I won't get into my detailed, point-by-point criticisms of the beta, because they already have that. Instead, I want to express the thing that bothers me the most by far about all this. As some commenters above have pointed out, it's tied into them calling us an "audience".
My biggest problem with the redesign is that it calls out, loud and clear, that Slashdot no longer values the existing community. The redesign is including things that are of no value at all to us, and is omitting things that are of great
We have no intention of moving away from our current community and demographic.
One of the big reasons for the redesign is that we don't want new readers to instantly be turned off to the site by a design that looks old and unmaintained. When we say 'new readers,' a lot of people are assuming that we mean a different demographic -- but we don't. There are lots and lots of people in the existing demographic that don't read Slashdot. Either they're already part of a different community, or they haven't joined
OK, fine. But if that's the case, then why is the current interface going to be retired? This whole firestorm could have been avoided entirely by committing to keeping the current interface indefinitely for us old farts, and providing the shiny new gee-whiz interface for the newcomers.
The beta doesn't look very promising in terms of meeting my needs. I tried using it seriously for a while, but it was 100% unusable for my purposes. If I had some assurance that if I still find it unusable when it leaves beta,
"Indefinitely" is problematic, as there's a very real maintenance commitment even if active development on it stops altogether. Our engineering team is small, and the codebase is vast. It's not that we want to actively kill the classic site (and who knows, maybe we'll find a way to keep it going in perpetuity); it's that eventually something will seriously break, and we won't have the resources to fix it.
In the meantime, we're leaving the classic site up for a wh
In timothy's statement, he mentioned a time period of a few months. That's soon, in my book.
FWIW, when the last redesign happened in 2011, we had a very strong negative reaction from the community. But we kept improving it and fixing things people complained about, and now people are very upset that it might be going away.
Oh, I remember! You can't tell from my ID # (I lost my five-digit one years ago due to some sort of problem Slashdot had way back when), but I've been around since well, well before that redesign. And, if I'm to be perfectly honest, I did like the site better before that happened. But you're right. In the end, although the design we have now isn't quite as good, you guys did make it work adequately. Maybe you can do the same here. Still, I would prefer that the new design actually be better, not like the one in 2011.
I don't think people are complaining now because they love the current design as much as because the redesign beta as it currently stands is greatly inferior to what we have now.
The biggest thing (Score:3)
I won't get into my detailed, point-by-point criticisms of the beta, because they already have that. Instead, I want to express the thing that bothers me the most by far about all this. As some commenters above have pointed out, it's tied into them calling us an "audience".
My biggest problem with the redesign is that it calls out, loud and clear, that Slashdot no longer values the existing community. The redesign is including things that are of no value at all to us, and is omitting things that are of great
Re: (Score:3)
We have no intention of moving away from our current community and demographic.
One of the big reasons for the redesign is that we don't want new readers to instantly be turned off to the site by a design that looks old and unmaintained. When we say 'new readers,' a lot of people are assuming that we mean a different demographic -- but we don't. There are lots and lots of people in the existing demographic that don't read Slashdot. Either they're already part of a different community, or they haven't joined
Re: (Score:3)
OK, fine. But if that's the case, then why is the current interface going to be retired? This whole firestorm could have been avoided entirely by committing to keeping the current interface indefinitely for us old farts, and providing the shiny new gee-whiz interface for the newcomers.
The beta doesn't look very promising in terms of meeting my needs. I tried using it seriously for a while, but it was 100% unusable for my purposes. If I had some assurance that if I still find it unusable when it leaves beta,
Re: (Score:3)
Well, the classic site isn't going away soon.
"Indefinitely" is problematic, as there's a very real maintenance commitment even if active development on it stops altogether. Our engineering team is small, and the codebase is vast. It's not that we want to actively kill the classic site (and who knows, maybe we'll find a way to keep it going in perpetuity); it's that eventually something will seriously break, and we won't have the resources to fix it.
In the meantime, we're leaving the classic site up for a wh
Re:The biggest thing (Score:2)
Well, the classic site isn't going away soon.
In timothy's statement, he mentioned a time period of a few months. That's soon, in my book.
FWIW, when the last redesign happened in 2011, we had a very strong negative reaction from the community. But we kept improving it and fixing things people complained about, and now people are very upset that it might be going away.
Oh, I remember! You can't tell from my ID # (I lost my five-digit one years ago due to some sort of problem Slashdot had way back when), but I've been around since well, well before that redesign. And, if I'm to be perfectly honest, I did like the site better before that happened. But you're right. In the end, although the design we have now isn't quite as good, you guys did make it work adequately. Maybe you can do the same here. Still, I would prefer that the new design actually be better, not like the one in 2011.
I don't think people are complaining now because they love the current design as much as because the redesign beta as it currently stands is greatly inferior to what we have now.