For some time we’ve been working on updating our user pages. It’s time for me to give you another tour.
Previous entries: Original Beta Announcement and
User comment list view announcement
We’ve been distilling and incorporating feedback from our beta process, with a lot of minor and major changes that we hope have helped. They include:
- A sortable list view for stories (want to see your most commented or most recommended? You can!)
- Converting the comments page back to a list view
- Adding in the Recent Replies comment list view so it is neatly integrated instead of bolted on oddly
- Adding comments to the “Everything” page when a user has written comments but not stories
- Better image optimization for improved performance
- More natural links that restore the right-click menu
- Changed the sort on the Following tab to have most recent followers on top
- A sortable list view for your groups
- Better descriptions to guide you towards where the user does have activity
- Improved error handling and messages
Mark Sumner’s most recommended stories, at www.dailykos.com/...
A clear and regularly repeated request was to feature list views for stories and comments, and we’ve put some work in to change to that style for several pages, thinking closely about user goals when interacting with them.
As a reminder of some of the major goals for these pages versus the old ones:
- Make these pages width responsive so they are readable and usable on every device and screen size, from desktop to phones, and to allow for user control of screen and font magnification.
- Make our pages more accessible to people with disabilities and people using assistive technology on the web. (This includes making linked areas large enough for fingers on touch devices and for people with tremors or other fine motor coordination issues, which is part of the WCAG official standard.)
- Integrate into our more modern codebase for improved maintainability and unified site behavior
To get to these pages, go to an existing user’s page, and in the URL, replace user with users (that is, add an s). Some example pages to start from:
At this point the project feels pretty close to complete. We continue to seek your comments and feedback. Remember that kind and constructive comments that clearly describe a task you can’t do as well as before are the most successful at getting the changes you want and need.
Moar Lists
The list view is clearly valuable and needed so we’ve also moved this change into Groups and Tags.
Groups now have an “Everything” view that shows stories in a card mode with an image, but also a convenient list view:
Note that the headers on the list view are sortable, so you can find the most recommended stories if you like.
“Stories” is the list of all stories in the group.
“Original Stories” is the list of all stories published initially through the group queue — ie they were written specifically for this group and published through/by it.
“Reblogs” is a list of stories republished to this group after an initial publication elsewhere. For example, if the group editors notice a terrific story on their topic published on the site and add it to the group. (“Reblogs” is not the most elegant name, and I wouldn’t mind finding a better word for that.)
We’ve done something similar for tags:
Again, this is sortable, so you can quickly find the most recommended story written with this tag, or group them by author, or see the most commented story.
Now you can choose between a “card view” with images and a list view for your favorite tags, and the list view is sortable.
We hope this will provide some additional ways to find, explore, and manage stories on the site. I’ve found it quite illuminating to see which of my stories generated the most comments and recommends — and also the least.
For now, the old users pages will remain, but we’ll be slowly moving the site links over to the new pages and deprecating, and eventually removing, the old. So, please take the time now to try out the new pages and let us know if there are any bugs or missing features.
