Slashdot Keybindings, Dynamic Stories

We've been working hard on the new dynamic Slashdot project (logged in users can enable this by enabling the beta index in their user preferences). I just wanted to quickly mention that there are keybindings on the index. The WASD and VI movement keys do stuff that we like, and the faq has the complete list. Also, if you are using Firefox or have Index2 beta enabled, you can click 'More' in the footer at the end of the page to load the next block of stories in-line without a page refresh. We're experimenting now with page sizes to balance load times against the likelihood that you'll click. More features will be coming soon, but the main thing on our agenda now is optimization. The beta index2 is sloooow and that's gotta change. We're aiming for 2 major optimizations this week (CSS Sprites, and removing an old YUI library) that I'm hoping will put the beta page render time into the "Sane" time frame (which, in case you are wondering, is several seconds faster than that "Insane" time frame we're currently seeing).

Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Because I'd personally be more tolerant of pages taking a few seconds longer to load everyone's comments up than the usually 5-30 second delay on previewing and submitting my own comments.

lynx

[Gothmolly]

Just don't break Lynx support.

Stop auto-updating?

[Smitty825]

One (small) issue I seem to have is with the auto-updating feature. Often, I'm connected over a (relatively) slow cell phone link. When I'm using this slow link, I'd prefer to not have Slashdot query the server for updated stories. I know I can press the "pause" button, at the top to stop the auto-updating, but if I forget to do so, then I'm annoyed by some other app responding slowly. Is there plans to make this feature configurable? (Note: Each time I load /., I need to remember to hit the "pause" button...the previous state is never saved)

UI plea

[drDugan]

Would you hire a great UI designer and make a brand new layout or skin that is easier to read and navigate?

... really love reading the content on ./ - but can't stand the design.

I have my preferences pared back to skeletal for readability - but makes the site look painfully ugly

Feature request --

[girlintraining]

Please fix the user pages. The new way of doing it where our comments are buried several clicks in is irritating. The only reason most of us go to our own user pages is to see if anyone's replied to our comment.

Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading

[beelsebob]

Which is easily translatable to "I'm more interested in speaking than reading what other people might have to say on the issue".

javascript

[Speare]

If I load the front page, all the content appears nearly instantly. Then the whole world freezes for about two seconds before the new bright green search button appears next to the search field. I can't scroll or do anything with the page until the godawful javascript decides to finish whatever it wants to do. True for my versions of Camino and Firefox. Just because Chrome has some fancy-dancy new speedup for JS doesn't mean we all have that browser, nor should we fill up pages with new heavy features with little benefit to users.

Bring back meta!

[clang_jangle]

While you're working on the site, will you please fix meta-mod so we're *actually* modding the mods? I can't see that the current meta-mod does anything whatsoever. It doesn't mod mods, and it doesn't mod comments either. Just + or - for no particular reason, not used for anything at all. Reminds me of voting in US elections...

Re:lynx

[Anonymous Coward]

I say go back to the way slashdot was 10 years ago. In my opinion, all of this fancy newfangled stuff makes it harder, not easier, to get what I want from the website. It seems like every month there is some new "feature" which breaks the old proven way of doing things. But I don't want it. I don't want to login, I don't want to muck around with javascript sliders, and I don't want to have to use "preferences" just to make the site work as basic HTML. It's like the whole site has turned into a sign-up trap, and I'm out in the cold because I don't *want* to sign up.

Turning it off.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I'm not fond of the new beta index or the new user page system. Can they be turned off?

Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading

[Shadow of Eternity]

Which is even more easily translatable to "It's less disruptive for a page to load comments over time while I'm reading through them than it is for me to need to wait a minute or two just on previewing/submitting something I've already typed".

Re:Bring back meta!

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean there's always a recount and in the end it's the supreme court judges that decide the outcome?

Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading

[Swizec]

Agreed. WHY does it take so long for my preview to load? Sure I can understand taking a while for comments to appear on the static page, but when I click Preview I want to see the fucking preview instead of wondering if some javascript somewhere crashed and nothing's about to happen.

Edit: you vile bastards, you've changed the delay on purpose while I was typing that first paragraph didn't you!?

Re:WASD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people really use WASD for navigation and games?

I don't use WASD because you see I have this amazing device called a mouse with a wheel so I can easily navigate things. I also have the glorious space button to do a page down if my heart desires!

Stop catering to those who want to browse with one hand. Put down your coffee/crispy kreme, wipe your hand off on your filthy jeans and browse like the rest of us. Creeps...

Re:WASD?

[Hatta]

For that matter, wouldn't it be more in line with the spirit of the site to use HJKL for navigation?

Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Which is easily translatable to "I'm more interested in speaking than reading what other people might have to say on the issue"."

Which is easily further translatable again to: I have a Slashdot account .

To be fair, if the guy has a clue, he would be more interesting in posting than reading, and he would be right to have the preference. For example, take your post. You missed major computing concepts like batch processing and time slices. The guy just wants one big time slice to load large amounts of data, and one small time slice to post small amounts of data. This is called intelligent system design.

How much should he be interested in reading your post? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader(s).

Re:Feature request --

[pjt33]

Exactly. When someone posts something really good I check to see whether they consistently make good posts, and if so I add them to my friends list.

Re:Slashdot looks weird

[ivan256]

I don't think the original poster correctly framed the spirit of his question....

Why doesn't the front page filter out the display of the 'story' tag?

(Can't help but stick this in here: Why did the horrendously buggy and unusable new default user page go live? A lot of the stuff on there just seems random. Is the number in the speech bubble at the top the number of total comments in the thread the user last posted in? Why? Why the terrible CSS for the top item? Why are the comment titles formatted differently there than everywhere else? Why the redundant 'comments' slashbox on the right with the same content as the left half of the page? Why remove the menus that are on the right side of every other page on the site?)

Please restore small right column!

[maxwell demon]

What I strongly dislike is the disproportionally wide right slashboxes column. I guess that's so you can display big-image ads without breaking the layout, right? It's a shame that Slashdopt goes to such a low to make BAD DESIGN DESICIONS in order to just display slightly different ads (it's not that the there are no other ads which worked just fine on the homepage without breaking the layout).

The big right column takes away to much from what it the one thing I visit slashdot for: The stories. The difference between the left and right column also makes for a very unpleasant optical design.

Please restore the original size of the right column (and just refrain from showing big-image ads there)!

Re:My lawn

[Yaur]

There is nothing wrong with AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff, but Slashdot seems to have completely missed the point in its implementation. If done right it should improve the user experience, but here it mostly doesn't.

Rainbow wtf?

[Bazman]

What's with the rainbow colours? Each story has a little flash of colour on it, and then top right there's a dropdown with some colours on it, and if I choose a colour the stories all seem to dance about a bit and shuffle around. What. The. Flip? And then on the top left there's an 'Edit' box which has - amongst it's other unexplained options - another colour selector. Which does what? I have no idea. Is it some kind of quality thing? I don't have a map of quality to colour in my head. This is meaningless. And don't try and explain what it all means - I'm trying to read the news here, I don't want to have to read a manual. I'll go elsewhere.

And what do colour-blind people think? At least if you are playing with colour be smart and use Color Brewer palettes.

Honestly, I think slashdot looked pretty good enough in 2002:

http://web.archive.org/web/20020806091841/slashdot.org/ [archive.org]

  - go back to that, change the fonts and colours a bit, perfect.

Another recent example of a design-gone-bad - www.freshmeat.net - is the current new implementation:

  http://www.freshmeat.net/ [freshmeat.net]

  really better in terms of ease of use than 2002?

http://web.archive.org/web/20020603034258/http://freshmeat.net/ [archive.org]

Raaaaage!

B

Re:My lawn

[Gothmolly]

Nothing wrong, except where it adds no value. I want a list of articles, grouped by category, that I can browse, then hit either a link to the article, or the comments.

I don't need tags, AJAX, redraws w/o page loads, blah blah blah.

There was nothing wrong with good old 'rn'.

Mark Stories as read?

[CopaceticOpus]

Sometimes, I won't read /. for a couple of days. Then I'll bring up the site and start reading through stories. After I've read (or scanned over) several stories, I might need to go do something else, and so I close the page.

Now a few hours later, I come back. There are a few new stories I haven't seen, followed by a big chunk I have seen, followed by another chunk I haven't seen, going back to whatever story I read last two days ago. Trying to figure out my place is a pain.

I'd love to see a personalized index in which I check off stories as read, and they disappear. If I close the page and come back later, only those stories not marked as read would be listed.

I know you can do something like this with an RSS reader, such as Google Reader. But I really prefer to read stories directly on Slashdot.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The Beta Index is horrible

[bonch]

I hate loading content without refresh. This is becoming standard on too many websites. IT BREAKS THE BEHAVIOR OF THE BACK BUTTON. Such use of JavaScript should be reserved for minor interface interactions, like saving settings or opening a login prompt.

It's getting really annoying how, after decades of desktop API development and interface conventions, the web has come along and not only required everyone to reinvent APIs for every website, but custom interface behaviors as well. It's like we're back to MS-DOS programs when it was every man for himself.

There's my cranky rant for the day.

Re:My lawn

[jc42]

There is nothing wrong with AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff, but Slashdot seems to have completely missed the point in its implementation.

But the ability to do that is the main thing that's wrong with AJAX (and JavaScript and ...). What's wrong is that these things allow the web page to override the browser's basic behavior, so the user get surprising (and usually incomprehensible) results when they hit keys. It's especially wrong to break things like the Back button or the space bar or the pg up/dn keys. This effectively destroys one of the main benefits of a browser, which is a consistent way of doing things regardless of what site you're looking at.

I find it especially annoying when a site takes away my ability to use CTRL-click to open a new page in a new tab. Gmail does this, for example, preventing me from seeing two email messages at the same time, making it a rather crippled email reader. /. also did this to me when I tried the beta, and it was one of the things that quickly persuaded me to go back to basic.