Hey all! As you’ve seen (to many of your consternations), the big change happened yesterday late evening. Some quick notes:
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Site speed. Things were laggy overnight and this morning. I felt it, and it was weird because in testing the new site was exponentially faster than the old one. Well, turns out a database cleanup operation was the cause. That ended a little after 9 am and things have improved dramatically, at least for me. Please note in comments your experience (whether it HAS improved or not, we need to know).
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White space. This one has been a big complaint after every single site update. Not kidding. See this old diary after we switched over to DK4. There are places where there seems to be an extra carriage return, stuff like that we’ll continue tweaking. Other places, I’m going to give it some time to see how things settle in as people get used to the new look. Remember, DK4 was a jumbled mess of white space that made people’s eyes hurt, etc, etc. A few weeks later, that was no longer a problem. All I ask is that you give this design a chance. In a few weeks, you may not even remember what the old site looked like.
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New comment notification pop ups. You say they’re fucking annoying, I agree. In the slow beta environment it wasn’t noticeable. In a high-trafifc, high-comment environment, they just don’t work. We’ll fix this.
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Linking to individual comments, loading full page. You used to be able to pull up a comment in its own page. Now a comment link pulls up the whole story, then jumps to comment. This was especially annoying with slower-loading site. The site should be loading faster so it shouldn’t be so bad anymore. But still, we hear your concerns here and will be looking for a solution.
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Advertising. None of you mentioned this, so I will—notice the lack of a leaderboard ad at the top of the page? We’ve significantly reduced the amount of advertising on this site. This means less revenue for us. I’m serious when I say this is all being done to make your experience better.
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Comment footer. The place where you can recommend and flag comments? Yeah we know, it needs work.
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Writing. I know and appreciate that you guys are focused on the things you hate, because that’s human nature. But this new site really does make writing so much easier—both stories and comments. My favorite is the ability to use word-processor style key-commands to change text formatting. For example, command-B is bold and command-I is italics. If you mouse over the formatting buttons above you can see the key-command equivalent, which makes writing so much faster than having to deal with HTML code. My second-favorite feature is embedding media, like YouTubes. You don’t use the embed code, you simply copy and paste in the YouTube URL. So for this YouTube, I simply pasted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va1TYFeMdeI
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Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking! For those of you who were around during the DK4 transition, you might remember the vast number of changes in the two months following the change. While we have an aggressive new-feature roadmap ahead of us, the next several weeks (probably to the end of the year) will be heavily focused on tweaking and fixing things that are still not right, or break under heavy load. Last time, an entire group emerged—Cranky Users—to complain about the site, and we took all that feedback and converted a great deal of it into real changes. So complain away! Note, however, that constructive criticism always wins over the other kind. That’s as human nature as hating change.
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New features. We still have to finish porting over many pages, such as group queues, user pages, etc. We also have a MAJOR upgrade to the commenting system in place, including a feature that will make comment nesting (replies to replies) even easier to follow. Internal messaging is getting a rewrite, search is getting updated, and user metrics will get implemented (the ability to track traffic to your pages, and to your overall account). That’s the short term. Longer term we have a major revamp to the Groups that I’m extra excited about, including the ability to extensively brand them).
Alright, that’s good for now. I’ve got to run to my son’s birthday party, but I’ll check in later tonight, and either reply in comments or write a follow-up piece if warranted. Thanks for your patience as we make this major change, and please believe me when I say that we take every bit of feedback seriously and are working hard to improve what I already think is a major upgrade.