doom's Journal: Problems with slashdots new discussion system

I have problems with slashdot's new discussion system ("D2", no longer in beta, I gather), and I'd like to report them, but instead I'm writing about them here for now because of my first problem:

1. It's not clear how one is supposed to report bugs. Contact info is buried, and not well labeled. (I could just send email to taco, but he seems like an idiot... should I just email chromatic?). Ah, if you drill down through "Help & Preferences", there's a line how to report a bug. And as for mis-features?
2. There's some attempt at implementing "smooth scrolling" that's herky-jerky and irritating. Even if it worked right, it would still annoy me: when I punch "page down" or "down arrow" I want it to snap, not to stall. (Turns out this is a mis-feature of Firefox -- I needed to uncheck "Edit Preferences/Advanced/Smoothscroll".
3. Nested comments are indicated with a heavy side-bar -- this is unnecessary visual noise. Quotations inside of comments are also indicated with heavy side-bars and they've become very hard to see now.
4. Some comments default to a closed state, and I need to click on them to open them -- I hate this kind of thing myself, it forces me to read with my hand on the mouse. (Maybe this is fixable with pref changes? I'm trying it out).

Thus far, there's only one thing I've noticed about the new system that I like: I can get the entire current state of the discussion in one huge page: I've always disliked the way the old system split things up into several pages (it made it hard to use text searches to skim for mentions of particular sub-topics).

In any case, as the slashdot brain-drain continues apace, it's going to be harder to find things in the discussion that are worth reading. It's more like a place you duck in if you feel like arguing with 13 year-olds and government propagandists. The various "features" being added to slashdot don't seem to address any of the real problems with the system.

(Actually: there's one "new" feature that sort-of works: I was skeptical of the utility of a friends network -- it just seemed like imitating all those other sites -- but actually it's kind of useful to be able to identify a cluster of nominally intelligent folks and automatically, instantly, mod them up. Kind of like the stuff I've been doing with nn and/or gnus on usenet for many a year...)

I also like

[smittyoneeach]

Clicking the title and having the discussions collapse beneath, for quicker navigation.
The fundamental problem with /. is that all of the technical discussion is gone.
Years ago, I'd log in here and learn stuff, or find links that taught me geek things.
Anymore, I just log in and see that, again, my opinions/japes are cutting against the grain of somebody with substantial mod points. Such is life.

Re:

[doom]

Clicking the title and having the discussions collapse beneath, for quicker navigation.

Is that something you like about the new system? It might be mildly useful, if the titles or threads reflected anything in the messages. Everyone tries to cram their comments into the first thread, because they know that's the only thing that's going to get read. And few people bother to revise the subject when they reply (anything that slows you do for 20 seconds is counter-productive in the slash-world).

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

I do like it. Knowing that the first comment is usually the dumping ground for the lame jokes makes it easy to skip them outright (unless I'm part of the problem ;)