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Today we stand proud, fellow Soylentils. Two stories have been received to explain why:
Slashdot.org switches accounts to Classic-like interface
It now appears that Slashdot has now completely changed its interface to the new "beta" interface - which looks almost the same as the "old" interface. Users can no longer view the non-beta classic site, which is being reported by users all around the site.
The only official news on the matter is in the form of a journal entry.
Does this mean it's time to go after our original mission and let them know we're here?
"Beta" Delenda est!
Remember Slashdot? Remember Beta? This blog post might be tagged "sudden outbreak of common sense," if it wasn't well over a year too late:
...effective today, we've jettisoned the Slashdot Beta platform out the side portal. [...] After heavily experimenting on the Beta platform and splitting traffic between Classic and Beta, we've made some decisions about which platform changes ultimately make sense: starting today, we're unifying users back on our Classic platform.
A raft of minor changes came along with this announcement. Still no comment, though, on whether those users are a "community" or an "audience."
And frankly, that's why soylentnews is better.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by n1 on Friday February 27 2015, @02:59PM
Welcome to SoylentNews! I am not a dev so I may be wrong on this but...
The core reason we don't currently have the UI features as described in the comment you replied to: The dev team is doing everything possible to avoid requiring javascript to make the site function. As I understanding, they are working on other methods to enable the functionality the previous comment notes we are lacking.
I have no disagreements about the UI improvements we need to make, but implementation is perhaps taking a little longer than we'd all like for the above, ideological reason.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by githaron on Friday February 27 2015, @03:57PM
How would they enable those features without Javascript or reloading the page? The best they could hope to do is make some features optional for those that are willing to run Javascript.
(Score: 1) by n1 on Friday February 27 2015, @06:00PM
Paulej72, as lead dev for the site provided some more information on this matter here [soylentnews.org], also can be found a few comments below this one.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:49AM
*blink* I've never had JS active on slashdot, and it all works. Am I doing something wrong??
I mean, besides still reading slashdot...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday February 28 2015, @09:56AM
It *mostly* worked with classic, but under beta, if JS was disabled, you couldn't filtered by score, couldn't reply, and a lot of other crud just plain old broke. For the most part, with the exception of the admin screens, SN works fine if JS is disabled.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:35PM
Under beta and with JS off, I had to turn CSS off entirely (Prefbar has a setting for that) to be able to read the durn thing, and all I could say about it is... well, at least that degraded into something like Mosaic 0.99 would display. I wasn't real impressed with JS active, either.
[checks SN without CSS]
Hey! SN degrades super-gracefully. About all that really changes are fonts and centering. Good job!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday March 14 2015, @12:24AM
Bit late to the party, but it is possible to browse and post with Mosiac (esp if you have a version that understands PNG files). Can't log in since most versions of Mosiac don't understand cookies though ...
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 14 2015, @01:15AM
http://sillydog.org/narchive/full123.php [sillydog.org]
http://sillydog.org/narchive/fulldata.html#retro [sillydog.org]
Tho I can't for the life of me see a download link for it.
I've used Mosaic 0.9 myself, used to use it as my acid test for website readability. Another good one for testing is Netscape 3.04 -- if the page looks okay and doesn't trigger the old old (and still with us) "too many elements causes a runaway resource leak" bug, then you're golden.
And..... [goes off, tests SN in NS3.04 which I happen to have handy... was only about 3 years ago I stopped using it!] ... looks fine, lets me log in, but when I tried to bring up this page (cuz I thought I'd try replying in NS), I persistently got "Connection Refused", and after that SN wouldn't speak to NS at all. Maybe they don't like sharing initials. ;)
But I don't remember anything that old that grokked PNG files? NS3.04 certainly doesn't.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday March 14 2015, @06:34AM
VMS Mosiac and Mosiac-CK both can handle PNG files.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 14 2015, @02:01PM
Ah. They must be much newer models.
[goes off, looks 'em up]
MUCH newer! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29#End_of_Mosaic [wikipedia.org]
Found a copy here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/openvms/freeware/mosaic/ [hp.com]
Thanks! I'd had no idea there was a more or less modern version.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday March 15 2015, @09:00AM
Despite the name, VMS Mosiac should build on Linux. CK-MOsiac required hitting the makefile with a wrench to get it to build under Ubuntu, but otherwise was easy enough. PNGs load fine, though our site layout sans CSS is a bit awkward.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 15 2015, @01:46PM
Ah, no fun for me then... have yet to find a linux I can love for everyday use. :(
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday March 15 2015, @10:49PM
My guess it would build on BSDs or under Cygwin. What OS do you use?
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 16 2015, @01:13AM
WinXP. I live in a cave. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday March 16 2015, @04:12AM
An unsupported cave :). It might still be possible to get it to build, Mosiac did build for Windows at one point. I remember using it.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 16 2015, @04:37AM
Support is overrated ;) Yeah, antique Mosaic was a Win3.1 app. I can't seem to find a copy online right now, but here's an emulator!
http://www.dejavu.org/1994win.htm [dejavu.org]
Heh, SN doesn't look bad at all. Pretty much like an average modern Mobile page, in fact.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @06:09PM
Which is a lot more work because now they must maintain two versions of the site, one with javascript and one without. Unless you're willing to pay and/or spend time writing and maintaining code ...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NCommander on Friday February 27 2015, @06:48PM
Graceful fallback. If you load SN without JS today, you'll notice the expand topic icons vanish. Is it extra work? Sure.
Do a significant portion of our users care about the site working without JS? Yup.
We may not be perfect, but we do try and listen to what people tell us.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday February 27 2015, @07:21PM
As long as each button has an ahref as well as an onclick (with return false) then there will always be a graceful fallback. "Reply to this" could open an inline reply without breaking non-JS users. Ditto for Moderate.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday February 27 2015, @10:52PM
Do a significant portion of our users care about the site working without JS? Yup.
I block all JS by default. Rare a site gets it enabled - usually for good reasons, like real-time product selection tables. I wouldn't mind permitting JS at SN, but there is no reason to do so. I wouldn't even ask you and other SN coders to implement those widgets because that's the function of the browser already.
Removal of the gray bar on the left would be handy, but that's just some HTML template. The space is reserved for some boxes... but they are rarely needed, and they are always on top of the page, invisible.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:53AM
Didn't realise the +/- stuff was there, which is testament to it working well enough without JS. I hadn't even checked SN with JS!! (Thanks for this!)
(Tho I have threshold set to 0 and it's never so wordy here that I care if it's all expanded.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @06:48PM
I don't have a link to the comment thread, but they mentioned some pretty good ideas to handle it without JS.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday February 27 2015, @06:50PM
Actually, I'm pretty sure you could accomplish all of that with CSS alone these days. As long as the user has a fairly modern browser.
It'd probably be some *horrifying* CSS, but it's possible...
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:09AM
Yeah, we could use a good CSS expert, know any?
(Score:1^½, Radical)