It's on our to-do list (and has been for a long time), but our to-do list is pretty huge. I'll bring it up again at our next meeting and see when we can find time for it. Sorry I don't have anything more specific for you.
You're correct that relatively few people check out the submissions bin/firehose and vote on entries there. One of the goals of the redesign is to make that process easier to find and participate in.
You can talk on a phone and not be an ass (use noise canceling headphones, noise canceling microphones, keep your voice down, and talk.
This is basically how I feel about it. When I fly, I can occasionally hear conversations within a few rows, but the noise of the plane drowns out anything further away. The conversations I do hear don't really bother me, so I'm not sure why hearing half a conversation would be significant enough to warrant legislation. Granted, if somebody's loud and obnoxious about it, that'd be annoying. But chances are, that person would be loud and obnoxious without the phone anyway (or, if they don't realize it, a polite request would probably make them stop).
The skeptical part of me figures it's just grandstanding on the part of the politicians pushing it through.
It's more that any community, even Slashdot's, has a variety of interests and areas of expertise. You can be very educated and technically-minded, but still not know anything about NTP, in the same way a network engineer may not know offhand what solid rocket grain geometry is, or Sanger sequencing.
It's a bit of a catch-22 -- when we post more explanatory summaries, people say that we're dumbing it down. When we post more complicated ones, people say they shouldn't have to turn to Google to figure out what the story is about.
Plus, I asked months/a year ago about exporting existing comments out of Slashdot but you/They made sure that was never close to a possibility... really now? Data Capture? I calculate I have almost 100 blog topics stored in raw material here. But no. You gang NEVER made ANY easy export tools under ANY management even BEFORE Dice.
That's actually much closer to reality now than it's ever been. Hopefully it's something we can get finished soon, but we have a lot of work ahead of us yet. I'm sorry things are slow.
Big Bad Dice owns you and you have lots of firepower to add!
Despite popular sentiment, Dice hasn't taken to Slashdot with a heavy hand. Our engineering team is not much bigger now than when they bought us. Coming up to speed on this codebase is very much not trivial, so even if they sent us a dozen developers tomorrow, it'd be a while before their impact was felt. And the mythical man month, etc.
Unfortunately, this will likely just lead to them removing the Anonymous feature, which does have it's uses.
Not going to happen!
Sorry the useful conversation is dampened right now. Hopefully it'll get better as people communicate what they need to communicate, and as the beta itself improves.
It does, usually. You don't notice the typos that have already been fixed because there's nothing to notice.
But we do make mistakes. We can't get 100% of them, but we try to. As you can imagine, it's been pretty hectic around here for the past few days, and that doesn't help.
The amount of people complaining about the beta across multiple stories and multiple days should be enough to verify that. If not, it's easy enough to test for yourself. What's been surprising to me is how many comments and emails we've seen asking for us to ban people/delete comments about the beta protest.
Side note: we do ban (and have always banned) commercial spammers and bots that try to flood us with traffic. The folks that do that like using proxies, so if you use a proxy, it's possible you'll end up on one that got banned for that reason. If that happens, you can switch proxies or email us at banned@slashdot.org.
"Indefinitely" is problematic, as there's a very real maintenance commitment even if active development on it stops altogether. Our engineering team is small, and the codebase is vast. It's not that we want to actively kill the classic site (and who knows, maybe we'll find a way to keep it going in perpetuity); it's that eventually something will seriously break, and we won't have the resources to fix it.
In the meantime, we're leaving the classic site up for a while yet, and we're continuing to work on the beta to make it more usable for the people who have problems with it. I can't promise it'll end up being exactly what you want, but it will certainly get better. FWIW, when the last redesign happened in 2011, we had a very strong negative reaction from the community. But we kept improving it and fixing things people complained about, and now people are very upset that it might be going away.
We have no intention of moving away from our current community and demographic.
One of the big reasons for the redesign is that we don't want new readers to instantly be turned off to the site by a design that looks old and unmaintained. When we say 'new readers,' a lot of people are assuming that we mean a different demographic -- but we don't. There are lots and lots of people in the existing demographic that don't read Slashdot. Either they're already part of a different community, or they haven't joined one at all.
It's vital for any online community to have a stream of new users. No community has 100% retention of older users, so without new minds joining the discussion, they'll all dwindle eventually.
We're quite happy to have new users come from the same backgrounds that our older users came from. Letting the site slowly stagnate would be a disservice to those of you who have helped build the community in the first place.
We're aware of how poorly nested comments render on small screen widths. It's one of the things we have to fix.
FWIW, we do have a dedicated mobile version, and cases like this are one of the reasons the classic site is still around, and will be around for a long time yet.
I'm sorry it's not usable on your devices yet, but we're working to finish it, and definitely not ignoring those use-cases.
We have plans to implement direct linking to comments. It's been on our to-do list since before the recent expansion of the beta test. It's one of several features we simply haven't had time to implement yet.
Also, the way in which comments are displayed is still a work-in-progress as well. There will be improvements.
I miss the one-line comments, too, and it's one of the features I've been trying to get bumped up on the to-do list. The commenting system is not finished, by any means.
Since Slashdot seems to have little or no interest during the past couple of years in repairing broken issues with profile options, I suspect the new version isn't going to be any better.
That's actually one of the reasons for the redesign. Our codebase is vast and byzantine, and some of it stretches back from more than a decade ago. Rewriting and redesigning will allow us to make some changes and fixes much more easily than we can do currently.
I can categorically state that the beta site will certainly get more features and layout changes.
I can categorically state that redesigns happen, and will continue to happen. We've had, what.. 4 redesigns, now? This isn't our first, and I'm sure it won't be our last.
As for how long the classic site will stay up: it's not my call, and plans are far from firm. I wish I had more information for you, but I don't.
I'm really sorry if it doesn't end up in a state that's to your personal preference. But given your comments, I'm not sure how that's even possible. Are you objecting because you don't like the specific changes, or because you don't want it to change at all?
You're right -- we should have communicated it better. It would have been my preference to get closer to feature parity, too, personally. But I do see value in rolling it out to more people, particularly when they're free to switch back to the Classic site. It helps a lot with the statistical significance of the feedback. Our earliest, invite-only alpha got very positive feedback overall. If we'd just gone with that, we'd be in serious trouble.
I got some numbers for you on the D1 system. The total number of users who have it enabled is very small -- less than 10,000 out of 3M+ accounts.
However, among active users, the percentage is much higher -- around 10%. And those users contribute roughly 15% of the comments on the site.
It was a poor choice of wording, I agree. But believe me, there's no confusion that the community drives the site. When we're talking about fixes/changes/new features for the site, the commenters and submitters are foremost on our minds. We call you folks Makers.
I don't know offhand how many users are still using D1 -- I'll ask one of the engineers to run a db query when I can.
Personally, I was expecting the community to rain hell down on us. I was not disappointed.
Let me ask you a question: if we'd spent a bit more time polishing the site and then just set it live for 100% of users, do you think that would have gone better? That's basically what we did for the 2011 redesign. Hearing some users now say, "Slashdot's perfect as it is, don't change it" is.. odd, to say the least, after the amount of criticism it received on launch.
We've got the beta site up because we really want to work with the community this time around.
Do you want to triple the users and you don't care if you alienate and reject the current user base? Is that the secret plan?
Very much no -- while we don't want to actively alienate non-technical readers, our core audience is definitely our main concern.
People keep throwing out the word "trendy," and I have a few responses to that. First, I don't know if I'd call the Beta trendy. When I think trendy, I think the recent http://www.nbcnews.com redesign. But OK -- I'll grant that at the least, it's trendier than the classic site. Second, Slashdot is a pretty big community. We have a lot of users with a lot of strong opinions on how websites should look. And a lot of users who don't really care how websites look. So when we're making design decisions, the only thing we know for sure is that a lot of people are going to hate it. Our job is to balance everybody's needs, and it's not an easy one.
Heck, there are users advocating for Slashdot's original look from ~17 years ago. Frankly, I don't see a way to make that (albeit small) group of users happy. It's not that we don't care about them, but returning to that design would pretty much kill the site.
Third -- I know a lot of the internal discussions during the redesign process centered on things I think you'd agree are important: highlighting the substance of the comments. A lot of people are looking at the beta comment sections and seeing tons of whitespace. But that also means we have fewer giant colorful bars, links, and ornamentation to distract from the comments. The font choices were made for readability, as was the spacing. It may not be to your preference -- people can disagree about the best way from Point A to Point B -- but that doesn't mean the intentions aren't there. Should designers avoid that because it might look tendy?
I'm afraid that's just not the case. If you're not seeing comments you expect to see, it's likely that you either don't have your thresholds set right (probably not, since you mentioned browsing at -1), or you don't have all the comments loaded on the story. When a story get beyond a certain number of comments, you'll have to hit the button at the top that loads more.
"Flag this comment" button is not hooked to any automation -- feel free to test it on any comment you like. All it does it put the comment on a list the editors review, and we make a decision on whether or not to moderate it down. Even then, it's only for the worst of the worst -- spam, racism, other actual abuse.
If you ever have trouble finding a comment, feel free to contact me -- I'll do what I can to help you locate it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's on our to-do list (and has been for a long time), but our to-do list is pretty huge. I'll bring it up again at our next meeting and see when we can find time for it. Sorry I don't have anything more specific for you.
If you switch the view to Classic using this dropdown menu, you should see full summaries rather than truncated ones.
I'm still arguing to get it changed/fixed for the default view.
You're correct that relatively few people check out the submissions bin/firehose and vote on entries there. One of the goals of the redesign is to make that process easier to find and participate in.
This is basically how I feel about it. When I fly, I can occasionally hear conversations within a few rows, but the noise of the plane drowns out anything further away. The conversations I do hear don't really bother me, so I'm not sure why hearing half a conversation would be significant enough to warrant legislation. Granted, if somebody's loud and obnoxious about it, that'd be annoying. But chances are, that person would be loud and obnoxious without the phone anyway (or, if they don't realize it, a polite request would probably make them stop).
The skeptical part of me figures it's just grandstanding on the part of the politicians pushing it through.
It's more that any community, even Slashdot's, has a variety of interests and areas of expertise. You can be very educated and technically-minded, but still not know anything about NTP, in the same way a network engineer may not know offhand what solid rocket grain geometry is, or Sanger sequencing.
It's a bit of a catch-22 -- when we post more explanatory summaries, people say that we're dumbing it down. When we post more complicated ones, people say they shouldn't have to turn to Google to figure out what the story is about.
That's actually much closer to reality now than it's ever been. Hopefully it's something we can get finished soon, but we have a lot of work ahead of us yet. I'm sorry things are slow.
Despite popular sentiment, Dice hasn't taken to Slashdot with a heavy hand. Our engineering team is not much bigger now than when they bought us. Coming up to speed on this codebase is very much not trivial, so even if they sent us a dozen developers tomorrow, it'd be a while before their impact was felt. And the mythical man month, etc.
Not going to happen!
Sorry the useful conversation is dampened right now. Hopefully it'll get better as people communicate what they need to communicate, and as the beta itself improves.
To be fair, the English language had it coming.
It does, usually. You don't notice the typos that have already been fixed because there's nothing to notice.
But we do make mistakes. We can't get 100% of them, but we try to. As you can imagine, it's been pretty hectic around here for the past few days, and that doesn't help.
I just updated the summary with grammar fixes. Thanks for pointing it out.
We're not banning people for anti-beta comments.
The amount of people complaining about the beta across multiple stories and multiple days should be enough to verify that. If not, it's easy enough to test for yourself. What's been surprising to me is how many comments and emails we've seen asking for us to ban people/delete comments about the beta protest.
Side note: we do ban (and have always banned) commercial spammers and bots that try to flood us with traffic. The folks that do that like using proxies, so if you use a proxy, it's possible you'll end up on one that got banned for that reason. If that happens, you can switch proxies or email us at banned@slashdot.org.
Well, the classic site isn't going away soon.
"Indefinitely" is problematic, as there's a very real maintenance commitment even if active development on it stops altogether. Our engineering team is small, and the codebase is vast. It's not that we want to actively kill the classic site (and who knows, maybe we'll find a way to keep it going in perpetuity); it's that eventually something will seriously break, and we won't have the resources to fix it.
In the meantime, we're leaving the classic site up for a while yet, and we're continuing to work on the beta to make it more usable for the people who have problems with it. I can't promise it'll end up being exactly what you want, but it will certainly get better. FWIW, when the last redesign happened in 2011, we had a very strong negative reaction from the community. But we kept improving it and fixing things people complained about, and now people are very upset that it might be going away.
As we said a few days ago, we're slowing down the rollout. And we aren't "getting rid of" the classic site any time soon.
We have no intention of moving away from our current community and demographic.
One of the big reasons for the redesign is that we don't want new readers to instantly be turned off to the site by a design that looks old and unmaintained. When we say 'new readers,' a lot of people are assuming that we mean a different demographic -- but we don't. There are lots and lots of people in the existing demographic that don't read Slashdot. Either they're already part of a different community, or they haven't joined one at all.
It's vital for any online community to have a stream of new users. No community has 100% retention of older users, so without new minds joining the discussion, they'll all dwindle eventually.
We're quite happy to have new users come from the same backgrounds that our older users came from. Letting the site slowly stagnate would be a disservice to those of you who have helped build the community in the first place.
We're aware of how poorly nested comments render on small screen widths. It's one of the things we have to fix.
FWIW, we do have a dedicated mobile version, and cases like this are one of the reasons the classic site is still around, and will be around for a long time yet.
I'm sorry it's not usable on your devices yet, but we're working to finish it, and definitely not ignoring those use-cases.
We have plans to implement direct linking to comments. It's been on our to-do list since before the recent expansion of the beta test. It's one of several features we simply haven't had time to implement yet.
Also, the way in which comments are displayed is still a work-in-progress as well. There will be improvements.
I miss the one-line comments, too, and it's one of the features I've been trying to get bumped up on the to-do list. The commenting system is not finished, by any means.
That's actually one of the reasons for the redesign. Our codebase is vast and byzantine, and some of it stretches back from more than a decade ago. Rewriting and redesigning will allow us to make some changes and fixes much more easily than we can do currently.
I can categorically state that the beta site will certainly get more features and layout changes.
I can categorically state that redesigns happen, and will continue to happen. We've had, what.. 4 redesigns, now? This isn't our first, and I'm sure it won't be our last.
As for how long the classic site will stay up: it's not my call, and plans are far from firm. I wish I had more information for you, but I don't.
I'm really sorry if it doesn't end up in a state that's to your personal preference. But given your comments, I'm not sure how that's even possible. Are you objecting because you don't like the specific changes, or because you don't want it to change at all?
Linking to comments will definitely be re-implemented. It's something that was already on our to-do list before expanding the beta test.
You're right -- we should have communicated it better. It would have been my preference to get closer to feature parity, too, personally. But I do see value in rolling it out to more people, particularly when they're free to switch back to the Classic site. It helps a lot with the statistical significance of the feedback. Our earliest, invite-only alpha got very positive feedback overall. If we'd just gone with that, we'd be in serious trouble.
I got some numbers for you on the D1 system. The total number of users who have it enabled is very small -- less than 10,000 out of 3M+ accounts.
However, among active users, the percentage is much higher -- around 10%. And those users contribute roughly 15% of the comments on the site.
It was a poor choice of wording, I agree. But believe me, there's no confusion that the community drives the site. When we're talking about fixes/changes/new features for the site, the commenters and submitters are foremost on our minds. We call you folks Makers.
Oops, responded to you here by accident.
I don't know offhand how many users are still using D1 -- I'll ask one of the engineers to run a db query when I can.
Personally, I was expecting the community to rain hell down on us. I was not disappointed.
Let me ask you a question: if we'd spent a bit more time polishing the site and then just set it live for 100% of users, do you think that would have gone better? That's basically what we did for the 2011 redesign. Hearing some users now say, "Slashdot's perfect as it is, don't change it" is.. odd, to say the least, after the amount of criticism it received on launch.
We've got the beta site up because we really want to work with the community this time around.
Very much no -- while we don't want to actively alienate non-technical readers, our core audience is definitely our main concern.
People keep throwing out the word "trendy," and I have a few responses to that. First, I don't know if I'd call the Beta trendy. When I think trendy, I think the recent http://www.nbcnews.com redesign. But OK -- I'll grant that at the least, it's trendier than the classic site. Second, Slashdot is a pretty big community. We have a lot of users with a lot of strong opinions on how websites should look. And a lot of users who don't really care how websites look. So when we're making design decisions, the only thing we know for sure is that a lot of people are going to hate it. Our job is to balance everybody's needs, and it's not an easy one.
Heck, there are users advocating for Slashdot's original look from ~17 years ago. Frankly, I don't see a way to make that (albeit small) group of users happy. It's not that we don't care about them, but returning to that design would pretty much kill the site.
Third -- I know a lot of the internal discussions during the redesign process centered on things I think you'd agree are important: highlighting the substance of the comments. A lot of people are looking at the beta comment sections and seeing tons of whitespace. But that also means we have fewer giant colorful bars, links, and ornamentation to distract from the comments. The font choices were made for readability, as was the spacing. It may not be to your preference -- people can disagree about the best way from Point A to Point B -- but that doesn't mean the intentions aren't there. Should designers avoid that because it might look tendy?
I'm afraid that's just not the case. If you're not seeing comments you expect to see, it's likely that you either don't have your thresholds set right (probably not, since you mentioned browsing at -1), or you don't have all the comments loaded on the story. When a story get beyond a certain number of comments, you'll have to hit the button at the top that loads more.
"Flag this comment" button is not hooked to any automation -- feel free to test it on any comment you like. All it does it put the comment on a list the editors review, and we make a decision on whether or not to moderate it down. Even then, it's only for the worst of the worst -- spam, racism, other actual abuse.
If you ever have trouble finding a comment, feel free to contact me -- I'll do what I can to help you locate it.