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How much do you like/dislike the new site?
Awesome - Love all of the changes  3%  [ 2 ]
Great - Like most of the changes  13%  [ 10 ]
Decent - More to like than dislike  33%  [ 26 ]
Meh - Neither love nor hate  10%  [ 8 ]
Whatever - Both hate and love  6%  [ 5 ]
Fail - More to dislike than like  22%  [ 17 ]
Awful - Dislike most of the changes  6%  [ 5 ]
@#$% - Hate all of the changes  5%  [ 4 ]
What - Polls are stupid  1%  [ 1 ]
Total votes : 78
 
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 Post subject: The New Website
 Post Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2017 7:16 pm 
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Always wanted to do a poll, so this is as good of a time as any. This is for the main site/archive, forum, and anything else affected by the change... Um, everything then.

Also you can re-vote if you change your mind later.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2017 11:54 pm 
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Well, the new forum theme is a bit jarring, but I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.

The new archive system is pretty cool. Reading a chapter at a time is certainly going to speed up archive trawls.

edit: Oh! Yay! It's still there. Thanks Zill!

edit: Wait, I take it back. You know what I miss? Being able to jump to specific pages from the list of topics. Although that may be an oversite on phpbb's part and not the Sluggy 20+ crew. But we're going to need that back I would think.


Last edited by Dodger77 on Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:10 am, edited 2 times in total.
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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:09 am 
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Dodger77 wrote:
I hope we get dialog search back. That was a godsend. But if not, well, we'll just have to resurrect the long lost art of strip-finding.
So you don't like using NiftySearch to locate strips?

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:42 am 
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Zillatain wrote:
Dodger77 wrote:
I hope we get dialog search back. That was a godsend. But if not, well, we'll just have to resurrect the long lost art of strip-finding.
So you don't like using NiftySearch to locate strips?

Yeah... Not quite working yet... Ow. And it was painful to watch it not quite work yet... Just sayin'...

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:48 am 
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My first impression "Where's the ****ING back button".

The archive might be great for reading the whole comic, it might even be great for searching for specific pages, but when I come here daily and want to look at the previous page or two because I missed a detail or missed a day, I don't want to have to pull up the whole chapter, wait for ALL of it to load, and scroll through.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 2:34 am 
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It should not of been done by chapter. At most it should of been by sub-chapter. Though the single page option should of been the default when it launched. The chapter view should of been after.

The current chapter is 49.9MB and with my connection it takes 19.5 seconds which is pretty good, but just to see one or two strips? No.

Then there's how much data transfer does Pete have per month? Myself alone with my tests yesterday and today, is over a gig.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 2:45 am 
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I think overall the site looks awesome and sort of more modern, but in some ways it's flashy and unwieldy.
I know that we're celebrating 20+ years and that demands for celebration and flash and awe! Hell, it even justifies a banner on the home page proclaiming this achievement to all the Internet! And I also know that the website isn't quite finished yet and that there are some bugs being fixed.
But it doesn't look completely efficient or intuitive in my personal opinion, like the description box in relative size and distance to the announcement box at the bottom. It's also hard to navigate; it may be just being acustomed to the old layout, but I think it looks kind of confusing to a newcomer too.
Sotanaht wrote:
The archive might be great for reading the whole comic, it might even be great for searching for specific pages, but when I come here daily and want to look at the previous page or two because I missed a detail or missed a day[.]

I agree and I do the same thing, when you do go through the archives, it's divided chapter, not by day. It may be a personal preference, but I find it easier with a comic per page (with its date on it) so that you get that 'page-turning feel' and don't accidentally skip a comic and get spoiler-ed or lost.

This reply turned out longer that I expected, but I feel like it portrays my 2-cents on the new website. I appreciate how much time Pete and the staff have been and are putting into the comic and the site and I think it looks extraordinary overall! It'll be incredible once things are wrapped up and I feel it will be great to move that banner in a few weeks and march on to Sluggy 20+!
haha (No seriously, you guys are moving that banner right? :x )
Happy Anniversary Sluggy Freelance!

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 3:33 am 
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My biggest annoyance is page scaling/fit on mobile screens. I've got to put my phone into landscape to log into the forums. Odd, but it gets around strange menus.
Having pictures for the chapters is nice, but a good old drop down box would be preferred.

Reading an entire chapter is different. It's better for archive trawls. Getting daily, weekly & sub chapter options done would be great.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2017 4:24 am 
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I like most of the things I've interacted with on the site so far, and it seems like some of the troublesome issues are being worked on!

Thanks for the hard work to those that have been working on the site!

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2017 5:09 am 
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Sotanaht wrote:
My first impression "Where's the ****ING back button".

This was my immediate impression also. When I click on the archive link, I just get a jumbled mess that oscillates wildly across the screen, making it impossible to read anything, since everything is missing...and somehow still manages to oscillate wildly like my scrollbar is possessed.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2017 4:58 pm 
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swmartian wrote:
Zillatain wrote:
Dodger77 wrote:
I hope we get dialog search back. That was a godsend. But if not, well, we'll just have to resurrect the long lost art of strip-finding.
So you don't like using NiftySearch to locate strips?

Yeah... Not quite working yet... Ow. And it was painful to watch it not quite work yet... Just sayin'...

It seems to be working now. And I'm not as motion-sick once it settles on the strip... ;-) Navigation around the site in general is slowly getting better....

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2017 11:02 pm 
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Overall I like the new look, and some of the new features are going to be cool. I do share the concerns of others about data usage and performance on slow connections: on my slow DSL, data caps are not an issue, but the time to load a whole chapter could probably best be measured in sandwiches (as in how long it takes me to go to the kitchen and make one). However, I like the chapter view in concept, at least (it's an improvement on weekly view), and I do appreciate the fact that it seems to prioritize the strip being viewed, so I don't actually have to wait for an entire chapter to load before I start reading (which partially mitigates the complaint about load times). I think the bookmark feature will be useful (it's arguably a bit redundant when one could just use a browser bookmark, but at the very least it's helpful for those of us whose browser bookmarks are perpetually a disorganized mess).

The main thing I'm missing is the RSS feed, especially now that the update schedule is going to be less regular. I don't know how well that could be interfaced with some other site features, but it would be nice to have back if possible.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 8:30 pm 
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I hate coming off as critical. It's obvious that someone put a lot of work into this new site design. It can't be avoided, however: the new design is not very good. There's now no way to quickly jump to a specific comic in the archives without loading a boatload of comics related to it. The site loads slowly even on a modern connection due to the mess of new features. It looks like something out of 2005, especially with how janky it loads things like the archives. The new site design feels like something cooked up by a teenager to show off his "mad HTML skillz" without really considering what the site's users would need. I've always been a big fan of practicality and functionality coming first, if you didn't guess.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 10:58 pm 
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I don't like it, to be honest. I hate sites that have a massive rotating banner at the top. The new top banner isn't quite as bad as some, but it's multiple layers (taking more processing power).

The archives are really hard to use. It loads up hundreds of comics. Some of them are framed wrong, so they're missing the first or last strip on that day, which is really frustrating if you're trying to read something.

The archive thing means that it's almost impossible to read on a phone, and I couldn't even read the front page on my old iPad; it the browser 3 times before I gave up.

I understand technological house-cleaning. Crufty sites need to be updated. I get it, I really do. Unfortunately, this one went from a non-perfect but functional and very fast site to a bloated, templated web 2.0 mess.

Maybe it just needs some tweaking. I'll keep coming back. But at the moment, the usability is significantly diminished from what it was.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2017 11:35 pm 
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In short: the new site LOOKS more modern.

However, the functionality seems to be pretty poorly designed in many aspects. Done any user testing? Seems like a lot of very useful and basic tools were removed for 'a cool new idea' which isn't really user friendly. There's a goldmine on ideas by the community though, so I'm going to refrain from voting just yet.

I'll trust that the 20+ team will carefully go through the goldmine of free feedback in the forums this past week. I'd call this a decent rough draft with lots of room for improvement.

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