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Journal Just Some Guy's Journal: I think they're trying to kill Slashdot. 12

Journal by Just Some Guy

I seriously believe that someone is trying to sabotage Slashdot by making it decreasingly pleasant.

Exhibit A: the new-and-busted discussion system. I actually like it more than the old way for reading comments, but for writing comments it's almost maliciously bad. The new system's preview button is much slower than the old way, and the mandatory waiting time between posting comments is a lot longer than it used to be. The net result is that whenever you're eventually allowed to click the "Submit" button, if your comment doesn't go through immediately, you're stuck staring at a pink error message until the countdown is finished. The only thing keeping this tolerable is that you can middle-click on "Reply to This" to open the old-style comment form in a new window, but I don't know if this workaround is going to be left in place long-term.

Exhibit B: Idle. This is truly the worst interface I've ever seen on Slashdot, from the painful color scheme to the tiny fonts to the difference between the markup used in comments between Idle and the rest of Slashdot. For example, the <quote> tags are treated like <p> in Idle, so there's no visible difference between text you're quoting and your own words. I don't even mind the content so much because it can be an amusing diversion, but wow, the implementation is just terrible.

No, I contend that the new changes are deliberately designed to drive away readership. I don't think that the Slashdot admins are incompetent, so I'm convinced that this is on purpose.

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I think they're trying to kill Slashdot. More

I think they're trying to kill Slashdot.

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  • FWIW, I can't disagree with you on any of the points you made.

    However, it's still possible to use /. the old-fashioned way, and I'll be bitterly clinging to it as long as it's available.

  • Are blurry psychedelic messes. They look like something from an early 90s interface trying to look futuristic. The old ones were smaller, crisper, and jsut plain better designed.

    • Preach it brother! This si the first day i've noticed them and I already miss the old ones. I get enough of the XP "look" at work, thank you very much. As for Idle, I think the idea of a "beta" section is great, but before releasing it there should be a mandatory minimum of functionality. The tags should at least work, the display should not be borked, that kind of thing.

    • Oh, I don't mind them too much. For me, it's mainly that that look different from what I've been used to for the last decade. However, to my dying days I'll never understand the gigantic new "Reply" button (and its cousins). What's the point of that except to make the page taller?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Ain't that the truth. And if that stupid delay is to prevent spamming the main discussion threads, can't we at least disable it inside our own freakin' journals? I mean, I can't think of any reason why anyone would care if I spammed this forum.

  • I miss how you used to be able to click on a post's ID link and then see what all went into its current score. Sure it was doing some weird math so that things sometimes didn't add up, or only did according to some mysterious algorithm. But I could sort of get an idea of what and how many mods had been applied to something, and what its real current score was, independent of my set modifiers for reading. Now I can't tell, and it's too much of a bother to unset all my modifiers to moderate and then set them

  • Oh c'mon JSG, surely it ain't that bad. Have you tried emailing either Malda or Hemos and asking them what's up? I mean, c'mon, UUID less than 5k and you don't email them? I've chatted with them several times (I tend to only pick Malda if it's something I think is fairly important...) and I usually get great responses. Well, they answer my questions quickly, I won't say they're poetic, as someone is sure to misconstrue my comment.

    But anyways, I only today noticed the new icons for FFFF, and I don't real

    • I've written but haven't received a reply.

      BTW, I initially attempted to post this at 4:36PM CST. Let's see when it actually gets through.

      • Wow, six minutes really?

        • For real. And trying again at 5:51 CST, just after I posted in another story.

          I've started hanging around at stackoverflow a lot more often as they seem to "get" interactive discussion more than Slashdot ever has. This saddens me.

      • I've written but haven't received a reply.

        Perhaps you should check for a reply in the Idle Hate Mail section. That's where most of my replies end up :P

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