Shadow Wrought's Journal: An Open Letter to CmdrTaco

Mr. Malda:

I'm writing about your changes to the user's pages. I understand you are trying to continue to improve and tweak slashdot, but my user page no longer works. It is unreadable, has links which do not work, and, as far as I can tell, there is no way to opt out of the new look.

I am a subsciber and have been using slashdot for a great many years. I've written over a hundred journals, had a couple stories accepted, and posted over 6,000 times, and have never had a worse experience than this. I feel as though you are forcing all of us to be beta-testers for a new system which, to be blunt, isn't even needed.

I do not expect you to have time to respond to this, but I would very much encourage you to rollback slashdot to its previous usibility, and in the future give people the chance to opt out of beta-testing new designs.

Thank you,
Doug

Don't you know?

[jawtheshark]

People with over 6000 posts have no life (I'm too bored to look for the FortKnox reference where someone from slashdot said that to him)

Re:

[jawtheshark]

from slashdot = employed by slashdot

Re:

[johndiii]

That was back when FK had 713 posts. :-)

Re:

[jawtheshark]

LOL.... Okay.... I thought it was in the thousands... Still it illustrates how they think of the people who keep the site alive. That is you and me (and many others)!

Re:

[tomhudson]

It really IS fugly. I have something like 14,000 comments, and it now no longer shows the total - so how will I keep track of the fact that I have no life :-)

Seriously, the ajax is terrible. I was continually getting "a script is taking too long to run" errors until yesterday - that's when I added a custom hosts file to block the ad servers (I wasn't blocking the ads because I want slashdot to get the revenue, but this is ridiculous).

And like some other posters, I've had a couple of stories accepted (

Yes, and

[Alioth]

Yes, and the firehose sucks now. It's totally unusable. It used to Do The Right Thing, i.e. you clicked on it and it showed you what had been submitted, journals etc. with a couple of clicks. Now it's just a confusing and slow morass. And I mean slow. Just because AJAX exists doesn't make it a good idea to use it everywhere.

(In fact, AJAX is almost always a terrible idea. Making a user interface by writing bits of HTML using Javascript to the DOM is just a filthy kludge. It's so slow my ZX Spectrum can rend

Re:

[jawtheshark]

AJAX can be done well... Look at Google Docs... Responsive, useful and great.... I'm not a fan of Ajax, but when done well it rocks.

Re:

[cayenne8]

Yes...please fix the firehose, and the user page (that changed today I think).

The firehose has been unusable to me for awhile now, and I don't like the user page...ESPECIALLY where it puts your last post in big letters for everyone to see...while you're posting at work.

Not good....

At least give the option to keep it 'classic' please.

Also,those with less that optimal hardware thank you...that is one thing that kills firehose for me even when it does work. I also used to metamoderate a lot, but, that does

Aughhhhh

[nizo]

The new user pages are full of eye-poking goodness. It took me ten minutes to figure out where the hell my messages disappeared to.

Re:

[beav007]

No joke.

*sigh*

Cosigned

[peacefinder]

n/t

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[Captain Splendid]

Same here, just to add to the numbers.

Re:

[Degrees]

Ditto. FWIW, I think the Slashdot folk should have been a tad more smart, and built in 'skins' to their interface, and then let the preference page specify which skin to use. New users default to the new skin, but existing users get what they always did. Then make a press announcement that the new skin is available. You win loyalty that way, instead of damaging it.

/signed

[Kymermosst]

Let's go back to the KISS principle, please.

Yep

[Poppler]

Aside from being ugly, the new home pages seem to be utterly useless as far as I can tell.

Re:

[nizo]

New motto: "The new user pages, now with extra uselessness!"

Constructive criticism

[Nefarious Wheel]

The part I like least is my last post up there on top. There's no point to it, I don't want to read it again, and I don't need it for continuity. Please at the very least remove that feature.

And it seems to be very slow to get back to the old list of comments, which I use as a means for checking the thread content. Cosmetically the page looks better formatted, but in practice usability suffers from having to wait (and wait...) for the "more" link to load. I'd really rather not have to click "more" to

Re:

[Qzukk]

The part I like least is starting out on the firehose instead of the comments. Swap them around so it works like it used to, and we'll never have to look at our most recent comment on a dark gradient background (damn you, Idle!) ever again. Especially since the default tab is some sort of mishmash between "last comment" and all of the semi-useless "My Firehose" (why are there things I didn't hit + on? ... on second glance I think these are comments I modded up) content that's still on the firehose tab whe

The Big Switch

[Hucko]

I stopped using firehose because it was a crudge now they make my user page based on it? gah. Ars Technica is a pain to read too, but it is better than /. now... I will have to move there permanently.

Me Three

[retech]

Talk about a non-feature. Add me to the list of folks who do not like the new/.

I didn't like New Coke either. Not that you care.

Agreed

[johndiii]

Bad design. Broken "features". Ugh.

Agreed

[halcyon1234]

Agreed. The only thing I want out of my user page is the classic view of my posts + replies and moderation(s). If I wanted Firehose, I'd go to Firehose. If I wanted clutter, I'd add a bunch of widgets. I want to be able to click on my name in the upper left corner of the screen, and immediately see, right on top, comments+mods.

Re:

[halcyon1234]

And for the record, "immediately" doesn't mean a retarded overlaid DIV with the comments and mods like the user preference. I mean take me to the page, and leave me there.

I couldn't agree more...

[mce]

... and here is why:

1. I don't want some random crap from the firehose on my user page. It is remember *my* page, so I should be in control of what is displayed there.
2. The old user page is exactly what I wanted: a history of my comments, compact, clean, and simple.
3. I do not want my last comment on top of the page in full length. What use is that supposed to be in any case?
4. My user page now displays an irrelevant submission dating back to March '07. I don't even remember seeing this, let alone doing some

PS

[mce]

PS: To drive my point home, I just changed my subscription to burn through the remaining pages ASAP. There will be no renewal as long as the user page does not become sane again.

PPS

[mce]

Before the /.crew thinks that they'll earn money nonetheless on the adds, so it doesn't matter: I'm blocking 99% of them, both at /etc/hosts file level and inside my browsers.