So, I guess the site redesign is live?
I saw some discussion posts earlier talking about a LessWrong redesign, and now that things look different, I guess that it’s been implemented. I’m always slightly annoyed for a while when a site I use gets redesigned because I have to relearn where everything is, but it eventually wears off once I’m used to the changes.
My initial impressions:
“Hmmm… it seems like the category menus have been replaced by dropdown menus. It’s not like I used many of them anyway.”
“Okay, I’ve clicked my name to see my recently posted comments. Now, where’s the link to see it in context? Oh, I guess I have to click that icon in the lower right corner. For some reason I was looking for something at the upper right of the comment box.”
“Well, that worked. Now how do I click to the parent comment? Oh, wait, it’s probably one of those new icons in the lower right corner. I’ll just mouseover them to see what they do...”
::realization sets in::
“AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!”
So, what does everyone else think of the new redesign?
- Recent site changes, Mon 4th July by (4 Jul 2011 7:25 UTC; 39 points)
- 's comment on How the LW2.0 front page could be better at incentivizing good content by (21 Jan 2018 23:58 UTC; 9 points)
- 's comment on So, I guess the site redesign is live? by (22 Jun 2011 22:23 UTC; 5 points)
- 's comment on They Changed It, Now It Sucks by (23 Jun 2011 15:28 UTC; 3 points)
I want the number of comments to appear above the fold. Though it was clutter, so if few people were using it, whatever.
I want number of comments to be as handy as it was in the old version.
At the very least in the discussion section, where # of comments is a much better indicator of value than # of upvotes.
I want the number of comments to appear on the recent posts page, which is something they didn’t used to do.
Agreed. And on a similar note, it’s hard to distinguish the “voted up” and “not voted up” icons and so hard to tell what my current decision about a post is.
And that problem has been fixed! Yay! Seems like it was the main complaint.
My only major issue with it is that posts on the main or discussion page no longer show the number of comments they’ve received, or even that they’ve received new comments. Being able to tell this at a glance was an extremely useful ability.
Amusing to me: I voted the parent up but now as I encounter it for a second time I am resisting the impulse to reverse the vote based on the phrase “My only major issue with it”. ;)
I do not like the icons. I want them to be words.
The colors will take some getting used to but I don’t really hate them.
The extra linebreaks on the right sidebar annoy me.
And we still can’t view upvotes and downvotes separately on comments argh.
Also, not thrilled about my username being in all caps.
It doesn’t read as excitement for you? ALICORN! (Mostly sarcasm, as I almost always read all caps as yelling)
Agree with all of the above. Also, drop-down menus frustrate me when I misaim a mouse click, frustrate me when using a very slow computer, frustate me when Javascript is off, and are generally the spawn of Satan.
On the plus side: whee, it looks pretty and light and stuff! (The thick borders are ugly—maybe keep lime for new comments but don’t change border width.) Turning karma bubbles to karma bricks was a good idea. The header and footer are good (though the two icons are too dark for many screen configurations). The “nearby meetups” section is a really, really good idea. Yay.
I, personally, prefer the icons. Mouseover reveals the text explanation, but regular users will have the icons memorized quickly.
What do you mean by ‘extra linebreaks on the right sidebar’?
There are now gaps between each recent comment, recent post, recent wiki edit, OB post, and hall-of-famer. This is new. It makes it harder to see lots of info in each screenful.
I second this being annoying.
Yeah, mystery meat navigation sucks!
Words mess up with search engines: “vote”, “parent”, “child”, “date”… There was a comments some months ago about just that. LessWrong looks like democratic astrology to Google. It may suck, but those words have to be removed if we want to change that.
Now there may be a solution if there was a way to use CSS to reintroduce words in a way that search engines don’ see them (
beforeandafterpseudo attributes). But such a strategy might be interpreted as Black Hat SEO, so…If you look at the HTML (or turn off CSS) you’ll see that the words are actually still there, only hidden. It’s making the site harder to use and not even helping the search engine issues.
Ouch. A decision may need to be made one way or another, then. It would indeed be a pity to have the worst of both worlds.
I must say that I kinda like those icons though.
I thought so too at first, and was annoyed, but it seems that icons are more inclusive, as they don’t unnecessarily favor native English speakers.
That doesn’t mean the current set is optimal. I already registered my objection to an envelope icon for a reply, when the symbol normally means “private message”.
This might be a more important consideration for a website that wasn’t, you know, based around arguing subtle points in fairly precise English.
True, but from the fact that someone is somewhat fluent in English, it doesn’t follow that they can easily infer the meanings of such context-free and technical terms. In fairness, though, I don’t know the extent of this problem, and I can’t really speak for such an audience. I do know that has been, well, general, unspoken policy to be at least as inclusive in other contexts, even when the nature of this site would kind of obviate the need to be inclusive in that particular way.
The new icons have potential to be offensive, however; a thumbs-up gesture is an obscene suggestion in some cultures. If we have to use icons for up/down votes, it might make more sense to use reddit arrows.
I’m personally not in the “no icons” camp, so much as the, “these are the wrong icons” camp. Even though I know what they mean, I keep thinking the bent arrow is the reply button and that the envelope means private message. And the peanut-looking thing isn’t very suggestive of its function, either.
Of course, I don’t know that there are any icons that would satisfy me; I’m just saying I’m not in principle opposed to them.
However, if the main purpose of the change is SEO, then there’s no reason we couldn’t have icons with text in them… ;-)
(As someone else pointed out, though, the text is still there, just hidden. A little tweaking in Firebug, and I’ve actually gotten the action links to look roughly like they did before, and I’m tempted to try to figure out how to make those changes permanent on my end.)
One other thing that bugs me about the current icons is that they are not at all inviting. Every time a new user sees “vote” and “reply”, they are being subliminally primed to participate in the site. (Heck—they have that effect on existing users as well.) The icons, however, don’t prime a damn thing AFAICT. I see the thumbs and think, “meh”—they look like somebody changing their mind, unsure whether to vote up or down. I see the envelope, and wonder if I have any mail.
komponisto pointed out earlier that “Hall of Fame” has connotations we may not want. I’m surprised that got changed when nobody seemed to disagree with him. I suggest that be reverted. (Obviously this is minor, though.)
Also, I’d like to repeat my suggestion that the “New on OB” sidebar section have “Overcoming Bias” as a link so I can jump to the blog rather than individual posts.
I’m disapointed with the new graphic behind the lesswrong logo.
I always used the territory vs the map graphic to explain to people what lesswrong is about.
I really don’t like the reply icon. I see it and think “ah, that’s something for sending a reply via a private-message facility. So what do I have to do to reply here?” Any chance of changing it to something that doesn’t feature an envelope?
(Also, I agree with Alicorn: the all-caps username is bad. Does it have anything to recommend it at all?)
I am less likely to read all-caps. That is good, because I don’t want to read the username. It’s usually my username, which is uninformative. I don’t want my eye drawn to this box. Other times, I just clicked on a particular user and I probably don’t need to be reminded who it is. Not being drawn to the box in that situation is a small cost. If I opened a bunch of user pages in tabs, it would be bad, but I don’t do that often. I have no idea if the designers were thinking anything like this.
That’s truly ingenious, but (to me) unconvincing: I think my eye is drawn to all-caps things that I’m not already looking at, but tends to skip over sustained passages in all caps in material I’m already reading. So using all-caps for something short, in a corner of the window, doesn’t seem likely to help ignore it. Perhaps I’m very atypical?
Positive:
Meetups have its own bar.
Sizable karma buttons.
No visible difference between promoted and unpromoted posts. I suppose that promotedness biases my choice what to read.
Header design. Looks cleaner now (although the old design was certainly not bad).
ETA: Retracting instead of deleting.
Not sure about:
Not clear what nearby means when attributed to a meetup. I see Melbourne, which is on the opposite side of the globe.
Icons instead of words.
Dropdown menus.
Graphical distinction between new and read comments. I like the idea, dislike the way it looks.
Negative:
Own user name in all caps. What’s the reason?
Blank lines separating comments in the recent comments and posts bars. Needs more scrolling and reduces the amount of visible information. The items are already visibly separated by colour and bold font, there is no need for those gaps.
Too large indentation of nested comments.
The comments have become significantly farther apart. Too much scrolling is required to read them.
We’ve tried to make it easier to visually track indentation level (and thus which comment replies to which). We could vertically compress while preserving the horizontal extra distance, but it’ll look squished.
KDevelop , a c++ integrated development environment , has IMHO an extremely convenient way to visually track “indentation level” in source code. It shows a coloured bar to the left of the source whose colour indicates the “code depth” at that line. See e.g. this screenshot
I’m fine with the distance, personally.
Looking at the discussion and main pages, the number of comments for each post doesn’t seem to be displayed anymore. Does that mean I have to separately open each post I’m interested in to see if there are new comments? Meh.
That’s an omission—we’ll fix it.
Note that on return to posts you’ve previously visited, new comments are highlighted for you.
We may show new comments since last visit on post index pages too.
Please do, that’d be great.
Given that we want:
The ability to delete comments that have accidentially been posted multiple times, or such
To retain comments that are a part of a conversation
The solution seems simple. If there are no replies to a comment, allow it to be deleted. If there are replies, retract instead of deleting.
Also, whatever happened to the idea of havng separate buttons for “agree” and “vote up”. I think this is an important distinction to make—it is very useful to know both:
1) which comments are agreed with, but not necessarily high-quality ways of arguing for them, and
2) which comments are disagreed with, but are regarded as articulate and worthy of response.
And IIRC, the voters in favor of separate buttons were coming out ahead.
They were, and it’s still in the design. No promises on when we’ll get to that, but we intend to get to that.
Thanks!
Bad: There is no longer any visible difference between promoted and non-promoted posts (all circles are green).
Extremely Bad: It is no longer possible to delete comments, only “retract” them (with usernames remaining displayed).
Actually, I think I like this. You can still edit, so if there’s something that you don’t want even under a strikethrough, you can get rid of it; but the default is just to cross it out, and this encourages people to do that instead. Deleted comments with replies have been seriously disruptive in the past, so this is an improvement.
jim has it exactly right—this is very intentional.
Anonymous didn’t suggest it was an oversight. He declared it Extremely Bad. An entirely different axis.
I note in myself a tendency to see some things I don’t understand as “extremely bad”, stupid, frustrating or etc., especially things that have changed recently from what I am used to. Merely having it pointed out to me that a thing is intentional causes me to work harder to figure out why the thing was done as it was done. I sometimes revise my option of the thing after an experience like that to not actually being “extremely bad”.
I affirm everything everything I have said on this very subject over the last couple of years. My objection to this feature remains, as do the rather well developed reasons I have for my position.
I can understand people having different preferences and I am able to handle not getting my own way but I am not going to abandon my preference simply because social factors make satisfying it beyond my power. That is a common fallacy of thought (or useful mammalian adaptation) that I am aware of and want to avoid. I prefer to acknowledge that the state of the universe is not desirable, acknowledge that I am unable to change it (or that doing so is impractical) and yet still be able to accept things as they are without emotional distress.
The borders on comments are fairly ugly, and far too thick. When I go to view all my comments, the way they are listed there is much more aesthetically pleasing.
I like the new header. The footer is a great improvement.
Mixed feelings about the thumbs up/down icons. I like icons, and they are smaller than the text “Vote up” and “Vote down”, but they actually end up taking more space than the text, because their vertical height is greater. Perhaps they can be shrunk a bit and placed in the title line of the comment, along with the permalink and reply icon? You could potentially hide all the icons unless you’re mousing over the comment, to avoid clutter.
I refreshed this page, and only the new comments had the thick, lime green border, so it seems to be a way to show which comments got posted since one last viewed the page. Anyway, it looks a bit off to me too; maybe it’d work almost as well if it had the same thickness as the normal, thinner border? The lime green colour would stick out less if the border weren’t as thick.
I think this is worth a shot. (Also open to Alicorn’s suggestion that the icons go back to being words, in which case they should probably stay at the bottom of comments.)
Count me as a vote against that idea.
Yes. I think we should probably render all comments normally on your first visit to a page, and new comments as new on subsequent visits. I’ll play with a new “new” comment style that doesn’t eat more space.
Ah, so that was why my eyes hurt over the whole page! Much better once I refreshed. (Don’t get me wrong, I do like highlighting new comments)
I would actually prefer it if the border were thicker, or the color darker. That way, new comments would be harder to miss when scrolling through a discussion like this one, with close to 200 comments.
Perhaps make it an adjustable option in preferences.
Because my username is fairly long, it overlaps with the “Create new article” button, which is annoying.
As a somewhat casual reader and participant, my immediate reaction (regardless of functionality, which I really haven’t tried out yet) is that the new design is horrendously ugly compared to the old one. I was intending to go through the Sequences soon, but the visual change is a pretty strong disincentive.
If at all possible, I’d like the ability to view posts using the old interface.
Wait a couple weeks. Website users in general are biased against change.
I had a stack of business cards printed for myself, using the (old) style of a comment box. They arrived yesterday.
Picture?
http://oi55.tinypic.com/50ju5x.jpg
Awesome. :D
This is a poll. Vote up one of the choices below, and downvote the karma sink.
Vote up if you want all three options with restricted deletion: edit anything, retract anything, delete only comments without children.
Vote up if you want all three options: editing, retraction, and deletion of any comments.
Vote up if you preferred the old way of handling the getting rid of comments: editing, and deletion of any comments at all.
Vote up if you prefer the new way of handling the getting rid of comments: editing, and retraction.
Karma sink. Imagine something hateful to be written here!
More than anything I greatly miss the ability to see the number of comments on a post without having to click through to the post. Number of comments is—to me—even more important information than Karma. Please put back!
Hah, you can retract a comment, then edit it. But you can’t un-retract it o.o That doesn’t even make sense to me.
I’d seriously suggest allowing for “delete”, and reserving retract for comments that have replies.
Overall conclusion: This redesign is an utter abomination. Yes, the Karma bubble fix is useful and the ‘Nearby Meetups’ feature is of interest. But every other intervention seems to be a bad idea. I particularly despise the removal of the delete feature.
I already upvoted, but I still like I need to make an actual comment to express how much I agree with this. Please revert the changes for now.
I’m going to give you a few days, and be more interested in your opinion then (but be genuinely interested in your opinion then).
I think that having announced your early opinion publicly may have been a mistake.
FWIW Matt, I’ll take the karma hit and say that I think the new design is nice. There are minor things that could be tweaked, but I can’t help but think that all this strong negativity is mostly just status quo bias.
Every time Facebook rolls out a new layout, my news feed fills up with people screaming that they’re really going to leave this time, and I get invitations to 5 different “Bring Back the Old Way!” groups. Eventually you start to notice a pattern, and to distrust your Automatic Strong Negative Reaction to Any Change. You let that phase pass, actually put in the minor effort to learn the new interface, and a week later you don’t even notice the difference.
There are little things in the interface that I’m sure will fall into place in the coming weeks (for example, I agree with the notions that there’s a little too much separation on the nested comments, and that the envelope icon is counter-intuitive) , but overall I think that if you “redesigned” the site in reverse, you’d have just as much (probably more) complaining.
It looks good, some of the new features are really nice, and I see the rationale behind some of the more controversial ones. Thanks.
heh
Given that my most significant objection is in regard to a ‘feature’ that I have consistently objected to whenever it has been proposed in the last several years I do not anticipate my opinion changing between now and then. I also have not the slightest illusion about my ability to influence your decision now or then.
For what it is worth the design changes are excellent. If you constrained your influence to improving the graphical presentation then your work would be a valuable contribution worthy of much appreciation.
Have I earned that? I’ve changed my mind about a number of our design and functionality decisions in light of comments made in the past 24hrs. Is there some past public discussion I should review that’s good evidence I failed to change my mind when I should have?
wedrifid, you seem grumpier today than you have on any other day I’ve read your excellent contributions to this site. I’m pretty sure that I have an open mind today, because I’ve today concluded that several of our design decisions were errors/sub-optimal, and I’m working to fix them. All of them were (I hope obviously) made in good faith. Are you thinking clearly and positively about how you can best get your way today, or are you feeling grumpy and venting?
Please, try hard to just win. I’ll try to help you.
I’d love to give you an opportunity to retract that sentence. I think it implies more than is reasonable.
I just wanted to comment and say, seeing your replies has made it very clear that you are listening, and I really appreciate that. When the changes originally went live, I assumed they were a final version and we wouldn’t be seeing much else, especially since there wasn’t a top-level or even discussion post about it. I think a post illustrating this attitude (and ideally listing the changes made thus far, and anything planned-but-incomplete) could be really helpful—I know I’ve relaxed a lot now that it’s clear that (a) you’re not finished and (b) you’re open to feedback :)
Just my two cents, though. Just seeing the comments has done good by me, but I don’t think everyone sees those.
(Choice of post to reply to arbitrary; this one just happened to flip my threshold of “okay, matt seems to genuinely be listening to people who complain, even when they’re being very blunt”)
Thank you. I’m feeling very short of warm fuzzies today, and every little bit helps.
That seems to have been a very common assumption. I have found that surprising and am endeavoring to change minds on it. Writing a post would take me time I prefer to spend fixing issues, but I’m reaching out for help on managing the torrent of unhappy and expectations of future changes (I’m working today to try to decide what changes we should make, and we’ll start work next week on some changes and some reversions).
ETA: I thought of a shorter post I could write.
Very awesome. Thank you for providing that feedback in a visible place :)
If you read a little more literally you will observe that this is strictly a compliment. You already know that I consider the overall effect of the changes is ‘abominable’ and so no new slight is conveyed. Instead, it puts the “agree that we obviously disagree” parts to one side so that approval of the remainder can be honestly expressed. The design changes are overall a solid step forward in elegance. To what extent you appreciate that indication of approval depends on, among other things, to how much of your identity is invested in all the user interface development you have been involved in verses the amount you are invested in the functionality and policy decisions.
(Note, by the way, that you opened up communication with grinding your teeth then proceeded with an emphasis on other-optimisation. This almost never works unless you have a strong indication that the other is fully emersed into your frame. But who cares? You don’t need to engage with me or to control what expressions I make. You would lose almost nothing just by ignoring me and letting me answer CronoDAS’s question then move along.)
Be very careful what you wish for. Wedrifid when he is trying hard to win scares me. Even in the few seconds it took to write this paragraph he plotted several paths for victory. They were… creative.
So that this context isn’t lost in this unfriendly exchange: I’ve enjoyed your contributions to this site for a long time, and expect to continue to enjoy them in the future. I have much respect for your clarity of thought and intelligence.
Now…
So you know why I’m still bothering you -
Each change can be individually further tweaked, reverted, or replaced with something else. I’m uninterested in your opinion of the “overall effect” of the changes and interested in your particular thinking on each change. I’m more interested in your opinion after it seems to me that you’ve had the opportunity to understand our thinking behind each change rather than only your first responses.
Hmm… I seem to be assuming it’ll be easier for one of us to change the other’s mind than you do. I honestly don’t know whether I’d change my mind or you would, if we invested the time to understand each others reasons, but I think it likely enough that I’d profit from listening that I’m happily investing the time.
… though, I guess you’ve not convinced me that today isn’t an uncharacteristically grumpy day for you, so I guess I will leave you alone for the next few hours.
Again: you have my respect and I expect to continue benefiting from your contributions to this site.
It isn’t personal. The prior for changing people’s mind is abysmal and in this case I am also able to take into account information about the political context. There are people with more status and more power than me who disagree with me on the underlying issue. One of them is Eliezer. This is not a situation in which I wish to internalise a goal of changing the mind of the implementors.
Nor should I have, for it is a grumpy day. But that doesn’t mean I don’t endorse my comments fully on reflection. I also suggest you see aggression when there is mere flippancy, leaving you with more of a feeling of personal unpleasantness than I have.
I appreciate the attempt to maintain goodwill. That matters to me given that I’ll be returning to Melbourne once I’m done at Berkeley and I understand you are prominent among the Melbourne LW community.
Then goodwill is maintained, and I look forward to seeing you at a future Melbourne meetup.
By the status afforded through karma, you’ll be by far the highest status participant if you do attend :)
I wish the server was as smart as the AJAX. The AJAX on the ‘retract’ button still knows how to make removed stuff invisible!
This is retracted but given the context I’m not sure whether it’s still a valid bug report that I don’t understand. Is there a bug report I should action here? If so, can you make it easier for me to understand?
Not a high priority report. Just minor bug. That is, the javascript on the retract button still acts as if it is a delete button. (At least sometimes.) So it looks gone until you refresh. Let me confirm.
Testing again.
Yes. I retracted the parent and it disappeared. I refreshed and it was there again with the strikethrough.
Again, low priority. It could be work to fix (unless, say, you could copy and paste some of the AJAX from the post comment code that loads the new comment code from the server when it is submitted.)
Yea, at first I thought it looked cool, but after the first 5 seconds the whole thing seems problematic. Not only is there mystery meat navigation, but it’s also really hard to see which links you’ve clicked before. And the whiteness is way overdone to the point I get snowblind and have to squint in order to see where one post ends and the next begins.
The whole actually doing things in practice and so is admirable… but sorry the execution sucks, please revert and have it opt-in until you’ve worked out all the quirks.
Some of the links are a black-ish color, which is a problem, because the “visited link” color is gray. The usual convention is that a visited link is darker, so this is very confusing. I also personally find the two colors to be a bit too close even if they were swapped.
I accidentally clicked the little eyeball at the bottom of a post, which hid it. Now I can’t even see it if I browse to the permalink.
Also, there’s no number of comments on posts on the front or new pages, nor link to the comments.
I had been wondering how one “un-hid” something after pressing that button. It worries me that the answer is unintuitive...
So I looked in to it. If you go to your profile, and then “Hidden” at the top, you can find them and restore them. As of now, for me, I can also access hidden posts via a perma-link and if I have it “saved” it will show up there too.
I figured it would be something like that, but I was mostly filing this as a bug report: this behavior is not user-friendly in any way.
It’s definitely worth a “bug report”, but I figured I’d at least provide you with a temporary fix in the meantime :)
I understand that the changes are still ongoing to some degree, but I will be fairly upset if there is no modification to make it easier to access users’ comment histories, as I described here in the redesign suggestion thread.
In addition, I had to flip through my comments one page at a time to find that link, because the “load more comments” link at the end of the main suggestion thread is not functioning properly, i.e. it does not appear to be loading all of the comments.
ETA: The new “load all comments” link appears to function correctly, but does not sort correctly. For example (using the above-linked suggestions thread), the last comment after loading all when sorting by new is one of mine, and the first comment when sorting by old is one of Louie’s.
This has made me realize that switching the sort option for one thread switches it for all threads. This is not preferable behavior. Switching the sort within the thread should only switch that thread at that time, and users should have a global preference to set for default sorting behavior.
I preferred when there was a prominent, single-click link from the main page to recent comments. It’s always been the main way I’ve navigated the site, and I think it may have helped draw people to the site’s content, much of which is in the comments, including comments on top-level posts that don’t in themselves look interesting.
It’s an oversight—we’ll fix it.
Apparent glitch I’ve found: on the Wiki page the header stretches all the way horizontally on my screen, in contrast to the Main and Discussion sections where the pages are horizontally bounded. Now, I have 22′ widescreen monitor with 1920x1080 resolution and the Wiki header appears to be not big enough to fit my screen and thus it abruptly ends around 90% of the screen on the right side, leaving the SIAI and FHI logos with a partially white background.
Does “NEARBY MEETUPS” sort at all? The Austin, TX meetup I made that’s a few miles down the road is displayed second after a meetup in the UK (which is actually spam). (Note: I have set my location to Austin, TX.)
Once a polling system is implemented, I would like to see a poll that lists all the changes with “better, worse, or neutral” so that we can get a more accurate representation of what people like and dislike. I hesitate to write my own response of “I agree to X but still like Y” whenever somebody lists multiple likes/dislikes. It would clutter the page and not help very much unless many people responded.
It would have been nice if somebody took screenshots of the old version so we could compare. Some things are much easier to tell the difference, but it is very difficult to pull up memories of how easy to read/nice to look at the old site was, when comparing things like the color scheme.
My personal preferences:
Positive dropdown menus Comment layout and visual representation: better than it was
Negative: Comment number not appearing Header: I like the old one and it’s map/territory artwork. When in the discussion section, the header is ugly (3 different fonts in 3 different colors). I would like to see a picture of how it was. I feel like this is a case of “why fix what isn’t broken? (WFWIB)” (it makes some sense if it didn’t go well with new site changes.) Hall of fame rather than top contributors WFWIB
Neutral comment icons vs. words Color scheme: background SIAI /FHI links: seems reasonable
Thanks for working hard at making the site better! The negative comments are probably rough, but we appreciate you.
Edit after a few days: I really like the new layout and graphic design. Except for the header. Not being able to delete comments is interesting, since I used to hesitate and delete what I wrote directly after writing sometimes. I was going to do that again, but wasn’t able to, and my comment got a few points, so it may have been worthwhile. An uncomfortable, but probably positive change.
A couple of points / whining:
On the main page, it is not clear whether the up/down/save/hide icons belong to the post above or below it. I would suggest removing the line above these links.
I would like a link to the article or to the comments at the bottom of the article, but I suppose this has been mentioned already.
Give me back my text links instead of icons, I liked the simple look it gave the side, and it is easier to understand. The vote up/down buttons are easy enough to understand, but the other icons are not. When I want the permalink, I don’t immediately know what to look for. Also, the pop-up balloons are annoying, and would be unnecessary if text links were used.
Also, it is not immediately obvious if an up/down vote icon has been clicked. It turns green, but there is already lots of green on the page.
Why are the text input fields in ugly blurry gray? I would prefer a crisp edge.
Why is the text of buttons gray on a gray background? I would suggest using black text for a better contrast.
The green border for new comments is a bit much. I would prefer it if it just said “new” somewhere. Or with an icon if you are so inclined.
It’ll do. I like that it highlights new comments (but I’m not too keen on how the highlighting is done—the thick green border looks pale and fuzzy).
There are a few glitches (even after cache-clearing):
My username is long enough that the end disappears behind the “Create new article” button.
The number of comments on a post is no longer displayed except in the page for that post.
Loading lesswrong.com gives a page in which none of “Promoted”, “New”, “Top”, or “Saved” is highlighted.
“Nearby meetings” shows a single meeting, in Australia. I am in the U.K. How is the site deciding what is “nearby”?
Is there any page I can go to to see all forthcoming meetups, regardless of location? If I was travelling, I might very well want to know of meetups not currently “nearby”.
The foot of each comment seems to have too much empty space in it, especially for nested comments.
I have some good news:
We’ll review that styling.
Agreed—we’ll fix that.
An oversight. We’ll fix that.
Changes coming to lesswrong.com—they didn’t quite make the presses.
Of the set of 3 meetups that have been entered into the new system, those are the 3 closest. That list will likely look much better in a few days (as others enter new meetups to the new system).
Click the meetups title in the sidebar.
We have a feature we didn’t quite get to to honour the location you can enter on your profile over geoip.
Hmm… there seems to be a lot of unhappy being directed at the icons down there. We’ll review.
Will_Newsome points out that we haven’t thanked you. Some of us have thought of listing changes they liked as well as changes they disliked, some of us have thought of correcting for bias against change, some of us have thought of simply not being jerks. But we haven’t thought of thanking you.
So, thanks. Thanks for making LW better. Thanks for working on new ideas even if you’ll get bitten if they’re bad and ignored if they’re good. Thanks for taking criticism into account. Thanks for being nice even when criticism isn’t of the form “Changes A through F rock, changes G and H are neutral, change I annoys me but that seems personal, change J was a bad idea, change K was good but change K’ would have been better”, but of the form “You suck”.
You’re awesome. Have some karma.
Thank you. That helps.
I’m working on collating opinion today, and we expect to be working on further changes and some reversions early next week.
I’m pretty sure he’s not referring to the icons, but to the bottom of stacks of nested comments, like in this screenshot
Thanks. I think there are two issues there—the normal padding and that the comments-new-since-your-last-visit styling consumes extra space. We’ll fix the latter, and will review the former.
“Main” feels way too bright and washed out. “Discussion” strikes a better balance.
(ETA2: ah, strike that—I was having the same weird caching issue many others have mentioned.)
This will take some getting used to.
ETA: also I regret that the tagline “a community blog, etc” has been rendered all but invisible in the main masthead (insufficient contrast) and in discussion (type too small). Either remove the tagline entirely or make sure it can be read—don’t sit on the fence.
ETA3: so the tagline is OK on the main site, but my comments stand for Discussion.
ETA4: I don’t know if that’s a recent change or yet another cache issue, but that also looks fine in Discussion now.
A bug: in the previous design, comments on the old posts that were imported from Overcoming Bias could only by sorted by “old.” The new “Sort By” dropdown menu now allows the user to select the other sorting methods on the old posts, although they don’t change the actual sorting of the comments. There should probably be some flag added to those old posts to prevent the dropdown menu from appearing to prevent future confusion.
I like the icons, the karma bubble fix, and the meetup section.
The new layout and colors are neutral to me—neither better nor worse than the old ones.
I’m not sure how I feel about the lime green border to highlight new comments. It’s slightly useful, but mildly ugly.
I’ll miss the map-territory header. I’m not sure what the new one is supposed to be. It does look better, though.
Not being able to see the number of comments on the main and discussion pages is annoying, even if aesthetically pleasing.
The new retraction mechanic is silly. I wish deletion was back.
I still think it’s an improvement overall, and I support a policy of “when in doubt, experiment” and “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission”.
Better:
Meetups!
highlighting of unread comments!
Retracting comments instead of deleting them!
The icons are a bit better than text—well, except for the “reply” one, which looks like a “send PM”, but overal I think it’s better, it makes it slightly easier to quickly scan through the comments
The karma bubble is slighly better
Temporary setbacks
Some people have css cache problems, that should clear up soon
The comment counts have been lost :( But it should be fixed
Some bugs in comment submission—it doesn’t accept accented characters in locations, which is blatant discrimination against nous les français.
Worse
The header is uglier than before :(
There’s a bit too much spacing between comments, but that may just take some getting used to (it’s not as bad for comments you already read, it’s the new ones that have a lot of spacing).
Why is this in “setbacks”? Do you mean you would prefer an even better karma bubble?
It’s in “setbacks” because the edit window is too small so I have to scroll up and down and can’t see the comment as a whole so put it in the wrong place; also because I don’t reread although I should.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
This is especially stupid when combined with the inability to delete comments.
I don’t understand.
I thought the fact that the grandparent was posted 20 times within 5 seconds made the meaning rather obvious.
It. Is. Too. Easy. To. Double. Post. Comments.
Many people do so accidentally and in fact it is the case that yesterday there was a list of about 50 most recent comments that were all multiply posted. This is a bad thing. I cannot make this any more clear and would not take further incomprehension of evidence that my meaning is not clear.
Divination of intended meaning is bounded at the moment, please hold.
Это слишком просто удвоить оставлять комментарии. На самом деле легко.
Allow me to revise this. I can, in fact, supply instructions on how people are most likely to double post comments.
View any original post.
Find the comment box immediately below the post.
Write text.
Click “Comment”
Experience lag (like the entire site was experiencing immediately after the upgrade) or even just experience the slightly different commenting experience when commenting on posts vs commenting on other comments.
Click “Comment” again.
???
Fail to profit.
That helped: we should disable the Comment button when you click it. Thanks for the bug report.
Please don’t do this. In the event of a network failure, this can leave one unable to retry submitting a comment; I have actually experienced this on sites other than LW.
Instead, assign a unique identifier to each created comment form, and if the server receives two submissions with the same identifier, consider the second one an edit to the first comment. (Even client-side pseudorandom identifiers would be good enough for these purposes.)
Exactly!
(I thought that this was how LW already worked. My impression was that the code for replying to comments still has such a system and it is just the replying to the original post that is broken.)
I’m guessing you implemented this, as the other page on which I just tried to make a comment is stalled. Not only is the Comment button disabled, I cannot select my comment’s text to try again after reloading the page—the box is grayed out and won’t take my cursor. So the comment is lost unless I hand-copy everything in it, or the page spontaneously recovers. Please fix this.
Edit: I can’t even click Cancel.
You have my personal apology for the lost time.
We’ve intended to fix that properly for a while, but have not gotten around to it.
I would like to note that your consistently polite, selfless, composed, and even-handed behavior is making me react along the lines of “Stop countersignalling your high status by refusing to shoot down our attempts to grab status from you!”.
That’s not what I verbally think, though. What I verbally think is “Serene bastard.”.
grumbles
adds $10 to SIAI donation pool
This is a test to determine my ability to ban my own comments as a stopgap measure for the inability to delete, until this horrible, horrible oversight is corrected.
This is stupid. I can ban but not unban my own comment.
ETA: Now I can unban it. Either this only works in certain views, or there’s some kind of delay. Either of these things is a dreadful idea.
This is the first time I have been the slightest bit envious of the priviledge of moderater authority!
You can retract, and you can edit. We thought we’d left the important powers intact.
Easy deletion breaks the old conversation. Retraction shows that you’ve changed your mind. If you really want to hide your previous comment, edit it.
Am I missing an important power?
Retraction-with-the-strikethrough is like divorce to deletion’s annulment. When I delete comments, here are some motives not addressed by retraction:
I got simuposted by someone whose comment was similar and as good or better, and want to quietly remove the excess without leaving any clutter. (Or, I double-posted myself.)
I realize that I said something really, really stupid and don’t want to admit to having said anything in the first place.
The only reply to my comment is from a source I don’t want to interact and I wish to remove myself from the thread, rather than being tempted to abuse mod powers for the purpose of not interacting with the source.
I haven’t actually changed my mind, but I decided that I didn’t want to air the contents of the comment in a public forum, or someone else complained of a privacy violation; I don’t want to draw attention to there ever having been a comment in the relevant location.
It’s possible that comments with children, especially with several children, should exhibit more limited behaviors than those without; but the retraction/editing options are not sufficient.
The second one there is why I’d like deletion back, or at least the ability to make a post anonymous. My sanity and intelligence has a lot of time variance.
That sounds like a fairly strong argument for restoring deletion of comments without children.
I hear you on the rest. If we restore delete for childless comments but leave it out for comments with children, I think we’re balancing the cost to others of the broken conversation vs the ability to pretend you never spoke—your remaining edit ability means you can remove everything but the trace showing that you once spoke.
I’m not sure how to make that decision, but am inclined to bow to public opinion. Can you see if you can raise some evidence for me that the community prefers one over the other?
Sounds good, except there’s that nasty race condition.
Was a poll feature added somewhere that I haven’t run into yet, or shall I do it the old-fashioned way?
A poll feature is still planned but not scheduled. The old-fashioned way still works.
Thanks.
You could “retract” things anyway by editing them (adding a statement of retraction with actual reasons). Striking through all the text is a bad default for how to do that, makes the original text unnecessarily inconvenient to read (it’s a better default than removing, but the use case is different).
You’re right that the original power to edit and retract in plain english existed. In practice, deletion was fairly common, which meant that broken conversations were fairly common. I hope that the new delete button will make retraction more common than edit-to-delete-content.
If you retract, can your comment still be voted on? If so, then there’s definitely an important power missing.
We understood one of the reasons for comment deletion was to prevent karma drain—you say something unpopular and watch your karma drain away, then delete the comment to prevent further drain. The current functionality is that by retracting the comment you leave the conversation intact but stop the karma loss.
If we add the planned agree/disagree voting readers will still be able to express disagreement with your original position.
Am I missing an important power?
I know. That is retarded FUCKING piss poor shit gay like your momma is. it also duzent use gramer or spellun and bypasses the primary role of karma. That is, you can now write comments that are immune to voting at the expense of being somewhat obscured. This is a new, undesirable power.
If people go around swearing and insulting others or spamming, or trolling, they should get downvoted to oblivion and not just rely on moderators finding them.
(Insults provided purely for illustrative purposes.)
In addition, retracted comments now have the undesirable property of being MORE visible on the page than normal comments—the strikethrough draws the eye. It’d be better to have a link to view the original comment, e.g. something like:
[retracted by author—click to view original]
I like this suggestion.
My input: what the fuck happened to the site???
Edit: This was just intended to convey my immediate, gut reaction to the site. Of course I can find out what happened, I did so, and I elaborated in other comments. I leave this here as a reminder of my initial expression of shock.
Not exactly mystery meat, the icons contain some information. A real MMN would have all icons looking the same, or at least having shapes unrelated to their function.
By the way, the Web Pages That Suck site is amusing, but since I have seen it for the first time I wonder whether the site itself has a fairly sucking design on purpose.
I am seeing a few glitches—the “+” and “-” icons are cut off at the right, so they are surrounded by Cs not circles—but overall this a big improvement. Thanks to the people at Tricycle for a great job!
That’s a caching issue. The + and—have been replaced with thumbs-up and thumbs-down.
Ah, thanks! Thought a shift-reload would clear that up, but obviously not.
There are definitely some wrinkles to iron out. Make the images the right size and readable, maybe also increase the contrast in some of the colors. Actually I’m seeing a lot of wrinkles. We should probably make a laundry list and see if there’s any way the community can help.
I’m very happy that there’s a meetup system now, so the revamp is definitely a good thing overall. But there’s still work to do.
What do you mean by ‘make the images the right size and readable’?
By the right size, I mean I’m seeing the borders as cut off on the + and—buttons, only seeing half of the SIAI and FHI image, and then only when I mouse over. The icons that you are going to click a lot should also be larger—I don’t want to have to work for it. By readable, I actually meant two things. “A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality” is unreadable in the images. And the icons probably do need little readable labels on them so someone who doesn’t use the site every day doesn’t have to wait for the alt-text every time.
Same here on Linux/Firefox. Turns out the cause was a browser-cached copy of the old version of those images.
Ah, I’ll hold judgement a bit then.
EDIT: Yay everything’s fixed. Well, not everything. The biggest problems.
I now see thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons instead of the cut-off + and—icons.
Yup, looks like that was also one of the problems caused by an old browser cache.
.
I am also seeing the + and—icons cut off; I’m using Firefox under Windows.
I had it but fixed it by reloading—F5 / Shift+F5 didn’t work, the reload button did.
Are you zoomed at 100% in your browser?
Very likely, and it’s the same size as shows up on other computers, but I don’t know that there’s a way to test it. Zooming in doesn’t fix the images being cut off, it helped the discussion section header from unreadable to just too small, but it didn’t help the main page header, where the problem was light beige on light beige.
What’s your browser and OS?
So to be clear, you don’t see the same problems?
This computer is windows XP, latest version of chrome.
Right, I don’t have those problems, as I understand your explication of them.
I’m not a big fan of the big green ovals. Maybe it would be better if it remained circle for two characters and only expanded for 3 or more? People’s karma reaches high levels, but posts usually only have double digit karma. Then a list like the main discussion page would be uniform.
Hmm, after using it for some bit I notice that I seem to care less about karma, and be a lot more prone to up-voting things. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
Presumably this as somehting to do with the interface, maybe somehting as simple as attaching less weight to a thumbs up than to a vote.
For some reason, the new design is (sometimes) very sluggish on my iPhone. Can the tricyclists look into this?
Another iPhone bug report: since the post buttons have mouseover behaviours, you need to tap it twice to actually click it, which can be annoying. Though I’m not sure what the best alternative would be, since people on mobile devices should still be able to see what the buttons do before clicking them. Maybe just show them as text on mobile browsers?)
(Actually, a whole mobile-formatted version of the site would be great, but I know that would be a larger project…)
Also, the Singularity Institute logos and FHI Institute logos in the upper right corner aren’t visible at all until I mouseover them.
EDIT: The problem went away when I hit “Refresh”. It looks just fine now.
They’re just dark, and become lighter when you mouseover. Increase the brightness or contrast of your monitor.
A blog shouldn’t tell readers to adjust their hardware in order to view it properly.
Readers have a ridiculously wide variety of hardware (several generations of multiple platforms of desktop and laptop computers; plus a few generations of mobile device). If you’re creating for the general Web, you have to design within the constraints imposed by that diversity, not tell people that they have to adjust their gear to compensate for the site’s design.
Which browser and OS are you using? I’m not having this problem.
Me? I’m using Chromium on Ubuntu Natty. The person you were suggesting should adjust his/her monitor? No idea.
To me, the site appears to be sponsored primarily by the Visitacion Valley Playground, whose name appears in much clearer print than FHI or SIAI in the banner. The FHI diamond appears immediately below the Visitacion Valley Playground name; the SIAI logo appears drifting below the banner.
Here’s a screenshot of what I see, mildly marked up. I have no weird font settings or browser configuration so far as I know; this is pretty much default.
But then, I gripe about flaky experimental web sites all day. Don’t worry too much about it.
:)I don’t see anything about a playground. Please do post a screenshot, thanks.
Done; see above.
Whoa … on reload, the map banner is gone. I’m guessing that particular weirdness was one more effect of caching. Funky.
Oh yeah. I should mention that to people.
Woops. Same issue; same fix.
Refreshing fixed that problem, I think.
.
Same here. Chrome 12 on OSX. The SIAI logo shows up in the wrong place (below the header).
What’s your browser and OS?
Same thing here. Chrome, XP
I can’t see the rightmost bit of either logo even when I mouseover.
Browser and OS?
Firefox on OSX.
Sounds to me like a caching issue. (We didn’t handle that very well.) After you clear your cache does the problem resolve?
Plus: the new reply icon is a big improvement over the envelope. It looks like a public discussion now.
Minor bug in the highlighting of new comments, though: clicking on any link to a comment (e..g in the recent comments or your inbox) causes you to go to a partial view of the containing post, and it resets the “new” status for the page, meaning you can’t then look around for other new comments on that page. The newness should only be reset when you view the page proper, if it can’t be reset on a comment-by-comment basis (and I’m assuming it can’t.)
(I still think the “parent” and “permalink” icons need improvement, but I don’t have any concrete suggestions. Also, it appears that redacted comments show unredacted if they’ve already been sent to your inbox.)
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
You can’t delete posts from your user menu. Damn.
You can delete posts from your user menu.
Retraction test.
Is delete still missing? Yes. Regression test fails.
Test
Test
Hah, you can retract a comment, then edit it. But you can’t un-retract it o.o
Yet Another Comment Retractation Test
Overall conclusion: This redesign is an utter abomination. Yes, the Karma bubble fix is useful and the ‘Nearby Meetups’ feature is of interest. But every other intervention seems to be a bad idea. I particularly despise the removal of the delete feature.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.
This is a test
This is a test to see how retracting of comments works.
This is an edit.
This is an edit done after retraction. It appears, but the comment is still retracted. Strange that one may edit a retracted comment, but not unretract (tract?) it.
Some edits done to a comment after it was retracted
This is a test.
This is me testing if the “Retract” button does anything more interesting than deletion.
What happened to the agree/disagree buttons that were voted on, and why?
How did you get strikethrough text in your comment?
editiing
retracting lead to strikethrough.
I tried to delete the comment… this is what “retract” does.
Also, there is no “report” button in the new design.