A few thoughts on the new design.
- Like I said, I’m getting used to it. Someone said the white is too white — yes, but that’s OK.
- Don’t like anonymity of uprating/downrating. However, do like the simple pass/fail system.
- Links seem to fail a lot (even fixed links) if I’m not logged in.
- I like Page 2, both conceptually and the design of the little box.
- Peter Porcupine nailed it the other day. The biggest problem right now is the huge decline in content, especially comments on diaries.
- I don’t sub-blog. Are there oodles of content that I’m missing? How do I know if, say, stomv does a sub-blog post?
Thanks for all your work. Cheers.
Discuss
27 Comments . Leave a comment below.Re the white space: the actual “white” color is not any different from what we had on soapblox. It’s just that there’s more of it, because on Soapblox there was a pale blue background behind the sidebars. That would be easy to recreate, if people thought it would be helpful.
Re ratings, we are working on a fix that will enable identification of the up/down ratings. I agree that a simple “yay” or “boo” is better than the numerical system. We’re working toward something like what the new Daily Kos has – check it out and see what you think.
Re links, that is very odd and I don’t understand why it would happen. If you can give some concrete examples, we can investigate.
Re Page 2, we’ve taken it down for now, for a couple of reasons. First, it took up a lot of space on the page, which forced readers to scroll down further to see new content. Second, we found it to be less useful that we had anticipated – it ended up seeming like more of a graveyard than a space to feature something interesting. In almost all cases, the front page and the “recommended” list seem adequate.
Re content, I certainly hope that people will resume contributing at previous levels – though it is certainly true that even before the transition, we were in a slow period due to the relative lack of hot election news. We’re working on a fix to the “reply” feature in the comments that will have it pop up below what you’re replying to, and that will help a lot, I think.
Re sub-blogs, no, you are not missing any content. New posts from sub-blogs show up in “recent posts,” just like a regular user post. That’s why it’s a nice feature that, once we finish working out the kinks, we hope more people will take advantage of.
In theory, when not logged in, I can click my user name to see my comments. That frequently fails. But it works if I am logged in.
Also often have trouble clicking the Links link in the page banner. I think this is more reliable when I am logged in.
Thanks for replying and for persistence.
is worth trying.
The DailyKos comment format also looks worth trying as well.
Keep up the good work!
Yes, my eyes are telling me the Trebuchet feels better.
Sub-blogs: I, and maybe others, just put that aside while we were getting up to speed on the new BMG. Maybe a separate post could be written that explains the purpose, how to create one, and how to find the ones that already exist.
We’ve been holding off until (a) all kinks are worked out with the sub-blog system, and (b) everyone is (more or less) comfortable with the rest of the stuff. Once all that happens, we’ll do a big push to get people to use the sub-blog system, which is really pretty cool.
n/t
Just to say thank you again for the editors for all the work that they do on this site. I want to stress that reliability was the major motivating factor for the conversion. As a software engineer by profession, I know how little that is valued until there is a disaster. I’m trying to comment more in general and I thought it worthwhile to stress reliability. I know that it was mentioned in another thread but not everyone reads every thread.
At the top of the comment section, under the main article, it says,
“Discuss 7 comments. Leave a comment below.”
Can you add the number of “new” comments to this line? E.g.
“Discuss 8 comments [1 new]. Leave a comment below.”
Thanks!
I think they add clutter and garbled confusion by being incomplete sentences, and they kind of disrespect the post by treating it as if we can get the gist of it by seeing the first 50 characters or whatever. And they might be why people don’t bother to click and go to the diary and possibly respond, they think they’ve seen the whole thing already. The Title is all I’d like to see displayed (and user and a short date), and then we can choose what to put in the title and what to reveal in the comment.
unless there are violent objections.
Fewer people open the diary and that may have contributed to the lack of comments.
I noticed today that on dKos’ “community spotlight”, if you hover over a title, you get preview text similar to what BMG is displaying. Maybe that’s a good compromise. It would allow the recommended and recent list entries to be shorter and cleaner but also provides a way to display some teaser text. Many news sites do something similar.
If this doesn’t make sense, shoot me an email and I’ll explain better.
But it will take a little but longer to build than just getting rid of the snippets.
Not a biggie, but definitely nice to have. When I click on “My comments”, it would be nice to see the ratings info there as we did on the old blog.
Thanks!
In response to the “layout thread” the editors have swtiched to Trebuchet, an internet font. I think it is much more readable and a big improvement. I hope other changes are in the works.
For reference, here is the old BMG ca. August of last year.
I’m just going to list here some of the features that I miss from the old site. Unlike my partial design critique this includes a lot of personal taste.
1) Staying logged in. Some people seem to have this, but not me.
2) Better-integrated ratings. I saw ratings information in more places on the old site. For instance, if I looked at my comments (which were just a list of headers by the way, much better), I say not only if any had comments but if any had ratings. (I also liked seeing who had rated me what, but really can’t defend that as important).
Similarly I think most or all of these little notes about ratings included a second note about how many of them were “new” (unread by me) if any were.
3) Reply box in thread. Having the reply box appear at the bottom of the page makes commenting harder.
4) Richer personal pages. The old one had room for a thumbnail bio, a link, and (yep) ratings as well as comments and posts.
5) Reader moderation in the form of hidden posts, integrated with (you guessed it) ratings.
That’s all right now. Note how many things connect to the ratings system, which I think is maybe underrated.
RESPONSES TO YOUR COMMENTS:
I hope other changes are in the works.
YES, THEY ARE.
1) Staying logged in. Some people seem to have this, but not me.
THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE APPEAR TO PREFER NEVER TO HAVE TO LOGIN. SO THAT’S HOW WE HAVE SET IT. YOU CAN CLICK ON “LOG OUT” TO SIGN OUT. IF ENOUGH PEOPLE AGREE WITH YOU, WE’LL TRY TO CREATE A SETTING IN PREFERENCES FOR HOW LONG ONE STAYS LOGGED IN.
2) Better-integrated ratings. I saw ratings information in more places on the old site. For instance, if I looked at my comments (which were just a list of headers by the way, much better), I say not only if any had comments but if any had ratings. (I also liked seeing who had rated me what, but really can’t defend that as important).
WE’LL IMPROVE THE RATINGS SYSTEM. TAKE A LOOK AT DAILYKOS. DO YOU LIKE THE SYSTEM THEY USE?
Similarly I think most or all of these little notes about ratings included a second note about how many of them were “new” (unread by me) if any were.
THE CURRENT SYSTEM DOES THAT. IT SAYS [NEW] FOR ALL NEW COMMENTS SINCE YOUR LAST VISIT (PROVIDED YOU LOG IN OF COURSE, OTHERWISE IT DOESN’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE).
3) Reply box in thread. Having the reply box appear at the bottom of the page makes commenting harder.
EVERYONE AGREES ABOUT THAT. WE’RE WORKING ON IT.
4) Richer personal pages. The old one had room for a thumbnail bio, a link, and (yep) ratings as well as comments and posts.
GOOD POINT. AGREED.
5) Reader moderation in the form of hidden posts, integrated with (you guessed it) ratings.
THAT ALMOST NEVER HAPPENED IN PRACTICE, JUST FYR.
That’s all right now. Note how many things connect to the ratings system, which I think is maybe underrated.
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO PEOPLE WHO COMMENT HERE A LOT, WHO ARE A SMALL BUT IMPORTANT MINORITY. IT APPEARS LESS IMPORTANT TO THE MAJORITY OF VISITORS, WHO READ BUT DO NOT COMMENT.
I do not like being such a naysayer and appreciate the care you are giving these issues. I could probably enumerate a few things that are improvements here too.
My comment about logging in was that I get logged out whenever I close my browser, and would prefer to be logged in all the time by default. I was not expressing a preference for being logged out automatically.
I do not have an account at Kos (some fine stuff there, but I prefer the vibe here), so I do not really understand the comments rating system because I can’t see how it works.
I will say that Kos recently went through a site redesign that is really dreadful.
You say
I will therefore report that when I go to “My Comments” this information does NOT appear.
Finally, you make a good point that many BMG readers do not care about this the comment-rating stuff. Question for you: How many BMG writers do?
but he sure as heck doesn’t do it on purpose, as he has no idear what a sub-blog post is.
For about a week now, I find that I’m getting logged off by the system when I leave after a site visit, and have to log back in to see comments and post. Logging in is easy to do, but a nuisance. Is anyone else running into this, and is it an issue with the new software?
Before I was always logged in. With the new platform a took a little bit of extra time to get my new password setup. Thanks David for taking care of this. But it always seemed like I wasn’t logged in. That seems to have stopped. Bob referred to a change.
We’ve set things so that the cookie that determines whether you’re logged in doesn’t expire (actually, it expires after a year), so once you’re logged in you should stay logged in (for a year), as long as you’re using the same browser and computer, and you have cookies enabled.
If this is still happening, I’d suggest clearing your browser’s cache and deleting existing cookies, and starting over. It should work – if it doesn’t, let me know and we’ll investigate.
I am logged in for the life of my browser session, though.
As I said before, I assume this is a product of how I deal with browser privacy. I think if you used plain vanilla site cookies to track this (not session cookies or flash cookies) it would work as desired fro more people.
or anything else that’s fancy … just the standard WordPress cookie that every other WordPress site uses. But if you are using unusual browser settings, I would imagine that’s the issue.
I’m sure the editors are well aware of this, but I see spam showing up in the Recent Posts just about every day. Is there something about the new platform that makes this easier to spammers than the old?
We’re aware of the issue, and we take them down when they show up. So far (knock on wood), the problem is actually much less serious than it was on Soapblox, where for months we had a full-scale invasion of literally hundreds of accounts that had to be deleted by hand. Most of them didn’t write posts (preferring to post spam links in their profiles), so you might not have been aware of them, but they were there.
We’re also getting lots of posts from writers like strictlynumber and steven-j-gulliti who “share” their “work” with lots of other blogs. MASSterList, by comparison, is refreshingly local.
this was the case before the transition as well. Of the 20 posts in “Recent User Posts” just before the transition:
2 were by Boston City Council gadfly “don warner saklad”;
2 were by far-and-wide poster, and paid Social Security blogger, “fake consultant”;
2 were by paid Pioneer employee “micaela_Pioneer”;
3 were by paid employees of other campaigns or groups (Bob Massie’s “MassCamel,” MA ACLU’s “aclumblog,” and MassVote’s “avigreen”);
1 was by “my favorite troll” contestant David Whelan; and
1 was by “StopScott,” who is anonymous but sure writes as though he/she is affiliated with a group or candidate whose sole interest is unseating Scott Brown.
That leaves 9 posts by “regular” BMGers: HesterPrynne, pablo, ChiliPepr, Mark Bail, Judy Meredith, stomv, Patricia Field, jconway, and Tyler O’Day. That’s a “normal post” rate of 45%. I won’t do the math for our current recent posts list, but if you exclude posts by the editors, I’d guesstimate that the rate isn’t too different from that.
So, I certainly hope and expect that our traffic and participation will return and surpass previous levels as the election cycle heats up. I’m sure some of the recent decline is attributable to the new platform, but definitely not all of it.
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