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Okay, I know it's been a long time since we did one of these but life does intrude on volunteer dev time. Hopefully this one will be worth the wait. Bear with me if I seem a bit off today, I'm writing this with a really fun head cold.
First, what didn't make it into this update but is directly upcoming. Bitpay is still down on account of them changing the API without notifying existing customers or versioning the new API and leaving the old one still up and functional. It's the first thing I'm going to work on after we get this update rolled out but it will basically require a complete rewrite. Don't expect it any earlier than two months from now because we like to test the complete hell out of any code that deals with your money.
Also, adding a Jobs nexus didn't quite make the cut because we're not entirely sure how/if we want to work it. One thing we are certain about, it would not be for headhunters or HR drones to spam us silly but for registered members who have a specific vacancy they need to fill and would like to throw it open to the community.
The API still has some broken bits but it's been low priority compared to what I've been busy with. I'm thinking I'll jump on it after Bitpay unless paulej72 cracks the whip and makes me fix bugs/implement features instead.
There were several other things that I had lined up for post-Bitpay but I can't remember them just now what with my head feeling like it's stuffed full of dirty gym socks.
Now let's throw the list of what did make it out there and go over it in more detail afterwards.
- Tweaked the themes a bit where they were off.
- Changed or fixed some adminy/editory stuff that most of you will never see or care about.
- Fixed a mess of minor bugs not worth noting individually.
- Improved Rehash installation. It should almost be possible to just follow directions and have a site working in an hour or two now.
- Added a very restrictive Content Security Policy.
- Added a link to the Hall of Fame. It was always there, just not linked to.
- Return to where you just moderated after moderating. (yay!)
- Return to where you just were after commenting. (yay some more!)
- Added a field for department on submissions. Editors get final say but if you have a good one, go for it.
- Added a Community Reviews nexus.
- Added a Politics nexus.
- Added <spoiler> tags for the Reviews nexus in case you want to talk about a novel without ruining it for everyone else. They function everywhere though.
- Changed really freaking long comments to have a scrollbar now instead of being click-to-show.
- Massively sped up comment rendering on heavily commented stories.
- Dimming of comments you've already read. (You can turn this off with the controls on the "Comments" tab of your preferences page if it annoys you.)
- Added a "*NEW*" badge to new comments in case you don't like dimming but still want to easily see new posts. (Disable it the same place as above.)
- Removed Nested, Threaded, and Improved threaded comment rendering modes (Necessary due to the changes required for the massive speed-up)
- Added Threaded-TOS and Threaded-TNG comment rendering modes. (TOS is the default)
- All comment modes now feature collapsible/expandable comments. (Without javascript)
Morning Update: Really digging the constructive criticism. Some quality thoughts in there. Keep them coming and we'll see how fast we can get a few done. --TMB
Before the specifics, I know some of you are going to see the new Threaded modes and be like "that's pretty awesome" and some of you are going to call us dev types very bad names. Well, this ain't the other site. We're not saying "You Shall Use This Because It's New And Shiny". We're saying something had to be done about page load times approaching a full minute on heavily trafficked stories and the way we pulled and rendered comments made up nearly all of that time.
So, the first thing we did was we stopped pulling every single comment and then removing the ones we didn't want to display. Mostly that means that the comment counts in the dropdown menus for Threshold and Breakthrough are on a per-page basis now.
Next we did away with templates for comments. Wildcarded, case insensitive search and replace, even in perl, is horribly slow and that's a large part of how templates worked. The html and related logic is now hardcoded into the source. This did mean though that we had to entirely rewrite all the comment modes logic. Flat and Threaded-TOS are pretty much identical to the old Flat and Threaded, so there shouldn't be any surprises there except that we got rid of the javascript in Improved Threaded and gave every mode collapsible comments with nothing but CSS. Threaded-TNG is new-ish however. It's essentially Nested but without Threshold or every top-level comment being fully visible. If Nested users absolutely cannot live with that, we'll preempt working on the bitcoin rewrite and slap a Nested mode in as well. It shouldn't take but a week, testing included.
Third, we paginated every mode. I know it was nice being able to see every comment on one page but that meant pulling and rendering every comment and that simply doesn't work if a story has over a hundred comments.
The removal of sorting by score we can't roll back though. Its loss was a necessity due to the way we pull and sort only the comments that the user actually requests. Previously, we were pulling every single comment for a story and then removing the ones we didn't want. That was both bloody stupid and slow as hell, so it had to go. Unfortunately it means we have to do things slightly differently. It may make a triumphant return eventually but it would require some moderately tricky coding with the particular way our code is laid out.
Oh and if you have objections to the new Threaded modes, by all means bitch about specifics in comments here and we'll see what we can do to address them. After having spent so much time recently bashing on exactly these bits of code, we're quite familiar with them and changes/additions shouldn't take too terribly long to whip out.
Now to the specifics.
The buttons on the upper left of each comment don't work exactly like the Javascript version did but we do like how they work. The double chevron either shows or hides the comment tree beneath a comment but it does not change their collapsed/expanded state. The single chevron controls the expanded/collapsed state of each comment individually. Adding another button to expand/collapse every individual comment beneath a given comment may be doable but we haven't figured out how so far. It is high on the wish list but not high enough to delay the release any longer than it already has been.
Flat: Flat is still flat but now with a collapse/expand button that functions like the ones from Improved Threaded.
Threaded-TOS: If you can find significant differences between Improved Threaded and Threaded-TOS, let us know because it's probably a bug. The idea was to make it as much like Improved Threaded as technically possible with just CSS but paginated like Nested so we don't have to render more than 100 comments at a go. We defaulted everyone on Nested/Threaded/Improved threaded to Threaded-TOS to minimize the aggravation of unexpected change. Oh, and Breakthrough now takes precedence over Threshold, so high scoring comments will always be visible even if they're responding to blatant trolling.
Threaded-TNG: All comment trees start fully branched out but with the individual comments either expanded or collapsed. "Comment Below Threshold" functionality is gone. Breakthrough gets compared to a comment's score to decide if it gets expanded or collapsed. Play with it a couple minutes; it's not terribly hard to grok. Why do we need this mode if TOS covers most all of the best bits of the three old modes? Because I like it. You don't have to use it. Shut up.
What happened to Nested? What's old is new again. Threaded-TNG more or less is Nested but with the fun bits of Improved Threaded bolted on as well and without the annoyance of having to allow Javascript to run. Minus Threshold functionality. If you spot any serious differences between the two besides those, give us a heads up, because we didn't. It's a very easy mode to code on though, so if you absolutely cannot live without Threshold it's not at all difficult to clone it, add Threshold back in, and call it Nested.
Why not leave the old comment rendering modes in as well as the new ones? Because by rewriting them we got a rendering speed increase around a factor of two+, to go with the factor of two+ increase we got by pulling only the necessary comments instead of every last comment a story has with every page load. This has been becoming necessary as we increasingly go way above the 100 comment mark on busy stories. It's not cool for you lot to have to wait forty-five seconds to load a page of comments and it's even less cool to peg a cpu core for forty-five seconds to deliver it to you. If you ever again find a story that takes 10+s to load, something's going wrong and we'd appreciate a heads up. We think there's still some room in the code for improvement but this was the lowest-hanging fruit.
Now on to the rest of the details.
The Content Security Policy should cover what's required for operation of this site (plus allowing for Stripe payments) and nothing else. If your browser honors CSPs, it should not be possible to get smacked with XSS or inline script injection on this site any more; even if we write code buggy enough to allow it, which we have once or twice.
On dimmed comments... This only functions for logged in users currently as it would take some serious work to get it functioning for individual ACs, even using cookies. What it does is when you load a page of comments, it picks the highest comment ID from that story and marks that comment as read by you. Switching between pages of comments or changing your Threshold/sort order should not update which comments you have read, even if new ones have come in since your last read comment ID was set. Hitting the "Mark All as Read" button or hitting your browser's Refresh button on the main story page should take the stored comment ID and set the opacity to 60% on all the comments with a comment ID equal to or less than that. It's not entirely accurate but it's pretty damned close and it doesn't bloat the db much at all. Oh and read histories get wiped after two weeks of not being updated for a particular user/story combination to save on db space as well.
The new comment badge functions exactly opposite of dimmed comments. It puts "* NEW *" in the title bar of comments you haven't read yet. It's there strictly so you can have the same functionality but dislike the aesthetics of comment dimming. You can technically use both if you really want new comments to stand out but that would just be weird.
Returning to where you last moderated works like this. If you moderate one comment, you'll get sent back to that comment. If you moderate several in one go, you should get sent to the one farthest down the page. Moderating does not update the comment ID of what you've read for dimming purposes.
Returning to where you just made a comment? That's pretty self-explanatory. It also should not update the comment ID of what you've read for dimming purposes.
The Politics nexus. This does not mean we're looking to have even more political stories. The balance of tech/science/etc... to political stories is not going to change nor will the quality of accepted political submissions. It's primarily a way to let people who are sick and bloody tired of seeing politics here set a preference and never see political stories again. It's also handy if you wish to see what political stories we've run recently as clicking on the nexus link on the left of the page will show you only those stories.
The Reviews nexus has been brought up three separate times that I can remember by different groups of people, so we decided to go ahead with it. It's going to be a book/film/software/hardware/etc... review and discussion place. By my understanding, though I'm not really involved, it's getting its own space because some folks wanted to start what amounts to a site book club. Tech books will of course be welcome but it's open to all genres of printed and bound words. Ditto non-book reviews. Just don't go sending in a review of something we normally wouldn't publish news about on the site. Not enough people are going to be interested in your review of the barber shop down the street from your house, so it won't get published.
Spoiler tags, <spoiler>text you don't want casually seen</spoiler>, work both in stories and comments and are just a bit of css trickery that hide the text between them until the person viewing them hovers over the *SPOILER* text. There's a slight delay, so don't think it's not working because it's not immediate. That's intentional so you don't accidentally trigger showing the contained text by briefly crossing it.
By popular demand, <del> tags were also added.
That's all worth mentioning in this site update. Look for another one hopefully in May or late April. If you find any bugs, please slap them up as issues on our github repo or email them to dev@soylentnews.org.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 26 2017, @10:09AM (11 children)
(I use threaded-TOS)
1] Could how much the dimming is done be a usersetting? (I like it, but it looks like my vision got wrecked, a 90-95% opacity would be nicer for me - but lot of people would miss that)
2] Everything after "Modding :N)" should go the the same small bar as the comment-id, excepting the "*NEW", it currently requires me to rescan the entire title visually to see who wrote something,also - makes it take longer to findnthe current moderation.
3] Scrolling inside comments - either get rid of it or put it at the same threshold as the old "read full comment", as it is I see very short comments require scrolling and I do not enjoy having to interact a lot when reading (also when at desktop I often need to reach for the mouse - so try the current way in keyboard-mode only).
4] I want the "reply to"-button (for a story) to be the right-most button, personal preference but it will make it easier to hit when on smartphone
5] when in chrime/android the reply-to textbox (where I write now) renders weirdly until you hit preview (ie - the textbox will expand over the preview/submit, but after hitting preview evertyhing works as expected), this was like thusi prior to this update as well.
(Oh look, this short comnent requires scrolling, so to preview I do now [on smartphone] I do now have to interact more... - yes, it really bugs me)
And just a "would be nice", could it be possible to increase the space between "preview" and "submit" (below where I type), I'm on a 4.3" screen...
Probably has a crapload of typos, but I'm not scrolling again
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 26 2017, @10:19AM (7 children)
Also, on chrome/android, after moderating you get returned wit some element being much longer, which means now lines are being wrapped at longer than screen-width (which requires you to revisit the comment-page to not having to scroll horizontally as well).
And it seems like the reply-to button (chrime/android again) gets rendered bigger for your own comment (did'nt have "parent" nor moderation)
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 26 2017, @10:36AM (2 children)
And while replying to myself.
Now qhen we have behavior based on previous load; could we get a "page generated at" near the top? (and maybe an amnesiac reload-button as well)
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:39PM (1 child)
We could add a page generated time, but the time you want is when you first loaded the story from the home page. As you comment and moderate a story, this time (saved as the highest comment id loaded at the time) is not updated. It only does so if you load the page from the home page, or click on the "Mark All as Read" button.
Turning the comment id back into a load time would be difficult, but showing the current time is simple, but not fully accurate. If I have been commenting, as I currently have been, that time will be out of sync with what the new comment highlighting is current showing.
(I have been commenting for 45 minutes now and all comments from 45 minutes ago are still showing as new to me.)
Also I am not sure where you would want this reload button and what you would like it to do. If you can explain it more, we may like the idea and add it.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 26 2017, @10:29PM
A page generated would be enough - I more interested in if the last reload was before or after I left for work.
Might have been I misunderstood when the highest id was set (I tend to leave tabs open for the week or so I follow a story, and reload whenever chrome has gotten swapped out on smartphone or when going to the tab on desktop)
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:31PM (3 children)
Strange bug. Not sure what might be going on. Can you send a screen capture to dev@soylentnews.org. It would help us figure this out.
Looks like I will need to find a way to view chrome on android without having a device. I guess there is some dev environment that will allow this.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @01:01PM
Tried Chrome and FF on two different Android phones. Couldn't replicate.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday February 26 2017, @10:25PM (1 child)
Sent. :)
Sorry for the slow reply, just got home. (And yes, that chrime/android as in a smartphone)
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Monday February 27 2017, @03:34AM
Wow, that is strange. Going to need to research that one.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:27PM
1] We were afraid that a higher opacity would not be noticed as easily, so we added the NEW badge and gave you the choice of which to use.
2] We needed to create a new title bar to make collapsed comments easy to create without making a separate set hidden title bars. We will look into changing how things are displayed to make it easier to see.
3] Mentioned this above. We will be working on a fix for this soon.
4] Not sure if we will change this, but your comment is noted.
5] There was a last minute fix for the preview box that does need some additional tweaking. We will try to replicate this bug and try to fix it.
6] Yes we can see if we can ad some extra space between the buttons.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:48PM (1 child)
6am, mid-coffee thoughts:
1) Hmmm, we could just dim the title bars but that wouldn't work for the vt100 theme at least, so we'd need to override it there.
2) The "NEW" badge was done at the last minute because someone complained about dimming not working well for their eyes. I have no doubts we could have done something better with it but we're currently lacking in the artsy-fartsy dept. We used to have a guy in charge of making pretty things but all we have now are devs, admins, editors, and SirFinkus. Which is a long way of saying we'll see if we can come up with better.
3) Yeah, I don't really like it myself. I'm thinking... I'm not sure what I'm thinking. Whatever we end up doing needs to take into account the vast majority of our traffic is ACs who can't use user preferences.
4) Love to help you out there but I think more people would be annoyed than helped out by changing that. Let me think on it some.
5) Can't replicate. Renders as expected aside from some font-size issues on both of my phones in both FF and Chrome.
6) Yeah, we can add a little space between buttons. Half an em or so of margin-left I think so Preview spaces away from the dropdown list as well.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday February 26 2017, @03:12PM
In case my other comment [soylentnews.org] gets lost in the shuffle, I'm going to repeat part of it here because I haven't seen anybody else mention this so far;
Finally, I just noticed while writing this that comment preview loading is a bit strange now. I'm on a high-latency connection so it probably is more noticeable to me, but when I preview I'm getting an unstyled version of the page for a few seconds before the styles apply. This wasn't happening before the update, and doesn't occur on any other part of the site I've tested; it's exclusive to previews so far.
I use the Grayscale theme (as noted in my complaint about spoiler background being too close to Grayscale's comment background), so having the entire window flash white and look like it's being rendered by "links -g"* for several seconds every preview is rather jarring and a bit hard on the eyes.
* Seriously, I loaded links' graphics mode and compared, and the output's nearly identical except that Firefox's default background is brighter.
(Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Sunday February 26 2017, @11:49AM (1 child)
Chevrons are kind of borked visually. AFAIU I should see 2 buttons, but below each of them I see another 2 starting again. Especially if I use text only zoom.
There is also this thing for spoilers (does not work in IE and older browsers, though): http://caniuse.com/#feat=details [caniuse.com]
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:17PM
Thanks for catching the chevron bug. A simple tweak to the CSS will fix that and will be incorporated into an update soonish. As far as the the spoiler not working we will look at that as well.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:28PM (3 children)
First the bug:
If you hit the 'Reply' button at the bottom of comments, it will take you to the reply screen but it puts you at the top of the screen without the reply text box visible.
And the feature request:
For those of us not good at HTML code, how about a simple visual editor with buttons for the common HTML options (like embed URL with link text) and an option to quote the parent.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @12:57PM
Re: Feature Request... That'd require javascript and we don't currently have a javascript coder on the dev staff. We do have some on the editorial staff but have yet to convince them to come over to the dark side.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:12PM
takyon's greasemonkey script does a lot of this. Most of the editors use it.
https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/journal/1788 [soylentnews.org]
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @07:13PM
Sorry about that bug. Will fix it shortly. Too many links to fix and one was missed. Thanks for finding it.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Sunday February 26 2017, @01:07PM (19 children)
One of the reasons I moved from that other site was because they kept "improving" things that didn't need improving. I thought that I wasn't alone in that, damnit. I don't like what's going on here. I'm afraid this will fall on deaf ears, but this is one of like two sites that I visit on a daily basis, so as a subscriber I feel I have to speak my mind or risk seeing all this become permanent.
I'm not a fan of the way the username has been moved into a mess in the middle of the red bar instead of at the beginning of the gray bar. Because subjects are variable length, now I have to hunt for the username. All text in the red bar is white, so it's a pain to visually extract the username even though it's still a link. It's all white, bold text, so it just gives the impression of a really long, ugly subject line. Plus the stars and face emojis are all in the red bar now. I'm struggling to understand how this layout makes sense to someone. Whoever did this must see things much differently than I do. You've turned a beautiful, clean interface that I found delightfully easy to understand and navigate into visual confusion.
I am not a fan of the chevrons at all. To me, they are ugly and confusing. Trying to put rounded corners on a small black and white square icon just ends up looking icky. Not sure why they can't remain nice plus/minus/plusplus icons with precise square borders even if the function changes.
I really do appreciate all the work you guys are doing behind the scenes to fix bugs and security issues and modernize the code, but I have to be honest; I hate this. I hate this very much. And I just reloaded the page and now all the colors are washed out. Text boxes with gray backgrounds instead of white? The red looks like tomato soup now. The lack of contrast between background and text makes my eyes hurt. Everything keeps changing.
What in the actual f**k? Why do you have to ruin this site for me? Am I totally alone in wanting the site to stay nice and simple and look the way it's always looked? Oh god it's going to be so much fun trying to scroll through a page full of long posts and have the cursor get captured by each post that has its own scroll bar. Loads of fun, especially on a phone. Spoiler tags that auto-open and shift the whole page around as I'm moving my cursor around. Just what I've always wanted!
I'm just about done here. If you wanted to drive me crazy in one night, you found a good way to do it.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 26 2017, @01:21PM (6 children)
You can get rid of the washed out colour thing with a single click in your preferences (the summary explicitly says so).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday February 26 2017, @01:52PM (5 children)
Thanks for that, and it's nice that it's an option, but most people will never look through the preferences enough to find that. And what about lurkers and those who aren't logged in? If that faded crap is the default they'll have to see that whenever they come here. Why can't it be opt-in instead of opt-out? Bottom line is it makes the site look horrible and the lack of contrast between text and background causes eye fatigue. The only worse option would be white text on a black background.
I also forgot to mention that I hate how the score is now jumbled up in the mess of text in the red bar along with the username and everything else, instead of being at the end of the line. Now there are four different kinds of elements that I have to visually parse out of a single line.
I hate this with a burning passion. This site and its predecessor (before it was ruined) have always been among the cleanest, easiest to read Internet forums I've ever been on, and now half of that has been destroyed for me. Maybe I'm the only one who sees it this way, and no one else cares. It certainly seems so.
I am going to be very depressed if this is the way things are going to be from now on. As a user, I don't recall asking for any of these massive visual changes to suddenly occur.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @02:02PM (4 children)
It's not. It would in fact be a whole lot more work to make that even possible.
It could, and it may very well be in the future. We wanted opinions on it though and since probably half the community won't even read this post, it needed to be opt-out at the beginning at least.
That's a fair beef. I even agree. I'll discuss that with paulej72 as soon as he pulls his head out of fixing whatever he's currently fixing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday February 26 2017, @03:31PM (3 children)
That's fair. Opt-out just to test it. Unfortunately I seem to be the only one complaining about it so far. Makes me deeply worried it'll get stuck that way.
Here's the deal. The old way wasn't just visually easier to parse, it was mentally easier to parse, because there was a logical separation of elements related to each other, a simple subject line beautifully visually separated from everything else, and a logical manipulation of important vs. trivial details when expanding and collapsing posts.
Red bar:
Subject text (Score: 999)
[ Two important elements, makes it easy to pick through long collapsed threads for gems that might be interesting. ]
Gray bar:
by SomeDumbassNoob (1234) on The Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, @ZERODARKTHIRTYFM (#9999999999999) [[relevant star/face icons]]
[ All elements related to who/what/where/why/when Re:This post and its author ]
All of the unnecessary details disappeared when collapsed. It was Right[TM]. It was Good[TM]. Stop NotDoingThat[TM]. I don't need to see the star and friend/foe icons still hovering next to collapsed posts. Put them back in the gray bar where they can stop shining like beacons out of the dark night of the red bar. They work so much better on the gray. Fix the expand/collapse icons to something precise and classy (hint: hold shift key to draw a perfect square with the rectangle tool*) and make the fade stuff opt-in (and for the love of eyeball health, tone down the color difference drastically between new vs. faded, even think about making new somehow brighter rather than fading anything), and my sanity may yet be restored. In fact, if the faded thing was really done right, with subtlety and aesthetics in mind, I'd probably even turn it back on and maybe even argue to make it permanently opt-out. But it would have to be beautiful and totally lacking in obnoxiousness. And tomato soup.
I may or may not be misremembering exactly what info was still visible when a post was collapsed. Seems like the username remained visible, and I think it should be. I don't know how technically difficult this is to do with the new code if the username is moved back to the gray bar, but I'm sure a way can be found.
Unfortunately I really have to get some sleep so this is really all I can participate in this thread for now.
* Shift key also makes the line tool draw only orthogonal (horiz/vert) lines. Sometimes 45deg angles too, depends on the software.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 3, Insightful) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:07PM (2 children)
Revered to the previous form for the byline. also fixed some other bugs.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @10:59PM (1 child)
That solves my only big gripe.
The entire Subject line now being all bold (headline tag, actually) relative to how that looked last week was a bit jarring for me.
I'm getting used to it.
Depending on the length of the Subject, that line can now wrap to a 2nd line which adds to vertical spacing of the page.
That's my remaining bugaboo. Small potatoes.
My preferred presentation is HTML-only (so, black text on a white background and no sidebars) with images blocked (except the subscriber star) and scripts blocked.
My old bookmarks are in the form
https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=17/02/12/1618241&threshold=-1&highlightthresh=-1#topcomment [soylentnews.org]
and those are working as before (with the new default threading).
The Degrades Gracefully thing is still working well for me with the new changes.
Big props from me there.
I will still grouse about the way that long text strings with no spaces (folks including monstrous URLs) are folded via CSS (which I don't download) instead of in HTML (as it was done way back at the start of the site).
Small potatoes there as well.
I also still think that honoring the quote pseudotag via CSS was the wrong way to go, but I figure I'm in a tiny minority.
The way you guys are making it work for so many use cases is impressive and very much in keeping with the spirit of the site as I see it.
Again, big props from me to our devs.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 27 2017, @12:33PM
Yeah, we really should s/quote/blockquote/ it to be more compliant. Low priority at the moment though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @01:46PM (11 children)
Rest assured none of the above was done "just because it's new". Most all of it was done because our top commented story in the hall of fame was taking up to fifty seconds to load. Using curl. Locally on the web frontend.
The CSS collapsible comments was done so that all modes could have them as well as people who use script blockers. I've got no beef with making them +/- instead of chevrons, I'm just personally incapable of making the images. I can't so much as draw a circle. Yes, I know there is a circle tool in gimp. That should tell you how bad I suck at art. Dude above dropped some CSS to do it without images though and I think I'll test that out on dev here when paulej72 is done with his morning coding.
Now you've got beefs with the aesthetics, that's fair. Hell, I've got beefs with the aesthetics. That kind of thing happens when you have no art folks on staff. Like I said up above though, this ain't the other site. You bitch about something here, we hear you and address it. paulej72 was already coding up fixes that need no debate when you typed this and we're debating the stuff that does need some.
Speak your mind. Chew our asses. Just be specific and we'll see what we can do.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday February 26 2017, @02:25PM (9 children)
I really appreciate everything you just said. And the thing that I dislike the most is even feeling like I need to "chew somebody's ass" at all. I know you guys are always doing miraculous and magnificent things in the background with no recompense besides a job well done. I totally understand and approve of taking measures to fix major performance bottlenecks. But these visual changes have taken a site that, out of hundreds of horribly designed forums I've encountered, has always been easy for my eyes and my foggy brain to parse through with little effort on a daily basis, and just metaphorically whacked it in the face with an ugly-stick. Especially that faded stuff. Egad. If I want tomato soup I have some in the pantry. I don't need it splashed all over my favorite website.
If the star icon were just given a darker border similar to the face icons it would be perfect going back and hanging out in the gray bar. That was literally the ONLY change I ever wanted to make to the old format, a better border around the star so I could more easily parse how many subscribers were participating in a conversation. Without a dark border the star tended to get lost in the light gray. But it wasn't a big deal at all, and everything else with the old layout WAS FINE.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @03:11PM (8 children)
Yeah, I get that. Unfortunately sometimes we get to a point where we really need feedback we just can't get without pushing code live.
paulej72's almost done with having the "by RedBear(1734)*star**zoo-icon(s)*" only show up in the title bar when a comment is collapsed and having it always show up in the details bar. That's the title bar showing when a comment is collapsed btw, just unstyled. When he's done, I'll be checking out dude above's +/- buttons CSS and possibly adding an "expand all beneath this comment" button if it's as simple as I think it might be.
We'll likely roll whatever we get done this morning out this afternoon or evening.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday February 26 2017, @03:42PM
Sounds like you're describing it working the way I described in my other longer reply above, the way I remember it working. I have confidence that it can be done, while retaining all the performance and compatibility benefits this was intended to bring about. I look forward to seeing things make sense again when I wake up. Good night and godspeed.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:17PM (6 children)
I can't even keep up with the changes. Things are looking much better already. But at the moment the star/face icons are still hovering next to the collapsed posts. I don't know about everyone else, but personally I find this neither useful nor aesthetic. I just see a page full of way too many bright yellow icons interspersed with text. I hope that when I return those too will be hidden and the collapsed text will be solely:
Subject goes here (Score: 6) by ThatDirtyNoGoodSoAndSo
I notice that (at the moment) the collapsed posts are entirely in bold text like the text in an expanded red bar. I feel like this is not how it used to be and makes it look like the page is polluted with header text that pulls the eye away from the non-bolded text content of the expanded posts. I shouldn't have to fight to keep my attention on the actual content of each post.
I also feel that collapsed posts used to be somewhat better connected visually with their parent posts. This clear connection between child and parent posts is one of the things I always liked about the old style layout (and Slashdot). Unfortunately without a screenshot of the older layout I can't be more precise about what seems to be different. Like, there used to be actual lines connecting the parent post with each layer of descendants? Something like that. Something's just missing. It's not horrible, but it doesn't look right.
I am turning the "Dim older comments" thing back on and hoping it will either disappear or look 1000% better when I wake up. I think it's a faulty concept. Find a way to make newer comments look shinier/darker/bigger or something of that nature, rather than fading old comments into oblivion. Think subtle. Just like with makeup, a little can go a very long way.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:37PM
I think you're going to want the highlight new comments mode for that with dimming disabled. Different people are going to prefer different methods which is why we put both in. We just weren't sure how cosmetically to highlight a new post. We'll probably end up having to write a new style in for each theme, which is slightly time consuming but not a big deal.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @07:14PM (4 children)
Opacity was changed for dimmed comments. Made them more opaque, but tried to leave enough contrast to see the difference. I hope this helps.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Sunday February 26 2017, @08:05PM
One voice here saying yes, it helps. Until reading this comment, I thought it was my phone's browser rendering it too translucent. (I browsed on my phone this morning, not on my laptop this evening.
And the highlighting of new posts is really helpful: it will make me more likely to re-visit recent articles and potentially drum up some conversation. I'm still using both the opacity and *NEW* flags for the time being, but can't readily see me changing from the current default.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday February 27 2017, @05:56AM (2 children)
Now I see how you're doing the dimming, and why I had such an extreme reaction to the original setting. It still looks bad even toned down. Here's the problem: When you change the opacity of the entire element, you are also changing the opacity of the text. This exacerbates the "low contrast" feeling even with a very minor change in opacity.
If there were a way to, say, change only the opacity of the red bar, or make a very minor change in the size of the font in the header of newer comments, while keeping the opacity of the primary text, the overall effect would be far less jarring. Better than changing anything's opacity would be to just make the color of the red bar slightly brighter. Not grayer. An art teacher would probably say, "Add white, not gray or black".
There has been a bug in Mac OS X for many years that sometimes causes the color profile of a calibrated display to revert to a default profile, which tends to make the screen suddenly look "washed out". Some hardware faults like faulty display cables can mimic this. It's unpleasant to see this when you're used to seeing crisp, vibrant colors on your screen. By choosing to fade older comments rather than highlighting newer comments, you end up making typically at least 90% of a page look "faded" and it makes me feel like there is something wrong with my display. It's like driving a car through a thick fog bank or trying to read a newspaper through dusty goggles. I just don't believe it's the right way to do what you're trying to do.
Before someone corrects me again, I know the dimming can be disabled and I know the new comments are also highlighted with [ *NEW* ].
Thanks for fixing what you've fixed so far. I note several remaining issues (and some weird actual bugs) in this reply to cmn32480:
https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=17968&mode=threadtos&cid=472100#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 27 2017, @12:30PM
That's actually not a bad idea. I may monkey with that today. Any changes to the highlight new posts functionality to say brighten the new title bar colors will need to be theme-specific though, which means 8x the work or so.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Monday February 27 2017, @02:10PM
The dimming of comments was something the green site did, and us devs thought it was a good way to show posts you already read. As you should have read them, having them dimmed gets them out of the way somewhat visually.
What we did not do is set the dimming on a per theme basis, so we may need to look at how it does on individual themes. Also if you have your monitor setup with lower contrast to begin with, it may be very hard to read. Right now I am using Night Mode and the dimming is noticeable but not detrimental.
It is very hard to make things look different easily to allow users to pick out what it different. I would rather not say highlight old or new comments by radically changing the title bar color, but if we can get away with a subtle change that is noticeable we will try.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darnkitten on Monday February 27 2017, @03:48AM
't's OK--speaking as what passes for an artist, myself, I'd rather see functionality emphasized over aesthetics . I've seen too many projects ruined by artists trying for some gawdawful affect (yes, that was a pun, and I apologize). Aesthetics are subjective, and need to change with all deliberative slowness.
And many "tips of the hat" to y'all for the speed and tact with which you've responded to criticisms, as well as your responsiveness in fixing issues. I was unable to log in earlier (otherwise occupied), and it looks like many of the problems alluded to up-thread were solved before I even saw them.
We appreciate all of your hard work--it is one of the many reasons we green-site expats have found a metaphorical home here.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by ShadowSystems on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:05PM (10 children)
I'm using a Screen Reader Environment (SRE known as Jaws from Freedom Scientific) to access the site & I read at the -1 threshold, so you know how I'm trying to consume the content.
I listened to the whole page wondering about the chevrons (I remember that gas station!) but not finding any, which makes me wonder if they're purely graphical elements that don't get found by my SRE.
I heard about the expanding/collapsing bits but haven't encountered anything that needed it.
I heard about the scroll bars for individual comments but never found them, so perhaps my SRE ignores them & just reads the whole comment by default.
I heard about the Strike & Del tags plus what they're supposed to do, but if anyone has used them in the forum my SRE hasn't found them. Perhaps a SRE ignores the tags & just reads the spoiler/striked text as if it weren't so marked? I dunno, nor do I really care. It sounds like it would be a purely visual thing which my SRE would ignore anyway in the same way it ignores fonts, underlining, bold facing, italicizing, or underscoring. *Shrugs, smiles*
The only thing I might want to change is all the badging in the header section of each comment.
Subscriber, Neutral, et al is stuff that can be listed/shown in the member page if we care to go look, but just clutters up the page otherwise.
Post title, post Author, & the time it was made are all that's really needed.
Even the post number is a bit of fluff that's not too terribly needed. Perhaps if the date/time stamp were a link that when clicked displayed the post number as well? I dunno, & it doesn't really matter.
Otherwise I can't comment on the fonts, colors, dimming, button spacing, or any of the visual only bits. I can only comment on the text layout itself, & that sounds fine to my SRE.
So Thanks again for the awesome work. I'd bake you all a big ol' batch of chocolate chip cookies in gratitude...
But I'd end up Cookie Monstering them before they cooled & feel sheepish about having to bake a new batch.
=-)p
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:42PM
That's funny, that is. All the arguing and complaining a lot of us do over minor details of aesthetics, myself included, and you're all "la-la-la" with your screen reader not noticing any of what's just critically important to us.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:45PM (5 children)
The post number is a link that allows you to see the post and what moderations have been applied to it.
As far as I know, there isn't another way to see that information without knowing the post number.
This, of course, may not translate well through the screen reader.
As a test for your screen reader, the following text is set with a del tag.
This is just a test.The following is set for the strike:
This is a test 2
And finally a spoiler:
This is a test 3.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by carguy on Sunday February 26 2017, @05:16PM (3 children)
> The following is set for the strike:
> This is a test 2
I'm in green screen, VT100 mode, and those two lines look like the identical font (typeface and size) to me.
del shows strikethrough (nice!!) and spoiler works correctly.
(Score: 3, Funny) by cmn32480 on Sunday February 26 2017, @05:27PM (2 children)
Me thinks I pooched it. Or that the tags I put in don't work.
But this is why there is a preview button that I pressed and completely ignored what it spewed out at me.
I'm gonna go get more coffee.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @11:24PM (1 child)
Or that the tags I put in don't work.
Nope. WFM.
I suspect that carguy is using the -one- config that doesn't work. 8-)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by carguy on Monday February 27 2017, @03:35AM
> I suspect that carguy is using the -one- config that doesn't work. 8-)
I seem to have an special ability to find things like this...comes in handy for alpha/sanity testing.
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Sunday February 26 2017, @07:54PM
And all those tests were audible to my SRE without any interaction on my part.
*Sighs, shrugs, & smiles*
As I said before it doesn't really matter to me. Since my SRE can't differentiate between stuff that's supposed to be hidden (the spoiler tag) or the visual-only font bits (bold, italic, strike, underlining, point size, color, etc) then it all makes zero difference to me.
I hear the plain text in a robotic voice exactly as if Robbie the Robot in a bored mood. =-)p
Again, *Thank You all* for the work you do on the site.
I know the rest of you are pretty riled up over the visual bits that have changed, but I just wanted to chime in with my own $0.02 to say that it works from an Accessibility standpoint.
The fact that you have managed it all using CSS rather than Java is rather impressive, & the fact that you've done it in a way that didn't break Accessibility functionality makes me very very happy indeed.
So consider yourselves as having been given a giant mountain of freshly baked cookies in gratitude.
I'd do it for real but wouldn't survive the spike to my blood sugar level.
*Sheepish, silly grin*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @11:51PM (2 children)
I'm using a [closed-source payware] Screen Reader Environment (SRE known as Jaws from Freedom Scientific)
You've said before that you tried Knoppix ADRIANE and couldn't get that to do what you needed.
I've been meaning to ask if you've you tried Emacspeak. [opensource.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Monday February 27 2017, @12:09AM (1 child)
No, I had not knowingly tried that particular package, so thank you for the heads up.
I will go click the link to go visit the results in a moment so please forgive me if I'm about to ask what turns out to be a rhetorical question.
Is there a "LiveCD" distro that includes it working OOB that I can try on an Intel NUC?
I would "burn" it to a USB stick, boot to that, & give the distro a spin.
(I'll have to get a sighted person to mash the keys to get the boot menu up & then choose the right option to boot from the 'stick, but that's a problem I'll tackle once I've made the 'stick.)
If it works OOB & lets me control the computer then you will have earned my thanks twice over.
If it doesn't do it then you will have still earned it for bringing it to my attention.
=-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @04:35AM
I was hoping this might be dirt-simple, but DistroWatch doesn't list this app in its tracking database.
https://distrowatch.com/search.php?pkg=emacspeak&distrorange=InAny#pkgsearch [distrowatch.com]
I then thought that getting it in a live media distro was going to be a real longshot and that you would end up installing a smaller distro like antiX (pronounced "Antiques") to a box, then installing the app, then using something like the RemasterSys app to remaster that installed OS as a Live Media thing.
I did stumble on something, however.
Heh. I'd like to hear what your screen reader does with this name.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Grml (G R M L) is an operating system based on Debian. It is designed to run mainly from a live CD, but can be made to run from a USB flash drive
[...]
Features
In addition to the sysadmin tools, security- and network-related software, data recovery and forensic tools, editors, shells, and many text tools included with grml, the distribution focuses on accessibility by providing kernel support for speakup and software like brltty, emacspeak, and flite.
From DistroWatch's page for the distro [distrowatch.com]
Origin: Austria
They say nothing about Multilingual support, so I'm guessing English-only.
The most recent release is 2014.11 from November 2014.
The DistroWatch page has a link to OSDisk.com to buy live media.
I found something that has me wondering what's up.
It's a mailing list post from 2007 that says
I'm guessing they got past that years ago.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:23PM (9 children)
My God. So irritating on a start phone. Requires two hands (!) to read a page. Try to scroll page down is an exercise in frustration because every third time my right thumb strokes down it scrolls a comment instead of a page.
Need to use my left hand for page scrolling.
Seriously, this is annoying enough to drive me away. It's unusable.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:44PM (8 children)
That should already have been fixed. Is it still going on?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @05:03PM (7 children)
Well I made the scroll only show for comments longer than 1000px. If I need to I can make it longer. I really need to keep it for now in case someone spams the site with a really long comment.
But maybe we can filter that instead.
Please let me know if you need it more than 1000px.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday February 26 2017, @06:46PM (3 children)
1000px
px?? As in pixels?
What makes you think you can possibly know how many pixels it takes to show something on my computer?
I don't know you, and you're probably a smart and hardworking guy trying to do some good for this free site and I appreciate all that but... if you're laying out a web page and thinking in terms of pixels I'm deeply concerned that you're well down the road toward a thousand other abominations.
Why wouldn't the limit be measured as the number of characters in the comment?
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @07:20PM (2 children)
As far as I am aware, CSS does not know about the amount of characters in the code. I can set a max-height that can be in px (pixels) or other various web approved measuring systems. The scrollbars were added to eliminate very long troll posts from the site, since we had to remove the code that broke long comments.
Even though we had users test with phones, no one had issues with what we proposed, until it went live. It has been removed an a hard limit on the comment posting is in place.
Hopefully this will be enough to keep the trolls at bay while allowing normal operation to the site until we can re-implement long comment hiding.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday February 26 2017, @08:17PM (1 child)
OK, I think our world-views are starting to converge, which is usually a good thing. :) You're operating on pixels on the client side via CSS, which does know about my computer, rather than on the server-side, where as I remarked you can't reliably know how it will look on my computer.
But that implies (unless I'm being dense) you send the entire comment to my browser and let the CSS decide what portion to show or hide.
So, if Mr. Obnoxious User decides to upload a megabyte post, you'll cheerfully burden everyone's internet connection and browser memory with that megabyte. You just won't let them see the bloat that is there anyway.
Now perhaps you can see why I would have expected the limit to be imposed on the server site.
Perhaps there are both... an upload limit and a client-side "hide big stuff" setting.
Still, I'm suspicious of using pixels as a unit of measure, and I don't care at all for "web approved measuring systems" if they are based on braindead assumptions such as "everyone else uses my device". Suppose one person has an old mobile device with only a few pixels for the entire display, and has therefore chosen the smallest readable font. Meanwhile, another user (perhaps even reading this page in the future) with money to waste has the latest enormous 32000x24000 display and has chosen a font that takes 750 pixels per line of text. You see, you can't design for devices you don't even know exist if you think in terms of pixels!
I'll let the blind guy speak for himself on how many pixels his device supports...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Refugee from beyond on Sunday February 26 2017, @09:12PM
CSS pixel is not equal to device pixel nowadays.
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @06:52PM (2 children)
OK tested a new filter to limit long comments, It should be long enough for even NCommnader but short enough to keep the trolls at bay. Removing the scroll in comments in just a bit.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @06:54PM
If we have users hit this filter, we can easily adjust it to fix the issue.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Sunday February 26 2017, @07:13PM
Thank you!
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Sunday February 26 2017, @05:04PM (1 child)
As I noted in IRC, there is no line fore the dept to be added by the submitter in the submission interface.
Minor detail.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday February 26 2017, @06:27PM
tuned on just a bit ago.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bziman on Sunday February 26 2017, @08:01PM (3 children)
Browsing at +3, instead of hiding comments I don't care about, it has lots of empty lines of "Comment Below Threshold" wasting screen real estate:
And each comment has its own scroll in the mobile view (I think at least partially because the "moderate" button wraps the text), which is even worse. Ugh!
I just want a basic flat Web 1.0 UI that isn't interactive!
(Score: 2) by bziman on Sunday February 26 2017, @11:47PM
Okay, the scrolling in comments issue appears to be fixed. Thank you!
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday February 27 2017, @03:34AM (1 child)
To add to this, the collapsed comments were all in bold text last night when I left. I asked that that be fixed to what it used to be. Now they're mostly fixed, but the "Comment Below Threshold" of downmodded collapsed comments is still in bold. As I pointed out in another comment, bolded text looks like header text and draws the eye away from the non-bolded text in the comments. It makes the page seem way too busy. So this should be fixed just like the rest of the collapsed comments. The rest of the header style text on the page is within the red bars and has always been much easier to ignore while reading comments. It's also white text, which means it has less visual "weight".
tl;dr: The "Comment Below Threshold" should not be bold.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Monday February 27 2017, @02:14PM
sorry, missed that one. Will get it tonight after work.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday February 26 2017, @09:26PM (1 child)
I have my browser set to ignore the text and background colours specified by Web sites. Before the update, this site displayed for me as black text on a white background. Now, I sometimes see that, and sometimes see grey text. I assume it's due to this new feature:
On dimmed comments... This only functions for logged in users currently as it would take some serious work to get it functioning for individual ACs, even using cookies. What it does is when you load a page of comments, it picks the highest comment ID from that story and marks that comment as read by you.
Often I intentionally re-read comments. I wish that the indication of which comments have been loaded before could be optional, or could be implemented in a way that doesn't hamper readability, perhaps with a check mark in the heading of a comment that had been loaded before? I'm seeing "*NEW*" in the headings of some comments; if that is meant to serve the same purpose, it is fine.
Changed really freaking long comments to have a scrollbar now instead of being click-to-show.
This will be, for me, an improvement if the length that triggers it is similar to the length for which we previously had to follow a link to read the full comment. However if it happens, as I saw earlier, to comments that are only two (typical) paragraphs long, it will prove annoying.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cmn32480 on Sunday February 26 2017, @11:49PM
The dimmed comments ARE optional, as stated in the summary.
The scroll bars have been removed by paulej72. He explained it further up the comment chain, but i think that was after you posted.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Username on Monday February 27 2017, @12:19AM (9 children)
Was it too accessible? Because I cannot read comments on my phone anymore since there is no link.
WTF is with https://soylentnews.org/images/chev1up.png ? + wasn’t good enough?
Why has '<a herf=' . $commenturl . '>' . $commenttitle . '</a> by' . $username $score $date $time; been changed to $commenttitle $score . 'by' . $username $uid; Do you really need to brag about your uid?
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Monday February 27 2017, @12:50AM (8 children)
The summary (in the new feature listing) tells how to turn this off on your preferences page. It isn't your cup of tea? No problem! Uncheck the box, save it, and go on your merry way!
Please explain. Specifically, which link is missing?
The + to chevron has been addressed several in this thread. Start reading here [soylentnews.org] for a decent idea of what the devs have said.
If you are referring to the byline on the comments, the UID has always been part of it. If not, specifically what are you referring to?
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday February 27 2017, @01:23AM (7 children)
Saying that somewhere, buried on this site, is a way to opt out, does not make my criticism invalid.
http://oi67.tinypic.com/2cgo6zd.jpg [tinypic.com] Well, what differences do you see?
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Monday February 27 2017, @02:15AM (3 children)
OK. Let's try this again, shall we?
The differences in the pictures you link to show 2 distinct differences that I can see.
1) The buttons to collapse individual comments and the comment threads are different.
This has been addressed upstream in this comment thread.
2) The comments are collapsed or not, (I am assuming by default) in your view.
These are controlled by the Threshold and Breakthrough settings between the summary and the comments.
If these are not what you are looking for, can you tell me what I should be explaining?
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday February 27 2017, @04:58AM (2 children)
cmn32480, I will thank you to be less dismissive of complaints from the members of this site that help keep this site in existence by contributing subscription funds and content. You make your own contributions and we thank you for it. But the rest of us contribute as well. You've taken a simple website that we've loved for many years (under different names) and basically broken it for many of us. You should take that more seriously.
Now, maybe you should look more closely at that screenshot. There are dozens of important differences between the two images. Do you really only see two differences?
The poster you're replying to said there's no link anymore to read comments. As you can clearly see, the new collapsed comments have NO LINK. The old collapsed comments are each highlighted as links, presumably to go directly to that individual comment, like the (#NNNNNNN) link in the gray bar. (I never browsed collapsed comments this way, but I can see how someone might want to, rather than fiddling with expanding and collapsing comments.)
The old collapsed comments looked like:
[plus/minus] Linked Subject Line by Author (Score: N) Date and @Time
This was pretty nice. Now, even though a lot has been fixed since last night, it's still decidedly different. Just like the original poster (Username) in this thread said, now UIDs are being displayed in the collapsed post lines. This is pointless and just clutters up the page with useless information that can be found by just expanding a post and looking at the gray bar. The UID should be removed from the collapsed post header, just as the unnecessary icons were removed (possibly directly related to my requests last night).
The author also comes after the (Score: N) in the new layout. This makes less sense to me. It interrupts the flow.
I would be strongly in favor of returning the collapsed post line to looking exactly like it used to, with the exception that perhaps the date and time could use abbreviated days and dates. They tend to get a bit long. [ Thu Feb 26 2015@12:0AM ] is a lot shorter than [ Thursday February 26 2015 @12:0AM ]. Or even, heaven forbid, a more proper day-month-year format that separates the two numbers in a more readable way: [ Thu 26 Feb 2015 @12:0AM ]. How glorious would that be? Pretty damn glorious!
Another difference I notice is that for a user like you, there doesn't appear to be a link anymore to the user's journal in the gray bar. I would think you might care about this, if you care enough to write journals. Or is the appearance of the journal link just a setting in preferences?
There are also fewer vertical lines now helping visually separate the different layers of child posts in a thread. I brought this up in another post last night/this morning, but without a screenshot I couldn't describe exactly what was missing.
If you want people to abandon this site, feel free to break it some more and then be dismissive of user complaints. The grandparent poster's issues and many others still need to be addressed before this site is back to normal.
Um, so I'm previewing this post and noticed something really odd. Where I typed above [ @ 1 2 :0 0 A M ], it displays [ @ 1 2 :0 A M ] (the spaces are to avoid triggering the bug that eats one of my zeros.)
I also noticed a bug recently that's been replacing the thousands separator comma in numbers with a space, making quantities difficult to parse. Has that one been fixed?
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Monday February 27 2017, @07:27AM
I'm going to weigh in here. First this change was not made lightly, and I nearly vetoed it entirely, it took several arounds of fixing by paul and TMB to get to the point I was willing to let it out in the world. If you want to blame anyone, blame me.
Secondly, the drive for the change is that several pages, on a cold load could take over a minute to load from the backend. Varnish caching would hold most of these pages in memory but it was fairly common for 100-200 comments on a story to tank the site. Testing changes to the commenting code on dev is unfortunately not a good process. If we change the commenting, how we use it on dev and how we use it on production are two very different things, and I'm finding things here on prod that either didn't bother me on dev. We're going to run a daily story on this keeping things updated. If it absolutely comes to it, we'll revert, and deal with the loading times.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 27 2017, @03:23PM
Also, we never cache pages with comments for logged in users. It's not possible because of the gerzillion and one possible adjustments they can make to comment scores.
That said, I'm personally willing to contribute as much code as I have to to get the majority of people happy, up to and including rewriting the javascript for the old IT mode and creating a comments mode it'll work with if absolutely necessary, but a complete rollback to stupid-long load times will have me more pissed off than anyone who's opined about the changes so far. I mean one guy and a proxy could DoS the entire site by making sixteen requests per minute. DDoS be damned, we could be shut down by a raspberry pi 1 without it breaking a sweat. It's ignorant as shit to allow code like that to exist.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by charon on Monday February 27 2017, @03:47AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday February 27 2017, @06:09AM (1 child)
We all understand the motivation behind it. We're not stupid. We're just saying the way it's being implemented makes some of us want to claw our eyes out or never return to this site. Maybe both. I have several much longer posts in another thread describing ways this could be done in a much less jarring way without making it painful to read older comments. See here:
https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=17968&mode=threadtos&cid=472114#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
And yes I now know the fading can be turned off, thank you.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by Username on Monday February 27 2017, @08:50AM
Or just have it off by default and have an opt in buried somewhere.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by EETech1 on Monday February 27 2017, @01:46AM (5 children)
Soylent News BETA
Here we go again...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 27 2017, @03:11AM (4 children)
Yeah, this is exactly like /.'s Beta. You can tell by how paulej72 spent all morning fixing user complaints and how I'll be doing the same all week.
If you've got a specific beef or beefs, let's hear them and we'll work on them as quickly as possible but you can go fuck yourself with comparing us to them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by EETech1 on Monday February 27 2017, @03:23AM (3 children)
Guess I'm not getting a funny mod from you?
I really appreciate what you guys do, perhaps I should take this opportunity to request a sarcasm tag:)
I was hoping I didn't have to end that message with:
I kid... I kid...
Thanks for sticking up for us!
Cheers
(Score: 2) by chromas on Monday February 27 2017, @03:30AM (1 child)
There actually is a <sarcasm> tag ;)
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Monday February 27 2017, @05:17AM
I guess I need a tag:)
I see it now!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 27 2017, @12:00PM
My bad then. It's been an exceptionally long day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday February 27 2017, @07:20AM (1 child)
Had to scroll back a page to find this, and by the time I read it I'm having a hard time complaining.
I guess in a way it's cool you got this to happen without javascript but I didn't want it to happen at all!
So no it's not cool.
What's with all these silly chevrons and I have to click twice to see each message I've already loaded? Seriously WTF? That's way too annoying to deal with.
I'll try to be more focused and constructive at a later time but right now this thing has me doing a fair imitation of tourrettes.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 27 2017, @12:02PM
You sound like a Nested user. Try Threaded-TNG, it's probably closer to what you want.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by andersjm on Monday February 27 2017, @06:17PM (1 child)
I'd scan existing comments quickly to see if anyone else has commented on the loss of the expand-all functionality. Except I can't. The feature I needed to do that is gone.
So I'll just have to write this blind and ignore what everyone else is saying. Not really what I wanted to do on SN, but what can you do?
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:36PM
Set your comment mode to Thread-TNG and set your breakthrough to -1.
Just had a bad thought that is probably a bug in setting breakthrough. I'll need to look at that tonight and fix it if needed.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:25AM (1 child)
In concept, great. I do love the idea of not having to click a back button.
BUT... it eliminates a piece of user feedback. Specifically, if my mod was successful, and how many mod points I have left.
It'd be nice if after clicking MODERATE, and the page posts back and reloads, and I'm anchored to where I was... there was some sort of message there. Could just use the old message (Modded +1 Funny; 3 mod points left). Put that message next to each of the option-lists that I moderated with.
That way I know my mod was successful, and I have a quick-look at how many points I have left.
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by paulej72 on Thursday March 02 2017, @12:09PM
Noted, and I think I have a solution. It will take some work, so probably not going to come for a short while.
Team Leader for SN Development