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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: 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.