UPDATE: elfling has pointed out that, unlike DK4 which most of us saw when it had been wrecked and rebuilt a few times, this is a very early iteration of DK5. They let the whole bunch of us barbarians crash the gates... which they may now regret.
But this means it's vitally important that we take our concerns to the feedback section of the helpdesk, and explain what are problems and issues are -- nicely, please. It's fine that we're venting and sharing our exquisite pain here, but let's not heap it on hard-working tech and designer types who are invested in doing a good job.
elfling's comment:
Beta is here to get feedback
And it's really valuable for us to get feedback about ways that we broke people's workflow, things that weren't considered, things that just don't translate. That's what it's for and there will be real changes in response, as there have been already, as there were in DK4. We want this to work for people, and make things better. We need to hear when it didn't.
To some extent it's a learning experience for us as well. Static comps always lie. As soon as you try to work with real content and actively communicate using the tool, the perception changes. It is simply a different experience talking with y'all there and trying to find the comments and diaries I need, versus when I was literally posting every comment and diary myself with my army of mutant sockpuppets. I think that is the experience of other team members too.
Last time we did more of a staged beta process, inviting in 10 people at a time or so to come and help us. We had to do that, because the hardware wouldn't take the load of all of you at once, but it had the net effect of insulating most of you from the earliest, roughest iterations. This time, we had the hardware capacity, so we opted for a more open and transparent process, which means you're all starting from the roughest draft.
It is nice to read acknowledgements that we are trying our best to do right by everyone, even if we aren't 100% successful yet. I can help people who have a technical problem or a work flow issue. There's not much I can do for someone who thinks we're actively malicious in this effort. I appreciate when people can give us the benefit of the doubt at least for our intent if not our delivery.
Emphasis mine
I've been here a long time. I know -- plenty of you (168k plus) have been here longer. But I can navigate this site with great ease, and have survived the DK3-to-DK4 change.
This time, you guys have left far too much out.
I will first offer the obligatory remark that I understand you've all been working really hard on this, and users bitching about the new site isn't exactly what you're dying to read. But I'm seriously frustrated here, and I honestly am kind of horrified at some of the changes. Just sayin'. I respect you all far more than my tone would seem to imply, but usability is critical on websites -- especially sites like this one -- and it seems to have been far down on the priority list.
Here goes.
There's no way to search for new comments. Not everyone uses auto-refresh. I reload, and then search (using Ctrl-F) for new tags. There's nothing on the pages (at least so far) showing how many new comments there are. In addition to that, spotting the rec button is hard enough, but a mere change in color is a) not enough to make it easy to see; b) not a searchable item, which means scrolling through a diary hoping to catch the difference in color. Good thing I'm not colorblind, huh?
So if I'm sticking around in a diary, as I do often enough, I have no way to seek new comments. That's just ridiculous. Auto-refresh makes the page jump around; there's no way to keep up reliably; it's essentially only useful for those who are only concerned about replies to their own comments (at least that's my opinion). When I hang around in a diary it's because I'm reading all the comments. Every last one of 'em.
Next, there's no way to add special characters. What would Rei's Bárðarbunga diaries look like without that? What would diaries about Greece or Russia or any other place that uses a different alphabet/different diacritical marks look like? Aren't we international? Don't we look elsewhere? Don't we occasionally want to say something with an accent or a tilde in it? And how come you'll give me the option of centering my text or posting it flush right (why would I want to do that?), but you won't let me use special characters?
No html. The option of a loaded toolbar for html is nice. But for those of us who prefer html, it's severely limiting. This doesn't just eliminate the use of special characters. Every time I have to take my hands off the keyboard to reach for my mouse, I'm losing time -- and, in my case, focus. It's always been easier for me to type < blockquote >in order to blockquote or use slashes to set off italics or asterisks to indicate bold. That's all gone here, and I have to putz around with your menu. Suppose I want to make a point by using < small > or < big > or another font? What if I want to force a line break? Give me the option to use my own html, at least, please. And we do need to be able to add a tilde or an accent here and there, y'know?
Hashtags tags?! Really? WTF? Let us at least separate words if we need to. Twitter does not rule the whole world, much as we'd like to think so.
No Preview on drafts. Suppose I want to proof this as it will look published? For some of us with perceptual issues, that's a vitally important ability, yet I see no preview button.
Too much white space. Seriously -- how come I have to scroll so far to read the next comment? DKos is as much about pie fights conversations in the comments as it is about reading a post. The nesting is less distinct, it's hard to parent up, and shouldn't we be able to read at least most of a long comment before having to scroll? I can read at least 24 lines of text in DK4 before I have to scroll. On DK5 I get an average of seven lines. In a diary I can get 26 lines of text on a screen. There? A measly 13. And it's even worse than that because on DK4 my zoom is set to 110%. There on beta it's at 100%. So the difference is even greater than what I've listed.
bsegel said:
Everything runs together, drives me nuts. I would never do a yearbook like this. Define your spaces!
And right there -- that blockquote is freakin' HUGE on DK5. And my eyes get tired reading through so much space. Generally speaking, I appreciate space on a page. I have my Kindle set so that the font is not too dense, there's decent line spacing, wider margins, and the words aren't too close. I do that because I'm dyslexic, and it makes it much easier to read. But this here? I'm exhausted after one line. And conversations don't even feel like conversations. They feel like disconnected lines of type.
Okay, I'll just say it. I'm hating this look. (Sorry.)
Too many rollovers. It's hard to find a blank spot on the page to click the universal scroll button on my trackball without hitting an unexpected pop-up or rollover.
You can't open a comment in its own tab or window. Sometimes we want to keep track of a particular thread without having to reload a whole diary with a ton of comments each time. Even if someone wants to link to a particular comment, it opens the whole diary before dropping to the comment location. What if that diary has 800 comments? This is just damned inefficient.
Where's my &#^*ing hotlist!??? And what's going to happen to my existing one? Do I have to open hundreds of diaries and bookmark them to preserve that list? Who'll reimburse me for my time doing that?!
No link information when you hover in draft mode. If there's no preview how can I check that my links are correct other than opening every. freakin'. link to double check?
Shrunken hide-rated comments are impossible to read -- and I see no way to find out how many HRs the comment received, nor who tossed said donuts.
And now, a few polite questions: What happens to my unpublished drafts? Do they migrate over, or do I need to save them all to documents on my computer? Likewise, will my message threads migrate over, or do I have to save them to docs, as well?
Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse has an excellent diary on some of the same and some other issues, as well. And including this crucial point:
I draft my diaries in word document, and do my coding for pictures, blockquotes etc. in the word doc. Then I copy and paste my draft into DK publisher to preview its look and to edit. It is one thing to use this editing box for a brief comment, but quite another to use for an entire diary. It creates extra, unnecessary work and will demand more time. These editing tools should be an option, not a requirement for posting diaries.
Belinda Ridgewood speaks for me in
hers -- as do many of the comments.
You want to make the site more intuitive to new users? That's great. But don't make it dumber and less flexible for the rest of us. We went through this stuff with the DK4 change-over. And we lost a bunch of functions many of us used that time, too. (Okay, you want an example? I'll give you one. For folks with really slow internet connections, DK3 allowed us to read through comments one at a time by simply opening a comment in its own tab and then advancing through the rest of them by adjusting the comment number in the url. That comment number is now gone from the url.) Now there's even less that kos-savvy old-timers can avail themselves of. And not for nothin', but didn't y'all spend a fortune totally changing our look back then? It's just three years later, and you're turning the site on its head again. I get wanting to primp your look. But diminishing functionality and flexibility (not to mention readability) is just wrong.
Now maybe I've got some stuff wrong -- maybe there are ways to do some of these things. But I find no cues on the page, which I would expect to be there, since everything else (and I mean everything else) is.
Thanks for listening.
...You are listening, right?
6:08 PM PT: Elfling has pointed out that new comments are searchable using the old new tag text. She has a number of useful comments here, so quit searching for New comments and search elfling's name! And thank her!