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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: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2017 12:37 am 
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I spent a whole bunch of time looking for the "flip to previous comic" button.

I think I have figured it out now, but it is kind of weird. Also, a heck of a lot of scrolling. I don't have much of a preference either way.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2017 7:21 am 
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I wish they'd given the job of site redesign to someone who had seen a web site before. It's ugly, tricky, and nearly unusable.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2017 1:40 am 
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I know that the new site is a work in progress, and I'm sure it'll eventually work itself out, but it is a bit of a mess right now.

Getting to the archives is, while not impossible, a headache. Arranging things by book and chapter is logical but loading the entire chapter when selected is asking for trouble. An option to select chapter by date is still a must.
Forum navigation still lacks the option to select a specific page in a thread without opening the first page in a thread.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2017 12:42 am 
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I have to say that the strips in the Archives are much, much better than they used to be. Went from jagged gifs and artifact filled jpgs only 700 pixels wide, to smooth pngs 900px wide. Of course back then with so many people having dial-up, you really had to do that.

Okay, we have 900px for level 0, 1000px for level 1, and...what does level 2 or higher have? I don't know. I thought there was something that said what everything was, but I can't seem to find it. Does anybody around here have level 2 or higher and is able to tell me?

That alone would tempt me to change my vote...if the navigation of the Archives wasn't so horribly thought out. Oh, and I still don't like the look of the forum. Wish it at least had more color than gray. Though it appears we are allowed to have larger avatars now.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2017 12:47 am 
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I agree with most of the previous problems.

The site sorely needs:
  • An RSS feed so that people can see when an update has occurred without wasting a whole bunch of time and bandwidth.
  • Back and forward buttons. These buttons should go JUST to the previous/next comic, NOT a 40+ megabyte (!!!) monstrosity that takes forever to load.
  • Single-day views of past comics, for quick review, hyperlinks, etc. Again without loading the whole blipping archive.
  • A better way of tracking bugs and feature requests.
    GitHub and Trello both do this, and they're: free, and standard, and have huge expert bases.
    Trying to mine an old-style forum for complaints just doesn't work well.
  • Developers that have a clue about usability. Nielsen Norman Group consultation would seem warranted in this case. They also have a plethora of free and relevant articles and videos.
  • Open source the code, or at least put the code on GitHub. That way, those of us with: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and usability skills can chip in with the occasional bug fix. I'd be willing to commit 4 or 5 hours a month to fixing up the site. But that's just not practical unless there's an easily accessed repository somewhere.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2017 1:17 am 
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Pete!

Your bandwidth costs are going to go through the roof!

As others have pointed out, sometimes we just want to go back / forward one or two days.

Even if you do decide to load the entire chapter at once, there are much better strategies for managing bandwidth, such as progressive loading. (i.e. You only load an image shortly before it scrolls into view).

There are some very minor tweaks that can save you a lot of money here, (As well as making the site more usable)

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2017 12:09 pm 
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uploadable user pics are back! yaay! Hi WingWong, it's been far too long!

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2017 2:38 pm 
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lensam69 wrote:
Pete!

Your bandwidth costs are going to go through the roof!


Pete never reads this sub-forum (by design, he doesn't want to be affected by all the spec). I don't know if any direct members of his team are reading these posts, but this is probably NOT the best place to try to communicate directly with them.

@Mods - Is there a designated thread to communicate with Pete + team? The Sluggy 20+ Support Thread perhaps?

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 2:14 am 
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Hey! The Archives are better now if nobody noticed. They implemented lazy loading of the strips. Much faster now since the strips only load when you are looking at them. No downloading of the entire chapter to see just one strip! Pete's data usage is going to be much better.

kitoba wrote:
@Mods - Is there a designated thread to communicate with Pete + team? The Sluggy 20+ Support Thread perhaps?
I'm only partially in the loop, but I would say that is probably the best way right now.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 2:36 am 
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slightlylooney wrote:
I know that the new site is a work in progress, and I'm sure it'll eventually work itself out, but it is a bit of a mess right now.

Getting to the archives is, while not impossible, a headache. Arranging things by book and chapter is logical but loading the entire chapter when selected is asking for trouble. An option to select chapter by date is still a must.
Forum navigation still lacks the option to select a specific page in a thread without opening the first page in a thread.


If you go to the 'User Control Panel' you can change your global defaults so that the most recent post is at the top

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 2:42 am 
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Zillatain wrote:
Hey! The Archives are better now if nobody noticed. They implemented lazy loading of the strips. Much faster now since the strips only load when you are looking at them. No downloading of the entire chapter to see just one strip! Pete's data usage is going to be much better.


Better? It's impossible to find anything if you don't know the chapter.

No search for individual strips. No select by date. Barely usable.

I used to use the Sluggy NiftySearch site to find stuff on the old archive. That is of course broken now, which is perfectly reasonable. But without date ordering I can't see how they will ever fix it. I know that's not Pete's responsibility, but it's a shame, it was a great resource.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:24 am 
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erewhon wrote:
Zillatain wrote:
Hey! The Archives are better now if nobody noticed. They implemented lazy loading of the strips. Much faster now since the strips only load when you are looking at them. No downloading of the entire chapter to see just one strip! Pete's data usage is going to be much better.

Better? It's impossible to find anything if you don't know the chapter.

No search for individual strips. No select by date. Barely usable.

I used to use the Sluggy NiftySearch site to find stuff on the old archive. That is of course broken now, which is perfectly reasonable. But without date ordering I can't see how they will ever fix it. I know that's not Pete's responsibility, but it's a shame, it was a great resource.
"Better" because it doesn't download the entire chapter to see one strip, which many were complaining about. They are working on the other things.

As for NiftySearch, what exactly do you mean by "not working"? Just now I went there and randomly searched for something and clicked on View for one of the results and it took me to the correct strip. Here's the link I used from the NS site http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/20000910

Also if you know what strip you want to see but not what chapter it's in, you can use this format:
http://archives.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=YYYY-MM-DD

I know they should of gotten the site much farther along before going live, but they didn't. So for the time being, all of us have no choice but deal with it and wait for the team to bring more improvements to the site.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 3:33 pm 
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erewhon wrote:
Zillatain wrote:
Hey! The Archives are better now if nobody noticed. They implemented lazy loading of the strips. Much faster now since the strips only load when you are looking at them. No downloading of the entire chapter to see just one strip! Pete's data usage is going to be much better.


I used to use the Sluggy NiftySearch site to find stuff on the old archive. That is of course broken now, which is perfectly reasonable. But without date ordering I can't see how they will ever fix it. I know that's not Pete's responsibility, but it's a shame, it was a great resource.


As Keeper of the Nifty, I will back Zill up on his reply. NiftySearch works extremely well now (except for the transcription page - which is still using the stopgap 'load the whole chapter and pause it in the wrong spot...'). Just don't click on "Archive" - click on "View" (as you're supposed to). When you click on 'View' after you've searched for a strip, you will be taken to the correct strip (I tested it a couple of times as well). I'd say it works even better now that lazy loading is in effect, since you can now super easily view strips in either direction of the one strip in question.

The team fixed the initial 404 error I was getting within 24 hours of my initial post in their thread (AWESOME). So they are working hard and don't deserve constant nagging - especially when the nagging is so very wrong...

Pete & co. do intend to incorporate NiftySearch onto the new website (once they get caught up on all the other issues), and I trust the transcription page will get fixed then as well. In the meantime, I'm keeping up with transcribing (usually within 12-15 hours of a new post), so there shouldn't be any remaining issues from the user point of view.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2017 9:01 pm 
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I really, re-heally don't like how the archives work. I also want the "First, Previous, Next, Last" buttons back.

Sure, let me load a whole chapter as an option. Don't make it the only option.

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 Post subject: Re: The New Website
 Post Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2017 2:36 am 
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"Meanwhile in the DOP" is still terrible, which I guess isn't a new bug report. But without the calendar view it's impossible even to read it all in one chunk so it doesn't break up for example the excellent pacing of Kesandru's Well.

I'd argue the whole thing should simply be grouped together in a row (it's highly serialized anyway) and put somewhere. The new site format leans things way more towards "This is a book and you're reading it one chapter at a time" and pretty far away from "This is a webcomic and it matters what aired on Saturday of this week," so filler stands out even more than it used to, and MitDoP more than even regular filler due to it being one ongoing storyline. Trying to jump between regular Sluggy and MitDoP in calendar order is giving me tonal whiplash.

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