Now there's some irony for you
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Recently, Slashdot launced a newly redesigned site. It's one of those "redesigns" where nothing is actually any better, just different, and people are complaining that some things don't work properly in certain browsers. I noticed that the "new" layout doesn't display properly in Firefox (my usual browser) -- all along the far left edge, half of the first leftter of each line is cut off by a menu block running down the side of the screen, possibly a CSS positioning issue? Don't know. Don't really care enough to look at the page source.
Then, for some unknown reason, I decided to try Internet Explorer, which I almost never use. And IE actually displays everything properly. The site where everyone froths at the mouth at the mere mention of anything Microsoft, and it displays better in IE than in saintly open source Firefox.
Now there's some irony for you
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This update is actually significantly better than the last one they did. (Unless you were using the "classic discussion system" or whatever they called it, which was the least WTFy of all.)
Reading through the update thread is hilarious... Slashdot really needs a "you'll get over it" guy. Except for a very, very, very few genuine complaints (relating to some buggy JS), every single comment is "they changed it, now it sucks". Of course, what do you expect from the biggest community of luddites-pretending-to-like-tech on the web?
Edit: BTW
1) It looks fine in Chrome for me
2) IE8 is a perfectly cromulent browser; it would be weirder if it *didn't* work in IE8+. (You don't say what version of IE you have.)
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two things
1) I think what we're seeing is that they only fully tested the site in IE, which is normally a good business decision, as testing resources are limited. I'd be willing to bet that slashdot is one site that doesn't have the "normal" distribution of browsers among its visitors.
2) FF isn't truly open source in the sense of Debian, but whatever. I guess I'm just nitpicking, which is what this site is all about.
3) I wanna move this to the sidebar, so I will.
4) yeah I know I said two, but I can't be arsed to count things
5) Profit!
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Bit of a side track question for all the old-time /.ers (my ID is in the 600,000's):
Has their comments pagination always sucked? As far back as I can remember, whenever a particular first-level comment has a fair amount of replies, that comment will stick at the top through 2 or 3 more pages. It's rather annoying sometimes. I use threaded view, oldest first.
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@Nexzus said:
Has their comments pagination always sucked?
Hmm, in general Community Server sucks goats.
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@Nexzus said:
Bit of a side track question for all the old-time /.ers (my ID is in the 600,000's):
Has their comments pagination always sucked? As far back as I can remember, whenever a particular first-level comment has a fair amount of replies, that comment will stick at the top through 2 or 3 more pages. It's rather annoying sometimes. I use threaded view, oldest first.
Slashdot has always sucked approximately the same amount it sucks now. The difference is while other sites evolved over time, Slashdot is still running the same creaky Perl-based comments code it was in 1999. (Rich-text entry? Hah!!) What they do is every 5 years or so, they make some new CSS styles to whitewash the site and try to get people to forget the 40,000 bugs they encounter every day.
The impressive thing is that the site still somehow "works" despite itself. The moderation is decent, even though the system is completely fucked in many, many ways. (Meta-moderation seems to be entirely broken now.) People have mostly learned the quirks of the commenting system and so comments are mostly ok, although you do still get the occasional wall-o-text or person-trying-to-use-bbcode. (Here's my tip: if you set it to "plain text" mode you can still use HTML tags. Obviously this isn't documented or spelled-out anywhere.)
Edit: this new CSS whitewash actually contains one of the same bugs I put in for the last one. Their system of threading still shows a bunch of replies that look like they're a level up. It just does so with a slightly different visual appearance. Natch, none of those bugs have been closed, even though most/all are invalid now. Since only 2 of the 12 had been triaged in the THREE YEARS since I posted them, I guess that's no shocker.
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@belgariontheking said:
1) I think what we're seeing is that they only fully tested the site in IE, which is normally a good business decision, as testing resources are limited. I'd be willing to bet that slashdot is one site that doesn't have the "normal" distribution of browsers among its visitors.
Those two sentences seem contradictory. I would agree that Slashdot probably has fewer visitors using IE, mostly due to the nature of the site -- a strong bias toward Linux/Open Source and against all things Microsoft. Given that, I would think they would test against something other than IE and not care what IE users think.@belgariontheking said:
2) FF isn't truly open source in the sense of Debian
What does that mean? I've been doing my own custom builds of FF for several years. Although I've lost interest because the code base is just too much of a mess.
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@blakeyrat said:
none of those bugs have been closed, even though most/all are invalid now. Since only 2 of the 12 had been triaged in the THREE YEARS since I posted them, I guess that's no shocker.
I've never bothered submitting a bug to Slashdot. Somehow I just intuitively knew that it would be a waste of time.
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@El_Heffe said:
@blakeyrat said:
none of those bugs have been closed, even though most/all are invalid now. Since only 2 of the 12 had been triaged in the THREE YEARS since I posted them, I guess that's no shocker.
I've never bothered submitting a bug to Slashdot. Somehow I just intuitively knew that it would be a waste of time.I only did it because one of their "editors" (Jamie I think) told me to after I wrote a post bitching about it. I was like, "well, ok, fair enough." Then they ignored the bugs, so...
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@blakeyrat said:
every 5 years or so, they make some new CSS styles to whitewash the site and try to get people to forget the 40,000 bugs they encounter every day.
Best description of Slashdot I've seen.
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@El_Heffe said:
@blakeyrat said:
every 5 years or so, they make some new CSS styles to whitewash the site and try to get people to forget the 40,000 bugs they encounter every day.
Best description of Slashdot I've seen.Sad, but true.
One of the bugs I encountered early on in this redesign was that you couldn't switch from the new discussion system (which still sucks) to the old one (still sucks, but less than new). It would just ignore said profile change.
So, they actually fixed that bug! But not the others, including the one Blakey was commenting on in an earlier post; I noticed that bug just earlier today when a reply was indented the same level as the post it replied to.
