? Am I a dying breed?

Use the Space, Cowboy Neil

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

As a user of wide screens and larger fonts, I find the fixed width of the layout harder to read - I can only see a small list of one-two story summaries in the classic or new layout. Please do not follow the trend of making narrow center columns just to make space for pretty or advertisements on the sides.

Re:Use the Space, Cowboy Neil

[Lunix Nutcase]

It is a fixed width. The CSS for the articles div has a "max width" property set at 625px.

Meh

[Synesthes]

Switch the frame layout to 'classic' and it doesn't look half bad. Still think the right hand column is too wide, personally.

The default view though? Not a fan.

The look

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever wondered what it would look like if Scientific American got drunk and fucked Pinterest, today is your lucky day.

Can we please make it narrower?

[ClayJar]

I'm *so* tired of having slashdot use the entire width of my browser. I've been pining for expansive areas of whitespace for years!

Re:Can we please make it narrower?

[Cigamit]

My first thoughts exactly. Even in Classic mode, I can only read 2 articles before I have to scroll down an entire screen.

Re:Can we please make it narrower?

[steelfood]

Then I guess you'll like this.

I absolutely hate it.

[nospam007]

Just did a 10 second look.

Found distorted photos, very wide text with no serifs helping you stay in line and the other 90% was white space waking me up.

Re:I absolutely hate it.

[ColdWetDog]

Exactly this. And this was on my plain vanilla IE 8 browser at work. God knows what will happen when it hits a modified Firefox.

Re:collapsable comments

[strength_of_10_men]

Agreed

And the redesigned nesting layout makes it harder to follow threads. I'm not exactly sure what others are seeing but my current layout preference has comments nested with clear boxes/lines delineating each, which makes telling what nesting level they belong to.

pluses and minuses

[Strange Ranger]

Well it certainly looks more modern and pretty.
But the part where 70% of my monitor is blank white space sure isn't a step forward.
And not being able to see any comment info on the home page is another step backwards.
 
But it doesn't look antiquated. That's sure a plus. It looks like the default wordpress theme.
 
Hey it's like a hot sorority chick! Sexy as hell for an hour. Then frustrating and mostly empty. But hey it shows real well at homecoming.

Re:pluses and minuses

[afidel]

Luckily the layout can be fixed with a few lines of greasemonkey script, just turn off max width on the split-right container, turn off the background images and turn off the max width on the col-river pull-left div and things look MUCH better. I commented on the first day of the beta that the whitespace was horrendous but apparently they don't care, luckily HTML and CSS are client side so we can decide how to render the page =)

Re:pluses and minuses

[afidel]

Oh yeah and if you want to get rid of the right column crap in comments just write a rule to remove the width parameter from col-river pull-left for *.slashdot.org/story/, it makes the content 100% width and hides the right column.

Re:pluses and minuses

[MonkeyDancer]

Luckily the layout can be fixed with a few lines of greasemonkey script, just turn off max width on the split-right container, turn off the background images and turn off the max width on the col-river pull-left div and things look MUCH better. I commented on the first day of the beta that the whitespace was horrendous but apparently they don't care, luckily HTML and CSS are client side so we can decide how to render the page =)

Maybe everyone on /. should just use the same greasemonkey script and then we can make the site the way it should be?

Re:pluses and minuses

[radicalpi]

I threw together a GM Script to fix the width issue. I plan on expanding it and tweaking it a bit, assuming they ignore the feedback and don't address it on the Beta site. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/179020

Re:pluses and minuses

[radicalpi]

I threw together a GM Script to fix the width issue. I plan on expanding it and tweaking it a bit, assuming they ignore the feedback and don't address it on the Beta site. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/179020

Re:pluses and minuses

[afidel]

Unfortunately it doesn't work in Chrome when loaded as an extension, I'm not sure what the issue is. Also you might want to update the include to be *beta.slashdot.org since they have implemented the sub-sites in the beta now.

Re: pluses and minuses

[radicalpi]

It should work with TamperMonkey on Chrome. There are a bunch of improvements that can be made to the script. This is just a starting point.

Re: pluses and minuses

[afidel]

Thanks, I haven't used an extension for GM scripts in Chrome since they added native support several years ago but that did in fact fix the problem =)

Re:pluses and minuses

[Urza9814]

No. Somebody should make a Slashdot web proxy. One that restores the old formatting and strips out the ads (because Fuck You, Dice!)

Two bonuses there: First, it's easier; browser extensions suck. Secondly, Dice gets to see all of their traffic coming from a single host -- classicdot.com or whatever.

In fact...I may actually do that if this redesign moves forward as is. Shouldn't be too hard to modify PHPproxy accordingly...

Re:pluses and minuses

[John.Banister]

This is the perfect plan. The Slashdot configuration tool. It'll be like a secret clubhouse. If some random person loads the site for the first time, they'll see crap and think "why does anyone bother?" Only the initiates who have customized Slashdot into a useful configuration will get a site to which they want to return.

Looks like all the content shovelware sites now

[rafial]

A slim column of text lost in a sea of ads. But that's okay, I rarely come to Slashdot any more, so I doubt I'll miss it.

Awful

[i_ate_god]

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?

Be a first rate Slashdot, not a second rate other.

[atlauren]

Dislike. If I wanted to read TechHive, I would read TechHive. Slashdot became /. because only it was /. Be the best /. and don't try to be someone else.

Charlton Heston's ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!

Ahem, excuse me.

I don't frequent slashdot anymore. Hell, I didn't even bother signing into my account to write this. But I do stop by occasionally, when I've exhausted the front page of reddit.

I'm a creature of habit. Are you really going to risk losing page views from people like me -- people who, I assume, are as plentiful and important as we are beautiful?

Pictures?

[Anonymous Coward]

/. you're not Playboy, people genuinely only read you for the articles.

Some issues

[Medieval_Gnome]

In my first minute of using the site I found some issues.

On the home page, there's a popup that is half off my screen. I tried resizing the browser, but it continued to be anchored to the side like that.

Once I clicked on this story, I was greeted with a story in two different fonts (or at least different font sizes).

Wasted space

[Flentil]

I have a widescreen monitor and roughly half is blank white space. Also, the images load slow, like they wait for me to scroll and see they're not loaded and only then do they begin to load. I guess this is a feature, but it works like a bug. I'm with the others who say give us the option to see the old format, but the cynic in me says that will expire and we'll be stuck with the new view anyway in a few months.
Also, Slashdot, please remember what happened to Digg when they redesigned everything.

Bah?

[denmarkw00t]

The threading isn't nearly as easy to spot so far, and I agree with others - why all the empty space?? It feels like it's a waste to at least not be able to choose a layout that really takes advantage of screen real-estate. Also, I don't see indicators for friends/foes...HOW DO I KNOW WHO I AGREE WITH!?!?

Use 100% width please

[Tepar]

This layout does not auto-adjust to the width of the browser. It is responsive for smaller screens, but for large ones, it wastes space. I hope you're also working on the comment filtering, because I don't see those controls anywhere.

Re:Use 100% width please

[dwpro]

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.

Re:Use 100% width please

[Jim Hall]

This layout does not auto-adjust to the width of the browser. It is responsive for smaller screens, but for large ones, it wastes space.

The beta site may scale down well for desktop browsers, but not for phones. On my phone, the new site design does quite a lot of scrolling to the right, mostly thanks to a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge ad at the top. Also, the site pops up a message box that disappears off the left side of my screen, rendering half the message unreadable.

It's 2013, we must support mobile devices at the same time as the high-resolution desktops.

Re:Use 100% width please

[drussell]

It's 2013, we must support mobile devices at the same time as the high-resolution desktops.

Then go back to what HTML is supposed to be, simplify the site and let the browser do what it was originally intended to do! Stop trying to second guess everything and force a layout that may or not fit the end device! This is getting as ridiculous as the early web days when everyone starting to return completely different page content for Netscape vs IE, etc. although that was caused mostly by braindead browser choices, etc. (Poor bastardized Mosaic... Ah, Mosaic, which I actually liked back in the days of my bedroom 286 network booting Windows 3 over a SLIP serial connection from the FreeBSD version 1 box downstairs with the $200/mo dedicated 33.6K dial-up connection), but I digress....

OH GOD IT BURNS

[TangoMargarine]

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.

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[TangoMargarine]

Or are the blank stripes at the sides ads? I've forgotten how the non-AdBlocked live...

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[JMJimmy]

If you loved the old design, you'll hate the new design...

FTFY.

Agreed. I left Digg because of a crappy redesign, I came here. Now they want to make it yet another crappy 2 column blog style instead of thinking about how their readers use their site. This goes live I go elsewhere (or just give up on this style of site).

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[ninlilizi]

Very much this.

Even compact mode is horribly verbose and wasteful of available space.
Way too much white space. The insanity inducingly narrow content design is made twice as bad by a massive 2nd column eating into much of the sparse space given for content.
The old design was already irritating for only featuring 4 or 5 articles per scroll. The new brings this down too 2. Turning browsing into a terrible scrolling finger chore.

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[Anonymous Coward]

The new design wastes lots of screen space.

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[BitwiseX]

rounded edges,

Uh oh. I think someone has prior art...

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[Push Latency]

I truly hate it. I promise, I will never again return to slashdot, my homepage for about ten years, one of the only sites I read religiously and with enthusiasm, if you choose this design. That was my first reaction when I saw it, and about 5 hours later, I feel that way more.

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[TangoMargarine]

Agreed. I've been debating giving it up for the last couple years because of the bottoming-out article quality, but if they actually roll that out, that'll be pretty much the last straw.

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[Askmum]

That, and the article names are in an ugly font that seems to be the standard these days. Why designers choose this font is beyond me. It's not that I have an outdated browser or anything, but the typesetting of the font is just wrong. Vertical lines like in l, i h, b, u and n are much fatter compared to the round parts of letters.
What I also like better in the old style is the inverted style of article name. It makes it that much easier to spot the next article.

All in all: for now IMHO the old style is better.

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[tibit]

You're mischaracterizing the issue. Narrow columns work just fine - get any paperback book and see how many characters there are per line. Compare that to the current layout on a modern wide screen. Long lines are unreadable. That doesn't mean that there should be just one column of content, though. Someone with brains can surely come up with a way of laying out a discussion in multiple columns. Sure it may not be a trivial algorithm, but that's, supposedly, what the professionals are for. Why can't slashdot innovate? Why can they only copy all the bad things others do?

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[zidium]

I will NEVER visit slashdot AGAIN if this goes live, and I've been a member for 10+ years now!

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[ninlilizi]

I guess its a personal thing.

Long lines I can track just fine... Moving too a new line takes me a bunch of seconds, because if I don't follow carefully what I'm doing I mix all the lines up in a random order and confusion results. Still nowhere near the pain of trying to read black text on a white background. But its up there.

Re:OH GOD IT BURNS

[BalthCat]

I'd like to bury design.

(Did they not see Digg crash and burn?)

Ugh

[sexconker]

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).

Re:Ugh

[ColdWetDog]

Goddamnit yes.

IF THE IMAGE ISN'T INDICATIVE OF YOUR COMMENT IT DOESN'T BELONG THERE.

Cut the cutsey, generic picture crap. We all know what an airplane looks like. Hire a graphics artist like Aurich on Ars (or make it a game here or something) but if all you can do is find some random picture on Flickr, cut it out. If I want to look at random stupid pictures, I know where to look.

Look, whoever you hired is not smoking the same thing the rest of us are. Can you maybe take a spin through a local nursing home and see what the smart people are doing?

Re:Ugh

[sexconker]

Here's a visual representation of what I'd do to fix it. (Not a joke/goatse/troll.)
http://i.imgur.com/rNPke5p.jpg

all that shit on the right?

[X0563511]

Get rid of it. After a bit of scrolling it's wasted space (and it's still wasted space for lame content before you scroll)

Re:It looks alright

[woodworx]

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!

Quite nice, but...

[torsmo]

Can't post comments from elinks.

Complete waste of space

[damnbunni]

The actual content only fills about a third of my browser's width.

Worthless.

Re:Complete waste of space

[gallondr00nk]

The actual content only fills about a third of my browser's width.

This. On my 1024x768 laptop screen, the comments on the beta take up about 3/5 of the width. The rest are links, which is just ridiculous.

I don't go to /. to read the Freecode links. The comments *are* /., so why go from giving them the width of the screen to just over half?

The new homepage is just as poor. /. has very clear visual cues - Headline white on green, summary in normal text, comments in larger dark green. Nice and simple, easy to follow. Comments are also framed in the same style, and replies follow easily (with the good use of screen width) and makes for easy reading. It's a good design.

The beta just goes for different sizes of text. Losing the styling cues makes everything harder to follow, both on the homepage and in the comments section. At the very least it needs clear, consistent framing between headline and summary, subject and comment. Not just using white on grey.

And please, please, lose the pictures. Look at the submission today about older people and money, it has a helpful picture of.. old people in a casino. What exactly does this contribute?

I just hope they keep a classic version.

eeeeew

[DOK2]

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.

Re:eeeeew

[Ksevio]

For example, this image of a guy jumping into a pool to go along with the article "The Next Big Fiber Showdown: Austin", but we don't get the extra sentence from the summary. http://i.imgur.com/OzS4RdP.png

Re:eeeeew

[Tr3vin]

Don't you love having to click on each story to read what will be a crappy summary?

Re:eeeeew

[Atzanteol]

I didn't realize the photos were even related to the articles at first... WTF?

Comments are hard to read

[Alternate Interior]

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!

Re:Comments are hard to read

[Anon, Not Coward D]

^^ Finally someone pointed that out! Mode up please

Why so narrow?

[Max_W]

Why did I buy a large wide display? 20 centimeters from the left and from the right are empty. A narrow long column of the text, like a pillar, is on the screen.

Re:Why so narrow?

[hendrikboom]

Why did you buy a wide display? So that you can read slashdot on he side while your code s compiling on the rest of the screen,

Terrible

[Charliemopps]

It's awful.
The right 1/3 of my screen is filled with polls and ads I don't care about
Scroll down past all those polls and adds and now that 1/3rd of my screen is just blank. wtf?
The headlines are in 30pt font and take up huge amounts of space like I had set windows to "I'm f#$@# blind!" mode.
Lots of white space (have you ever taken a webdesign course?)
Pop-up notifications that cover up the content until you are forced to make a choice? Really? Am I on yahoo or something here?
Under my account... again with 1/3rd of my screen taken up my nonsense. Now I have tokens? What?

Let us use the old layout

[Saethan]

Wasted space, images I don't need plastered all over my screen when I have this up on my third monitor at work... Yeah, thanks slashdot. Had to check my calendar to make sure it wasn't April.

Some feedback

[jones_supa]

The main page looks refreshing and nice. Bringing more attention to submissions is also a good idea. Tree structure of comments is now harder to follow though. The classic version with clear borders around comments and ample usage of horizontal page was much more comfortable. I hope the main page autorefresh has been removed (or an option to turn it off), I always find it annoying in the current version. Now would also be excellent moment to roll in the long-awaited Unicode support.

Re:Some feedback

[David_W]

I hope the main page autorefresh has been removed (or an option to turn it off),

I'll probably make a post decrying some of the other stuff later, but your point here seems a good launching point for this. I too hope the auto refresh is gone. But beyond that, I really dislike the "about an hour ago" nonsense. I like that we get the actual times on /. instead of those estimates. And further to that, unless you do have some sort of auto refresh, they don't make much sense, because they become outdated quickly. Let's say I load a couple of stories in different tabs, read the first tab, close it, go off to do something else, then come back to that second tab an hour later. None of the times are correct! On the other hand, if it says a comment was posted at 16:45 EDT, well, that's not going to change no matter when you happened to load the page vs. read it.

Re:Some feedback

[Teckla]

I hope the main page autorefresh has been removed (or an option to turn it off)

I hate Slashdot's auto refresh with the red hot burning passion of a million stars. I often browse Slashdot and then leave my computer for a few hours and then come back and it's not where I left off. God damn I hate that feature.

If any Slashdot devs are reading, please, please, please make it possible to disable auto refresh.

Re:Some feedback

[Bigbutt]

The main page refresh doesn't bother me but when I'm in the comments, refreshing moves the comment I was reading down further. When I get back to the tab from whatever I'm doing, I'm reading a comment I've most likely already read and I need to scroll down until I find where I left off.

So yea, disable the in comments refresh but leave the main page refresh (IMHO of course).

[John]

Re:Some feedback

[leptogenesis]

Autorefresh is by far the worst "feature" of slashdot. Sometimes I don't read straight down the page--which means it takes me a long time to read the whole page--and in these cases the autorefresh often happens in the middle of reading a summary. I can't even imagine a use case where users would want this, yet there's no way to turn it off.

Is not April 1st

[smoore]

April fools days in a few months away. Your supposed to hold stuff like this for then when we will appreciate it as a joke.

EVERY redesign has haters...

[Slartibartfast]

But I really do think the pictures are too big. They get in the way of the page's continuity. I kinda like the small icons we have now. If you want other icons, or even images, that's cool -- but these are as big as the stories, themselves. Overkill, IMHO.

Re:Every redesign has haters...

[http]

Absolutely true, but in this case each thing hated is backed up by at least one cogent post outlining the nature of the redesign's basic UI failures. Making content harder to discern (indenting of threads is de minimis) was what caught my eye. At first, I believed they'd thrown away threading.
Fixed-width text areas? That was a face palm in the 90s. This feels like a college course test - "Fix this website where the developers committed each of the ten fatal web design mistakes we discussed in class.
I've tried to find something to like about it, but there's nothing there.

Re:collapsable comments

[Verdatum]

My fingers were crossed hoping for this. I've always sorta figured that /. always had collapsible comments, I just wasn't clever enough to figure out what I needed to click to collapse them, and was too lazy to look into it...

Re:Gonna miss Slashdot

[tuffy]

The "we'd like your thoughts" link is a standard mailto: URL. If it's using Outlook, that's because your browser is configured to use it.

Fixed-width text areas are brain-dead.

[jcr]

When I make the window wider, I don't want to just get more blank space.

Seriously guys, this is pretty simple stuff. Get it right.

-jcr

Content Width

[AlreadyStarted]

Please let the content scale horizontally with the window size. It's so skinny as-is it's painful. And the always there top bar is incredibly annoying imo, just more javascript to lag.

Lovely.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can fit two more entire Slashdots in the waste of space laying alongside the "I'm an asshole hipster designer and it looks fine on my 14" Viewsonic at 800x600" column.

Re:Lovely.

[FatLittleMonkey]

"I'm an asshole hipster designer and it looks fine on my 14" Viewsonic at 800x600" column.

Actually, it appears designed for a 9:16 format tablet.

Bad on some browsers.

[serviscope_minor]

I like to browse in unusual browsers, pimarily because they ru very quickly and work on ond machines. The new version is essentially non functional.

Re:It looks alright

[i kan reed]

Yeah, except I don't actually visit those sites, and when I end up there, I usually have to spend 5 minutes setting up adblock rules to make using the site bearable. There's a lot of studies that say that users rarely read more than the first few lines of an article before moving on. Those studies always seem to be about "modern" whitespace and ad-filled garbage, where your eyes roll off the unreadable tiny corner of the site with content, and to the links. Where you leave.

Yuck

[whyde]

My first impression was that I accidentally clicked through to news.yahoo.com, which I abhor.

I think you're missing the point of your legacy readership wanting information-dense content, with a minimalistic "user experience".

Re:Gonna miss Slashdot

[afidel]

Dude, it's a freaking mailto: link, if your system is setup to use Outlook to handle mailto: it's nobodies fault but your own!

100% WIDTH PLZKTHX

[TheSpoom]

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.

Re:100% WIDTH PLZKTHX

[drussell]

Everyone has widescreen monitors now.

Blech!... Most certainly NOT!!

This new look is absolutely horrible even on my 4:3 1280x1024 screens also, BTW....

Ick. Blech!

Wasted space

[jbmartin6]

The side bar is too big. And the images with the stories serve no purpose other than to clutter up the screen.

"What the people want"

[TangoMargarine]

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!)

From the looks of the comments so far, it looks like they took the sample of the 15% of people who didn't hate it and discarded the rest. Way to go, guys. Either that, or you really need to choose your acceptance testing group better (although honestly, who doesn't?).

Re:"What the people want"

[Specter]

I was part of the alpha test group and I raised most of the issues listed here during the alpha. Clearly I was out-voted. I'm still waiting for all those other alpha testers who outnumbered me to show up and defend this god-awful redesign.

Re:Gonna miss Slashdot

[TheSpoom]

To be fair, it was probably a mailto link, meaning you haven't set up your email client correctly.

fixed column width sucks

[bored]

See subject

horizontal waste

[mspring]

Why is the new design wasting so much of horizontal screen real estate? The design should leverage the full browser window!

Re:collapsable comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we need the lines to delineate threads especially since there is so much white space and so little information density per page with the redesign that you'll have no idea where you are. It is terrible as far as ergonomics. Take half the info off the page so people have to scroll and scroll and scroll... Silly. Collapsible threads would be of great value.

Another cramped canyon

[istartedi]

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.

Re:Another cramped canyon

[MMC Monster]

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.

Actually, looking at the beta again, I bet this is exactly what happened.

Someone was tasked to make /. look good on a tablet and came up with this. That being said, /. mobile version actually looks pretty good on tablets, so I think they just had a bad batch of crack when they were making the decision.

2003 Word Press...

[retech]

I like how it looks just like every other word press template I've ever seen. It fills me with warm nostalgia for those days when the internet was still run by carrier pigeons.

Re:2003 Word Press...

[moschner]

I was about to ask why they decided to move Slashdot to Wordpress.

Re:2003 Word Press...

[Ice Station Zebra]

I think the designer probably does wordpress themes as their primary income.

I'm sorry, no.

[Kidbro]

I'm usually not one for just complaining, but... no.

It looks nice, I'll give you that. But if I want to look at pretty things, I'm not going to tech web sites. I want something simple, readable, and information packed. Hacker News is doing it right. No nonsense, pretty much just text, from the top of the screen to the bottom, from left to right. Layouted in a way I can understand.
Having whitespace eat half my screen doesn't cut it. Huge pictures are only acceptable if they really add information to the story. Having them just because they look cool[0] is not. It wastes my attention, my screen estate and my time.
On my 1366x768 laptop I can have one comment... one, on my screen at a time in beta. On the current site I can three or four, giving me the context needed to follow the discussion.

The main benefit I can see is that if it's coded right in modern technologies, text only browsers (lynx, elinks, etc.) will have an easier job of parsing it and giving me the stuff I want (the stuff that matters).

[0] For example: http://yro-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/10/01/1238216/former-microsoft-privacy-chief-doesnt-trust-company-uses-open-source-software

Re:I'm sorry, no.

[Hatta]

It looks nice, I'll give you that.

No, no it does not look nice. It looks like complete and utter shit. Seriously, how can anyone look at this and not see garbage?

And no, I'm not sorry at all. Everyone involved in this design getting past the drawing board should be fired, from a cannon, into a giant vat of hot grits.

Re:I'm sorry, no.

[Kidbro]

It looks nice, I'll give you that.

No, no it does not look nice. It looks like complete and utter shit. Seriously, how can anyone look at this and not see garbage?

Well. The same view looks like this to me - so it's probably a bug you have there.

What bothers me with (my version of the same view) is that absolute waste of space that goes on. A couple of percent of my screen is dedicated to showing me useful content.

Layout

[Megahard]

Maybe put the gratuitous pictures to the side of the story and there will be fewer complaints about wasted width spade. Personally, I use two monitors, one portrait and one landscape. Programs and web sites are moved to the monitor where they work best.

Shrink the photos

[HockeyPuck]

Why does it seem that each story has a photo above it that takes up 1/4 of my screen? I can barely get two story headlines on a page...

No.

[hpycmprok]

Please no.

Time to find someplace new to hang out.

Do Not Like

[medv4380]

It takes up less than half of my large monitor. There are too many pictures in the article headings. The ads don't bother be, but the story logos defiantly do.

Too little room for comments.

[mwvdlee]

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.

eliminate the haters

[NikeHerc]

Can you eliminate the haters? If /. gets much worse, it will be home to haters and no one else.

Re:eliminate the haters

[CanHasDIY]

Hater hater who hates haters more than haters hate the hater hater. HA!

Can you eliminate the haters? If /. gets much worse, it will be home to haters and no one else.

I don't suppose you considered the hilarious irony of such a statement?

Re:eliminate the haters

[Bigbutt]

I thought that's what the new design was doing. Getting rid of the haters since it looks like most folks will be heading off to something else. Maybe snagging the current code and setting up a SlashDot site of their own. Hey, slashdot.jp is still on the old code. Google Translate it and follow it instead :)

[John]

OMG! Ponies!

[msauve]

Can we just get support for Unicode, instead?

Re:OMG! Ponies!

[jones_supa]

Would unicorn support be a good enough compromise between the two?

Re:OMG! Ponies!

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Would unicorn support be a good enough compromise between the two?

Only if it is pink. :)

Re:OMG! Ponies!

[bidule]

Can we go back to the pink ponies style, I think I liked that better.

Lorem big picture ipsum wasted right column dolor cannot see enough sit comment depth amet,

Re:OMG! Ponies!

[Nimey]

Most slashdotters would be able to see unicorns, so it might even be worthwhile.

So replacing slashcode with wordpress?

[ducomputergeek]

That's what it looks like to me. I was half expecting to see in the tagline "Just another wordpress site".

Too much fluff

[scrib]

I read slashdot at work from a netbook tethered to a phone.
The extra screen real estate used for pointless, often goofy pictures is a waste. I have to scroll more and wait longer while I 3G down the nice big JPGs.
All I want is a clean, information dense site that I can browse quickly and easily. If this change isn't optional for users, then I simply won't be able to visit it at work and then I just won't visit it any more.

Hideous Blog Style

[__aasehi2499]

This garish post modern chic whatever that attempts to satisfy all the things that you think you need to do is offensive to the eyes and is a general waste of time, when you could just spend time improving efficiency in the current site code and streamlining the commenting system.

Looks like every other crap aggregation site

[Animats]

It looks like most other crap aggregation sites. What next, "Elsewhere on the web" paid spam? It takes three times as much scrolling to see the content.

When that becomes mandatory, I stop using Slashdot.

Cut the images

[Webs 101]

Pointless stock photography detracts from the information. It's wasted space and outshines the story-genre icons that are a tad useful.

Re:Cut the images

[Webs 101]

And put the whole front-page abstract in each story box. Why make readers click to see an entire abstract?

Re:Cut the images

[Drethon]

Not to mention it takes up so much of the screen that browsing the abstracts is painful

Pretty cool.

[rwven]

I like it. Note: Bulletted lists no longer have bullets. :)

Re:It looks alright

[i kan reed]

No, see, we have too much attention span right now. Gotta dumb it down a few levels.

I don't normally comment but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I tend to agree with the majority here..

This "redesign" is just terrible, it looks pretty neat but.. it's not Slashdot damnit!

Could we please... just keep the old design or have a 'classic.slashdot.org' in which we can continue to use and enjoy the old design?

If not, then please, fix this design or just dismiss it entirely.

Whitelist of code points

[tepples]

Even if the new Slashdot does support UTF-8, that doesn't mean you can post comments in Greek if the Unicode code points corresponding to a given UTF-8 string aren't on the whitelist of code points. There is a whitelist because of past abuses of Unicode directionality override characters and Unicode glyph art (the Unicode counterpart of ASCII art) by trolls.

Re:Whitelist of code points

[Atzanteol]

I always enjoy the "punish everyone for the actions of a few" model. And somehow this isn't an issue on other sites?

Re:Whitelist of code points

[melikamp]

If those were the problems, then white-listing characters was a totally wrong solution. So is the "spam filter", which amounts to censorship for idiotic reasons. The same moderation system that can "fix" GNAA's messages can also "fix" text art and right-to-left text. As a bonus, they could have a robot identify non-paragraph (and/or non-English) content and have a user setting to collapse it regardless of score. Problem solved.

What I've seen of the redesign is completely pointless. The current layout works pretty well, actually, so a useful thing to do would be to polish it, to document the style-sheets, and to add features that are 10 years overdue. Instead we'll be getting more neon barf, looks like.

Re:Whitelist of code points

[Pseudonym Authority]

That's what they claim the reason is, but it's funny that if you use Facebook or one of the other ``social'' logins with, say, Chinese characters, you get an Internal Server Error. I submit that the backend is garbage and they don't know how to fix it.

Also, those are dumb reasons anyway. If you're so scared of that, blacklist the directional formatting codepages and let the lameness filter block anything that isn't mostly text. It isn't as if spammers can't spam purely ASCII garbage that makes the page look hideous as it is (for example, look at what a certain HOSTS file fanatic does all the time).

Re:Whitelist of code points

[jones_supa]

Wouldn't it be better to have a blacklist for the dangerous characters instead?

Re:Whitelist of code points

[tepples]

If a blacklist were used, vandals would start using new dangerous characters the moment the new revision to the Unicode spec comes out.

Re:Whitelist of code points

[Megane]

If a blacklist were used, vandals would start using line drawing and dingbats characters instead.

FTFY

Re:Whitelist of code points

[tepples]

I think the idea is that a blacklist would include all characters in the various line drawing and dingbats blocks that are part of the Unicode spec as of the day the blacklist is written, as well as assorted dingbat-like characters. And by "dingbat-like", I mean this from the anglophone point of view: the CJK character that looks like a swastika, the CJK character that looks like the T-shaped piece from Tetris, or the Oriya character that looks exactly like the head of a Smurf. But the problem with a blacklist is that the authors might miss a dingbat, or a new Unicode spec might add dingbats that aren't part of the existing blacklist.

Mixed

[jason777]

I do like the design, the top menu, and the styling. But as others have mentioned, the width doesn't scale to my full HD screen which wastes tons of space. For this type of website, that's isn't good especially when viewing the comments. So that being said, just leave it the way it is, or just update the styling to look better than the current ancient looking crappy styling.

Please keep older browser in mind.

[linebackn]

It looks like a mess in SeaMonkey 1.1 and only slightly less so in Opera 10.10. Please keep in mind that there are some OSes that the geek crowd may wish to use but do not have more recent browsers. (BeOS/Haiku and OpenVMS come to mind).

Back when Slashdot worked in HTML 3 browsers, I used to love getting screen shots of different OSes and oddball browsers viewing Slashdot. So we now have to exclusively use Mac, Linux, or Windows on a supported version of Firefox/Chrome/Opera/IE? Guess I should be glad there is still some choice out there, but why make it so much harder?

OK, not horrible, but not great

[dskoll]

The new design isn't totally horrible, but I think it's somewhat worse than the current design. It wastes far too much space and the right-hand bar with polls, etc. is too wide. It almost overwhelms the story content.

Oblug.

[interval1066]

Queue the jokes/cuts/nasty remarks in 3... 2... 1...

some suggestions

[sl4shd0rk]

Beta uses wayyyy too much content.
Ditch the full size pics, use thumbnails or icons.
I'm scrolling forever and can't pick out the headlines from the summaries.
Too much overlapping alpha-blending

Think simplicity guys. There's beauty in simplicity. You're trying to do too much with all the latest trendy web 2.0 stuff and it's overdone.

Wow

[heezer7]

That is really bad. Looks like a default wordpress site. Holy fixed width fail.

Not happy

[jmanforever]

I'll even sign in to post this. I HATE the new layout. It is obviously designed by the same type of idiots who shoot vertical video.

One giant step forward to trendiness . . .

[Jimbo God of Unix]

One giant leap backwards for readability.

Come on, really? It's not a "media" site, it's a readers/posters site.

Please fix this issue

[Okian Warrior]

The current system apparently jumps to the top of the currently-viewed page when loading is complete. Probably a javascript that does something useful and then jumps as the last action.

It is annoying as hell to be reading somewhere scrolled down in a page and suddenly have the view jump to the top. This happens at the end of the page refresh, and also whenever the refresh timeout happens.

Please fix this - just get rid of the jump.

What to do with the spare pixels

[tepples]

Thank you for that helpful tip. Now I can clearly see my desktop wallpaper on half my screen, awesome!

I knew there was a reason I bought a monitor with this many pixels.

There are plenty of things you can do with the spare pixels, such as looking for links to paste into your comment. Exercise 1: Put Slashdot on the right and Wikipedia's article about tiling window managers on the left (or vice versa).

Or if you're reading Slashdot while waiting for a process to finish, you can put the process's window in the other half of the screen so that you can see when it finishes. Exercise 2 (under Debian derivatives): Open a terminal and enter the following command to download the latest security updates for your system.

sudo sh -c "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade"

Re:What to do with the spare pixels

[NoImNotNineVolt]

I don't know about you, but when I'm browsing slashdot, I don't need to have a separate window with reference material. I'm not implementing some esoteric spec, I'm reading a glorified blog. Those rare moments where I post a comment with links to references, I really don't need the reference material to be visible while I type my post. Oftentimes it is sufficient to simply copy the URL of the referenced page from one tab and paste it into the slashdot tab, which wouldn't really be any easier with both pages open simultaneously.

Re:What to do with the spare pixels

[aardvarkjoe]

Wouldn't a well-designed website make use of the available space, so that the user who likes multiple narrow windows can have that, while the user who prefers to fill the screen with the website that they're reading can do so too?

Re:What to do with the spare pixels

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah... tepples is a little intense. Just put porn on the side. Or another site to read while you're waiting for Slashdot bloat to scroll.

Grey background for text?

[bhspencer]

Please don't do this. I have poor eye sight and grey background for the text makes the site practically unreadable for me.

Re:Grey background for text?

[Megane]

But didn't you hear? The New Slashdot[tm](R) is only for the young, beautiful people. If you eyes are more than 45 years old, then either get them replaced with new bionic eyes already (with custom iris patterns selected by Lady Gaga) or GTFO!

Slashdot Poll Format

[dhalsim2]

I checked out the beta. I'll reserve most judgment for now, but I'm thoroughly disappointed that the Slashdot Poll format hasn't changed. It's a shame that a site like Slashdot continues to use plurality voting. We should switch to ranked voting (or at lease approval voting).

Ugh.

[rob_hines]

It's like the blog view of every tech site I go to. Gizmodo, Engadget, etc. Can we have the option to keep the current layout? Rob

DO NOT WANT!

[LoRdTAW]

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:
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". ./ 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.

Whew! Sorry bout that but I am tired of ohhh lets make it shiny! yay! web 2.0 bullshit.

Re:DO NOT WANT!

[hpycmprok]

Well said Sir.

Damn kids need to spend a week in lynx. Inside a terminal window. At 80 characters by 40 lines. And then design from in there.

Re:DO NOT WANT!

[umafuckit]

...creosote soaked telephone pole wrapped in barbed wire and covered in rusty nails - SIDEWAYS.

So you don't like the new design, huh?

Re:DO NOT WANT!

[istartedi]

Literal LOL. Best rant against the new design I've seen so far. Comments like that are why I read the old Slashdot. On the new Slashdot guys like us who have generated so much content over the years will just get disgusted and do something else.

Re:DO NOT WANT!

[Megane]

Take for example this pile of shit: http://tech-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/10/01/1521222/the-next-big-fiber-showdown-austin [slashdot.org] What the fuck is the point that picture?

Wow, just wow. I opened that in a new tab. After a couple of seconds, a space opened in the layout for the picture. At around T+10 seconds (I wasn't using a stopwatch), the picture finally loaded. Seeing how long it took to load the picture was as WTF as the picture itself.

Re:DO NOT WANT!

[Nimey]

Point of order: Slashdot /is/ a shitty blog. It's just that it has some interesting discussions to keep it alive.

YHGTBFKM

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously? this is an upgrade? in what ADHD-addled, prepubescent gamer mind has the Web monkeys at Slashtard come up with this abortion of a new design?

users choice

[jandar]

If I like small columns I can make the browser-window small. If a site patronizes me about column-size I feel disregarded in my preferences. This is patronizing attitude is found more often in the last years.

Re:users choice

[pspahn]

Actually, with this redesign, making the browser window smaller will actually make the comments wider.

I think what this probably came down to was a discussion between the developers/designs and the monetizers. They went with a responsive design, which is a good thing; however, it almost looks like that went with a responsive design simply for the sake of having a responsive design, not because they wanted to provide various users with meaningful design based on their context.

I will ape each of the comments above about the narrow comments column. It's not a great design at all, which I am assuming is the result of a "compromise" between the designs and the monetizers. The designers didn't want to devote that much right-col space to frivilous content, but the monetizers did, because, well, they don't give a shit about the users or the content, they simply want to make sure the links to DICE jobs are there as well as other affiliate content. I would not be surprised if the comment column is actually the "better" of two versions (as far as width/readability).

In the end I think you'll find a third CSS breakpoint for the responsive design will be the solution. This breakpoint will accomodate those of us on large, wide monitors, and will make better use of the available whitespace. Go ahead and abandon the 980px page width on the large screens and bump it up to something desirable (1200 would be a good start!). Of course, just bringing back the fluid design for large screens would also be a good option, but I can understand how that might make your lives more difficult.

If you want to just do the lazy thing, change the right-col to a collaspable panel so that users can "minimize" it and regain that real estate.

Theme support

[jones_supa]

Add a couple of color themes. A selection between a light or dark theme would be especially nice.

Re:Theme support

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Better yet, kill the high-contrast look and make use of some other colors -- extremely light blue with black text, deep brown with white text, whatever. Extremely high contrast (black-on-white/white-on-black) is hard on the eyes & often painful, and very low contrast like medium gray-on-light gray simply makes it harder to read.

No thanks.

[ExFCER]

Not looking good on my Note II. Reminds me of http://www.3quarksdaily.com/

Oh F*CK That!

[vinn]

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.

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[sbditto85]

I agree ... even though i don't have a 4 digit user id, i come here for content not cuteness.

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[phantomfive]

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.

Even OMG Ponies?

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[nitehawk214]

Slashdot 2.0 (what we have now) is pretty good, even though it had a crapton of backlash when it was implemented. That was mostly due to the bad coding, the design is still very similar to the Slashdot of 10 years ago. Once they fixed the bugs I think it is great.

This just looks like a crappy attempt to copy Ars, right down to the very poorly implemented comments system. Why change the best comments system around? Certainly nobody comes here for the articles, as those are done better and more accurately everywhere else. People come for the moderated comments, why fuck that up.

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[vinn]

Yup, despite everyone's criticisms over the years, I do enjoy reading Slashdot's comments. Sometimes that means it's simply for entertainment sake, although I will say over the years I've learned quite a few things from others and some useful tidbits of information. I think you'd be more hardpressed to find any online nerd collection that's larger.

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[orion205]

Thank you for posting that you have a 4-digit user id. Reading this in the new design, I couldn't even tell that!

The user id isn't shown. And there is no "Parent" link from a child comment, to help follow the conversation. The conversation thread needs to be easy to follow, I shouldn't be squinting to tease out slight indents to try to figure it out!

The narrow comment space sucks. At least I can turn off the useless huge pictures.

Please take another try at the redesign!!

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[Darinbob]

The definition of "nerd" changed since the days when new slashdot users had 4 digits. Now nerds are cool people who workout and have good skin and their qualifications to be nerdy are that they can play computer games or they work in a computer help desk (only until 5pm though, then it's off to the nightly party).

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[towermac]

Ars?

No, they are sliding down into darkness also. This was my bastion..

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[tamyrlin]

I think the most damning thing about the new comment system is that I had to go back to the old version of the site to read through the comments in an efficient manner. (And I'm not talking about the fact that the "reply" button is not implemented yet...)

Also, the exact user id is mostly for bragging rights anyway, but it does give an indication as to whether the user is a long time user of slashdot or not. Although other indications such as the karma of the user might be more useful in most situations...

Re:Oh F*CK That!

[jrumney]

Slashdot 2.0 (what we have now) is pretty good, even though it had a crapton of backlash when it was implemented.

Basically every iteration of Slashdot's design has made the experience worse. When they changed from user settings to sliders for controlling the number of comments displayed, the users lost a bit of control. Now in the current version, its basically a choice between 5 comments or everything. And in the new beta, it seems they're making a move to the flat comments seen on most other sites these days. The Reply button is still there, but its like they haven't decided what it should do yet, and the comments on the page are not showing much of a heirarchy.

But if you go back and look at the old ones now that you're used to the current one, the looks have improved with each iteration. And I guess that is what matters to advertisers.

Re:Use of Gray Text

[bhspencer]

I couldn't agree more. I have poor eyesight and grey text on grey background is practically unreadable for me. Please don't do it.

I feel a disturbance in the force

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not good. This is not good at all. How can this abomination be stopped?

This is distressingly bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That's a change that takes guts.

To throw out everything that made you good, and replace it with all the same stuff that make other sites shit.

Really, that takes guts, and by guts I mean sheer unadulterated stupidity.

It's Precisely six months offset from April 1st today, so I can hope it's some kind of anti-joke...

Nice Job with a few suggestions

[bogie]

First for people who hate it, maybe make the classic view more like the current one with light text on a dark background? Personally I'd go same font you have but use something to box it in from the rest of the body of the article.

Second maybe adjust the "Tri-View" triple headline photo layout thing? Maybe it's just those particular photos, but imho it looks a bit too cluttered and the photos seem to run into each other vs cleanly flowing.

My 2 cents.

no sir, i don't like it.

[sir 8ed]

crap. crap on a stick.

Ugh

[lengel]

Ugh

Comments section too narrow with wide sidebar

[nullchar]

A growing minority are turning their wide screen monitors on their side, enabling a large vertical space. With the wasted sidebar on the story detail page, all of the comments are squished into a narrow column. This results in much more scrolling, even on a vertical monitor!

ars?

[Nick]

Congratulations, you've achieved your goal of looking like Ars Technica. Can we go back to the design it was back in the 90s again?

As a daily visitor for the last 15 years...

[Joe Jordan]

No. Terrible design that makes it look like a cheap WordPress site using a free theme because /. was too cheap to spend $40 for a premium theme. What are you thinking?

Re:As a daily visitor for the last 15 years...

[unitron]

No. Terrible design that makes it look like a cheap WordPress site using a free theme because /. was too cheap to spend $40 for a premium theme. What are you thinking?

THIS

Been here since the Halloween Papers (0ctober '98)

Liked some of the changes, haven't cared for other ones quite so much.

But if you go with that, it won't be Slashdot anymore.

Pretty much like every Blah website out there

[DadLeopard]

Pretty sure most of us come to Slashdot for the content and not the Pretty. Lots of wasted space on the Beta page and the comment section could be a whole lot better than it is, I'm probably in some kind of minority now, but I don't use the screen on a phone to read Slashdot, and that is the only way this new layout makes any sense! It's made for mobile users!

Re:Gonna miss Slashdot

[0racle]

Clearly you don't belong here. It is not Slashdot's fault that your default handler for mailto: is a client you don't use.

Contrast!

[David_W]

Is it just me, or does the new design severely lack contrast? We have a gray background, with gray boxes on top of them, and black text on that. The headers? Huge, but still just black on gray. Funny enough, I like our current green bars with white text on the headers of the boxes. Why? Contrast!

Re:Contrast!

[Megane]

They didn't make the body text 85% gray like everybody else does, so quichyer bellyaching! But they did make the body text 85% size to help with the unreadability.

Current is much easier to read

[GlowingCat]

I believe Slashdot has more intellectual readers than many other news sites. Big images only get in the way of reading about the subjects. That's why I much prefer the current design.

bug report.

[HeckRuler]

The bottom line of text, the line just above "read more" cuts off the descenders of all the characters. You know, the bottom bit of 'g', 'p', 'q' and such.

And yeah, the flat and minimalist look is for phones where you have to cram everything into a small-ass phone screen. This is slashdot. We come here to screw around while we should be working for that half-minute of mental relief. That means we have big-ass honkin monitors that real people who do real meaningful work use to interact with real programs. This is where your website is viewed.

Come on Dice, know your market. Just because all the webdevs are wanking themselves off on iphone screens doesn't mean that's what's best here.

Re:bug report.

[HeckRuler]

Whooooaaa, even the comments are crammed into that narrow space.

Ok, listen up. The slashdot commentators (and the community mod point system they use) are really what has value here. God knows it's not the editors. If you don't understand that we're a cut above the facebook and generic web 2.0 crowd and that we'd want more horizontal space to have more in depth conversations, you really disconnected from what actually makes this site worth coming to. I don't come here for the "lol dems are crazy" "Nuh-uh, reps are stupid" one-liners. I'm here for

(also, why is the top third and bottom half of Snowden's face cut off and/or obscured? If you're trying to add an image, just add it below. If you want to overlay something on top of the image, it probably shouldn't block 83% of the image. But seriously, why overlay anything? Is that some sort of lame watermark-like effect?)

The users's page looks ok I guess. The karma image and the chievo badges are... cute? But where are the point values of the posts? And where the hell is the "comments" button that showed me if anyone replied to my posts?

Two-page monitor helps you RTFA

[tepples]

in an era where almost all monitors are WIDESCREEN

...there's no excuse for not Reading The Featured Article.

Modern desktop PC monitors have 1920x1080 pixels. This is bigger in both dimensions than the 1152x870 pixel, 19" VIS "two-page monitors" sold from 1989 to 1992. So if your monitor is as big as a two-page monitor, you can unmaximize your and display two web pages in 960-pixel-wide windows: one with Slashdot and one with the featured article. Being able to refer to the article in replies to other Slashdot users' comments is a one-way ticket to more (Score:5, Informative) posts.

Re:Two-page monitor helps you RTFA

[Kielistic]

So if your monitor is as big as a two-page monitor, you can unmaximize your and display two web pages in 960-pixel-wide windows

I have two screens for that. And it is still not an excuse to dictate the width of the content. If the content filled the width of the viewport then I can choose to have it fullscreen or halfscreen and both would work well.

Being able to refer to the article in replies to other Slashdot users' comments is a one-way ticket to more (Score:5, Informative) posts.

You're not even new here.. You should know by now that being correct is one of the least reliable means of getting +5.

Re:Two-page monitor helps you RTFA

[Lunix Nutcase]

Or they could just not put in stupid restrictions on width that serve no purpose other than to shove more ads on the screen?

Re:Two-page monitor helps you RTFA

[ceoyoyo]

I've never understood why people maximize windows. Particularly browsers.

Honest opinion

[yoda-dono]

Some of the new things are nice, but there is a lot of change just for the sake of change, which I hope will be reconsidered.

First off, basically all view modes expect a person to click on every single story to see EVERYTHING we can usually see with the current layout, even classic won't show the "From.....Department" bit unless you click on it (and that is one of my favorite things to look at when I browse the posts). I'd say first and foremost I want that from/department part to be visible at a higher level...

Headline view, that is just useless, it is all the worst parts of the other views, and with even more need to click through and waste our time. It is like a sad excuse for an RSS feed. Chuck it.

Standard view, what is with that blob of stories at the top (the text of which is hard to read on top of everything), if it was just promoting some top stories, that'd be one thing, but it instead rips those stories out of where they'd chronologically fall and has them only exist in that blob. Unacceptable. Also, having most of the Slashdot article readable but not ALL of it? Inexcusable, there is no reason to force someone to load a new page just to finish reading a mere summary. The giant pictures above SOME stories... they might be okay, if they were more relevant more of the time (there are some pretty sad examples on display today), overall, I could do without it, and it would be more bandwidth friendly, which Slashdot didn't use to have in issue with before.

Forced width, unacceptable, just scale the page accordingly rather than this insanity.

It is kind of cleaner, kind of nicer, but not enough of what makes Slashdot Slashdot is making its way over, please keep more of what makes this place great, rather than making the site a generic mess, especially one that doesn't give enough information up front.

Re:Honest opinion

[Soulskill]

Thanks for the specific suggestions, we appreciate it!

Re:Honest opinion

[Megane]

Some of the new things are nice

Care to list any of them, or are you just being unnecessarily polite?

Re:Honest opinion

[yoda-dono]

Feels good to know my opinion was heard and considered, thanks for letting me know you're listening; don't hesitate to contact me if there's anything else you want an honest opinion (TM) on.

Re:Honest opinion

[yoda-dono]

A lot of that was me being polite, but in all fairness they did put obvious, if somewhat misguided, effort into the redesign and that should be considered when tearing into someone's work, besides, kindness can often get one further than rudeness or hostility, so I try to lean toward polite. But to respond in full to your question, it is a little more spacious, cleaner and modern looking in classic view (still want my darned from/department jokes visible), comments seem less filtered/condensed and easier for me to follow (easier still if they'd included the full Comment Subject on replies, rather than just "Re:", maybe also include the lines we currently have on the side that help clarify nested comments) (and if all the information about the person posting comments wasn't just condensed down to a name/link and time. Where is the member number, where is the post permalink?), and that top bar thingy stays at the top of the screen (though it doesn't have a search bar, so it isn't nearly as useful as it should be, and widescreens or low resolution screens probably wouldn't appreciate that vertical space always being taken up...), but beyond that, there really isn't anything that increases efficiency for someone trying to keep track of nerd news, or even much about it that is uniquely Slashdot anymore. Hopefully they will steer away from the "generic news site" design this beta teases by thinking hard about what is really the heart and soul of Slashdot. Efficient and useful should always trump flashy at a nerd news site, and I hope they figure that out.

You guys (commenters) don't get it!

[grumpyman]

The white spaces are reserved for advertisements. BTW, what's the value for the added 'picture'? More scrolling!

the votes are in... everyone hates it

[spoot]

looks like every other news site. i will visit less. will have to scroll 3x as much to scan the posts. used to love the old school slashcode because it loaded fast and i could scan quick. that will be gone now. will visit the register more because let's face it, their writing is funnier anyway. but then again, i hate everything

Narrow margins

[goodmanj]

There are three reasons to make your text boxes only a couple inches across.

A, because you plan to fill the rest of the screen with ads, in which case, fuck you.

B, because you can't figure out how to make separate layouts for phones vs PCs, in which case fuck you.

C, because you figure your readers will get bored if they have to read a line of text more than five words long, in which case, fuck you.

I LIKE my wall of text!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I LIKE my wall of text!

[Monkey-Man2000]

oh wow, flipping between here and there is disconcerting.

THIS, the new format is HIDEOUS!!

UTF-8 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we talk about Georges Lemaître, the originator of the Big Bang Theory, by properly spelling his name in the new system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître

Oh look, pretty shiny things

[Bucc5062]

To be kind...it sucks. To provide more clarity:

1 - the fixed column for comments is horrible. Like most everyone else I read on a wide screen. For crying out loud the right sidebar is just as big as the comments.

2 - At times I could not reply to posts ('coming soon? wtf!)

3 - Collapsible comments.

4 - I am not a fan of the picture on picture for the story summaries. Looking at a summary with a picture I see two other summaries within the first. What does that mean? It is just confusing, not helpful.

5 - Putting large pictures.images in the summary eats up way to much space and bandwidth. Why? I barely read the summary and now you want me to look at a picture? Is it even relevant to the story. My god, next thing you will et people post links to youtube where the video is embedded in the comment (I'm looking at you Slate)

To same something nice....ummmm...the main page does have a fresh, snappy new look. Real hipster, Appleish, web 3.0 look...If you love white space, this site is da bomb.

Re:Oh look, pretty shiny things

[cervesaebraciator]

Agreed on all points. But to add some additional clarity:

6 - Looking at the same article summaries on the new and old version, one quickly discovers that the space used on the superfluous picture was taken from the summary. Now to finish the summary, I have to follow the link. I used to only do this when I wanted to participate in the discussion. This makes me less likely to come to /. for articles at all, if I've got to click an extra link just to read a summary.

7 - When the summary is interesting, I normally go to the commentary. Without the enclosed comment threads, it's visually much harder to follow the bounds of a thread. This is a downgrade and, again, it makes me less interested in /. where the main content is the interesting commentary.

Layout breaks on snap with a side panel

[Xolotl]

With a wide monitor (1920px) I like my browser snapped to half the screen width, so I can do something useful in the other half (also the format is a nice comfortable-to-read portrait). With Unity or another side panel, though, the 'half-screen-width' browser is no longer 1920/2 = 960 pixels wide, it's more like 920 (excluding scroll bar). Which breaks the layout - the right bar doesn't appear, the story boxes spread out wide ...

Also, waaaaay too much whitespace.

Why do we need Metro-look anyway?

There is way too much

[MXPS]

white space on the sides. What is the point? Most people are using wide screen monitors and high resolutions, so there is way too much wasted space.

No bullets

[joshuao3]

In the new design, the bullets in the articles don't have bullets! This makes for some weird looking posts. For example, check out this same article in Beta.

Worthless Photos

[matt328]

Websites in general need to stop just pulling similarly tagged photos from flickr or wherever just for the sake of adding color or whatever they think they do. If a photo is directly covering a story, for example a photo of a new piece of tech, or something that is better when seeing rather than reading a description of, that is helpful. A stock photo of security cameras pointed at some dude adds no value to a story about cryptography, it just wastes space.

My code's compiling (oh, Snap)

[tepples]

Some of us actually have monitors with 1680 width (or more) that we use... to read.

My PC at work has a 1920x1080 pixel monitor. I use half of it for the code editor and half of it for documentation. Or when my code's compiling, I use half of it for Slashdot and half of it to watch for the compilation to finish. Snap is like a poor man's dual monitor.

Horrible.

[Angstroem]

If that will become the new /. look, it will just be another site looking like any other half-assed wordpress site optimized for smartphone browsing. Seriously, why is everyone thinking that all sites should look alike? It's boring!

And, of course, you do know that there are still people using real PCs on screens bigger than 9"? Especially among the /. readers.

So make it at least two CSS style sheets, one for the mickey mouse screens and one for the real ones -- and let the users select.

Grey background

[Xolotl]

Also, the current text-on-white is much easier to read than text-on-grey ... and the current thin boxes make comment threading easier to understand.

Re:Grey background

[Megane]

Also, the current 100% body text size is much easier to read than 85% body text size. This is a stupid thing that "everybody does it" (as in if they jumped off a bridge you would do it too), and those of us with less than perfect eyes (which is most anybody older than 45) hate it. I set the text size in my browser where it is for a reason. At least they didn't go with 85% gray body text on top of 15% gray backgrounds like "everybody does it" too.

One word: CONTRAST. Learn what it means.

Re:Gonna miss Slashdot

[camperdave]

Well, I looked at the new design, and my thought is that I'm going to miss Slashdot. Not only did I find it awful to look at, when I tried to click on the "we'd like your thoughts on it, too." link to let /. know, it tried to open Outlook, which I never use and will never use. Anyone who expects me to use Outlook is so out of touch that there seems no point in telling them not to fix something that isn't broken.

All Slashdot is doing is using a mailto: link. It's your own computer that's telling you to use Outlook to open it, not Slashdot.

Slashdot...all grown up

[PopeRatzo]

Looks great on my tablet.

Need to see the entire article.

[Hemi Rodner]

Why can't I see the entire the article in the beta site?

You had the same problem in the beta mobile site and you changed it so all the story will be shown... so the same should be in the normal site - there is no need to shorten the article. It's already short enough. I want to see all of it so I can quickly skim the articles while reading the articles that interest me. I don't want an extra click just to read the entire article.

Can't stand the comments layout

[SpectateSwamp]

I never read them. They are the worst I have ever seen. On any site.

Not that it will matter...

[CyberLeader]

But I logged in for the first time in forever just to agree with the hundreds of comments so far about what a poor redesign this is, especially in its use of ridiculous amounts of white space.

Oh well, the end comes with not a bang, but a whimper.

Images

[Soulskill]

For those of you who would prefer to read the site without images, click the icon at the top right of the story column. You'll be able to switch to a classic view, or to a headlines-only view.

Re:Images

[linebackn]

That's great, but that button doesn't display in my browser.

Re:Images

[Jim Hall]

2 things:

1. I have a 3G phone, but my service area only offers 2G. After loading your new site on slooooooooooooooooooow 2G, I'm not feeling very motivated to find a menu item to turn off images. I'll likely go to Google News - Technology section instead.

2. Your beta site clearly is detecting that I'm using a mobile phone, because it gives me a different top-banner than my desktop browser. But that icon that you pointed us to does not exist on mobile.

Re:Images

[Drethon]

I would but none of those options show up for me under beta.slashdot.org. I suspect it may be related to me not being logged into the beta page but once I log in it redirects me to the normal slashdot main page. Whee!

Re:Images

[EL_mal0]

The site should default to classic. One of the things I love about /. is that it is generally pretty light, even with the stuff that came with the last update a few years back. Keep it light by default. Remember: you're audience are power users; treat us accordingly.

Re:Images

[paulej72]

Yes mouse hovers should be avoided. If you want on this button have a click toggle through all three states in order and leave the mouse hover for direct choice, therefore both usage patterns would work.

News for NERDS, not nerds with tablets

[Zeromous]

I stay for the hifi conversation and relatively lofi site. The day you switch to this redesign, slashdot is dead to me. I already don't surf on my phone because your ridiculous mobile layout hides features and makes reading comments impossible.

If I wanted arstechnica, I will read arstechnica (where incidentally I never post). I come here for the bulletin board and basic clean layout. Sometimes I don't want my website to read like a magazine. /long time reader #668365

Messaging system

[jones_supa]

I hope the crusty internal automatic message system gets reworked. It has been kind of clunky to click through those and then delete the messages, when it could be done way more elegantly with something like the Facebook's notification system.

Fix the mobile version first

[halexists]

If Slashdot would take less than 30 seconds to load up on my iPad 3 that would be just great. This new design, unfortunately, looks more like the mobile version -- and it seems to load slower on my desktop browser.

Hey Slashdot, don't copy crap and paste over good stuff! Or to borrow a headline style from Slate magazine: "You're Doing it Wrong: Web Design"

Re:Wasn't broken; Didn't need fixing

[camperdave]

Hey look! A redesign that no one asked for!

Actually, folks have been asking for a redesign for a long time. However, it mostly centered around being able to use unicode and being able to go back and edit posts. I haven't seen comments on either of those requested changes.

Stuff that matters, not the design

[Delifisek]

So,

Could you please fire the whiz guy who wants to put pictures on front page ?

Doesn't work at all: FF 23.0.1

[MobyDisk]

It doesn't work at all as of 10/1/2013 4:56 PM EST on Firefox 23.0.1. There are two crippling issues:

1) The CSS doesn't work at all. So I just see a stream of unformatted text and images. I've reloaded a few times and it still happens.
The head has the following in the top (modified to pass the lameness filter)
link href "//netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/3.2.0/css/font-awesome.css"
link rel "stylesheet" href "//c.fsdn.com/s/css/application.css?release_20131001.01"

2) It has a NSFW ad that says "MALE GAMERS ONLY"
The ad image is: here
I have enough Karma that I could disable ads, but I leave them on so you can have a revenue stream. But as of today I will disable ads because I can't have a mostly naked female body on my work computer screen.

Re:Doesn't work at all: FF 23.0.1

[MobyDisk]

I tried in IE 10 as well with the same result on the CSS issue. Are those links with the leading slashes even valid?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

No.

[darrellg1]

Too "busy". Actual content size reduced, like Facebook. Just no.

wider please,...

[Selur]

I agree there should be an option to make it wider, it's really a lot of (unwanted) free area on FullHD or up resolutions,...

NOT RESPONSIVE ENOUGH

[bananaquackmoo]

Actually, its not responsive enough. I have my window set at ~1040 x 840 px and stuff is flowing off screen.

Comments are good

[iONiUM]

But make sure you send them an e-mail as per the summary. I doubt they read the comments.

I see you didn't listen to Alpha feedback

[Vskye]

It still looks like crap.

Re:I see you didn't listen to Alpha feedback

[gmhowell]

Ditto. When I was 'invited' to the alpha, I mentioned several of the problems that others are mentioning today. It looks like not one shit was given.

Re:I see you didn't listen to Alpha feedback

[Specter]

Glad I wasn't the only alpha tester who felt that way.

Does not fit on my screen

[Ferrofluid]

See screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/JBNcRAL.png

I am running the latest stable Firefox on Windows 7 with a 1280x800 display (not huge, but certainly not a small resolution compared to today's laptops). The little text box is cut off at the edge of the screen.

Also, may I add that there is far too much wasted space. I can only fit about 1 - 1.5 headlines on my screen at a time. I prefer a simple text-based layout where the headlines are packed together tightly. This allows me to quickly scan the headlines to see if there's an article worth reading. What's the point of having these useless images and whitespace? It just forces me to manually scroll the page more. The images add nothing of value and just increase bloat.

Remember, Slashdot's core readership is IT professionals, engineers, scientists, STEM students, etc. People who value function over aesthetics. If you sacrifice the former for the latter (and I don't even think the new design is an improvement aesthetically), you will drive away those readers.

The golden rule is K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Sick of Google APIs

[TheResilientFarter]

Yet another way for Google to be the central repository for everywhere everyone goes on the Internet. I've blocked it with NoScript, but I suspect something will be broken, I'm just not sure what, yet.

So this is how it ends

[paraduma]

So this is how it ends, not with a bang, but with a wordpress theme.

All comments so far are negative

[alexo]

Everybody hates it, so it will make it to final release without changes.

Re:All comments so far are negative

[RussR42]

Of course.
1. Uh-oh, universally negative feedback. Maybe we should reconsider.
2. Hm, our users don't like it but marketing says it will work and that we'll attract more new users.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there is no way they're going to drop the changes this late in the game. The decision was made, it's over. Option 2 wins!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Right column

[Solitude]

I'm not a fan, but I can live with the home page. Once drilling down, though, it would be good if that right column went away.

I prefer not to scroll endlessly, page frequently, or have to press a button to load comments. I just want it all right there to read through in one page.

Fluid Design...

[Anaerin]

It's not THAT hard to do. Just look at how much nicer this appears with that whitespace zapped. It's not perfect (The width value in the CSS has to be modified 'cause the source is in the wrong order - if that right bar came first in the HTML, the CSS for it could be set "float: right" and the main area just set "width: auto" and all would be perfect, including comments flowing underneath), but for now it's a touch better.

If anyone wants a stylish patch for the changes I've made, let me know. :)

Re:Fluid Design...

[Anaerin]

Oh, and with the extra width, the "Hero" images don't look as stupid either (After a tiny bit of tweaking). The frontpage images also float nicely, with a touch more tweaking.

Re:Fluid Design...

[Anaerin]

And, because nobody asked for it, but I might as well while I'm playing, re-skinned the comments section to look a little more familiar. Stylish preset is now on pastebin.

Re:Fluid Design...

[znanue]

I think I could tolerate the new design with those tweaks... they're certainly a massive improvement.

Re:Fluid Design...

[Soulskill]

These are interesting, thank you. I'll make sure our engineering team sees them.

Re:Fluid Design...

[tamyrlin]

It is late here and I'm in a negative mood. However, the fact that at least one staff member seems to actually listen to the comments written here is a hopeful indication. (Also, the mock-ups on dropbox in the grandparent looks promising. I'll have to look into the Stylish plugin which I didn't know about before.)

Re:Fluid Design...

[claar]

Please do -- Anaerin's mockup is SOOO much closer to what a Slashdot redesign should look like:

* 100% width
* Familiar green headings on comment's, which give Slashdot its distinctive "Slashdot" feel
* Possible to read nested comments

Although it still misses comment filtering, and the comments don't start until half-way down the page, it's a lot more promising than the current unusable-comment-section beta!

What's with all the pictures?

[wcrowe]

What's with all the pictures? Not only does Slashdot load more slowly, now it's no longer safe for work. Did you REALLY work with members of the community to come up with this new design? I've been on Slashdot since 1999 (five digit user number). I don't want to leave Slashdot, but it's looking like every other craptastic news site now.

Re:What's with all the pictures?

[Soulskill]

Did you REALLY work with members of the community to come up with this new design?

Yeah -- and a lot of people actually responded saying they liked the images. That said, we knew plenty of people would prefer a more information-dense layout, so we created the Classic and Headlines options under this icon.

We opened up the beta because we really want more feedback about all these things. Thanks for your input.

Re:What's with all the pictures?

[jon2082]

Not trying to be snippy, but how did you ask the question about the images? It almost looks (from the comments) like you did it like this: Do you like the images? Please check one of the following: --- Yes --- OMG TEH AWESOMENESS --- A Little

I don't want to quit slashdot

[ninjackn]

It looks like every other blog site out there, too many images, too much white space, no comment filter and comments are much harder to read and understand who is replying to what. If you switch to this new layout with no option for the classic one, I will stop visiting slashdot. It won't be much of a sacrifice at that point, this site would have already lost what I liked about it, focus on stuff that matters, the comments and information.

Motörhead

[MysteriousPreacher]

Motörhead

Will the umlaut survive posting?

Re:Motörhead

[Megane]

I'm seeing broken UL tags (no bullets) even on the regular site, and I'm seeing a couple of instances of non-broken unicode, so it's time for a test:

®¥ø íîïì £999.99

Hmm, a few of them disappear in preview, so maybe there's some white-listing of code ranges, but it looks good. Time to hit submit.

Re:Motörhead

[Megane]

The Japanese text and a few random naked diacritical marks disappeared (I just held down the option key and spammed a few letters), but it seems to at least not break Latin-1 characters. So how about smart quotes? “‘‘“

Re:Motörhead

[Megane]

Great. It only took a decade to get /. to post Latin-1 characters without them turning into mojibake. I think their whitelist is still a bit too small, but it has finally achieved a minimum acceptable level of Unicode support while still preventing people from using it to post ASCII art.

Classic/Headline views?

[RazorSharp]

Anyone know where to activate these? I can't see myself still using the comment section under the standard view. It basically got rid of all the things that made /. great and turned it into what every other news site looks like.

Re:Classic/Headline views?

[RazorSharp]

Okay, I should have been more patient. There's an icon next to "most discussed" that changes this. The changes before the three views are minimal and they all feature the same crappy comment layout.

Goodbye fellow /.ers, I won't partake once this thing gets implemented. What made /. so great to me is that it encouraged discussions rather than mere comments. The new system looks like a haven for trolls. Way to become C|Net.

I assume the reason behind this is the whole mobile craze. Why not just have a mobile sight and a regular site? That's pretty normal.

Re:collapsable comments

[Atzanteol]

I had a firefox add-on years ago that allowed this and it was the best /. experience I've ever had. Every-time they redesign the site I hope against hope that this will be added.

DO THREADING RIGHT /.! Doooo eeeeeeeet.

No.

[Lord Apathy]

No. Leave the old design alone.

Things I dislike

[houghi]

I dislike the fixed bar on the top. It takes away space that I would want for content. If I want to go to something else, I can scroll back to the top. I am technical and know how to use a keyboard.

1920x1200 monitor user. The text uses about 25-30% of my screen. I am a technical person. I own a large screen

The complete uselessness on the right for 'easy access'. If I want something else, I know where to find it. I am a technical person. I know how to surf a website.

Usage of just a different font for quoted text instead of the line in front of it. I rather have the standard quoting from Usenet times. I am a technical person. I know what a | in front of text means.

On the user page, the icons for achievements. Looks like stars you give to kids, but I am a technical person.

The inability to see how many scores or replies there are or how a article scores. I want these details and numbers, because I am a technical person.

I do not even comment on the frontpage as I seldom use it. I link to the articles via RSS. I know how to do that, because I am a technical person.

My general feeling is that it is a great design. It is for others who are interested in how a site looks like more then the content. People here do care more about the content then the design.

Like some companies think what their users want, you should not only listen to your your audience, you must understand them. If you make this go through, it is clear that you don't.

Re:Things I dislike

[Soulskill]

Thanks for the detailed list!

Pictures????

[golfnomad]

it's like using color on your graphs are you getting more CEOs/CTOs/Managers reading this site? just sayin'

Smaller images, maybe to the side

[sonstone]

I kind of like the images, but they are huge. Might be nice if they were smaller and to the side?

The content area seems really narrow too. I'm sure it's nice on a tablet but everything feels really tight and constrained on a larger monitor.

Why the UI change?

[dudeus]

Why does every web site / OS / application always feel the need to change the UI? IOS7 stinks, every new release of Linux feels a need to change change the look of the desktop, etc. Why? Most of the changes are cosmetic and even if not they very seldom improve the usability of the software in question. If you feel a need to be busy, improve something else, make it faster; add a feature *if it makes sense*, etc. I dare you to make the new design a Slashdot Poll question!

I like it

[S810]

Clean, direct and contemporary.

A lot of sites are missing this.

Nice job!

Pretty weak.

[aseth]

As dozens of others have said - too much whitespace, too much crap on the side, and the comments section is better implemented on this version, or the even older formats.

The comments section is the single most important thing here.

Things to do in /. before you're dead

[dargaud]

• Fix the metamoderation (it hasn't made any sense since you were bought up)
• Fix the search function (which has NEVER worked), with options to search the blurbs, the original linked to pages, the discussions, the discussions were you've posted, your own posts, etc...
• Add a 'Like' button on individual posts. Not, not a fb 'like': a way to mark down other people's posts and have them all on your own page. And searchable too.

Re:Testing AC posting without javascript

[J_Darnley]

Ah it seems I can't even find this comment without enabling javascript. Nor can I post a new one without it.

Yes, I did try before logging in.

Hate the narrow format!

[kaka.mala.vachva]

This is not a prettied up blog, please do not implement non-scaling design.

Get off my lawn with your modern interface crap.

[Sansavarous]

You've got to be kidding me.

This is exactly why I don't visit digg anymore, it's horrible.

Slashdot is not a place for the tablet, big icon, lots of video, huge witespace, lets make it simple for the idiots CRAP that is being pushed as webdesign today. This is the internet not a damn magazine.

Make the fonts smaller! Takes too damn long to scroll through the articles to see the information.

Give me the option of turning off ALL images on articles.

Speaking of options, where the hell are they?
Where are the slashboxes?
Where do I set the option to not display my e-mail address?
Where do I set it to always show link domains?
Where do I set my time and date format?
Where do I set the threashold on comments?

OMFG who's the idiot who seup the thread view for comments?

I don't come to slashdot for video, big images or big whitespace.

I come to slashdot for information, quick easy read information.

WTF is wrong with people today?

Don't they teach you how to read in school? /agree stayoffmylawn.slashdot.org

Too Narrow

[nairnr]

In my mind it is too narrow for a site that is heavily text based. It makes it harder to go through the comments which is really the highlight of slashdot. The response and discussion that stories generate is the crux of the site. Eye candy is nice and all, but don't lose the base.

beta comments s*ck balls

[l3v1]

So, few things:
- the beta site looks like every mom&pop noob blog, the furthest away from anything professional;
- commenting is CRAP - the power of Slashdot is the comments, a standard blog-style commenting section will not do, it is stupid and useless, width is too low, fonts are too big, nobody will be able to handle even a few hundred comments in the current beta style layout;
- the site will not look more 'modern' or 'professional' by new headline styles with large space-eating images; on Slashdot, content is king; and most content that we care about is TEXT.

If you really want to copy a layout, then copy ArsTechnica's single column layout. That is nice. This new beta is not. It's childish and amateurish.

IPv6?

[3.1415926535]

$ host -t AAAA meta-beta.slashdot.org
meta-beta.slashdot.org has no AAAA record

Pathetic.

Useless

[Oliekirk]

Too much whitespace, I only have a portrait monitor at work. Can't find the threshold settings for the comments, makes comments near useless and therefore the whole website. I only come to read the comments. Not impressed.

Cross-posting from my comment in the Journal Entry

[Specter]

Original comments are here.

tl;dr:

"There are at least four glaring problems with how you've redesigned the comments:

1) You're wasting at least 33% of the usable screen space for comments. ...
2) You've dropped the visual cues as to how far down in the thread you are. ...
3) You moved 'load more/all comments' to the end of the comments! WTF! ...
4) You've removed the ability to filter on moderation rating in the story. ...

Also be careful with moderation changes and
You broke my ability to track my own comments and responses to them.

Overall this is much much worse."

Constructive criticism...

[mutube]

It's not too bad. Slashdot does look dated these days, though that's up to individual taste whether it's a 'bad thing'.

Anyway, two things jump out:

1. It needs to be adaptive (i.e. fit the window) rather than be fixed width. Slashdot is about the comments and the comments are nested. Nesting means you need width.
2. Drop the sidebar on the story pages - or use an abbreviated one and stack the comments full-width underneath the story and 'sidebar'. Sort of like, well, it is now.
3. I don't really get what is going on at the top of the front page. Are the stories with the images the 'most popular' or just a random selection with images? I typically scan read the stories looking for something that is interesting - hiding the summary behind an image will make me less likely to read not more.

In short I guess: change the design if you like, but keep the layout. It works.

I'm also surprised that you've appear to have opted not to use one of the layout frameworks (e.g. Foundation). Sure you can code it all up yourself but even the bare bones of Foundation would give you a layout the fundamentally 'just works' on different platforms.

Re:Constructive criticism...

[Soulskill]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Re:Constructive criticism...

[drussell]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Perhaps a design goal could be to make the site use, for example, 1/2 the total bandwidth per page that is currently required for most areas. That might make for some excellent efficiency tuning and remove some of the bloat that has crept in over the years.... It may well not be achievable for a typical comments page but would be a worthy goal as an average to beat back the nasty, nasty cruft.

Nope

[nitehawk214]

Front page: Looks like bad copy of Ars. Meh, I could live with it.
Comments: Looks like every other shitty site with non-threaded or fake-threaded comments. nope.avi

The Good:

[corywoolf]

Nice overall layout. The viewing options offer a more compact mode, which is nice when trying to quickly read headlines and summaries. The Bad: Some of the buttons have no hover differentiation. I realize a lot of people are using touch devices now, but at least put a slight tint when mousing over. Overall: Awesome redesign!

Really?

[Iconoc]

Please don't "improve" slashdot. I quit scanning CNBC because the website is similar to this "new" look. I like a dense page with information and could care less what picture a bored mod selected to go with an article.

This look is not an improvement.

There is an early Bloom County cartoon about how the UI should hurt the user. It was funny. Leave it alone.

Font

[fa2k]

If someone could offer me some help; I see the new page with the font "Nimbus Sans L Regular", and it's hard to read... Do you get the same font (maybe only on linux)

Re:Font

[Megane]

If you have a decent browser, go into font configuration and check/uncheck the box that denies web sites the ability to change fonts. Then find a decent font (I use Lucida Grande) and make that your browser's font. This will break icon fonts on Gawker sites, but who the fuck cares?

Need a classic option for seasoned users

[Demodian]

I have a widescreen monitor and this layout is an extreme waste of screen real estate. Half of my screen is empty in the horizontal axis. The vertical axis is spread out too much with empty padding, which requires an excessive amount of scrolling to examine all of the content and comments. Did someone see the artsy-fartsy upgrade from iOS 6 to 7 and say "Hey, we can do that to Slashdot as well"? Why does Slashdot have to look like every generic blog on the planet? Also, why did we go back to the "Load More Comments" Hell? The "Load All Comments" was a better way to handle it. Now you have to play "Hunt the Wumpus" to get more commentary.

Re:Need a classic option for seasoned users

[basscomm]

Why would you want to read part of a lengthy discussion, maybe even participate, and then come back to the discussion a few minutes or hours later and easily be able to check new comments or even replies to your comments? That's crazy talk.

No, no. When you get to a busy discussion, clicking "Load more comments" and praying that it loaded the comment you replied to, or your own comments. That feels right. Slashdot should feel like work, since we're all browsing it from work anyway.

Vim style shortcuts are missing :@

[dark-templer]

Well, the appearance sure seems better. However, please please enable vim shortcuts 'j', 'k' and optionally 'h', 'l' for comments To my knowledge slashdot was among to adopt, now gmail, (former google-reader), 9gags, google-plus and even recently facebook (in most places) are supporting these keys. It is shame for slashdot as pioneer and such a perfect functionality forgot to put these shortcuts while most slashdot reader are geeks who prefer to use keyboard!

Catering to the iPrecious

[Lawrence_Bird]

width is native iPhone piss off with that

its also a little too corporate in look for my taste
don't hate it but its just .. sterile.

My list of suggestions

[sootman]

Things I don't like:

• Do
• Not
• Put
• Images
• In
• Front
• Page
• Stories

As for changes you SHOULD make:

• UTF-8 support, so I can copy and paste text from a page with smart quotes and not have it look like ass.
• A basic rich-text editor for comments. Bold, ital, underline, link, OL, UL, and quote should about do it. Strikethrough, superscript, and subscript if you wanna get fancy.

Finally, make ULs work properly when you click "preview". (And maybe "submit". Not sure about that. I'll let you know in a bit.)

Low Res

[gd2shoe]

Unlike the current design, it did not scale to fit my 1400x1050 screen, leaving large whitespace borders on both edges. If that's what it does on a 4:3 screen with a narrower horizontal resolution than many modern widescreen "high definition" displays, then this is a bad thing.

It also doesn't work well on my laptop 1024x768 screen. (Yeah, I know that's low, but It's a laptop. People are still using this resolution, making it a good minimum gauge.)

The font is larger, but the real problem is the right-hand panel that takes up too much room. This compresses the comments, forcing them to take more vertical space and making the conversation harder to follow. The font size and extra whitespace give a more open feel, but they exacerbate the conversation problem.

Remember, Slashdot comments aren't loved because we can read what others have written. They're loved because we can hold conversations. Anything that detracts from being able to hold or follow conversations will make Slashdot less popular.

Re:Low Res

[gd2shoe]

Also, threads don't collapse, and we don't get a moderation breakdown.

(If I'm moderating, I want to know if someone has reached a true 5, or if the score merely appears to be 5 because of karma or foaf bonus, for instance.)

Re:Low Res

[Soulskill]

Remember, Slashdot comments aren't loved because we can read what others have written. They're loved because we can hold conversations. Anything that detracts from being able to hold or follow conversations will make Slashdot less popular.

Thanks for the feedback, and for stating this so well.

Re:Low Res

[gd2shoe]

Welcome.

Re:Low Res

[msorelle]

Remember, Slashdot comments aren't loved because we can read what others have written. They're loved because we can hold conversations. Anything that detracts from being able to hold or follow conversations will make Slashdot less popular.

I'm afraid that ship has already sailed, but this change certainly won't help.

At they rate they should probably just redirect folks to somewhere like Engadget (since that seems like the inspiration) or simply replace the comment system with disqus and call it a day.

Re:Low Res

[skegg]

* Same here: excessive white-space down the left & right-hand side of the page.
* As others have said, the presentation of comments is off-putting.
* Images at the top of each article are a waste of space; dump them and display the full bloody summary instead !

Let me put it this way:
I used to visit Engadget a couple of times a day (I currently visit Slashdot more often). However after Engadget adopted their current design, I'd say I now visit them about once every 1 or 2 weeks. I love the content, I just detest how it's being presented to me. And now you guys are going down the same path ?!

You've been told. The rest is up to you.

Re:Low Res

[elashish14]

Images at the top of each article are a waste of space; dump them and display the full bloody summary instead !

Seconded. Summaries are infinitely more informative than images. Images don't tell the story - words do. Do people really need to see a picture of Edward Snowden or a Kindle to better understand the article? No, they do not by any means.

Just generally speaking, are you guys even asking why you need to make these changes before you do them? How do you think they possibly help the site? In /.'s 15+ years of operation, have you not figured out the formula yet? Your audience is unique, and your website is too. Don't just turn /. into a generic site - there's plenty of other ones just like that. Keep it like it is guys, it's not broken, don't try to fix it.

Re:Low Res

[houstonbofh]

I do web development for a living. The 1024 x 768 market share is small enough these days that I use 1280 x 768 as my current minimum target.

You are also tossing out all the people that do not brows full screen. Like me. You choice, but what exactly do you get for eliminating all those people?

Re:Low Res

[tibit]

Why won't you hire actual, you know, people who do usability professionally, and have them tell the designer folks what should be the constraints for design? Unfortunately, most designers demonstrably suck in the usability department. They simply don't have the training nor understanding necessary to do it right, in spite of the correct examples glaring at them from stuff that has been around for very, very long before they were born...

Re:Low Res

[Imazalil]

A lot less people complaining about the page not being wide enough and that there's too much wasted space on the sides. :)

I'll show myself out.

Re:Low Res

[illiteratewithdrawal]

I agree with the majority of the comments here. The discussion/comments section is very important. Also, being able to scroll quickly through the latest headlines is important...adding huge generic photos does not help read an article (yes, I know they can be turned off but should still have never been placed there at all). The new version, even with "classic" mode turned on, has a ton of wasted space on the sides of the center column. The current version is much easier to read and consume information quickly. Photos, unless representing tables or graphs, do not add any valuable information. The older look maybe is starting to look a little dated but at least the functionality is still there. It is a strain to read through the submissions on the beta. Please keep the original look. I believe this is going down a slippery slope towards becoming a generic news aggregation site like any number out there. Keep going down this route and I'd worry that the next thing to go will be the "News for Nerds" moniker.

Re:Low Res

[hendrikboom]

The biggest mistake designers usually make is to prefer graphics and graphical layout to legible text.
They like to de-emphasize text by making it small. Perhaps graphic designers all have better eyesight than us ordinary screen readers.

Ant the browser manufacturers haven't helped by scaling the minimum-size graphics at the same time as the text. So if you want the text to be larger, you inevitably end up with lines that are too wide for the page.

-- hendrik

Re:Low Res

[tibit]

Maybe they just don't fucking read books. It may be that simple :(

How about adding Unicode, IPv6 support?

[unixisc]

How about /. makes changes that improve the actual features, such as supporting Unicode, or IPv6, as opposed to doing a overhaul of the entire UI? Or not have to type X/HTML tags?

Wonder whether this will be the GNOME3 or the Metro of /.? ;-)

Don't do it!

[ChillerMethod]

Why are you making Slashdot feel like some kid's wordpress? Keep the full width fluid design! fixed width is for new designers who don't know how to cope with intelligent design. I ask that you give us a "Classic view" but that would undermine the urgency of my subject line.

Images? Really?

[znanue]

The first thing that I see that I dislike is the presence of images. I want to read articles at work and I love that Slashdot is minimalistic and looks like a tech site. My employers understand people reading tech sites as a way to keep on top of things, clear the mind, read something relevant to the profession, etc. etc. Whereas, if I were to cruise perez hilton, they might have some concerns.

Slashdot is also awesome in that it mostly lets the words do the communication. Images might be in the linked to articles but I feel like a natural degradation will come in the quantity and quality of the words if the editors feel they can get away with just posting an image to communicate the same ideas.

The contrast between posts is so low that on my shitty work monitors its very difficult to visually separate the content. At first, the images seemed to be a detail of the post above the image, not below. It is prettier, but it is less "readable". I don't want a slashdot that mimics every clean responsive design site on the planet. I want visually parsable ideas. Actually, I kinda want it to be ugly, and techlike in general.

Incomplete Summaries -Fail

[JimMcc]

The title says it all. I don't want to have to load a new page, along with all the comments to read the whole summary. Additionally, with more and more people using mobile devices, loading a new page with a whole whack of comments that won't necessarily be read, just to get the whole summary, is a waste of metered bandwidth.

Incredibly wasteful of screen space.

[dbc]

The good: cleaner design over all.

The bad: "classic" view wastes huge amounts of screen space. Yuk.

The very, very bad: The new default view wastes ginormous amounts of screen space on images I don't want to see on the headline page, or wait for to load.

Over all, a slower, less functional web site that I'm sure some misguided designer is very proud of. If I wanted to see lots of white space, I can always go to about:blank. Slashdot should be providing actual, you know, content.

Hurr.

[bmo]

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

Re:Hurr.

[bmo]

http://postimg.org/image/ucbqrq6fn/

>stripping html used in quoting or emphasis.

Because nobody ever uses this, ever.

--
BMO

Re:Hurr.

[CRC'99]

This is so visually insulting that the only criticism I can give it is "start over."

Wow - you showed more compassion than me ;)

Maybe I am a luddite...

[FaxeTheCat]

... but what the heck: With the new design as demonstrated, I will probably pretty much stop reading /. Way to little use of the horizontal real estate, and way too much wasted vertical space. Spending more time scrolling than reading is not a good way to spend my time. Too bad, but life goes on...

Re:Maybe I am a luddite...

[Darinbob]

I think all old school nerds are considered luddites by the new nerds.

Re:Maybe I am a luddite...

[uninformedLuddite]

The problem is that the new nerds thing that a 555 is trendy text speak for snakiness.

Re:Maybe I am a luddite...

[uninformedLuddite]

s/thing/think

Many Sites Look Like That Now

[dcollins]

And I don't spend time on any of them.

What a piece of shit. Go work for Yahoo or something.

Dont go the way of lifehacker

[Mistakill]

They killed off the support for the blog view, and now the site is terrible to read... i prefer slashdot in its current form...

Re:Dont go the way of lifehacker

[Megane]

That's a Gawker site, isn't it? They're all terrible to read in exactly the same way. And whoever did this redesign apparently has a hard-on for them.

less information

[globaljustin]

I liked the last design more.

yep...it's not just *resistance to change* (what all designers tell themselves after a site re-design)

>the redesign gives **less** information per square unit of screen space
>it has too much whitespace and looks like a blog
>user profile pages do not have a 'list' style view for a user's comments, only a low-information sort of blogroll summary

everyone likes photos, but the whitespace of their

containers is wasteful and looks amateurish

Inefficient

[supertall]

Wasted space, useless pictures, makes digesting the news more difficult.

Don't like it

[pesho]

Color scheme looks nice. Too much wasted space both on white-space and useless and very large pics. You should know that most of your readers come to the website not because of the looks, but because of the content. Don't dilute the content with wasted space.

far too much wasted space - poor handling of text

[Lee_Dailey]

howdy y'all,

problems ...
- far too much wasted space
the right-hand 3/5ths of the screen is taken up by non-story stuff.
- even more wasted space
i'm seeing a 2 cm wide border area on both the right and the left sides. why waste that space?
- poor handing of text zoom
i have poor vision and the site STILL goes wonky when the text zoom is set to anything higher than 100%. i usually browse at 120% or even 140%.
- front page summaries are not shown
that is also quite annoying in that i can't tell when someone has been ego-masturbating with the title. usually, the summary gives a hint about the quality of the title ... and thus the article.

take care,
lee

Just saw this as of about 5 minutes ago

[TheResilientFarter]

Says it was posted 1 hour ago. Didn't see it until about 5 minutes ago.

Two thumbs DOWN

[drussell]

Wow, I hope this is actually more of an 'ALPHA' or some sort of trial balloon.... If this is supposed to be 'BETA', that implies there's been some sort of testing and supposedly some thought would have already gone into it yet I can't imagine who would actually think this is better. I preferred the simpler PREVIOUS layout years ago to the current one, but I got used to it even though it's far more bloated as I disliked the changes but it was at least the same basic style.

This new layout wastes even MORE space... Everywhere... I didn't think that would even be possible. Even with the silly photos turned off and whatnot, there's far LESS useful information on every part of every page! More scrolling, even more wasted space, exceptionally poorly laid out comments screen, ICK!.. ICK to it all! BLECH!... Horrible. Absolutely horrible... I simply don't know what else to say.

I didn't think they could possibly make it worse than it already is now, but whoa!! What were these guys thinking!?

Can I please go back to the previous layout from a few years ago? It worked great in any browser on any device. This "new" stuff is just plain bad. At least it still looks partially OK in lynx (unlike many sites, but that's certainly not saying much), but with a bunch more cruft at the top before you get to actually read anything useful. Argh!

Bring on the GAMMA version!

Re:Two thumbs DOWN

[Soulskill]

Wow, I hope this is actually more of an 'ALPHA' or some sort of trial balloon.... If this is supposed to be 'BETA', that implies there's been some sort of testing and supposedly some thought would have already gone into it yet I can't imagine who would actually think this is better.

We did have some feedback from the alpha testers, and we made some changes in response. However, the pool of users was quite limited, and we're well aware that we'll find a much broader range of opinions now that the floodgates are opened. We definitely want to hear what everyone thinks. Sorry you don't like it -- but we are listening, and we're going to iterate further.

What's the problem that the redesign fixes?

[s7uar7]

Most of us here are cynical old(ish) tech guys and gals that value content over form; the content on /. being the comments, not the 2 and 3 day old stories. Has anyone actually complained about a problem with the current design or is this just (another) redesign for the sake of a redesign?

Re:What's the problem that the redesign fixes?

[narcc]

Some people have complained about the lack of a moderation breakdown, the addition of even more unnecessary javascript, and lack of unicode support. It doesn't seem to offer users anything new.

Also, it completely sucks.

Please no

[mvar]

Can't we just go back to the 2000ish design? Really, please? The current design took me something like 6 months to get used to. I bet most slashdot readers don't care for any fancy looking shit, this isn't arstechnica or digg.

Re:Please no

[drussell]

Can't we just go back to the 2000ish design? Really, please? The current design took me something like 6 months to get used to. I bet most slashdot readers don't care for any fancy looking shit, this isn't arstechnica or digg.

Seconded!

I couldn't agree more!

Re:Please no

[Hey_bob]

Seriously! I'm fine with the occasional light amounts of polish and tweaks, but this is way too much.

I remember when the big issue on Slashdot was Taco's X key not working.

*Sigh* my lawn, get off it.. and don't implement this interface.

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[lexman098]

When you buy a bigger desk, the papers on your desk don't get bigger. Instead, you can see more papers.

They would get bigger if desk and paper technology was "cutting edge". It seems like a useful feature, physically impossible as it is.

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[green1]

When we bought computers we thought we wouldn't have to be stuck with a format that's thousands of years old... I'm tired of UI designers who want everything to look like something we used hundreds or thousands of years ago. We don't have to do that on computers, and it holds us back!

Unlearn anything from Gawker

[Dracos]

I briefly looked at the beta home page. Briefly, because it felt very much like the Gawker redesign from a couple years ago that made those sites (I only really read Jalopnik) a jumbled, discordant, unnavigable mess. FWIW, Jalopnik is the only bookmark I've ever deleted from my bookmarks bar... that's how incensed I was about it.

Two main things:

• Don't try to mash the newest three stories into a single picture collage. Every item on the homepage needs to have the blurb, period. Pictures are usually noise for most /. stories, and most of this audience will not tolerate it: you are not aimed at the average user.
• If a story is going to have a picture masthead, put it between the headline and the blurb. Above the headline, the pictures lose most if not all context.

If Nick Denton had anything to do with this redesign, even casually or tangentially, please let us know so we can riot. That idiot has no idea what he's doing.

Re:Unlearn anything from Gawker

[Megane]

FYI, the most recent main page redesign has made Jalopnik somewhat less sucky. Also the comments section is now barely tolerable again (that horizontally scrolling bullshit is gone, and it's much more like the two-column comments they had for a while, only with end-of-page insertion instead of having to click a button. But I only read, not post, so I don't know how bad posting comments may still be.

Yuck

[cpuffer_hammer]

Yuck,
fixed width
busy

Learned helplessness?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, having watched so many websites get a 'redesign' that is significantly WORSE than the original, and watched Microsoft bring out 'The Ribbon' and 'Metro', which most users hate, I sometimes wonder if all of this is being done on purpose. We have the new 'standard' website design being light grey text on a white background (including Slashdot...) which is really hard to read, with many sites going all out to make some of their text almost impossible to see, let alone read. This is clearly stupid and contrary to the entire purpose of a website- to let people READ your content.
It's as if all web designers and user interface designers have drunk some sort of 'learned helplessness' Kool-Aid, and are dead set on making the user experience as bad as possible. Don't even get me started on glossy screens and 'wide' screens (I think they mean SHORT screens), which are again a step backwards.
Google 'Frankfurt School' and 'learned helplessness'. No matter how insane these changes are (e.g. Google Mail), the companies responsible just ignore the overwhelming negative response and don't even try to explain their insane decisions.

Perhaps the CRETINS responsible for the hideous new design can come on Slashdot and tell us how clever they are, and WHY they came up with this crappy design?

I thought not.

Re:Learned helplessness?

[Megane]

This is clearly stupid and contrary to the entire purpose of a website- to let people READ your content.

You almost but not quite got it there. On most web sites, the content is the article. Comments are there just to let people whine about how it's Obamas fault, or post "I LUVZ BEIBER", so who gives a fuck if they're 85% gray text on 15% gray background at 85% font size?

Slashdot is basically a link aggregator site, so the "article" (aka The Fine Summary) isn't the "hero", it's the headlines and the comments. And whoever did the redesign apparently doesn't comprehend that basic fact.

The comment system on Slashdot is all about making it efficient to read a buttload of comments, and previous redesigns have been evolutionary, so they've managed to keep that basic function.

The new redesign is all about Web 3.0 wanking, not about usability. It's basically a bunch of egotistical snotty web desiiiiiigner cum squirted all over the page.

I like the "Classic" mode

[fa2k]

The "Classic" design (drop down on top of story column) is pretty decent. I get the same amount of text on a page as in the old slashdot. The comment system has been covered above, I agree with everyone that it's too narrow. Bordering on a "WTF". Also, I think the font is about half a pt too small.

The images; I don't think most of us slashdot readers come here to experience beauty. But if they're relevant then images are good. E.g. if it's some new gadget like the steam controller, then I wouldn't mind a picture. However, please don't just stick stock images on the stories, and keep them of the "classic" front page.

Just my 2 cents.

[Quantum gravity]

There are some nice improvements but I prefer to be able to view all recent stories on the main page by scrolling a little bit, which works great with old design because it doesn't have a fixed width. Also I don't like the new fonts because the appear to take more space. And I miss the ability to filter the comments. Previously one could filter to only see, for instance, the insightful comments, or easily decide to view the -1 comments or not. Those controls are no longer available. Please remove the fixed width and bring back the old fonts. And consider making the images on the front page somewhat smaller.

Holy fuckolies

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's bad. And I mean REALLY freaking bad, like the love child of a drunken encounter between Win8 and Yahoo News. [shudder]

Someone upthread said that making this change would kill Slashdot. I read that before clicking through to the beta, and thought the person was being a drama addict. Now that I've seen the binary abomination, I'm convinced that comment is right.

In fact, it's so bad that it looked like something you guys would post as one of your painfully lame April Fool's Day jokes.

Don't. Do. This. You. Morons.

sucks

[apcullen]

The slashdot home page, as it is, is clean and simple. I can read my news for nerds headlines quickly and browse through the stories that interest me. The Beta is not an improvement at all.

Fix Everything

[scribble73]

MISTAKE NUMBER ONE to never make:

After writing about 90% of a thoughtful, detailed comment, your f**king comment software suddenly blinked my comment out of existence.

This is the number one reason why a commenter leaves a website. Number two: Oppressive over moderation. Number three: spam negligence.

I haven't got time now, so I'll get to the point: Don't change the font. White space is your enemy on slashdot. Bring back some curvy corners. GET RID of that awful floating menu bar. It feels like I have an eyelash in my eye. Respect your commenters: No one comes here for your home page. We come here to talk with each other about what we find on your home page. and FIX YOUR COMMENT SOFTWARE.

Re:Fix Everything

[Megane]

Don't change the font.

I told Seamonkey to use Lucida Grande as my sans-serif font and un-checked "Allow documents to use other fonts". It breaks the silly icon fonts that Gawker sites use, but fuck them.

slashdot is the comment subject!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to say a few things about the beta layout and design. One of the wonderful things about the current and past slashdot designs is that it uses the main content (the text snippets and such) for a major part of the design, with enough contrast to let your eyes easily track where one piece of info begins and ends.

With the beta design, your eyes do not know where exactly to go or where the flow of things are. Am i looking at an image related to a posting or an ad? the top area where three postings are grouped together looks like someone used a CSS float where they should not have.

There is no "pop" color to keep the design from looking too bland and to direct your eyes. this, along with the very light backgrounds used in the middle, makes the design look rather washed out.

It is not easy to quickly scan the site and look for content you are interested in. that is one of the nice things about the current and previous designs.

What we have learned

[radarskiy]

The average Slashdot poster is a senior citizen that maximizes every goddamned window.

Re:not my problem

[XcepticZP]

Here you go Now kindly follow that link, it's your going away present. Don't come here again, and please leave your geek card at the front desk. That's assuming you ever got one in the first place.

ABSO-FSCKING-LUTELY NOT!

[ewhac]

You are forbidden from deploying this design. Dear $(GOD), what the hell is the matter with you? Who told you this was a good idea? Which three-pleat consultant said that this highly technical readership wanted this site to look like a fluffy blog with fscktons of whitespace? How much money did s/he take from you? Have you caught them yet?

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.

Does. Not. Work.

This is real, pathetically simple, Mr. S:

• Install Firefox.
• Install NoScript plugin. Leave at default settings.
• Surf to your site.

If your site does not operate correctly using this browser setup, --== YOUR SITE IS BROKEN!!==-- Please do not assume that the users on this of all sites are fscking morons who leave their browsers in an insecure state and happily execute just Any Damned Script. You're lucky I'm willing to whitelist fsdn.com, but just who the fsck is rpxnow.com, or ooyala.com?

Scrap the whole damned thing and start over. Better still: Don't start over. It's fine the way it is.

Re:ABSO-FSCKING-LUTELY NOT!

[SGT CAPSLOCK]

This guy's got it right! I don't want to navigate a bunch of bullshit personalization settings in order to be able to get to meat of a web site. Aside from that, excess javascript is the very reason that I use noscript in the first place.

Aside from the thick fucking white borders, the ugly "this domain has been parked, here's some ads (articles, really - look more closely)" interface, and the tremendous abuse of javascript, there's also the matter of usability. Let's say that I whitelist this site with noscript. Well, now I get LOOK-THE-FUCK-AT-ME giant tooltips explaining that it's alright to click on things at the top of the page every single time I visit it because I have my browser set up to delete all cookies/history/etc upon closing a tab.

In such a case, I also have to navigate those bullshit personalization settings I mentioned in order to disable the gigantic/distracting images, leaving only the article summaries which are in fact tinier than the images themselves. Now it looks like I'm on some beta version of a Wordpress blog that a kid just set up.

Well, I guess I'm not really fighting against this. If this is the direction that Slashdot thinks that it should go, then by all means, do it. If it happens though, don't expect to retain your usual base of contributors.

Neat trick in Chrome browser

[J053]

Just discovered - if you zoom to > 150% in Chrome/Chromium, the annoying sidebars and the top "menu" junk all disappear - you just get the stories/comments, and at higher zoom factors the text flows properly.

Re:Neat trick in Chrome browser

[Megane]

Ditto in current Seamonkey. I think it's a relatively recent update to what browsers do to layouts when you zoom in. I've seen it working on a lot of sites with stupid sidebars. It still doesn't make sidebars a sensible thing to do.

Not a redesign

[DerekLyons]

Slashdot's biggest redesign effort ever

This isn't a redesign - it's a fundamental replacement of how the site functions. Looking at the beta is like visiting Amazon.com and finding Flickr.com instead.

Frankly, the new commenting 'system' sucks - the comment area is too narrow for useful indenting, and you've taken away the bars the separate one comment from another. In the name of looking "l33t and h1p!11!!!11" you've basically torn the heart out of the most basic function of the site.

The less said about boring, generic, and derivative overall look, the better.

Slashdot is, and always will be, something of a fringe site. That's a function of the content and the community, not of the site design. It's not hip and trendy, and it never will be.

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[Kielistic]

Why do you keep posting this?! The whole point of responsive design is to adapt to the user. If you want two windows side-by-side it will work. If I want one big window on then it will also work. Do you not see how that is better? And foolishly limiting what the user can do is seen as worse?

Broken

[nightsky30]

Signup link seems broken. :P I guess I like it somewhat. They could use a bit more of the side margins.

what the fuck?

[larry bagina]

are you fucking kidding me?

Tweak the front page and focus on the comments

[egranlund]

Make the comments wider and the stories on the front page a little easier to tell apart.

1) The comments are way too narrow. Look at a place like reddit. I think of slashdot as the more tech-oriented reddit where the empathizes is on commenting and reading the comments. Due to this, many people post long comments, having them all smashed just makes it harder to read. I don't come to Slashdot to read the articles, I come here to read the comments.

2) Right now on the front page it's difficult to glance and see each story because everything is the same color. Take a look at the current page - each story has a bright green line which makes them very easy to quickly scan and figure out which one you want to read.

Another New Design?

[rtconner]

I haven't even gotten used to the current site design yet. Sheeesh.

I don't like the beta. Current 1 is more effective

[tecnico]

I like the current design compared to the beta. It has better contrast that help me do a quick glance and pick the headlines fast enough, I can also read more stories and comments. The beta makes Slashdot look like another mashable with stuff all over. If you want to change, better lead with something innovative rather than following the herd.

Well, it was fun while it lasted...

[Anonymous Coward]

The moment this design is live, I'm gone.

The focus of any slashdot redesign should be 80-90% on the comments. The team COMPLETELY missed the mark.

It's like they didn't even know what their site is used for.

Looks like:

[morethanapapercert]

Totally looks like www.crackedhistory.com ...

...and that's not a good thing....

Complaining punters == Marketing problem

[Aguazul2]

Oh, yes, this is absolutely a "beta, so you'll get used to it" not a "beta so we can get feedback". Otherwise you'd see at least a little editor participation in the comments.

If they don't like it, the problem is for the marketing department to solve! I seem to remember this with copy-controlled CDs (aka corrupt CDs).

Big Fan

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like the totally unrelated graphics interspersed on the thin line of text down the middle of my screen.

Slashdot copies Gawker....

[Lumpy]

Oh dear god, even slower loading and even more CSS and JS to make it even more of a bandwidth hog.

How about writing it for speed and less ohh shiny? Really JS fade in of photos?

I am not against a redesign, I am against the rampaging throngs of Webdesigners that think more and more shiny is far more important than load times and useability.

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[Oligonicella]

Seriously? Paper cannot get bigger. What a worthless comparison. Most people put their desk papers in stacks and move the necessary ones into the middle to work on.

Any other Slashdot-alike sites? (Just in case)

[Aguazul2]

Do you know any other sites like Slashdot I should consider reading if this goes to the wall? It took a year to find a reasonable Reader substitute. How long to get a reasonable Slashdot substitute?

Re:collapsable comments

[Soulskill]

This is a good point -- thanks.

Re:not my problem

[Oligonicella]

I'm guessing he probably doesn't bite the heads off of chickens. Don't project.

Just Another Cockup by Corporate Overloards

[JimMcc]

If I could reply, I would add a reply to my prior comment about incomplete summaries. Now that I'm on my desktop I can see that there is a goofy multi-bar icon, and when I click on it I can select classic view. Or at least pseudo classic view.

What's with the fixed width content and all the white space? Yuck. Please let me pick the width of the content area by changing the width of the window.

What's with all the white space. Did WalMart have a sale on blank pixels?

What happened to the "From the ... Dept." tag under the title. Are we now too grown up for levity?

Why is the fortune cookie now virtually invisible in small font with a low contrast?

The whole new look and feel, the removal or minimization of light-hearted portions of the site, and other features give me a strong sense that your corporate overlords have decided that you should look just like all the other sites that various corporate overlords control.

Increasingly /. seems to becoming irrelevant. I read Google News before getting to /. and increasingly I've already read stories about an issue before I get to /., sometimes days earlier. Slashdot used to be a site where one could find interesting stories about the tech world that generally weren't covered in the mainstream press, or at least we'd learn about them before they became mainstream. Not so much anymore. The new layout seems to be completing /.'s trip to being a JANS. (Just Another News Site)

Re:Just Another Cockup by Corporate Overloards

[Soulskill]

What happened to the "From the ... Dept." tag under the title. Are we now too grown up for levity?

It's only viewable on the actual story page, now. Do you strongly prefer them on the front page?

Thanks for the feedback.

I will of course be reading in classic.

[Oligonicella]

If that is made impossible later, I will of course be reading elsewhere.

The new design: Barbarians at the gate.

[MRe_nl]

I think it's horrible.
Sorry, you wanted feedback and this is mine.
It looks like a comic-book with half the images removed.
I'm a reader, give me no images, a wall of text and the comments. They are by far the best part of /.
High text density, high information density.
If your designers aren't a fan of the above they shouldn't be (re)designing /. as far as I'm concerned.

Re:collapsable comments

[harperska]

Yep, came here to post exactly that. Slashdot is the last comment board on the internet with truly threaded conversations where you can see at a glance who is replying to whom. That, I think, is the greatest strength of the comment section layout, and is completely lost with the redesign. My eyes hurt after a while trying to follow tab indentation for thread depth. Also, completely agree with being able to hide idiot posters below a certain score threshold. I wish the rest of the internet had a way of hiding all "-1 Troll" comments.

Can I haz sum

[nightsky30]

Looks like you bought a truck load of Coming Soon's...

meh

[BagOBones]

- News uses less than what 1/3 of the horizontal space not including the polls, everything is crammed in a narrow strip down the middle of the screen.
- bright blank white space on each side is great than the content section as a whole at 1920X1080
- contrast of new design makes reading harder some how.
- Comments are awful; due to the compressed layout and the fact they aren't boxed in as well as the old system
- loaded it on my iPhone, and waited... and waited... slow and the banner ad that loaded made the layout break. big step backward from the current mobile option

Bottom line I am hard pressed to find anything positive here...

Re:Gonna miss Slashdot

[Darinbob]

Actually I think "mailto:" links are becoming obsolete. So many people use web mail these days.

Why i come to slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I seem to come to slashdot as a collector. A collector of information/stories. I visit it many a day to see what i missed from the last time i visited.
A simple look where i see many things at once lends it self well to this behavior. If you make all those articles really vertically large with photos in them, I don't actually get to quickly see where i left off, and what items i should collect/consume. Coming to a page where it's harder to know where you left off makes it more confusing. Makes it harder for me to know what i missed and need to collect, and in so I give up this collection.

Use this as your site layout and I leave.

[Dwedit]

If you make this the preferred site layout, I'll simply leave Slashdot. You have competition now, don't fuck up.

Slashdot's new Metro design

[Somebody Is Using My]

It's the Windows 8 of Slashdot. Big panels, a flatter look, pastels, lots of wasted space. A lot of focus on form, none on the content. Big pictures, big fonts; lots of extra mouse movement to navigate. Change seemingly for the sake of change rather than to improve problem areas. Yeah, I see a lot of similarities.

Dice has always seemed more interested in catering to business users than us geeky tech types. Just as Microsoft alienated the nerds who supported it, this new design of Slashdot might finally drive away the geeks. I bet the management types will love it, though.

Boustrophedon

[tepples]

When we bought computers we thought we wouldn't have to be stuck with a format that's thousands of years old

Human eyes are hundreds of thousands of years old. Long lines of text are harder to read because the eyes tend to skip or repeat lines. To avoid this, you have to write in boustrophedon where every other line is mirrored.

Please don't...

[Endloser]

but if you do, allow me to use the old, useful site.
I mean if I wanted to visit Digg I would roll over and die.

Puns and jabs aside...
Thanks for trying, but isn't the addage, "If it ain't broke don't fix it"?
This simply feels like a developer got bored and tried to justify their existence.
In fact, it seems that by adding all the unnecessary crap, the new site takes away what I love about /.
The site used to care more about content and relevancy than shiny break your browser markup and photographs.

So while it is true that everything changes, rember that everything dies too.

Re:Awful

[Jim Hall]

It's 2013. Supporting mobile devices at the same time as the high-resolution desktops should be a no-brainer. But the beta site looks pretty bad on mobile. On my phone, the new site design does quite a lot of scrolling to the right, mostly thanks to a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge ad at the top. Also, the site pops up a message box that disappears off the left side of my screen, rendering half the message unreadable.

jh

why open in a new page?

[__aaacoe2998]

Why not make it with a "show more" link that expands, even showing comments, and "show less" to go back to the topics? When I hit back, it shows the beta hints again. Interesting design. probably looks better on a tablet in portrait. Unfortunately, my monitor is in landscape mode. If the 50% wasted space is for ads, adblocker and noscript is gonna block them.

What's with the giant useless images?!

[ConceptJunkie]

If I want to browse pictures, I'll go to Flickr. What brain-dead suit forced this design on a bunch of devs who hate it as much as every single reader who has responded here?

Leave Slashdot Alone

[turp182]

Seriously, leave the forma alone.

hate it

[towermac]

And who is the evil bastard that wants to kill slashdot?

Just what is so difficult..

[WebCowboy]

...about layout that is fluid/elastic? What makes it on par with aerospace engineering? IT ISN'T THAT HARD! It is not that much to ask for really! Using browser's full width has been done successfully on /. for many years now--what is with this throwback to fixed width that leaves 50% of my maximised browser window blank? I to NOT want to party like it's 1999!

Leave the shiney-chromey left and right columns fixed for all I care, but PLEASE--push them to the EDGES and use the flexible space for the main content.

I do like the updated style/presentation, I am not looking for the site to do ALL the thinking for me--the ONLY thing I am really wanting is a website that uses the width of my browser! The existing/old site does this already so it CANT BE THAT HARD. In my opinion that ONE thing would transform the beta site from one I'd spend minimal time on to one that would be my home page. HONESTLY.

Re:Just what is so difficult..

[morethanapapercert]

You fool! You've doomed us all! Your lack of seething hatred for the beta, indeed the audacity to say neutral things about it, gives Timothy/Soulskill et al the chance to cherry-pick your comment and believe that they haven't failed as massively as the rest of us claim.

Seriously though, You're still voting in favour of:

1) larger default text

2) huuuuuuuuge amounts of whitespace (which we are cynically certain will become ad space as soon as it's out of beta)

3) useless stock photos whose sole purpose are eye magnets

4) a photo-mosaic approach to summarizing the top stories in the default view. (I'm sure anyone with vision issues is gonna hate this)

5) Crippling the nested/threaded comment system. Which; as many have pointed out, is an important, I dare say critical and fundamental component of /.

6) More obvious whoring out to social media venues, a phenomenon which a rather large and vocal portion of us hate and bash at every opportunity. (C'mon Soulskill, do you really think many of us are going to link to here on Facebook? And even if we did, would you *want* the kind of yammerheads you'd catch casting a net in those waters?)

7) an overall marketing and packaging approach more suited to a glossy magazine than a salon where the articles are stimulators for lively conversation, debate and even outright arguing over by a self selected group of reasonably intelligent people. (trolls notwithstanding) Shallow glitz over actual content.

Re:Just what is so difficult..

[ceoyoyo]

I've had just this argument right here on Slashdot. The web was designed to be fluid. Absolute layout should never have been added to the standard. All the trendy wanna-be artsy types can't figure out how to do decent looking flexible layouts (the real artists can, but there aren't that many of them) so they all design magazine pages instead.

Fortunately they put so much crap on the sides I usually just zoom until that bit gets cut off.

Ouch.

[tamyrlin]

I don't want to sound too negative, so I'll limit myself to my major concerns:

* The current version has very clear boundaries between stories in the form of the green bar. (Same for (expanded) comments.) With the new design it is simply harder to find these boundaries.
* Why all the wasted space in this new design? If I want a narrow column I'll just resize my web browser. The old layout was good because it allowed me to quickly scan through a lot of stories to select the ones that interested me. Same with comments. With the new design I need to scroll quite a bit more before having seen all the content.
* Speaking of comments, what is going on with the comment system? I hope the limited comment functionality (for example, lack of folding, etc) is just due to the fact that this is a beta.

Fresh Take, Same Data

[lunadude]

Looks more modern. Who knew there were images associated with the stories? Ha.

Current design trends the worst in history

[FuzzNugget]

This current era of design trends -- the flattened, one-dimensional, oversimplified, pastel, decontextualized paradigm -- is one of the worst in design history.

Windows 8, ThinkPad chiclet keyboards, the Facebook timeline, achingly elongated iOS transitions ... it's not just form before function anymore, it's "fuck function, make it pretty!"

God help us.

Don't fix what ain't broke.

[TapeCutter]

Glad you posted directly. We're a hard crowd to please, after a very brief look my main objections are...
1. Use the whole width of the screen. The narrow width gives the individual comments a ridiculously tall aspect ratio which destroys the flow of the thread. The threads need to stick out like dogs balls for an old fart like me to follow them.
2. Get rid of the pictures on the front page or give the option of a list format that reflects the style of the current front page, thumbnails perhaps?.

Like many other loyal fans, the reason I have posted well over 5K comments, a few stories, and the occasional small donation in the past 10+yrs, is the comment system! There are a billion sites where I can post comments at strangers, but other than chat rooms full of sexually frustrated people, this is the only site where I can hold a conversation with them.

Slashdot will never be the "cool kid", but this "new look" is like Sheldon picking out his own suit, even the geeks are shaking their heads in bewilderment.

Re:Don't fix what ain't broke.

[B1ackDragon]

I agree with these two points. #2 (the obnoxious images on the front page, and "read more..." links after only 4 lines of text so I can't even read the summaries without clicking!) are bad, but the redesign for the comments section will very likely be bad for slashdot.

As I was browsing it, I realized that a single comment like the parent in the current format, that takes up less than a third of my browser viewport (so I can see the flow of conversation around it), takes up over two thirds in the beta format. I feel like "the medium is the message" applies here, or at least, the medium influences the message -- multi-paragraph comments are more common on slashdot than other sites, but if they want to discourage that kind of dialogue, this is a great way to do it.

Re:Don't fix what ain't broke.

[slash.jit]

Totally Agree. The only reason I prefer slashdot over other tech blogs is the lack of images. By lack i meant it was a good feature and not a bug.
Now its like any other tech blog.

I hope they give some feature to not show images .. or I will be forced to use ad-block on slashdot.

I see

[Stumbles]

So your just going for the Wordpress look; not impressed or likeable.

ARRRRGH!

[hduff]

I. Hate. Change.

Get. Off. My. Lawn.

Annoying things

[fox171171]

Large white space on either side is presumably to cater to vertically orientated crappy ass tablets and phones. Just like Windows 8.

Does it fix the most annoying thing about Slashdot (and I don't mean idiot posters)? The auto refresh!

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[tamyrlin]

I'm using A3 paper when appropriate and A4 paper when appropriate. However, if my printer suddenly starts to print A4 sized content (or even A5 sized content) on the A3 paper I actually wanted to print it to I'm getting mighty irritated.

Narrow little content stripe in sea of whitespace

[Mike Van Pelt]

What almost everyone else is saying, I'll just add my vote -- Slashdot is about **CONTENT**. I want information density. Vertical screen real estate is precious. I hate beyond all expression of hatred when there's a narrow stripe of the content I'm after, as if I'm reading this on a phone even when I'm on a big monitor. Especially when there's a whole bunch of vertical screen real estate wasting extra whitespace and formatting fluff.

The current layout would drive me to spend more time on ycombinator "hacker news", which I dislike (in comparision to Slashdot) for other reasons. (Fire-hose of constantly moving topics so you can't see just new stuff. Bleah)

Do not change anything

[danielcolchete]

Please! It is perfect just the way it is

Ok, to sum it up

[submain]

- No pictures. Again, please, no pictures.
- The current dark green "boxes" work very well to delimiter articles. It's hard to distinguish between articles in the new version
- Put back the fluid layout. We are all geeks. Many of us run in resolutions like 5760x1080 across three monitors, and we assume you guys know CSS enough to make a good fluid layout. The current one is not bad at all in that respect.
- Remove hover on top menu. When moving my mouse from the url bar to the page, it is very easy to trigger a massive menu that covers the entire top of the page

You Won't be Seeing My 4-digit ID Around Here...

[srobert]

... anymore, if that's what the page has to look like. Why is the actual content of the article confined to such a narrow column. I can't even de-widthify it with the HacktheWeb plugin. I typically zoom text only in Firefox and with that approach here there's only room for a sentence or so with each story (if that much). Is this going to render well in w3m? Because sometimes I like to browse from the console.

Oh God

[g8oz]

WHY. Incremental updates would have been better. And this is a generic low information density design.

Re:The decay of Slashdot

[tamyrlin]

Personally I'm very interested in the Discourse platform which is being created by some of the stackexchange people. I suspect that a website based on Discourse might become the new "slashdot" in the future.

Although I'm not volunteering to knock up a new slashdot based on discourse :)

You know the reason we're all still here

[eagee]

is because /. hasn't completely turned into the total crap fest other news aggregation sites have, right? If you give me a way to stick with the old design, then ok I'll keep sticking around - but I'm really not impressed with the direction this is headed.

It's New; I hate it!

[EvilSS]

Really, what did you expect? Now get off my lawn!

Re:It's New; I hate it!

[EvilSS]

Actually now that I actually looked at it (again, what did you expect! It's slashdot, we don't RTFA) I kind of sucks. Is there some new skinny portrait mode monitor fad I missed out on here? It's a bit thin.

Don't hide half of each post

[Qwertie]

Yuck! Most articles used to fit entirely on the front page. In fact whenever I was about to go on vacation, I would download a couple of pages of Slashdot to read offline. With half of each (already condensed) article hidden, I can no longer do that. I will not put up with having to click-through to read every article.

It's hard to evaluate the comment section as it's clearly messed up in my Chrome browser. This is a test: is Unicode is still not úppórtèd?

Mod parent up

[jrumney]

I'd mod the parent up, but I'm using the beta.

Just checking...

[davidu]

As long as my UID still exists and shows up... I'm all good with the changes. :-)

Why I have come to Slashdot since 1998

[GeekFreak]

To scroll down a list of "News for nerds; stuff that matters". That has been the beauty of /.: its simplicity in presenting many stories I can scroll quickly through when I have the odd moment to check while at work. It is always open in a tab when I'm online.

I used to visit Ars and /. about equally. I still read Ars, but I no longer keep it open in a tab as their new design makes the 'quick scan' impossible. I've relied on /. as an aggregator of headlines from all my favorite tech/science sites (including Ars). The new design takes away the clean, concise way of presenting so much information so well.

Why fix what ain't broken? The new design is horrible. Please don't. Please.

EPIC FAIL

[Roger Wilcox]

If you are trying to alienate your user base, congratulations. Do you even understand what kind of person reads Slashdot? If this beta peek is any indication, you are utterly clueless.

The homepage layout style on Slashdot for the last 10 years sells all the best aspects of Slashdot to those who might find a home here. It reflects our collective personality. If this new homepage is implemented, the site will fail to appeal to others that resonate with that personality as we do. "Hip and clueless," which seems to be the new design theme, will attract the wrong sort of person to the site and will have a negative impact on the community.

We want content, not glitz. We want function, and form only to support that function. We are techies, engineers, nerds. We don't have any use for the "fancy" wordpresspukevomitblog styling du jour. Give us dense, concise access to the information.

Truly, I sit in awe. It's almost like... you want us to leave Slashdot and never look back. That's how far from the mark you are with this.

Less adds but feels like more?

[KevMar]

The ads stand out way too much on the beta site. I tried it out and my first impression was that it was a site that I would not trust for the news. I thought it was all the ads on the site.

BUT then I went back to the main site and discovered that it was showing me more ads than the beta site. The main top ad was smaller on the beta site. I am not sure what to think. I don't like it because it feels like it is a ad driven site. Before it felt like it was about the content (it just so happened to have ads). Leaves a different impression.

G+?

[rueger]

Why, just yesterday I was saying to my mates, "Hey guys, wouldn't it be keen if Slashdot looked JUST like Google+?"

This redesign is long overdue - all of them "word" thingies keep getting the way of the pretty pictures.

Cannot be avoided...

[nightsky30]

ELinks it is then!

This doesn't render well on my Palm Treo

[sandbagger]

I'm shocked and appalled.

This will kill Slashdot

[Traf-O-Data-Hater]

All the text is jammed in the middle, with the heirarchy a jumbled mass of links. I HATE IT. If this goes ahead, slashdot will wither very quickly. As others have said - make it like it was 10 years ago.

Debate club

[TapeCutter]

"Debate club" is an excellent description! We have something unique here that is so far ahead of the game it looks old fashioned. Slashdot is not a "news" site and never has been, if I want to read a good a news site then I will go to the BBC. The slashdot "story" is just a summary of the (alleged) topic up for debate, it points to one or more articles that are already fine examples of traditional news publishing such as the BBC and invites the reader to express and defend their opinion on it.

The new style is like every other mainstream site because it's coming from a long publishing tradition. Things are set into columns, the columns surround by pictures in a way that's both easy to READ and eye-catching. The newspaper tradition does not expect the reader to insert their own comments within their carefully layed out columns.. Slashdot's format begs the reader to WRITE something. At Slashdot the comments are the content, take the focus away from them and it will rapidly devolve into just another link farm..

Put another way, if the active Slashdot commentators liked the traditional feedback formats of newspaper publishers then there would be no reason for Slashdot to exists. Sites like the BBC would keep the eyeballs on their own site. The comment system is Slashdot's "value add", without it, it's toast. Make it look like a traditional comment system that's normally provided by the real news sites and people will just comment directly on the real news site.

There's a reason people like me came here in the late 90's and are still actively commenting, it's not support for Slashdot in the way one supports a football club, it's support for a genuine alternative to the traditional publishing meme. One that has the ability to turn a story into a conversation, which is something I think is desperately needed to counter the undue influence of the incontestable propaganda statements known as "opinion columns" that dominate the MSM, particularly in the US.

Re:Debate club

[CRC'99]

I agree 100% here. It's just sad that you can't moderate comments above 5 for others to realise how many people actually agree here. I think you'd find it'd be in the thousands....

Re:Debate club

[nmb3000]

Very nicely put. There's a big difference between Slashdot and a news site or even your average news aggregator, both in audience size and professional makeup, and that's what has made the site so successful for so long. You did a great job expressing that -- now hopefully a corporate suit somewhere will read this and (more importantly) understand it.

I'm not hopeful :(

Constructive Criticism

[multimediavt]

Ok, I actually read the comments before I went to the link. OMG, I am a true /.'er now!

Sorry, I had an epiphany in my head on that front as I started typing this. Let me get back to the constructive comments.

I have been doing UI design for 20 years. I started doing interface design for CD-ROM based multimedia projects in 1992. I started designing websites in 1993 with the draft release of HTML 1.0. I don't say this to be arrogant--I say this so that the person reading this comment understands that I am not speaking from ignorance, or just because "I know what I like." I have made award winning interfaces and I've made some real bombs, but I have learned some valuable lessons that I don't think the current editors or design team that created the "redesign" (I'll explain the quotes here later) have learned from doing or from study of good interface design principles.

The best interface is one that is beautiful, simple and gets out of the way to let the content shine. Antithesis analogies jump to mind, "lipstick on a pig," "polishing a turd." You can't make bad content better with a shiny interface, but you can destroy good content with a crappy interface. The new beta design is a crappy interface for the content being displayed. It sacrifices usability and readability for pretty. It kneecaps key features that recurring users/readers/posters enjoy and clutters the screen--albeit a very narrow portion of the screen as has been pointed out numerous times.

Websites are designed for your audience, not yourself or your client. In this case, the audience is the thousands of people that submit, read and comment on your site. Technically, they are the client, not the person paying you to do the design. If your design team hasn't figured that out, then you don't have enough experienced designers on your team. Your audience *IS* your paycheck. No audience, no traffic, no paycheck. Also, what exactly was designed for this "redesign"? Hence, the quotes. It really looks like you took an existing Drupal/Wordpress template and modded some graphics. I seriously hope you didn't pay more than $60.00USD for the template and no more than 100 hours of labor for that design or you REALLY got taken.

When designing your website, take audience feedback seriously and keep them happy. I saw some comments from Soulskill in the threads. One, bad idea to comment on feedback until the feedback period is over. It shows a lack of focus and a tendency to be premature with evaluating feedback. Two, you will only stir the cauldron of discontent by jumping into things being said during an obviously, highly emotional period for your audience.

If you're going to take something away, make sure you put something better somewhere! This is especially true when redesigning any user experience. If you're going to sacrifice readability with narrow content divs and useless pictures you damn well better be doing something functionally better for the users somewhere. I think this is probably where the redesign really fails for most folks and they are expressing it as "This sucks!" or the like. I will agree, it sucks, but explaining why is important and useful feedback. There are too many examples above my comment for me to reference, but the explanations are there to extract. The fact that the design may look "better" to some folks doesn't change the fact that it doesn't implement anything new and better that your audience may want or have been asking for repeatedly for years. If the audience has been asking for features for years, it might be a good idea to try to implement a few of them with every new design.

I hope that I've been helpful. I am going to stop at four important points because I usually get paid for this sort of work, and it seems to me that someone lacking was paid for the work that has been done so far. Bottom line, implement the current beta as-is will destroy your audience and your ad revenues will go down the toilet

Cleanup? Options?

[AndyCanfield]

My immediate reaction was "How do I get rid of all this shit?" So I hunted around for an options / prferences control and could not find one. Not even clicking on my name gave me any options.

The current design is very simple - text in two colors. No file photos, no page full of garbage at the start. Just the news. Sownloads REAL fast. Read down until you see someting you recognize, then stop. Even the current mobile site is to complex for my patience; on my phone I have to wait 20 seconds for the stuff to stop bouncing.

Please, give me an "options" button, and there include a check list of what I want to see (news) and what I don't want to see (pictures).

WOW that is really BAD

[Archfeld]

I can't actually find any feature on the 'beta' that is NOT worse than it was before. I've been around /. for a long time and this is the worst, whether thru the old xp(ie8), new windows7(ie9),or firefox on ubuntu. Sad to see functionality traded for trendy...

It looks nice but....

[pseutheo]

I do like the looks of the new layout. Although, living in the rural parts of Humboldt county, we do not exactly get the best internet in the world. One of the main reasons I like your website is not only the news, (sure i can look for it myself), but the super fast loading times I would receive on our less than par internet. On a good day we run at about 50-100kbps, and the top internet you can buy is 3meg. I would simply keep the pictures to when you click on the read more link that way those of us stuck in the 90's can still check it out without waiting a day for the images to load.

What Billy said...

[rmdingler]

Don't go changing to try and please me, you never let me down before. I couldn't love you any better, I love you just the way you are.

Ewww!

[ElectraFlarefire]

What's wirth the G+ style 'magic bar that comes and goes at the top as you tr and scroll' thing? That's damned annoying..
The pretty graphics, I can put up with.. Heck, I can even put up with the pictures..
I /cannot/ put up with the few lines of text and 'Read more!' button that on this site doesn't even do a Javascript 'drop down and show the rest' thing.

But most of all, I hate that the text now takes up about a third of the screen, the rest either being blank or with HUGE sidebars full of stuff I don't care about..
Everyone who isn't on a phone has a fairly wide screen.. Some very wide indeed..
If your on a tablet, it tends to be quite wide too..
So what's with all this blank space, big text and graphics over text?

Seems alright for a mobile site.. But not for your main one! I really hope the new design will allow users to use the full width of their screen...

Re:Ewww!

[Megane]

What's wirth the G+ style 'magic bar that comes and goes at the top as you tr and scroll' thing? That's damned annoying..

But those floating bars are ALL the rage nowadays!

They only do two things:
* stroke the site-owner's ego by plastering HERE IS MY LOGO at the top of the page (real fun when trying to read at work!
* they make it so when you use the PgUp/PgDn buttons on your keyboard, you miss content because the web browser scrolls the entire area, including what is hidden by the float bar.

There is nothing useful on those float bars (any of them, not just this one) that I need so badly that I can't just scroll to the top of the page for.

What's next? Flyouts at the bottom of the page HEY READ THIS ARTICLE TOO!

dislike

[alx]

Really dislike the new layout. When did we decide to start making all web pages only utilize a narrow strip down the middle of the page? For tablets and phones? Make your UI adaptive so that it takes advantage of all available space.

Can't say I like it.

[zavfoud]

It looks like theverge.com eat anandtech.com and this was the BM.

Mostly pretty good.

[CrosseyedPainless]

Too much whitespace on the right and left, too much padding on every element. Other than that, it looks good.

Oh, and I want a gopher interface.

Filter by score?

[MMC Monster]

Is there a way to filter by score?

I liked how I could view all +5 comments and abbreviate +3 - +4 comments and hide everything else.

If I got bored, I would move the slider over a bit and read more of the raw comments.

More broken links

[TheCycoONE]

Whenever I click 'Load More Comments' I'm taken back to the main page - perhaps because I'm running NoScript? I can't post either.

Also it's ugly, and the font choice for comments here (linux firefox) are not pretty. ;-)

Major technical problems...

[Chewy509]

Only played with this quickly but:

1. The main page fails on the W3C HTML5 validator. Seriously, don't the devs run this first before pushing to production. (Or don't web developers actually do automated testing)?

2. Horribly broken with javascript off. (The "more comments" button takes you to the main page)? Yes, I browse /. with NoScript ON disabling javascript (It's not /. I'm worried about, but the adservers).

3. My screen reader can't read it. (It would appear that the new site has several issues, namely lack of any appreciation for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)) Which is a MASSIVE FAIL to anyone with a disability, especially for those that rely on screen readers or even screen magnifiers. The layout also breaks if you use large fonts as well. Oh, I'm not a citizen of the US, but aren't there federal guidelines for accessibility, and not following them gets your ass sued for discrimination?

4. As others have mentioned, the whitespace, the general lack of identity (it looks like a cheap blog) all have negative impacts as well.

don't pull a Flickr on us

[Dr.Saeuerlich]

I don't post often but the new design is just a big step back in usability.
Yes I know, this is done to "attract a new audience" but it seems the suits behind this thinking always keep forgetting the established audience - at least they sure did at Flickr. Please Slashdot, don't become another Flickr. Give us at least a choice which format to use.

Just leave the site the F@#k alone

[voxelman]

God, another attempt to reinvent the wheel by some wet behind the ears newbie. Change for change's sake is not progress and I don't want to have learn my way around a new user interface!

Simply, It Blows

[boogahboogah]

1) Way too much white space

2) El Gigundo pictures that have no business being on the page

3) Cutesy design makes me want to go over to El Reg for the antidote

4) Slashdot is a WORDS site, not a PRETTY design site or a PICTURES site or a social networking site. Can't you Dice morons get this through your head ?

5) Person who hired the folks to do the redesign, their salary should be tied to the readership count, so that when the readership dies he is the person to pay the price. I assume the people who did the redesign just don't know any better...

To narrow and to small on my 1920x1080 screen.

[Ice Station Zebra]

Old site is better. You should fire you designer because there last job was obviously doing wordpress themes.

Re:To narrow and to small on my 1920x1080 screen.

[Megane]

Also, hire someone above the age of 25 please. This looks like a classic ego-driven design. OOH I JUST DISCOVERED HOW TO MAKE IMAGES FADE IN SLOWLY LOOK AT ME I"M SO COOL

NOPE!

[GordonRMK]

NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE! Absolutely fucking hate it. Looks like a cheap ass crappy blog, slashdot is absolutely perfect the way it is. KEEP. IT. SIMPLE.

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[Lunix Nutcase]

Again you post this retarded nonsense. If I want multiple web pages open I use tabs. I don't open separate Windows. This isn't the 1990s IE days and next to none of us are using tiling WMs.

good use of 960px but here are my thoughts

[jampola]

I have my 1920x1200 displays on their sides so the site looks fantastic but the old site was making better use of the space, especially if I'm on my laptop using it's dismal 1600x900 display. If /. is going to go down this route, why not do something akin to Google Plus where you can switch between the 960px container and a 100% container and maybe have it saved as a user preference or dynamically re-size base on the users screen res (easy task using Javascript, not fool proof though) Also, what's with the header? Once the user scrolls to the top, why not have it expand even taller and bring some use to it (I love how Tech Crunch make use of their floating header, and also Google Plus) All in all, it's still WIP afaikt so I'll be interested to see how it pans out. Now get off my lawn!!!

Layout does not scale

[Danae's Dad]

Please define the layout in units of ems not pixels.

Some of us have hi-res displays and need to crank up the font size for readability. We do not appreciate our content being squeezed into a rigidly fixed-width column, nor do we enjoy the associated wrapping and overflow effects that result.

Epic fail

[Danae's Dad]

If you switch to this design I will stop reading Slashdot.

It is unusable. Too much vertical space is wasted. Layout does not scale up with font size. Default font size is miniscule. The top three stories are squished together, and I cannot distinguish between them. Story text is truncated too short, so I have to click on *every* *single* *story* just to get the gist, which takes too long.

main area has become smaller.

[rew]

Many people have a screen that's (way) wider than it is high. And they browse "full-screen". I like to multi-task: keeping an eye on other things on my screen besides my browsing. So my browser window will be something like 800x1024 when I'm browsing on a 1280x1024 screen.

Anyway, with that background, having even more "screenspace" that is dedicated to the sidebar is annoying. The sidebar is useful at the top (it has things), but then becomes empty next to most of the articles. So now I have just "half" the screen that's useful, the other half being blank means I bought a big screen with many pixels all for nothing....

Usual complaints

[khallow]

I agree with the people complaining about white space. There's too much unused space on the screen. I also don't like the mouse-over popups. And I agree that the "featured topics" are worthless. I'm not here to read about Slashdot cloud.

And those little people icons? Meh. As long as it doesn't affect my load time.

Ok, what do I like? It doesn't break threading. That's still fairly easy to read (though it still has the usual problem with multiple replies of not being able to figure out from a glance who is replying to whom).

The color scheme is tolerable and I get the strong brand sense I'm on Slashdot not some other site that happens to have threaded comments. The webpages loaded pretty fast for me despite the eye candy.

What I would like? The ability to search Slashdot comments from normal web search engines. It is remarkably hard to do so. Normally, when I do so, half of the papers are ever changing "search page" junk that doesn't even show on topic stuff.

An edit button would be nice, but I understand that we're bad people and can't have nice things.

And of course, the ability to stab people in the face via the internet. I'd like to do it and I know various parties which vigorously disagree with me would like to do it in turn. Come on. It'd be fun!

Hate it

[Ksisanth]

I disliked this so much that I logged in, something I rarely do, just to say that slashface sucks.

Let Musashi speak on this one.

[nu1x]

"If we look at the world we see arts for sale. Men use equipment to sell their own selves. As if with the nut and the flower, the nut has become less than the flower. In this kind of Way of strategy, both those teaching and those learning the way are concerned with coloring and showing off their technique, trying to hasten the bloom of the flower. They speak of "This Dojo" and "That Dojo". They are looking for profit. Someone once said "Immature strategy is the cause of grief". That was a true saying. "

--Miyamoto Musashi.

We should learn from the past instead of inventing The Next Fail.

The Goggles, they do nothing!

[xaosflux]

Ow Ow Ow, as soon as I hit the beta site all I wanted to do was RUN.

Didn't take time to find out why, but noticed third party scripts from rpxnow and ooyala attempting to load-- really /. you can afford to host your own scripts!

Glad I'm doing most of my reading through RSS and can avoid it!

Are we getting THAT old???

[bearded_yak]

I normally try to be constructive, but WTF is up with the giant font for the headlines? I may be old enough to remember when Slashdot was a newborn, but I'm not so old I can't see a more reasonably-sized font. The old style with a smaller contrasting font on a colored bar would make scanning the page for items of interest much more enjoyable.

I think ...

[PPH]

... this says it all.

Do not want

[c0d3g33k]

I sent my comments to the email address mentioned in the original post. They reflect what I've been reading here (I looked at the new site, sent my comments, then came here to see the response). The new site is bad. If it is implemented as default, I will go away. 16 years is probably too long to be visiting a site multiple times a day in any case. Thank you /. for freeing me to seek information elsewhere.

All I need now is a mechanism to disable my current account so I nor anyone else can post to it any longer. Then I can happily move on.

Goodbye, Slashdot.

fix the back-button

[morkk]

When you follow a link and then come back why aren't you at the same place on the page? This has been broken for a while.

"Boxed" Comments

[gimmeataco]

Personally, I prefer the way comments are "boxed" with an outline rather than this enormous use of white space. When there's a huge line of comments, where's the end() function?

Not a fan

[SageMusings]

The new look goes to great lengths to minimize the impact of user comments and discussion flow in favor of a toy-like layout. I personally want to immerse myself in nothing but discussion thread, utilizing more text and less art-school white space. Honestly, it's detracting.

This site gets enough traffic for reasons of information exchange and we do not need to be enticed to return with snazzy graphics or experiments in page flow. You have a good thing now ... let it ride. If the BETA goes live, it will likely result in a decrease of traffic.

New site has little redeeming value

[schwit1]

The new layout shows you have no clue who your target audience is.

More community-promoted content in the All Stories view.
*** Who cares? That's not why I'm here ***

Improved profile pages to give you a snapshot of other community members
*** WHO CARES!?!?!? ***. Please who care about this spend there time on facebook, not slashdot.

Easier browsing of popular topics straight from the main page.
*** says you ***. And this assumes that only popular topics are worth reading.

Flash Over Function

[BrendaEM]

The menu font at the top is too light.
Subheading fonts are way too big.
Too much horizontal and vertical space is wasted. It will make us scroll endlessly.
Pics videos seem disconnected from story.
Menu at top has too much whitespace.
Menu at bottom of pages wastes a lot of space, too.

Re:Gonna miss Slashdot

[SuperMog2002]

You can set Gmail as your default mail client via Chrome. When you click a mailto: link (in Chrome or otherwise), it just pops up a Gmail tab.

Otherwise known as ...

[Nefarious Wheel]

Otherwise known as

"Slashdot Jumps The Shark!"

Picture ads in the middle of the stories?

[ericcc65]

I've been using adblock with great success for years. But when I first brought this new site up I noticed what I think was an ad in the middle of the page that was a few product pictures. How annoying is that?

Re:Constructive Criticism

[Nefarious Wheel]

(And he means that in the nicest possible way!)

Remember why Google took over from Alta Vista as the preferred search engine?

Google was simpler. Think about that for a moment.
Now think about what you're throwing away.

NO

[d0s]

PLEASE NO

Wasted Effort

[http]

Don't fucking lie to us. There is no way we believe the UI fail that this beta is was "shaped by feedback from community members". The comment system may not be enough to keep us if you keep on in this direction. Did you fire all your competent UI people and hire their grandchildren?

Date Format

[knuth]

Please use real dates and times, not this "Two days ago" stuff.

I block slashdot's style sheets because I do not like the current layout. Fixed widths are evil. I set my browser window at a width that is comfortable for me to read. In the new layout, the right-hand column takes up too much room if viewing full-screen.

I agree with earlier observations about the new comments page: it is difficult to determine the level of indentation.

The version of the home page with big pictures is disastrous, IMO. The graphics take up more room than the stories!

...no...just no...do not want

[gottabeme]

Argh, this is worse than Web 2.0. Enormous margins, absurd amount of whitespace, poor mix of font sizes and really dumb use of gray-on-white text.

What is it with scrolling nowadays? On my 1080p monitor I can only see one or two stories on the front page without scrolling! SCROLL SCROLL SCROLL! It's going to wear out my mouse wheel. This is awful.

Comments are awful. Again, huge margins, too much whitespace, not enough use of color and separators.

Honestly, have we learned nothing from Google's recent mistakes? Apparently not, since Slashdot has now done its best to emulate Google's worst.

I implore you: Stop what you are doing. Delete this design. Delete the git repo. Delete the backups of the git repo. Fire the people who made it.

And don't ever put "beta" on anything ever again.

Honestly, the current non-beta design is still a step backwards from what Slashdot used to be. It's not just "don't fix what ain't broken"--it's "QUIT BREAKING IT!"

If Slashdot pushes this design out, I'm done with Slashdot. It'll be time to seriously make a replacement site for Slashdot and seriously put in time posting interesting stories and cultivating good comments.

Nice to have a unique looking site....

[MyBrotherSteve]

Wow, the new Beta Site looks like..... a million other websites on the web. I'm glad Slashdot doesn't want anyone to be able to distinguish their site from anyone else's on the web....

Centred?

[borl]

This incorporates everything wrong with modern "ain't broke" website design refreshes, except one thing.

You left the site centred. Left justify it and the train-wreck will be complete.

Nuke it from orbit.

[gottabeme]

It's the only way to be sure.

Yuck!

[YCrCb]

Terrible design! One column and lots of fluff and very little content. It looks like a Wordpress site you spent 5 minutes making with the default theme. I expect better!

Awful, awful awful.

[norite]

Awful, awful awful. Put some fucking DEPTH into the design. I'm getting more and more fed up with all this flat, monochrome bullshit 'look' with kilometres of wasted white space either side, and squashed text in the middle. I installed office 2013 today...my god, what a retard of a design. I see slashdot is following the same path to hell.

It's broken on the iPad

[93 Escort Wagon]

Clicked on the link, was taken to the beta front page. There was a pop--up bubble that I'm guessing was explanatory text about one of the page headers, but 1/3 of it was out of viewport and the whole thing was undragable.

Fortunately not many people are using tablets anymore, so I'm sure no one will notice.

Why I didn't like the new design

[ajyand]

Let me begin with what I liked : * Standard view with images is good. * Headline view is the most useful feature added. .......... And now what I didn't like: * Text displayed in classic view is less wider than the actual classic view. Lot of the screen width is unutilized in the new design which makes me scroll more often. * The new layout is just a 'blog layout' with lesser width dedicated to the actual content of the stories. * The new view lays emphasis on filters and popular topics. Oh, I forgot to tell you, I hate filters.

FOR FUCK SAKE LEAVE IT ALONE

[MrKaos]

For fuck sake, I KNOW I'M YELLING, I WANT TO FUCKING YELL content filter - ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

This is not fucking twitter or fuckfacebook IT'S FUCKING SLASHDOT where I come to get my ever-dwindling supply of geek through the stream of "first post" retards to eventually, occasionally come to some comment that makes it worth...

READING

You know that thing that all the "too lame ; don't read' morons don't do - so they don't come with their eternal stream of shallow, annoying, fucking bullshit to pollute my mind any further. I CAN FUCKING READ, I don't want pictures and all the other bullshit things you have been listening to your "FOCUS GROUP" bullshit audience has been telling you to do.

If I want pictures I'll read the article. What I want is a synopsis longer than the attention span of the gnat brains and frankly, scares the CRAP out of all the small IQ morons. FUCK OFF MORONS. It's not about modernization or keeping up with ... whatever... it's about a fast, efficient delivery mechanism for a bunch of words, which is what you have. So DON'T RUIN IT ANYMORE by making it any more accessible to the small IQ morons.

FUCK

Oh so very busy...

[hodagacz]

Graphics are way too large. I browse /. on a 1024x600 screen most of the time and it is not conducive to smaller resolutions.

Bad. Very bad. This isn't Slashdot.

[raque]

Do not deploy this beta. This beta is terrible. It looks like the mobile site, which is why I stopped looking at Slashdot on my mobile devices. You will destroy this site.

First, Ditch the pictures. This is about reading. Then ditch the rest of the bling. They don't do anything. Nothing here helps me. It just gets in my way. You could ditch the whole website and run Slashdot as a simple BBS and it would work. Everyone who comes to Slashdot -- please post if I'm wrong -- is comfortable with a CLI. No one needs another bad copy of Gnome or KDE, which are already bad copies of Windows and MacOS.

I come to Slashdot and not Reddit or Digg because it is edited and moderated. There are some smart people picking and choosing from what is going to be put up. It is a place for nerds, people who are very comfortable with text and typing to get together and type and read. None of the rest helps.

Is this a done deal? I saw no positive comments

[raque]

If this is the management of Dice saying we are making Slashdot us and not what Commander Taco made, then it is time to go. Everything about it is wrong.

I have never seen anything so universally hated on /. before. The design is horrible. It wastes space and what goes with what is unclear. Every new complaint is correct.

New tablet generation designers

[cute_orc]

I think new site is designed by designers who never saw desktop.

Is this to make it work on tablets better?

[raque]

After I posted my last comment I had a thought. Is this to make /. work on tablets and touch screens better? If so then it should be said so. Not some bull that it is to make things more clear. It doesn't. If it is to try and get ahead of some paradigm shift then say so. I may not agree but at least there will be a reason besides some sold some idea to some manager and now he is going to shove it through so HE doesn't look like an idiot.

Reddit has better desing, same content.

[VortexCortex]

Come on folks, this shit is retarding. Now even shite like Reddit will have a better interface.

Know what? Keep shitting it up, I don't care. I use a crap load of user scripts. I've been able to enable WYSIWYG HTML input formatting for years and years... If you're going to go, go full retard.

This half-ass shit is infuriating.

Why?

[k.a.f.]

Slashdot's biggest redesign effort ever is now in beta

Why?

Ugg, design fail!

[Tekoneiric]

Horrible! The web admin has too much time on their hands. Stick with the current design, it's more simple, faster and doesn't overload the screen with graphics.

Font continuity

[beaverdownunder]

Please don't change font sizes inside articles =/

2-4 column layout please?.

[Requiem18th]

Given that slashdotters are the kind of people that actually read newspapers at some point in their life it seems adecuate to use a 2 column layout. Mayme even a 4 column layout and hey! you can put advertising in between each set of columns.

Re:2-4 column layout please?.

[Megane]

Here you go!

PS: Ugly font.

[beaverdownunder]

Also, font-awesome is not awesome!

Re:PS: Ugly font.

[Megane]

And stop doing icons in fonts like Gawker. I noticed this in the vote up/down buttons of a firehose article viewed with the beta interface. Just because Gawker does it doesn't mean it's a good thing to do. I have my browser set to not allow web sites to change fonts because most of them make BAD choices of fonts, so all that shows up is the Mozilla missing character box with a hex code in it.

Just no

[gweihir]

/. is a site to be read, not to come to for the pretty pictures. Seems your "designers" somehow did not realize that.

Looks like Ars Technica

[L4t3r4lu5]

Right down to the large, dark area full of links none of your readers looks at.

Let me close all of those sections to the right hand side and have the content resize to make use of the space and I'll be impressed.

Focus

[SJ2000]

Too much focus on the articles, who on earth comes to Slashdot for the articles these days with the awful editing?

It's cuz i'm....

[mythix]

It's cuz I'm whitespace isn't it?

no seriously, this even has too many whitespace on the sides on my ultra low resolution work laptop... not to mention vertical whitespace...

I like to scroll it, scroll it, I like to scroll it scroll it, we like to... scroll it!

Terrible!

[soccerisgod]

I hate it. I don't even know where to start: maybe the fact it's too fluffy (too much whitespace), maybe the giant headlines that you could read from a mile away, maybe the whole design that looks like some tech pundit's blog, but not like slashdot. The comments sections looks like it will be impossible to follow longer threads, a definite three steps down from the current layout which itself is not optimal.

The whole design seems to be based on the assumption that right now, there's too much text and not enough media to "lighten it up". In effect, you're dumbing it down to a point where I feel like I'm being treated like some kind of moron who can't muster the attention span if there isn't enough fluff.

I'm not normally hung up on design, but if this is what slashdot's coming to, I'm out. This ain't a threat, this is a fact.

Classic mode isn't classic

[SirAdelaide]

The Classic Mode option doesn't make it look like the classic Slashdot. It still looks like the beta anorexic Slashdot.

looks worse

[smash]

just how big do you want those images?

My 2 cents : initiate a Slashdot Poll

[nicomede]

I have to agree on all the previous comments : I'm only here for the comments, not for visual candy. My suggestion is to initiate a poll with the different site design options ; seeing all the comments here I bet the results will by "90% - keep curent design 10%- Get us CmdrTaco back".

It's fucking horrible

[u38cg]

Do this and you've lost another reader.

Some one let the junior marketing guy in.

[BlindRobin]

Ohhh well time to go...

Hideous!

[burisch_research]

I like the current design, thank you very much, although Unicode support and support for editing posts would be appreciated. Oh, and it'd be nice if the front page didn't spontaneously reload while I'm reading a summary.

I think what we have seen in the nearly 1000 comments above is that people don't like or want the new site, and that it'd be a bad idea to change it. When slashdot moved over to the current 2.0 design, there was a lot of moaning but not nearly as much as the rabid hate the 3.0 design is generating; personally I liked the 2.0 design when it was introduced.

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[jez9999]

Nor can the field of vision, past a certain point.

Then why have widescreen monitors?

Surely the point of the widescreen monitors we're getting today is they're attempting to match roughly what the human field of vision is. In tersm of having multiple windows open at once, it's far more convenient to have 2 squarish monitors side-by-side that you can maximize windows on (actually that's my preferred setup) than one widescreen monitor where you have to awkwardly position two side-by-side windows.

There is a single reader that likes this?

[gabrygenoa]

I've read four pages of comments and not a single positive one, at least in the upvoted... I've compiled my "survey", giving mostly negative feedbacks. I really hope that thing will NEVER go live, also the "classic" mode is a joke, it's as classic as One Direction are in music...

Please No!!!!

[dayjn]

Dear Slashdot, I have been visiting this site for many years, and find the current version 2.0 decent (after a bumpy start). Slashdot has stayed mostly interesting while the user comments are sometimes funny and useful, insightful, etc. I have learned a lot from this site so I have a strong desire to see it stay healthy. However, you risk losing exactly the types of users who make the site worth visiting. How would this new design appeal to a technical person who wants to quickly scan through to find a few stories or comments to contribute to? The answer from the above comments seems to be that these types of users won't bother fighting against this terrible design and will leave instead. Biggest problem with the Beta: The new design forces too much scrolling which is a nightmare on a site where the the pages are long threads. It flies in the face of common sense. Even the BETA Classic View is clumsy and awkward to use with wasted space everywhere. Perhaps if you make the classic view much more compact - like the current version of the site - then you might keep a portion of the loyal users. In short, if the new design is adopted without significant improvements, I will probably stop visiting Slashdot. And I fear many others will as well, and that would be a sad ending for a once great forum. Please don't ruin Slashdot! Sincerely, Jason

What's with all the whitespace?

[durin]

1) Massively wastes screen real estate.
2) Doesn't improve readability in the least
3) Usability is out the window.
4) I'm not a web designer! This isn't even my desk!

No cool

[YoungManKlaus]

sorry, but looks like any boring blog from a default template
how about smaller, incremental updates (like finally cleaning up the border-madness in the comment section a little bit) instead of trying to break everything at once?

Old one looks better and is more efficient

[CptJeanLuc]

I've been reading Slashdot every day since more or less the beginning, and I want to be able to efficiently scan through the articles and selectively open links and comments. Scanning through the current layout is pretty efficient. The beta layout fails in that aspect. A lot more scrolling, too much space taken by pictures which add nothing to readability, and too little text to get a good summary of the stories without clicking to expand.

With the new layout, I might as well read Slashdot in an RSS reader.

ok

[candy apple island]

so...you want us all to leave then? cos that's what this is making me want to do.

Re:Constructive Criticism

[Tackhead]

I've posted most of this on the "blog" site where it's likely to be read instead of buried in a 1000-post thread, but this seems the right place to follow up with your well-articulated, broad-based global objections (with which I agree 110%), and outline the nits.

Upon re-reading this list, it's depressing just how many things about the 3.0 redesign that I'm already thinking of blocking/hacking out client-side via greasemonkey or local CSS overrides. The depressing part isn't that I'm willing to do it; I love the site enough to go through the trouble. The depressing part is that the only reaction I can have to all this effort is to start thinking about how I can disable it.

1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.

2) Whitespace:

Narrow the spacing between lines.

It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.

3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.

4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)

All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)

5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)

6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.

P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.

7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.

D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.

D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).

D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.

8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.

Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.

9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.

10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?

Load More Comments???

[MMC Monster]

WTF does "Load More Comments" do? Load 5 comments at a time?

If you really don't want people to comment, just disable comments. I'll just go to another website to read comments. I sure as heck don't come here to read the articles.

While we're at it, any other sites have good comment sections that you guys (users, not DICE) recommend?

Re:It looks alright

[Megane]

Well I see they already have the 85% body text size (so that those of us over 45 can have even more fun squinting to read the text), and the 15% gray background, but they forgot the 85% gray for body text that everybody does to make the text extra unreadable.

(Hint: DO NOT MAKE BODY TEXT SMALLER TO MAKE HEADLINES BIGGER. I SET THE TEXT SIZE IN MY BROWSER WHERE IT IS FOR A REASON. Of course with that stupid sidebar squeezing the text area, something has to give, so get rid of it first. Hint #2: NOT EVERYBODY FULL-SCREEN MAXIMIZES THEIR BROWSER WINDOW ON A WIDE SCREEN. Some of us actually use this thing called a "windowing system" to make other things visible on the screen too.)

Re:Constructive Criticism

[Megane]

I have been doing UI design for 20 years. I started doing interface design for CD-ROM based multimedia projects in 1992. I started designing websites in 1993 with the draft release of HTML 1.0.

And the guy who came up with this re-design was just learning to walk on two feet then. Those who fail to learn history (in this case, the history of UI design, and an old and very functional UI that looks nothing like the generic Web 3.0 crap that's everywhere) repeat it, badly.

If you're going to sacrifice readability with narrow content divs and useless pictures you damn well better be doing something functionally better for the users somewhere.

QFT. Also 85% body text size is an evil that must be purged with fire.

Bottom line, implement the current beta as-is will destroy your audience and your ad revenues will go down the toilet along with the site traffic.

And that needed extra boldface.

Excuse me, I'll just leave this here,

[TrentTheThief]

Don't step in my pile of fresh vomit.

The new layout is garbage.

Stuff that matters... not stupid pictures

[captainpanic]

I actually sometimes want to read something that I didn't know yet. In order to do so, I need some text on my screen.

On my giant screen, I now get barely 2 articles.. and in the comment section, I see no more than 5 replies at one time. In other words, the information density on my screen has dropped below that of my kindergarten books, where I sometimes got as many as 6 sentences one one page!

-- Information density matters!

This is the end of Slashdot...

[technobabblingfool]

The 'new' design is ugly, bandwidth-wasting with the unrequested useless photos, and denigrates the comments that are the lifeblood of slashdot. When your lifeblood goes...you are dead.

Massive picture on top of each post?

[ciantic]

I hope one can turn off that massive picture on top of each (or most) posts. They waste space & provide nothing.

Re:Massive picture on top of each post?

[ciantic]

Of course, reading the post would have explained. Clicking the hamburger next to Most discussed seems to do the trick.

However I'm not sure if that "standard" is a good default, the pictures (at least at the moment) seem utterly useless. FreeBSD logo that fills the entire vertical space? Really?

If this becomes standard, I'll be gone from /.

[trptrp]

I don't need pictures when there's no additional information in them that's worth the screen space you stupid fucking idiots.

yea... no!

[sordidbass]

I've been a Slashdot reader for over 10 years now, but I've never been one to post. In fact this is my first post ever on Slashdot. That being said, the new design is terrible. Who in their right minds decided that Slashdot needs to look like BusinessInsider?

Do I Digg it? No.

[g253]

Good god, it looks exactly like the Digg redesign that finally chased the last users away. Goodbye slashdot, all good things must come to an end :-(

Wide beta is wide

[ThatsNotPudding]

Wow. That's... that's really wide. But then again, I'm not sure my POS work IE8 has the proper Panavision plug-in.

Whitewash

[Robotron23]

I see Soulskill was kind enough to update with how to turn off images. What about those of us who'd prefer never to see this abomination implemented in the first place?

Once it's up, that's it. Slashdot as we know it is over. Kill it: there can be no compromise with something so shallow, so poorly functioning, and so obnoxious.

That this has even been proposed is a sign of colossal ignorance on the part of the owners and staff. You still do not know what makes readers come here, which is itself dismaying. If you don't have the initiative to actually inspect your own website, I doubt any of you will have the backbone to admit this is a huge mistake and put a stop to it.

Article-centric vs Link-Centric vs Comment-centric

[Megane]

So the important question is: why does nearly every other web site in the world look like what this "beta" is trying to be?

Answer: Because most of them are article-centric. The primary objective of the site is the well-written (we hope) articles.

Question: Where do Slashdot's "articles" come from? First, what is an article in the context of Slashdot? It's the summary. So back to where they come from: it's usually written by the article submitter, and slightly touched up by the "editors", who generally do a crappy job of taking 30 seconds to find misspellings and broken links. So in other words, slashdot's main attraction is not the "articles".

So if an article on Slashdot is just a quick summary, what's the most important part? It's what the article summarizes, which is almost always a link. So in that sense, Slashdot is link-centric. You just want a quick "why should I click this link" and that's it, with a bunch of links. Maybe a little icon for a category, and that's it. Another link-centric site was Digg, and look what happened when they forgot that.

But the other reason to read Slashdot is to see everybody's opinion on what is being linked to. The link is there to show us what we're going to comment on, then we read the comments. What other Slashdot users are saying is the content that people come here for. So Slashdot is also a comment-centric site, even more so than being a link-centric site. Another comment-centric site is 4chan, and I'll bet whoever did the redesign has never gone there. Go there and what do you see? Sidebars? Gigantic images starting every thread? Nope. You see a lot of comments, most of which have a small image next to them. Important here is that you see a lot of comments, without a bunch of stupid "hero" images between them wasting vertical space, and without a bunch of stupid sidebars (WTF do I care about "this day in Slashdot history?") wasting horizontal space.

So basically we have a web site which is link-centric and comment-centric, and someone is trying to redesign it as article-centric, without the article quality of a typical news site, much less an Ars Technica multi-page review.

This might be fine for the "topics" sub-sites (like SlashBI) that nobody reads anyhow, but It's. Not. Slashdot.

(And quit trying to force us to read SlashBI! It's not covering stuff that the Slashdot audience is interested in! It would do better if you simply put it on its own domain instead of being a sub-domain of Slashdot!)

Result: square peg in round hole plus bigger hammer = broken hole FAIL

Don't expect me to visit THAT slashdot

[BurkeTheEldar]

Slashdot is probably the only site I visit every day and at least read every headline. The new design is terrible for all the reasons already posted. I expect I'll drop /. if you make this change...the current site has it's problems but the revision is awful.

I like it

[Sir Foxx]

Looks good, keep up the good work. Most of the ones complaining are just used to what they've had and don't like change. I mean it's not like you went all v.4 Digg.

Worse not better

[tbannist]

The new design is pretty awful. This is a news site for people who are supposed to know more than bit about technology and you choose to go with a fixed-width design? That's amateurish by any standards. The pictures make it more colorfull but I actually found that they too large, they move the stuff that I can about (the article summaries) down the page a considerable amount for a picture that has questionable relevance to the topic, and they disrupt the structure of the page to the point of making it difficult to find where to resume reading.

It seems like you need to hire someone with user interface design experience to work on the redesign. It'd currently score the new design at 3/10 which is significantly worse than the current design.

Just Plain Horrible

[burnt_cajun_toast]

The original version is just very easy to navigate and see multiple news items on a single page. The beta, just has too many large graphic items and wasted space, with the worst font I've ever seen. I fail to see the visual improvement

Re:When you buy a bigger desk

[tepples]

Low-level creatures like us can only read one webpage at a time.

True, but low-level creatures like us can maintain context from the other webpage more easily if the other webpage's visual design is in the peripheral vision than if it is out of sight (and thus out of mind).

It makes a lot more sense for us to have one window open and some of us prefer that window to be fullscreen.

Then your boss can downgrade you to a desk that holds only one paper at once. If you're referring to one document while writing another one, put it away and get out the other one.

completely broken

[Toshito]

On my phone it's unusable...

Oh snap

[tepples]

If I want multiple web pages open I use tabs.

This makes it hard to write in one web application while referring to another web document. First, you have to take the extra step of first glancing up at the tab bar to switch tabs rather than glancing at the other side of the screen. Then, the full-screen transition produces an effect similar to doorway amnesia.

next to none of us are using tiling WMs

Windows contains a tiling WM. In Windows XP or Windows Vista, click one window in the taskbar, Ctrl+right click another window, and choose "Tile Vertically" (Windows XP) or "Show Side-by-side" (Windows Vista). In Windows 7 or the desktop of Windows 8, drag a window to the left or right side of the screen; Microsoft made a big deal about this "snap" feature. Even Windows Store apps under Windows 8 can be "snapped", and this is one of Microsoft's selling points of its Surface RT tablet over Apple's iPad.

Re:Oh snap

[Urza9814]

Stop.

Not everyone has the same preferences as you. Not everyone has the same work habits as you. Not everyone has the same hardware as you.

I can't fit two windows side-by-side on my laptop if I want them to be readable. Usually I keep the browser below full-screen, so I can see at a glance where I'm getting new mail in Outlook, but I can't tolerate the browser being less than ~80% of the screen width. Personally, I find excessive height interferes with my ability to read more than excessive width. Even on my phone I lose my place between lines, so the longer the lines are the more continuous my reading experience. And scrolling is the biggest interference of all. On the existing layout I can read the article and the first few comments before scrolling. On the new one beta site I have to scroll to even finish the summary!

If I want to reference multiple documents, I use multiple tabs. If I *really* need to I'll break the tabs out and overlap the windows, but since I can only interact with one at a time I don't see much point in putting them side-by-side. In fact, right now this window is the *only* tab I have open, and the *only* window I've interacted with in the past hour (yeah, slow day at work ;) I'm never reading from one while typing to another -- at worst I'm copying/pasting entire paragraphs, in which case I find it easier to put the new content where the old was, find what I want, then go back. I prefer to move the content rather than my focus.

Your comment reads like Jobs' infamous "you're holding it wrong." So you prefer vertically-oriented sites. Good for you. I prefer horizontal sites. Guess what? HTML is designed to be flexible and fit your display. I can view the current Slashdot on my phone (I don't use the mobile site because it never works); I can use it on my 1080p HD projector; I can use it on my 1600x1200 CRT...and I can full screen or window it on any of those and it still fills the available space and is perfectly readable.

Nobody here is saying you shouldn't be able to read it vertically if you want. What we're saying is that we don't want to, and telling what appears to be 95% of their users 'fuck you, you just don't work properly' is not a good way to improve your readership.

Real nerds aren't scared of text

[oag2]

(I realize people will always hate change at first, and this may be influencing my reaction, but...)

I check Slashdot for news 1) to read the comments on topics that are interesting and controversial (at least, after someone has helpfully filtered out the trolls) and 2) because I find it relaxing not to be bombarded with irrelevant images and animations on the home page. The new design undermines both those strengths. Where's the comment filter slider or its equivalent? And why, for an article about Samsung artificially boosting tablet performance stats, do we have to look at an old-timey painting of ladies playing cards?

The (supposed) target audience for this site, I suspect, is not afraid of actually reading a page of text to get the information they want. So why the need to make Slashdot look like every other tawdry news site?

Awful.

[Urza9814]

Awful. Absolutely awful. Stop it right now. This is Slashdot damnit, not Joe Smith's Tech Blog! The new design obliterates everything that makes this site what it is!

Slashdot is about comments and discussion...

[denzacar]

This makes Slashdot about pictures first, then summaries, then... maybe... comments.

You can forget discussions.
Comment systems are not designed for discussions - that's what forums and boards are for.
Where people discuss topics and issues, which can sometimes branch out into topic different from the original but still interesting to the people who are taking part in the discussion.
Text takes up as much space as needed, cause people often quote the people they're talking with, make counterpoints, link and copy sources etc.

Comments on the other hand are just a stack of singular, insular, bite-sized OPINIONS.
That's why you have those small nvarchar(254) comment boxes.
It was never intended for the CONSUMER of the news or blog to make long insightful or informative posts which might turn out to be more interesting than the original story, warranting further discussion both to the sides and downward, horizontally (replying to a reply of a reply...) and downward only, vertically (replying to the original post/comment).

Comments, limited from the sides, can only go downward or upward. Newest or best, yay or nay.
Forget reading other people's opinions - it would take too long to scroll through all that junk.
Instead, have fun reading 3 or 4 same comments over and over as people keep making them over and over... until you get it down to under a 100 comments or so PER STORY.
I.e. Until you cull the herd of visitors to a couple of dozen regular, diehard, commenters with the rest of the crowd being anonymous likers and haters, spammers and trolls.

Bonus points for the spam now taking up more space - cause it's all vertical, taking up more screen realestate.

They are literally killing the site and making it into just another blog.
Designed for consumers, who just read instead of discussing, who watch rather than read, skim rather than watch.
Going for that imgur audience I guess.

And now, the post above in NuSlash mode...

[denzacar]

This makes Slashdot about pictures first, then summaries, then... maybe...
comments.

You can forget discussions.
Comment systems are not designed for discussions - that's what forums and
boards are for.
Where people discuss topics and issues, which can sometimes branch out
into topic different from the original but still interesting to the people who are
taking part in the discussion.
Text takes up as much space as needed, cause people often quote the
people they're talking with, make counterpoints, link and copy sources etc.

Comments on the other hand are just a stack of singular, insular, bite-sized
OPINIONS.
That's why you have those small nvarchar(254) comment boxes.
It was never intended for the CONSUMER of the news or blog to make long
insightful or informative posts which might turn out to be more interesting
than the original story, warranting further discussion both to the sides and
downward, horizontally (replying to a reply of a reply...) and downward only,
vertically (replying to the original post/comment).

Comments, limited from the sides, can only go downward or upward. Newest
or best, yay or nay.
Forget reading other people's opinions - it would take too long to scroll
through all that junk.
Instead, have fun reading 3 or 4 same comments over and over as people
keep making them over and over... until you get it down to under a 100
comments or so PER STORY.
I.e. Until you cull the herd of visitors to a couple of dozen regular, diehard,
commenters with the rest of the crowd being anonymous likers and haters,
spammers and trolls.

Bonus points for the spam now taking up more space - cause it's all vertical,
taking up more screen realestate.

They are literally killing the site and making it into just another blog.
Designed for consumers, who just read instead of discussing, who watch
rather than read, skim rather than watch.
Going for that imgur audience I guess.

NO.

[Packgrog]

I've read this site since the mid/late 90's. I think I've only logged in twice to comment since then, but I'm doing so again now.

PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS.

I come here for a quick summary of tech news. The redesign is counter-productive to that, giving more focus on useless images and white space.

Slashdot readers read technical documents. We are educated and able to understand complex concepts from text. We do not need the website equivalent of a picture book. We come here, a place that is an exception to this trend in website design, BECAUSE it is an exception that doesn't cater to the least-intelligent denominator.

Please scrap that redesign, or use it for a different site that is not so geared to the technically inclined. Please keep Slashdot text-centric as is always has been. Do not compromise what has made this site special for over 16 years.

Userside solution for stupid retarded narrow sites

[FatLittleMonkey]

I hate this and I hate every web site that does this.

A partial solution for Firefox users is the addon NoSquint. It allows you to separately zoom site and text. So for a site as pointlessly narrow as Slashdot/beta you zoom the site setting to say 150 to 170%, then zoom the text back down to 50-70%.

It's not perfect, you can't increase the width without zooming non-text elements which can produce some weirdness occasionally. But it is better than the stupid narrow format of Slashdot/beta. Although it won't solve the problem of the hiding the text of each story behind "Read More" JS bullshit.

[Pro-tip: Global-settings/Exceptions/Pattern:"*.blogspot"/Add-exception/OK. Save you much annoyance.]

[[Optizoom might be the Chrome equivalent. Possibly.]]

WTF

[FatLittleMonkey]

Although it won't solve the problem of the hiding the text of each story behind "Read More" JS bullshit.

Oh god, I just checked properly and it's a normal story link. There's actually no way to read the summary text on the home page.

Re:collapsable comments

[FatLittleMonkey]

The subject.

Do not like it

[sasquatch989]

I normally embrace change, but not this

Hate is an ugly word

[mu51c10rd]

How about absolutely despise and generates violent tendencies? That would describe my feelings towards the redesign.

Content to Fluff ratio went down...

[mtippett]

The amount of content (text) to mostly irrelevant Pictures (fluff) went bad pretty quickly. If they are stock photos or Logos, why bother making it larger and apparently more relevant than the article?

If it is an image from the relevant article, i'm not so against it.

Re:collapsable comments

[zidium]

Um in the current layout, just click the subject to collapse it + children posts.

Very, Very Sad

[crunchy_one]

If this redesign goes live, I'm outta here. It's as simple as that.

Re:Font size

[Megane]

This. A thousand times this. The font size I set in my browser is the size I want to read text at. If you want other text to be bigger, MAKE IT BIGGER DON'T MAKE BODY TEXT SMALLER.

No way

[daffmeister]

Just in case someone that matters is actually reading these comments, let me add my voice.

I've been reading this site for at least 13 years and as others have said, it's not the stories, it's the comments and community that make it worthwhile. This change will absolutely kill that. I'm pretty sure that if you make this change, I'll move on.

Nope

[neurovish]

Hate the new design. It looks like every other crap website. If you want to talk about "brand", then Slashdot's classic interface/layout would be it. It is about as iconic as you can get on the internet. Don't fuck it up.

Re:Parent button

[Megane]

Without even the basic message threading functionality like that which makes Slashdot what it is, how can they call this a "beta" with a straight face? It's not even alpha quality as far as actual features are concerned.

Terrible!

[Sqweegee]

Giant pictures take up way too much space. Tons of wasted white space, especially on the sides. Comments take up up too much vertical space. Too much crap that doesn't enhance browsing the site.

This is the exact same reason I stopped going to digg, the amount of fluff overpowered actual content and the entire site became a pain to navigate because some stupid developers keep thinking OMGZ da peoplez dey wants da shineyz and da poneyz dat I just learned, rather than a compact, easy to read at a glance aggregation of news. The slashdot crowd is swayed by pretty pictures and shiny widgets, they only get in the way of having discussions about the topics and presenting information in a useful format.

The design is terrible and you should feel terrible.

Posts show "Days ago" instead of actual time

[halcyon1234]

First: What everyone else has said. Make this change, and you'll kill Slashdot dead. The comment section is tiny, confusing, hard to read, and pushed so far down the page as to be completely ignored.

Second: Don't even fucking think of using the brain-dead Facebook/twitter model of "x minutes/hours/days" ago instead of showing the actual posting time. One, it isn't accurate enough. Two hours ago-- and how many minutes? Two, if I want to know when something was posted, I don't want to do math. I want to glance at the post's title and see the exact time and date. I don't want to look there, then look at my clock, then look back again, and start to do math as to when it was posted. Umm--- thirteen hours ago, and it's currently 7am, so that means-- carry the 12, remember AM/PM-- FUCK IT!

This whole redesign has to be a joke. =(

Some humble feedback

[FatLittleMonkey]

I like the new design elements, but I have some suggestions.

The new ultra-narrow format is good, but the sidebar takes up too small a portion of it. The current ratio of main:sidebar is perhaps 2:1, but I think 3:2 would be better, maybe even 1:1. Also the side-bar should sort of hover inexactly when I scroll, maybe vanishing as I scroll then weirdly fading back in, I see that on many websites and I always really notice it! Anything would be better than having the sidebar attached to the main page, that's sooooo 2005.

Animated ads are okay, but I think more elements in the side-bar should move continuously while I'm trying to read. And have you considered making the "popular now" box continuously side-scrolling? This is pretty standard on many sites now, see your own Dice.com homepage for an example of this awesomely eye-catching gimmick!

Hmmm. Indenting comment threads. It's certainly an improvement how you've deemphasised threads so much, but is it really necessary to have them at all? Why not just bite the bullet and get rid of the threads and indenting altogether and just display the comments flat in order of posting.

The pop-over menu on the Topics tab is great. I love how it pops up instantly when you are moving your mouse down from your browser's tab bar, you don't even have to pause for a tenth of a second! And it's great how you have to move the mouse cursor so much further to get the pop-up to close, then move back up to what you are actually trying to click on. I think more page elements should have large boxes that instantly pop-up when you are trying to mouse past them!

Some additional suggestions:

It would also be nice to have big social media buttons pop-up whenever I mouse over each story! I see that on many sites and blogs, and assume you're already working on it.

I think you should limit access for non-subscibers. Say 5 articles a month? This would encourage lots of new subscribers.

And don't forget to welcome me to the site by greying out the page and popping up a little box encouraging me to sign up for email notifications, or inviting me to sample other Dice.com properties. I know I appreciate that on every other site that does it!

---

Congratulations on the new design, you are really moving in a positive direction. Keep up the good work. More generic pictures, less text please!

Dice, throw some cash my way...

[dnebin]

So Dice likes to buy something, rework it into a steaming pile of shit, and lose traffic/revenue as a result, thus totally devaluating an asset?

If they like throwing money away, have them throw some cash my way. I too will not generate any traffic and revenue for you, and I'm a lot cheaper than what you paid for the "redesign".

PLEASE NO!

[bsdguy]

Way too heavy on graphics and way too slow for people in rural areas without access to the kind of bandwidth people in large cities have! With the heavy graphics it will probably run me over my Hughesnet bandwidth allotment to use the new design.

I am not sure who came up with the idea of the redesign, but it will not work for folks with lower speed links. It is so painful on my satellite link that I have to believe that it will be worse on 2G or 3G wireless links (much of rural America does not have anything faster). I know most of my neighbors are still working on dialup because where we live there is NO DSL and NO CABLE. High speed in these parts is called a T1 at $500/month.

Slashdot readers do not visit the site for eye candy, we visit the site for the information. Please scrap the beta before wasting too much time and money on it. The only good thing I can say about beta.slashdot.org is that it seems to work properly in lynx. Maybe I will be forced to use lynx to view slashdot in the future.

-Brett

If you have to explain it, you've failed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

A great example of Mystery Meat navigation. If you have to explain how to use the site, especially to a Slashdot audience, you've failed.

"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."
Request: Define richer.

What do the pretty pictures give me that text doesn't? I'm going to be hard to convince though, because the WiFi node I'm on has crappy performance, and those images are big. They're taking a long time to download, and frankly add nothing to the text story underneath them.

Others have said it already, but I have a widescreen monitor. Why the hell did you make it smaller than that? Granted I can override it with a user CSS file, but come on guys. This is silly.

Fixed width vs. a river of text

[ProudParanoid]

Everyone is complaining about the fixed width/wall of white on the right side.
.

Isn't the alternative to have 1920 pixels of text? Readability dictates less than that on a line. I manage this with my browser by setting it up to half the width of my screen. Most people do not, so what every techie wants...free flowing text...will be very long/wide lines of tech to non-techies.

Is this what we want for everyone, or just as a setting for techies?

I think you're confused

[neminem]

April Fools Day was several months ago. This would have been a great prank, but you're kinda late.

I like it...but

[JeffDenver]

Please stop it with the pop overs. I don't know why web designers started doing this, but it is immensely annoying. Quit it. The new design actually looks modern and is easy to read though. Looks like Slashdot will finally escape the 90s.

No departments anymore???

[SoftwareArtist]

It no longer shows the "From the ... dept." line?

This does not make me happy. :(

Well...

[Guy From V]

...sounds like everyone's lovin' this redesign and stuff.

This is pretty much awful and history repeating...

[MillerHighLife21]

I don't know what gets into designers that makes them think stuff like this is a good idea. I spent about a year and a half working for a 14 year old web company that had a huge, loyal user base and a system that everybody in the community was very happy with. It was the system that had grown the entire community from nothing and fended off all competitors.

Then they brought in a consultant and a new design. They broke the site, broke the design and generally caused a complete and total uproar. Nearly sank the company and created a major hornets nest of competitors actively stealing traffic. Everybody thought it was going to be the next major "Digg" failure. I helped them survive and the only reason I even came on to help is because that company had a massive network effect of buyers and sellers. It would take a coordinated effort or a clear competitor (a Facebook to your MySpace) to get all of those people to leave...so they had some time.

Digg had no network effect. I could just start looking somewhere else for my general news around the internet.

Slashdot doesn't have a network effect either. Keep that in mind before you completely trash the site by converting into a web stereotype. Seriously, know you're audience. "News for Nerds". We care about data. We care about information. We care about functional systems and we don't give a crap about whitespace. The current design caters to ALL of that. The new design caters to NONE of that except what some designer probably told you was a really good idea/trendy/web2.0/upgrade.

You're putting the entire site at risk if you flip the switch on that thing.

Kill it.

[digitalmonkey2k1]

With fire.

What he said

[unitron]

"As a daily visitor for the last 15 years... (1)
Joe Jordan | yesterday
No. Terrible design that makes it look like a cheap WordPress site using a free theme because /. was too cheap to spend $40 for a premium theme. What are you thinking?"
*THIS*
Been here since the Halloween Papers (October '98).
UID 5733
I've liked some of the changes over the years and not cared so much for others.
But if you go through with this, it won't be Slashdot anymore.

You call it beta...

[unitron]

...for me a different 4 letter word comes immediately to mind.

In fact it's difficult to fully express my dislike of it without resorting to 4 letter words.

Samsung NoteII Review

[trollboy]

Your responsive scripts pick up that I'm on mobile, but then the mobile ad forces screen width to desktop size. This results in the mobile rendered page being shown on the left half of the screen in tiny unreadable text, while the right side of the screen is all whitespace, save for an actually readable mobile ad at the top. Clicking the menu button gives you a black slideout panel with only "Login" on it... having the default section buttons there would be ever so handy in lieu of taking up a VAST amount of screen real estate to urge me to log in and nothing else.

Let me know where to send a screen shot to and I'll gladly help out. Other than that... looks pretty nice and modern. So long as it's quick and smooth I say go for it. After you fix the mobile of course.

NO!

[TheBAFH]

NO! NOOOOO!!!

NO!
NO!
NO!

My eyes!!!!

The horror! The HORROR!!!!

I'll visit less, a lot less

[MrL0G1C]

If this gets implemented, Slashdot will lose it's appeal, I'll lose interest and I'm not threatening to leave, I just won't like the site anymore and won't have any reason to visit.

If this goes ahead, it'll be the end of slashdot :-(

The commenting system is what makes slashdot what it is, without it as it currently is, there will be nothing here for us. We won't come here anymore.

Gut slashdot and it will die.

Looks like every other wordpress site

[shirosenshi]

I always read slashdot and love the old school look of slashcode. The new site looks just like every other wordpress site on the internet :(

Advert relief

[Talcyon]

Oh, that feels better :). The horizontal banner ads are appearing at the top, and not in the right sidebar any more.
Just need to make the hover buttons toggle on/off for tablet users now. Or is it just IE10 on Surface RT that's doing that? I don't have an iPad available to test them with.

I'm talking about the topics menu. Not a problem with my type cover, but unusable without it.

Those Narrow Columns

[RyoShin]

A great deal of the (all negative) comments are about the fixed-width design, which is horrible--especially for wide monitors. And I agree.

But I think it's more insidious than that. I think this is Dice making Slashdot available for "Wrap Ads" (my term; I've no idea what the industry term for this is.) This is an advertisement that takes up all the white space around the site content (usually including some flash ad in the regular side-bar ad space.) I've only seen these in relation to video games and movies, but that might just be because I don't visit many sites not dabbling in those categories. Some sites that do this:
-IGN (they're running one right now for Final Fantasy XIV, even! Giant flash ad at the top. Load it in a browser without NoScript/adblock to see)
-Anime News Network (and what do you know, they're also doing it right now!)
-Escapist Magazine (home to the popular Zero Punctuation series of game reviews, but they're not doing it right now.)

Just like city buses wrapped completely for advertising, I believe that Dice has created this layout--which goes against best practices (I think?), especially where nerds and news are concerned--expressly for the purpose of selling wrap-around advertising. Most of us won't feel it, since a large portion of the community uses NoScript, AdBlock, and other such add-ons/services, but it still makes the comment section a pain and that's all Slashdot is good for now. Timely news? No. Properly edited synopsis that remove extreme spin/bias? No. Editing to check for dupes, sometimes within hours of each other? No. More-intelligent-than-average internet commentary with a user-ran moderation system that helps to bring the more useful comments to the front? Yes.

And this new layout cuts the space for that by half, wrap ads or no. So when the current Slashdot layout goes, so do I.

Re:Those Narrow Columns

[Golden_Rider]

A great deal of the (all negative) comments are about the fixed-width design, which is horrible--especially for wide monitors. And I agree.

Yes, that is my main complaint (together with the text spacing, which also reduces the amount of text you get on screen).

Just to show an example, this is what the new design looks like on my 2560x1440 screen (screenshots of the old and the new design in Firefox):

http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/8241/vpnt.jpg

GAHHHHH!!!

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

KILL IT WITH FIRE!

Thanks for giving me my life back

[daffmeister]

If this redesign goes through then I'm going to get a couple of hours a day back in my life, since I won't be checking out the stories here any more.

As others have said, this site is all about the comments. Break that and you've broken the site.

Whitespace

[BalthCat]

Why is there







so much?

Is this change really nescesary?

[BigLonn]

This beta is too busy and distracts from the stories. The stories are what drew me to slashdot, not the graphics, don't get me wrong pictures are nice but they aren't what drew me to this website, what drew me was the relevance of the information I could gain from looking on here. And that is what the beta should be doing, not thrusting a bunch of nameless pictures in the users face and expect them to be able to see a story in a picture. The problem in the pictures is they are only displaying a small fraction of the pictures your using, and not the whole picture. Linked started this a few months ago and honestly I now go directly to my profile page as the alleged home page is a useless wreck and totally unfriendly to use anymore. It's unwieldy and distracting. Please kill this change before I quit slashdot.

Wastes my real estate

[uninformedLuddite]

I browse at 1920X1080. If I am maximised it wastes nearly half of the page with white space. I bet it looks great on a tablet or smartphone. Bring back old management please.

Grumpy old guy checking in

[xtal]

I'm probably done here if I have to look at that hipster nightmare they're trying to promote.

We should fork the code, go back to the old stuff, and skim the site automatically. Don't piss off the geeks.

I'd put $100 into a kickstarter to support that.

abysmal

[peetm]

If you'd have just added a Facebook 'Like' widget (I didn't just miss that did I?), you would have won first prize for the worst, most shit like news site that I thought could only exist in a nightmare.

Summary: it's fucking awful!

Prediction: you'll just ahead anyway.