I’m sorry. I can barely bring myself to read the new BMG. I can’t really bring myself to write here. The writers are the same. The issues, too. The content is what I like. But for some reason, well, I loathe BMG.
I loathe the dozen+ articles on the sidebars that crowd out the screen with stuff I didn’t want to read a week ago, but still stares at me now. I loathe the daily ugly graphic from the MASSter list with a bunch or links. That tiny text that seems blurry around the edges. A slurry of sameness, grey, and blue. It’s like reading the New York Times. Strike that. It’s like reading the Financial Times.
I figured after a month or two I’d get used to it. I haven’t. I can’t. It’s ugly and confusing. There’s so much here, and I have no idea where to start. The same things languish on the front page. The sentence preview of the stories seems unnecessary.
This isn’t some weak GBCW diary. I’ll still keep hanging around here. And maybe these are all my issues (but I suspect not). But something about this site layout gives me an unpleasant feeling when I contemplate posting, or even commenting. Am I the only one who feels this way?
And you were a good, and prolific, commenter, back in the good old days. Comments in general have dropped off precipitously, it seems. Some people seem to have bailed. I hope in time things will get back to normal.
I’ve noticed a huge drop in comments, and yes, I find myself commenting less. My comments are attracting fewer reactions from others too. The site is still one of the slowest to load and I often get a “cannot display page” message from Internet Explorer. It’s become a hassle and I’ve gone from logging on a few times a day to looking at the site only a handful of times a week, not always logging on even then. What was transferring platforms supposed to fix again? Personally I was very happy with the Soapblox platform.
I wasn’t a huge presence when it came to comments or posts but I logged on at least once a day for the last three years. Since the change…I don’t even know why but I only come on once a week if that. I’m not antipathetic toward change but for indefinable reasons I don’t like the new site.
I too found enough difficulties that I didn’t make time for the site. I thought maybe it was just the fact that I was getting a lot of things ready for the Convention. I’m going to try to comment more. I am finding problems with other sites so I’m switching to chrome. My thinking to sab and the others is make the effort for awhile. BMG has enriched our lives in the past. Don’t walk away.
I find the “MASSterList” one (small) step removed from spam. I come here for dialog among a community that I have come to know and respect. The all-too-frequent MASSterList posts fail to meet that threshold.
The comment threading layout is, for me, confusing. I still don’t know how to get a reply properly nested under whatever comment I’m responding to. I know this is a classic wordpress layout; I still find it worse than the old one.
I’ve observed this before, but I want to say it again: the anonymous thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating scheme is, for me, far worse than the old approach. It is clear to me, in retrospect, that a surprisingly large part of my connection to the old site came from seeing the ratings different individuals gave different comments. This is, for me, perhaps the largest single obstacle that the new site presents to me.
At last for now, the bottom line is that BMG seems to have moved closer to the look and feel of the Boston Globe comments board — not a good thing. I think additional adjustments are very much in order.
So I should do massterlist less frequently, somervilletom and centralmassdad? I’ll sleep in.
I don’t come here as much as before, either. I’ve been thinking about this, and about how many times I have abandoned some site I liked after its management redesigned it.
Here’s the deal: the people who came here regularly and provided the content were comfortable with the old layout. I doubt that any of us thought it was perfect, but we’d learned how to use it, and could quickly find what we wanted on it. The best thing BMG management could have done would be to replicate as closely as possible the look and feel of the old site. That did not happen, and beyond having an unfamiliar feel, a lot of the changes make access harder than before.
It’s like how every time Microsoft releases a new version of Word, they change it so commonly-used features aren’t where people had learned to look for them. I understand that BMG mgt. did not make all those changes out of caprice, that migrating from Soapblox to WordPress mandated a lot of them, but you’d do us and yourselves a favor by working to recreate the old site on the new software. If you want to introduce changes after that, do it incrementally, so we can tell you which ones work for us and which ones don’t.
To be specific, lose the Massterlist, and the full-sentence topic listings. I also don’t like the thumbs.
I find myself trying to ignore it, hopping over, looking for posts that I might be interested in. What’s the point? There are things to like about the new layout, but that’s not one of them. One minor thing I’d like to see is to change the “click here to cancel reply” line from it’s current spot to a button to the right of the “Submit” button. It falls under my desire to see long posts as a series of phrases led by asterisks, rather than paragraphs of text.
The old site was trusty and familiar. I find the new site to be a little busy and difficult to understand. I agree that it would have been possible to switch to WordPress but to use a theme that was much closer to the original. Parenthetically, when I chose a wordpress theme for my own blog, I was drawn to a theme that came pretty close to the look and feel of the old site! But I still love BMG.
Whether in ie or firefox, the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” still do not work for me. I cannot do the graphics I came to understand from Soapblox and I find the site much less friendly and harder to read. I also miss knowing who recommended what I wrote, or reacted to what I wrote.
Take a look, for example, at the bottom of this post, which shows “Recommended by christopher, dhammer, somervilletom, kirth, shillelaghlaw, mrigney, trickle-up.”
and neither ie nor firefox let me do thumbs up or down even though I am signed in ):
I’m in agreement about a few things above:
– Thumbs up/down vs. the old ratings. The old system promoted a sense of camaraderie among the site users, to know who was with you (or not) on a certain point of view. I often found it interesting when I was 180 degrees out of sync with someone on one topic but spot-on on another. Riffing on the Deval Patrick line, we don’t have to agree on all things to agree on some things.
– The Masster posts. I just skip them.
Additionally, I notice that when I come to visit, it’s either 1) Little or nothing has changed (same front page articles, very few new comments) or 2) A lot of new front paged articles have appeared. If you were looking at a graph, you’d see spikes of activity rather than a smooth curve.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t find the teaser text for the sidebar posts or comments useful and it takes a lot of space. Also, I think on the old system, for each recent comment, if you clicked on the name of the post to which it was attached, it would take you to the head of the post. I used to do that all of the time so I could take in the new comment in the context of the entire post.
And I’ve beaten this drum a number of times, but the cartoonish Ariel font still turns me off. If you go to RMG, or Michigan Liberal, or even the new Kos, they all use Verdana and get away with a smaller font, allowing for more “stuff” on the screen. The big text reminds me of when I’d install a new Windows computer and all of the icons were huge until I’d adjust the setting for the monitor size.
All in all, I’m coming back less and finding fewer reasons to come back.
Thanks so much for your suggestions. We shifted to WordPress because it is a more reliable platform. What you didn’t see was the significant, and increasing, risk that the entire SoapBlox site and all of its past content could permanently disappear at the whim of some hacker one day without warning. SoapBlox got hacked more than once, which shut it down completely, and wasn’t maintained. Now we have a reliable platform to use and will for the foreseeable future. Comment ratings is an interesting issue. They appeal a lot to some users. But they also alienate many, especially casual readers, which is to say the vast majority of readers, most of whom never post or comment, because they often degenerate into clubby cat fights which are only of interest to the people engaged in them (for me, they took away more than they added). I don’t find the Masster List particularly interesting, either. 🙂 If a lack of interesting content is the primary problem, then by all means follow the excellent advice of your esteemed BMG colleagues and be the change you seek.
BlueMassGroup has been a wonderful addition to my day.
There are probably many different opinions on specifics like the ratings. But Bob, how much weight should be given to your opinion or mine, if the result is a significant drop off of interesting postings and comments, doesn’t this also translate into a drop in readership?
But it is not clear at all what a majority of readers prefer. You can review the traffic figures here. The new format doesn’t appear to have made much difference : traffic on BMG tends to rise and fall with interest in elections. It certainly is true that the vast, vast majority of readers (80 percent or more) do not post or comment. But most also only stay at the site for a minute or so. Maybe they just clicked through by mistake. A reader survey we did a few months ago which got an excellent response from hundreds of readers suggested most don’t care about, use or read comment ratings. So maybe a simpler system like the curent thumbs will actually increase ratings over the long term.
But it certainly seems like activity — posts and comments– have declined by quite a lot. I’m not sure if that is a function of the new platform, or perhaps of a few slow news months.
In any event, my sense is that new content has slowed, and nearly stopped in recent months.
Just looking at the present list of Recent Posts: it has two of the Massster spam posts, a few things dutifully posted by one or another Democratic campaign, a post by Dave, soldiering on to oppose the closing of the Fernald, and an ernie rant or two. And the things that aren’t MASSter or a campaign post have been there for a week, or nearly two weeks.
Bob, Interesting discussion on comment ratings. FWIW, most casual readers might not even be aware of the ratings. It added interest to the core community and I don’t think it detracted that much from others. Thanks for stressing that the need for a reliable platform was critical.
Be the change you seek is good advice. I’m going to try to raise my level of contributions, at least for now, when I don’t have huge other demands on my time.
And I do thank and respect you all for the effort it took to make that happen. I guess I”m unsure — did the move require a design overhaul, or did you decide to do it? As for comments, I miss the ratings. If nothing else, it was useful to tell what was just okay, and what was excellent. Now, not so much.
As for the fact that I’m not generating interesting content, I’d just put it this way. A lot of my writing bounced off of others, and some didn’t. This site makes it harder for me — and apparently, not only me — to do that. Telling me to generate more comment despite this isn’t gonna change that. Writing and researching for free, so that others can claim ownership, isn’t more attractive when someone else tells me to do it. It’s more attractive when it’s easier and more pleasant to do.
WordPress doesn’t work the same as SoapBlox. We tried to take the best elements of the old site, and respond to other criticisms that users had. For example, many said the old site was cluttered and confusing. Take another look at our esteemed interlocutors RedMassGroup.com and perhaps you can find some sympathy for that line of argument. Everyone agrees some kind of ratings is useful. If the thumbs don’t work, we’ll find something that does. As to my suggestion, please don’t take it the wrong way: neither I nor anyone else is telling. We’re asking. As to ownership, I invite you to examine the opportunity this new technology creates for users to start their own blogs, which can be customized in many ways (including, I believe, font styles). These “network” blogs automatically push their posts through to the “Recent” column on the main BMG site to help publicize them. Readers can also recommend them on BMG and editors can promote them. You can add your own graphics, even, later, your own domain name. We haven’t started to publicize this much yet because we want to get the main site working properly, but that is coming. Our broad goal is to empower the progressive community.
I have my mini-blog on this site, and maybe I’ll branch out there. I’d like to. As for the design thing, I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. Though I do wonder how many do.
Truth be told, I wrote this because I began wondering why I’m not writing more lately. I’ll read a post, and decide not to bother commenting. Writing this was my exploration of why.
I won’t give up. I won’t leave. But did want to share the problems I am having. I figured someone may be able to explain or train me…
Both petr and trickle-up have also mentioned the font issue. I actually stand corrected after looking at the old blog via trickle-up’s link. The font my browser renders for the old BMG is Trebuchet MS. The font stack has Verdana as the second choice.
The look-and-feel is quite important, which is why commercial sites spend so much time and money on these things. If users don’t get the warm and fuzzy (think comfort food; milk and cookies) when they visit, they might read a few things but probably not participate as much as they would otherwise, regardless of the quality of the content. It can be really hard to nail down what it is that one has issues with. “It just doesn’t feel right.” I’ve been able to identify a few things (I can rehash if you like) and others have also. Particular with fonts (and how they work with the background), it can be a physical thing – how much work the eyes have to do to read the text.
Right at this moment in time, this post does not appear on my Recommended list. It has a promotion comment by dhammer. It does not appear as a promoted front page post.
Anyone else see this? What up with that?
I am trying to promote the post to the front page. As I said, a work in progress.
n/t
I would prefer if the stuff on the right was much shorter and more attentive to what appears “above the fold”. I liked the way the old layout chopped the recent comments and recent posts titles nice and short so I could scan them all and decide which ones were the usual claptrap and which ones were too offensive to ignore. Now each one includes a big chunk of long-winded introductory text that doesn’t work to draw me in.
I also liked the old dashboard down the left side so I could quickly reread all the brilliant comments I had written earlier.
The new editor is great . Thanks for all the work on the site. It will come together.
I find the design off-putting. White space is all the rage in web design (ThinkProgress just updated their design), but I find it overwhelming here. White attracts/distracts the eye away from darkness. I feel like some boundaries are needed. Maybe new posts on the extreme left and new comments on the extreme right.
The stuff in the columns is just too small for me to read.
Technically speaking, I tried to give thumbs up just a minute ago, but they weren’t registering. The site still loads slowly. I think some material is boxed with gray fill, but it doesn’t come up on my computer. I noticed it projected from my computer projector one day after lunch.
I’ve tried to put some posts up to keep the content going, but they don’t seem to be generating that much activity. I don’t know if they meet Seascraper’s criteria. I’m not feeling it news-wise these days. I still check out the same sources, but nothing is really interesting me.
The MassTer list sucks. I subscribed to it for a while, then finally unsubscribed. I already see that stuff on my other news hauhts.
I think it takes a critical mass before participation reaches its previous level. Maybe later this summer or the fall?
When I click thumbs up (or down), nothing happens. I have to reload the page before I see it.
I do think the layout does give less real estate to posts. Are posts shorter than they used to be? Not sure.
People get information via phone etc., twitter is used by a lot of press and I believe that tweeting posts will grow the BMG audience. It probably already has, David’s post on Mitt quickly lit up the blogoshere, I believe it happened in part because of the new connectivity options.
I might have missed the initial post on this but why is the MASSTERLIST so predominant? Is BMG and other blogs formed some kind of group? I’ve seen it promoted by Garrett Quinn and RMG as well.
SoapBlox just displayed the Title and User and Date in the recent comments and user posts, but this site displays a few lines of the comment itself, often with raw HTML. I think that’s what makes it so busy looking. We don’t need to see the first two lines of every comment on the front page.
Come on, while we’re young!
BMG would do well with trying some less bright white.
Also, the particular font you are using isn’t particularly sturdy enough to stand well against the glare, this makes reading the site a great deal more work.
I seem to remember the old site had a stronger font and sufficient amount of sky and/or light sky blue to offset the white: it was a really good balance, why have you not tried to replicate that?
I’m actually squinting at this to read it tonight, and I’m on the verge of giving up with a headache. It’s too white, and the font isn’t strong enough against it.
I’d also agree on finding this more difficult to navigate now.
Sabutai’s post includes some criticisms of the new site that are more about user interface and functionality than layout (e.g. load time, rating system, etc.) I share those criticisms. But, let’s look at how it looks.
Generally, the new site is cleaner, yet less easy to read. There is more white space but it is not used to organize the material or provide any sort of priority or hierarchy, which might be useful.
Instead the white space feels squandered: the tiny BMG logo swims in a sea of it haphazard, and the sidebar matter has extra line spacing, which is actually a poor idea. The blog sprawls and does not seem to know or care what is important about whatever is going on. It is frankly amateurish in some respects.
Compare this to the old site. You can see more at a glance–more content per screen–but it is well organized and easy to read.
Specifically, I note the following.
Ariel is a poor choice for a blog. It’s Microsoft’s inferior version of Helvetica and in any case is a print typeface not optimized for reading on an LCD or CRT. There are many fine internet fonts.
The new layout does not fit my monitor. There are zero pixels between the edge of my screen and the start of the text at left. This feels cramped and broken. Meanwhile, to see the far right edge, I have to scroll horizontally. How lame is that?
Pages should scale proportionately, not absolutely, on the web. Use proportions not fixed values. I do not mean to be harsh, but that is not cutting-edge stuff and if I had hired a web coder who made that mistake I would get another one to fix it.
The fixed value for the width of the blog postings allows about 100 characters per line. The optimal line width is more like 60 or 70 characters.
As noted, the sidebar matter does not need to be set that loose. It would be easier to read and you could fit more in per screen if the line spacing were closer to the actual font size–not more than 110% if that.
These are design issues, not platform issues. You can implement a professional high-quality design in WordPress. The suggestion to ape the previous design has merit, or might have when you did the role-out. Then you could have tackled functionality issues first before moving on to a redesign.
The UI and functionality issues on the other hand may be platform-related. The site still loads very slowly and does not do everything the old site did. I can well believe that SoapBlox was inadequate for any number of internal reasons, but are you sure that WordPress was the best alternative?
I thought you guys LIKED the way the site looked, and shook my head.
It’s unwieldy, hard to follow and off-putting. It went from victorian clutter to Bauhaus with no onermediate step. BUT – the real problem is the drop in content/comments.
The question is whether that drop is related to the “this font, no that font” discussion above, or is because a lot of regulars didn’t bother to renew passwords and have been lost.
And I was going to add a “n/t” to my Title but, lo and behold, ya just can’t do a n/t post.
I tried to do a diary the other day and got confused when I tried to preview it, so I abandoned it.
computer and still can’t give the thumbs up.
In the old days, I’d give Trickle Up a 6, and nowadays, I’d give a lot of thumbs up to several comments.
I don’t know if it bums out you Editors that there’s a whole lot critiquing goin on, but many of us would give you a pat on the back (sorry,no button for that) for working to improve things.
whether it’s experienced spatially (as in Sabutai, Jaisu, Petr and Trickle-up, for example) or communally (as in SomervilleTom, AmberPaw, and Porcupine, for example).
What’s wrong with too much whiteness? As the white whale Moby Dick was described in Moby Dick: “by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.”
Or words to that effect.
(We understand that Soapblox was no longer an option.)
I also try to be tactful since as much as a jerk as I can be to the Editors over policy questions (and considering we are probably in 85% of agreement on the issues it shows how prickly progressives can be) I think our nitpicking does take away from the fact that they put their livelihoods on the line for this site and have put a ton of man hours into making the site better.
I do have to agree with sabutai though, I dislike the big links on the right, the MASSter list, and the monochromatic color scheme. This is a much less visually interesting site and the white on white really does take a toll after awhile. Sometimes it seems like White Mass Group and thats not what we want to be.
One change I do like is the new ratings system, I liked RMGs a lot better since it had only three options and like this even more. It helps casual users understand what is good and what is bad, and stuff thats mediocre gets neither. It stops the flagrant abuses in the past and the endless posts (again which I was guilty of) of “dude whyd I get a 3”.
I have gotten used to the new toggle bar in the upper right and like it a lot better, and for me anyway (a firefox user on a newish Toshiba laptop using wifi through a comcast modem) the site loads wicked fast and a ton faster than the old site. It also has consistently remembers me, I’d have to relog in so much to the old site, sometimes when I just pushed the back button. Previews look a lot better and I noticed it remembers articles you didnt publish yet and thats a plus. SOO a lotta good, a little bad, and the bad will be corrected I’m sure. PLEASE bring back more blue and more color in general, kill MASSter or at least leave a link at the side but dont put it on the main site, and lets make it easier to promote diaries. You guys are doing a great job, and if you only agreed with me 100% of the time this site would be even more successful
the Masster list. Shoot me.
It’s got nothing to do with design issues as far as I can tell. If we wrote more content it would be less prominent anyway.
I like it too.
Always liked the Masster list.
in Firefox. Is that an IE feature?
If you like the MASSterList, SIGN UP for the damn thing.
What does “Page Two” mean? An editor put you there, but the community did not?
Now we are supposed to be content with our post being listed in a side bar? We’re never worthy of being promoted to the main column, and briefly being at the top of the page? When that happens, it’s a thrill (from what I hear). So I think that takes a lot of the fun out of writing a post, if you know it will never be put on the front page. That was always the fun part: thinking, what if it gets promoted? What should be on the front, and what should be “below the fold? It was also nice to be able to control what was above and below the fold, instead of showing a certain number of lines and then cutting it off with elipses mid-word. I think those are an eyesore.
recommended posts, but not FP’ed them. My sense that Page 2 is the editor recommend and then there is the user recommend, posts. At soapblox, many times the only one recommending a post is an editor, that’s how they got in the recommend box in the first place.
Without promoting them all the way to the front page. In the past, there were only two options for editors: promote, or don’t promote. Now, there are two. There is also, as before, the area for user recommendations.
the favicon.ico appears in the main page, and appears when I reply, but doesn’t appear when I initially open a diary in a new tab. Check it out.
I have to agree with Sabutai…something is very off-putting about the new layout and it’s not improving with time. Change is often hard to get used to but for me this has not been a change for the better. Oh, well, if that’s my biggest diamond-studded problem today, I’m in great shape!
it crashes when recommending a post, I tried to recommend a stopscott2012 post, the user maintains a sub-BMG blog. Don’t know if that makes a difference. I go to a 404 page when hitting recommend.
The tech team has been alerted. It seems to have to do with the fact that the post originates on a BMG network blog, as you mentioned.