Experience the New Slashdot Mobile Site 384
After many months of effort, today we've brought the new mobile site out of beta. Featuring an interface optimized for touch devices, we think it's a huge improvement over the old mobile interface. You'll find comments easier to navigate, the most popular stories highlighted at the top of the page, and a surprisingly pleasant interface for navigating old polls. We've also spiffed up user profiles, resurrecting and improving the friend/foe system in the process. And that's not all: we're pleased to announce that you can login to Slashdot in general using various social media accounts, so if you use Facebook or Google+ there's no excuse not to enjoy the benefits of being a registered user, without the hassle of creating yet another account. Our weblog has a few more details. As always, if you encounter any issues let us know by mailing feedback@slashdot.org.
No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
No thanks. It's pretty terrible. Can you also stop the chooser popup please? I want to use the classic site without constantly bombardment with a popup.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Informative)
I third that. I don't understand why we need a dumbed down version of the site when my phone can display the full site just fine? I'v enever had a problem browsing the full site and prefer it.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way: polls don't work in the mobile theme in Dolphin: the options don't display. I think I'll keep using Classic.
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Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
And I thought it was just me.
Issues:
1) does not scroll smoothly or nicely
2) scrool is thought of 1/2 time as a cick - so off to storie no down to next page.
3) I do not what tracking by facebook or others on Slashdot site
4) pop overs are annoing specially when the X is to small to touch or acts like click. Touch interfaces need to big enough for touch! Fat fingers are fat fingers!
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Agreed 100% !!
The mis-scrolling and mis-clicking is the most frustrating aspect of the UI.
The _one_ thing I DO like is the lack of margins. There is no sidebar forcing all the comments to be indented wasting whitespace.
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The popup that comes up to ask you to switch to the mobile site seems to have a fixed position hit boundary. If you scroll the page a bit, the buttons no longer work for me on Android ICS.
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Sorry to report that it does not even show on my phone - I get white screen. HTC Desire. Could be that my Android version is too old (2.2) or something. Not my fault - I don't get OS updates from HTC. I hope it gets fixed.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Informative)
It's also a blank page if you use AdBlock+ with EasyList. The rule ||googletagservices.com^$third-party breaks their requirement for Google Tag Services, and they weren't bright enough to handle this failure gracefully. Same with NoScript -- unless you've allowed googletagservices.com (and I've managed to browse the web fine for over a decade without it) then it's blank-screen for you.
Pretty sad.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
The constant popup is annoying. I would use the mobile site, though, except when I said "yes" to the popup a few weeks back, then tried to reply to a comment, Safari crashed on my phone.
Can you let us set a user preference in our account as to whether we want the mobile site or not on mobile devices? Bonus points for letting us set it on a per-browser-string basis, so I could use the mobile site on my phone (assuming it doesn't continue to crash) but the full site on my tablet.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Roll Back!!! Roll Back!!! Roll Back!!!
abort, abort, abort!!!
News flash, techie people prefer functionality to glitz. I prefer the desktop site on my phone. New mobile version isn't appealing.
Re:No thanks (Score:4, Funny)
Best new feature of Mobile Site:
The link at the bottom right corner that says: Full Site.
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Re:No thanks (Score:5, Informative)
Why not a responsive web design? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm confused why anyone - especially a technology-driven site like Slashdot - would create a "separate but equal" website just for mobile devices. It doesn't make sense these days. What's better is to build a responsive web design [wikipedia.org] that scales down appropriately to the device. Then we don't have to visit a separate website with different branding to get to the same content on a mobile device.
In a responsive web design, you might still choose to detect a mobile browser, and then set the comment browsing level to "5" or maybe "4". That's arguably the only thing you'd need to do that requires knowing the type of the client device.
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I use stock Dolphin browser, and haven't disabled cookie storage. However, I do get the pop-up every single time I view a story on slashdot.
Re:No thanks (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome on iOS 6.1. I've been asked over and over. Also, the cardinal sin of "redirecting from a deep link to the front page of the mobile site" was committed, apparently :(
I'm on a discussion page and I get redirected to the front page of m.slashdot.org. Horrible, horrible!
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I second that. Why, why, why do the people who build the mobile sites assume, 'well they clicked on this link, but I'm sure they'll be fine with the home page, or this other unrelated page'
That is awful, it renders the concept of a hyperlink, the bedrock of the web, unpredictable for mobile sites. (i.e. the user's thinking they will actually get linked to what I want or will something else completely pop up).
Yep, its a cardinal sin of mobile sites. This meme needs to get some traction out there.
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Re:No thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
I am impressed to be hearing from the developers in this thread.
Thanks.
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Tried it (Score:2)
Re:Tried it (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm using it right now (though posting from my desktop). Honestly, it's a lot faster than the old site, and navigation is more friendly to touch devices. Most importantly, comments load better than before. With that said, two things bother me about it:
1. The aesthetic is completely different from the desktop site, to the point that I wouldn't know it's Slashdot if it didn't say so at the top. This isn't a huge deal, but brand recognition is important.
2. The article summaries are shortened on the front page, and you have to tap the headline in order to load the whole thing along with contents. This breaks up the site's flow and makes it harder just to peruse articles. Take, for instance, the following excerpt:
Two economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve have published a paper arguing that the American patent system...
The shortened summary offers nothing of value to me; the headline is actually much more informative. What I think needs to happen is either enable full, unshortened summaries, or write a summary of the summary for mobile devices. One of those options is silly, the other is reasonable.
Re: (Score:3)
YES
If the mobile site still LOOKED like Slashdot I think people would be more open to it.
But it looks like any Generic news site ...
I remember when they redesigned Slashdot 5 years ago ... and the new design retained the "feel" of the old design. The mobile site does not retain the Slashdot feel. Even hardcore old school Emacs guys have a certain affinity towards the way things look and feel here. So don't mess with that.
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Yes. I don't like the article "snippeting" on the main page either. It's the main reason why I didn't explore the beta very much; reading the articles so I know which ones I want to load the comments on is a core function.
If all I wanted was RSS snippets, I'd read Google News instead.
Re:Tried it (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this doesn't help you, but I have none of those problems here. I'm running Mobile Safari/Chrome on an iPhone 5.
Re: (Score:3)
That bug might only be present on Android then. I have the same problem as the GP and it makes the mobile site practically unusable.
I'm using the Android browser on 4.1 JellyBean (Galaxy S3 - not exactly an obscure or underpowered device).
Whereas Ars Technica use responsive design instead of a separate site and its almost a joy to read on a phone.
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I keep saying this. If enough of us get together I'm sure we could instigate a mass migration over to something else - Son of Slashdot maybe, with content and usability like /. USED be several years ago...
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Yeah. We could call it Reddit and then...
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oh please ... Reddit is the bastard step-child of Slashdot and Digg.
That is not to say Reddit is all bad -- at least _some_ of the sub-reddits are great like /r/LucidDreaming . However, others are a just a constant circle-jerk like /r/atheism /r/politics where it is impossible to have a civil discussion without getting down-voted into oblivion simple because you refuse to spout the fan-boi's dogma and want to look at things objectively. /. may have jumped the shark a while back but at most of the trolls ha
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Please, please, please let me know if a group comes together to make a new Slashdot. I'm a professional web developer, mostly backend PHP but I know Rails, wouldn't mind learning Python, am actively learning Node, and I'm very experienced with frontend stuff (jQuery, HTML 5, CSS 3, etc. etc.)
I'm thinking keep the karma system almost exactly the same if not exactly the same, and shift to more crowdsourced article posting. Keep editors, but their job wouldn't be to choose the articles to post, their job wou
m./. /.'ed? (Score:3)
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In that case, it should have a noscript element telling you to turn on Javascript, at the least.
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It loads on my Galaxy S III but as soon as you try to drag and scroll it opens the article under your finger. I submitted a bug report months ago and figured it would be fixed before launch, but apparently not.
It works okay if I switch to Chrome.
Sorry, not so good (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I have tried the new mobile site my experience was not good.
I can't even scroll down easily and when I do it jumps into an article that I didn't select.
And it doesn't look good.
Maybe it's opera mobile's fault. Maybe you need to think on this some more.
Re:Sorry, not so good (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Sorry, not so good (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm... I think I've spotted the problem.
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Every time I have tried the new mobile site my experience was not good. I can't even scroll down easily and when I do it jumps into an article that I didn't select. And it doesn't look good. Maybe it's opera mobile's fault. Maybe you need to think on this some more.
I've had the same experience on the default Android browser.
"New" Mobile Site? (Score:2)
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I like it but... (Score:2)
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But that would require actually expending effort to fix things. That's never been the Slashdot way. They couldn't even fix the pagination bugs in the version before they did the whole discussion overhaul. They want to chunk out new code, not do "boring" software maintenance.
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That's ok (Score:2)
I've had zero problems using the desktop version on my mobile devices, especially my tablet. Now I get a popup to deal with everytime. Seriously, the regular site is fine. I appreciate the effort but it's not necessary. Honestly I'd rather you guys spent time fixing bugs in the RSS feeds that perhaps someone reported months ago and go ignored.
What about ipv6? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hate hate hate (Score:4, Funny)
I hate it and it's terrible and it sucks and I hate it and it's different and why did it change and it's terrible and it's different and it's not working on my obscure phone so it's useless to everyone and it sucks and nobody should ever ever ever ever ever use it ever again and I don't like it. It's stupid. I'm a nerd, so I know this sort of thing. I'll click the link later when I've got time to look at it.
Do Not Want (Score:5, Insightful)
"we're pleased to announce that you can login to Slashdot in general using various social media accounts,"
Why would I want to do this? On Slashdot, of all the sites on the internet, people value their privacy. Perhaps we don't want the data-miners at Facebook to monitor our slashdot usernames, cross-correlate post times against estimated work hours and calculate our estimated slacking-off coefficient to better target advertisments? I'm entirely happy to have lots of seperate accounts - it beats 'One Account to Rule them All.'
Re:Do Not Want (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I want to do this?
Maybe you wouldn't. And maybe someone else does. That's why it's an option.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:5, Informative)
There's no evil conspiracy here (see the permissions the facebook "app" requests for example: just your name and email address); we just wanted to make it easier for people to login. I personally wouldn't use it (but I'm in the set of people who only grudgingly use facebook in the first place since everyone else is doing it), but folks immediately started using it, even without us mentioning that it existed.
Luckily, it's just an option, and will never supersede the native account system. Different strokes for different folks and insert other appropriate cliches here.
Re:Do Not Want (Score:4, Interesting)
Too Sensitive to Touch (Score:4, Insightful)
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I specifically reported this during the alpha and the beta and nothing at all changed. In fact, from a user perspective, nothing at all has changed from the alpha to the launched site, so I don't think they gave a shit about bug submissions. Since alpha, the short summaries, fucked up scrolling, weird swiping behavior, etc have all been reported by many users.
Worthless! (Score:3, Informative)
You IGNORED every constructive comment that people made regarding this mobile interface. You INSISTED on doing it the stupid way.
Nobody is going to use your mobile interface when it makes browsing slashdot MORE WORK than before. We can't even get full article summaries on the front page! What kind of bullshit is that?
And I think it's just wonderful how every mobile user gets a banner suggesting they switch to the much more heavily ad-strewn mobile interface. Congratulations slashdot, you've managed to create a mobile interface that is WORSE than the full site on just about every level. way to ignore your customers.
Laggy (Score:2)
The original site is better, because: (Score:5, Informative)
It has one disadvantage: I have to click away a popup which asks me to use the new site, time and again...
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Your code is broken, then.
Re:The original site is better, because: (Score:4, Informative)
I'll say it here too, your code is broken. It's not working. I get the popup on every page.
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By the way, I can say this with some authority; we use localStorage (and sessionStorage) on a mobile web app here at my work, and it works fine on my phone there.
I suggest you guys look into using store.js [github.com] for a consistent interface even when localStorage doesn't work.
scrolling lag (Score:2, Informative)
The mobile site lags badly while scrolling on an Android device using chrome. Any chance of fixing this?
Needs work (Score:5, Informative)
When following a link to /., if I answer Yes to the pop-up prompt, i get redirected to http://m.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] and NOT the story I was linking to
Re:Needs work (Score:5, Funny)
Hi! I'm a server!
http://xkcd.com/869/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Needs work (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, Thanks for fixing this. Awesome effort!
mobile site (Score:2)
*makes a-ok sign, then glares* It stinks.
scrolling still broken (Score:2)
Hey dummies, you broke scrolling during the beta. It simply doesn't scroll properly on the default Android browser. Something is mucked up with touch event handling. Please fix this. That is why everybody keeps saying they prefer classic mode - at least you can scroll properly.
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Go to the Play Store and get Firefox. You won't look back.
Yes you will, or at least I did. I have no idea what causes this, but I've had several pages where when you scroll below the currently visible content, the newly displayed stuff turns fuzzy/blurry. If you only scroll half a screen you get a clear top half and messed-up bottom half. I can't imagine what causes this, but it was annoying enough that for now I'm trying other browsers... Dolphin seems to be doing well, but I miss my extensions. :(
A little better (Score:4, Interesting)
The old mobile site wasn't really mobile, so I guess anything is better, though it's a pretty slow and heavy site it seems. It looks to be working in Firefox for Android now, that's an improvement over the last time I used the beta.
So how long until /. wraps up the new mobile site in an app wrapper and advertises a "mobile app" for iPhone and Android like seemingly every other website out there?
Classic (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet Slashdot is still incapable of handling nonASCII characters. Unicode is over 20 years old, guys.
Is there any reason why this was done as a separate site and not with a responsive design? Separate mobile sites are the old-fashioned way of doing things.
Re:Classic (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes but Unicode and IPv6 are clearly just fads. They aren't nearly as important as Facebook/Google+ login and filling out the buzzword bingo card with all the fad frameworks:
We built this app using the latest technologies and frameworks such as Backbone, Zepto, Underscore, Hamstache, Jasmine, and Sass.
Go away with this crap ! (Score:3)
I am sick of having the message "would you like to try beta or classic" every time when I browse Slashdot on my Chrome browser under my Nexus. I want the *regular* site, or something as close to it as possible. I even cannot click on the "classic" button... First lesson for new designs: if someone says *not for me* then leave them alone or they will leave your site alone.
Why should I have to press "request desktop site" each time I simply want to read an article ? This is not a PALM III where I zoom in with the Plus and Minus keys: my browser is more powerful than a Windows IE6 browser (feature wise), faster than many regular old Pentium IV's and pinching is good enough to get around the site.
[rant mode off]
Re:Go away with this crap ! (Score:4, Informative)
Unusably slow, UI provides no feedback (Score:5, Informative)
When I click on something it takes forever for the UI to respond. There is no visual feedback so until I realized that the new UI was just 200x slower than the old one I clicked on the things 5-10 times thinking the clicks just didn't take the first n-1 times.
I've obviously switched back to using the desktop site on my mobiles, but there is a popup on every page load asking me to try the mobile site! Sheesh!
You need to fire the contractors involved and hire some people who know what they are doing.
So so (Score:3, Insightful)
I jused the (new) mobile site for the first time on an iPhone 4S and had no issues whatsoever. Although I like the overall look and feel of the site I don't think a redesign was all that necessary. Sorry, devs :) But don't listen to the haters, they wouldn't like it no matter how it had turned out!
Scrolling not working (Score:2)
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If you scroll by touching just the right edge it works fine. Anywhere else on the screen and it doesn't work properly.
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Yeah it's really shit.
Holy crap that was awful (Score:4, Informative)
What the fuck were you guys thinking?
An, in general, what the fuck is going on with people designing user interfaces these days? It seems everywhere you go there's yet another abortion of a user interface.
Seriously...
scrolling is impossible (Score:2)
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On a decent tablet/phone the regular site is fine. (Score:2)
Fire your product manager (Score:5, Insightful)
The new site is terrible. I really tried to use it for a couple weeks but had to go back (iPhone 4).
The new site is significantly slower first of all, which essentially kills it right off the bat. Speed should be your #1 feature. If you can't make it faster on mobile, don't bother with the redesign just tweak the existing layout.
It's also very glitchy as others have pointed out.
- Scrolling down often results in a click.
- After the page loads it jumps to the top again if you scroll down too fast
- transitions are glitchy and slow. Don't use them they don't add anything.
As for the announcement it is just full of fail.
>> We've built this new mobile interface optimized exclusively for your touch smartphones and tablets.
Why? The revolutionary part of the iPhone was that it could handle regular desktop sites and we could do away with WAP. Now we suddenly need a special site again? Just make sure that the layout scales well and you're done for mobile on a site that is purely about content. It's a different story if you're something like an online retailer where people want quick access to a few key functions (search, store locator, inventory, my account, etc).
>> Read comments and stories in a mobile-friendly view (no more squinting!)
Never had to squint on the old site. what's the problem?
>> Most popular stories shown right at the top
If I passed by a story earlier in the day what makes you think I want to see it again?
>> See beautiful achievement badges
I have no words. This is so stupid.
>> Show off your latest Gravatar
Yep, that's why I'm here.
>> We built this app using the latest technologies and frameworks such as Backbone, Zepto, Underscore, Hamstache, Jasmine, and Sass.
So you jumped on the bandwagon of stupidly named frameworks and used all of them because that's the thing to do these days. Surprise surprise, the end result is too heavy.
>> Since there are so many mobile devices and capabilities, we targeted webkit browsers, and Android versions above 2.3.
Sounds like browser support got worse then. Say it like it is.
>> We didn't start sketching the blueprints based on what we thought a mobile experience should be - we asked YOU.
Ah, that's the problem then. Design by committee and it shows.
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Thank you for breaking this down in a very meaningful manor. Maybe they will hear and FIX it.
It's fucking worthless (Score:4, Interesting)
Now take that stupid popup thing that tells me to go to the mobile site. If I want to see your shitty social-web2.1-scalable-turnkey-webdesigner-solution I'll go to the god damn site myself. Whoever wrote this should be ashamed.
Threshold for Classic Discussion System (D1)? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Threshold for Classic Discussion System (D1)? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too funny (Score:4, Interesting)
I really wish slashdot had an api to access posts so we could calculate the exact turning point. Definitely 2013 is when the tide has shifted.
68/100 (Score:3)
Wow (Score:3)
Overwhelming negative response. It makes one wonder what the design criteria were, or the Q/A strategy.
Help us fix the mobile app scrolling (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi, I see a lot of you are having trouble with scrolls in the app being detected as clicks on stories. The team here has been trying to reproduce this, but failing. Here's a list of device / browser combinations I've tested:
The concern here is that there's some kind of common scrolling motion we aren't doing that's causing them to get interpreted as clicks. Are you holding your finger down longer? Pausing somewhere in the scroll? Is there horizontal motion in there? Is your scroll more of a flick? We've tried all those things and haven't seen it, so if some of you experiencing the problem would be kind enough to record a video of yourself making it happen (preferably on one of the above devices so we can reproduce it too), that would be great. There is no Slashdot Mobile QA team and our dev team is tiny.
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Re: It's ok (Score:3, Insightful)
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