Welcome to our latest design update, Ars 9.0!

More good stuff. Personalization, responsive design, and more...

See full article...

 

[Aurich]

We know the comments are broken, it's a bug, we're working on it.

Once we get things that are broken sorted out (we tested this all, and of course once things are live there are issues to sort) we'll take feedback into account more seriously.

Until we know everything is working right it's hard to sort bugs from everything else. We just need to ask for a little patience, we are a very small team that can only do so many things at once.

 

[Aurich]

Neutron Star isn’t bad, though having my home link be a category that instead of filtering the home page shows some different crappy view of one story means I didn’t see the switch to change themes (why isn’t it in settings? why is settings different depending on how you get to it? why is there still a toggle for dark mode instead of a drop down on some settings pages since their are three modes?) until I went to the homepage in desperation.

We'll take all the feedback in, don't worry.

But you're a great example of why we need some time to figure out where the pain points are. We didn't plan around someone bookmarking some other page and never looking at the front page.

If there's a use case we missed that makes sense we can certainly add it.

 

[Aurich]

Honest question, if you are such a small team, why are you embarking on a change that you cannot handle?

We can handle it just fine. People might have to be patient for a few hours while we sort the worst bugs, and then we'll start triaging feedback.

I've been doing this with Ars for over 20 years at this point, Of our 9 designs I've done 6 of them personally. I'm pretty much familiar with the process by now. Every single time we've done this we've gotten a similar reaction, it just comes with having a passionate audience that loves what we do. When that thing you're used to changes it's irritating. I get it.

I'm simply telling people that we're a small team to help them understand that you're dealing with a couple human beings here.

Fixing big bugs (like comments not working right) is the immediate priority, then we can start to look more into general feedback.

If the feedback is abusive or yelling or just telling us we suck we're gonna ignore it. But as people bring up real issues, or we see patterns of feedback we'll work on trying to address them.

Like we've done all the other times. The design that people say they're missing now? We were told it was awful when we launched it. Some things we fixed, some things people adjusted to. It's always a balance.

I do wish people had slightly more faith in us by now, we are pretty good about listening. Just you know, maybe don't treat us badly in the process, that would help.

 

[Aurich]

I don't really care for the new design, the old design was just fine.

The only feature change I'd really like to see is real threading in the forum posts -- i.e. put replies to comments under the comment that's replied to. It's super annoying to have a discussion dispersed over a dozen different pages, and I think having threads grouped together would help reduce a lot of repetition where someone replies to a first page comment and his reply ends up on the 10th page, and a half dozen people said the same thing in pages 2-9.

We're never going to make Ars discussions threaded. It's a choice, and it's good for some things. It's a lot better for getting answers to questions for instance. Reddit threading is useful if you're just googling for a problem and want to see the best solution.

But it's not a good fit for how we do things at Ars, and our style of conversation, and it's one of the base decisions about our community that will probably never change.

 

[Aurich]

I find it terrible that there are 14 (at the time of reply) down votes on this. It's a calm, level headed response to a passionate subject. Just give them time people!

Though I also think they should have given a heads up article a week or two in advance with some screen shots to explain what was going to happen. I've been here for what, 14 years as a member, probably paying for all this time. It's cheap for what we get!

I did do a heads up in our forum, with screenshots:

The new Ars Technica front page design is coming!

But I realize not everyone looks at that stuff. What happens on the front page editorial side of things isn't my department, we've traditionally never done a heads up article. I chose to do it in "my domain" so to speak. I hoped it would help some.

I think there's just a certain level of things going live that are what they are. Nothing we can do will really prepare people for a familiar experience changing.

We'll take feedback into account. It's sort of the only real acid test, making it live, and listening. We tested a lot, but our personal views and preferences can't match the real experience of a live audience.

 

[Aurich]

Same goes for me on desktop. Dark Mode with List View looks pretty similar to before, so I don't have too much of a problem. Comments seem to load much faster. Being able to hide "most read", which I don't care about at all, would be nice.

Something I did design that didn't make it into this version was a sub version of List mode, with no right column. It has to be there for the ads for non-subs. But if you're ad free it's not necessary. I think we could go ahead and still add that.

I love most read features on sites. I want to know what people are reading, I find it very interesting to see what stories resonate.

I'm really glad we were able to add it to the site. It's the kind of thing that I think people probably need to live with for a bit to see if they find it useful or interesting, because data over time might add more value.

But I don't object to turning it off or anything.

 

[Aurich]

I don’t see much of a difference between grid and list and classic, all seem to be way too spread out. I would have expected classic to be very close to the previous design instead of modeled after some other website’s design. Neutron star view seems ok, but I would like it if tapping the article title just takes you to the full article instead of doing that expand collapse thing.

And the font size seems to be all over the place.

I wish I could roll back.

Classic has been a mode for years. The entire life of the last design at the very least, I can't remember now if that's when we added it.

Subscribers have always had the choice to use it, and our stats show it's very popular with them.

As far as modeled after another website's design, the "other website" is Ars Technica, how we used to look. Hence the name.

 

[Aurich]

The list looks nice on my iPad. Unfortunately it remembers the Neutron view from my iPhone. I think preferences should be per device, not per account.

We're 100% open to looking into supporting this idea.

 

[Aurich]

Congratulations on launching your new design, well done!

I particularly appreciate the topic category filtering (mainly for shopping it muse be said) and the larger font sizes. I previously had Ars at 150% font size through Safari, dialled that back to normal now!

I will join the chorus complaing about the views, I was pretty happy with the old view on mobile and none of the new ones seem similar in density and information.

I think the number one thing I'm hearing as far as consistent feedback we should take action on is there isn't enough density on mobile.

I'm gonna bump that up to a priority once any more "show stopper" bugs are fixed.

 

[Aurich]

Best of luck to you ARS staff this type of change is never easy. Will reserve my comments until I spend a few days with the new design.

You sweet, reasonable soul.

 

[Aurich]

Thanks! I had totally forgotten that my subscription had lapsed. Now that I've resubscribed and turned off my ad-blocker, I see the same thing.

And while full-screen width would be silly, the incredibly narrow width (I'm still seeing) is also silly.

First off, thank you for not only supporting us but putting up with my ad block frustration and responding the way you did, I truly appreciate it.

I try to not get too frustrated by it, but when people post screenshots to point out bugs on our site that show them ad blocking it's a real kick in the balls. Especially when it turns out the 'bug' they found was caused by their ad blocker (you have no idea how common this is).

So now that we've gotten that out of the way, the short answer is that we lock the column width to get an idea character count per line for reading. If you look around the web you'll find most sites do it very similarly, for the same reasons.

But, that said, we do have a slightly wider view for features that don't have the same ad layout. I'd be open to seeing if we could make that more available to subscribers who don't see ads.

 

[Aurich]

definitely not as bad as the atrocious first release of the last Verge redesign.

They made a really unfortunate call to decide to go hard on embedding Twitter into their front page right as Elon Musk bought it. Oof.

But they've imo really improved it since then, and taken feedback into account. I love reading comments on other site launches, because it makes me feel better to see that EVERYONE gets hated on when things change.

But to be fair, they did listen to some of it. And we will 100% be listening too.

 

[Aurich]

Another bug

On mobile iOS, using Neutron Star, and on the home page, when I swipe down to reload the page I get an iOS dialog box asking me "Are you sure you want to submit this form again?"

Oh that's a good one, added to our bug tracking.

So this is one thing that testing live really helps with. Because on our staging site the content was static, we had to do a whole process to update things, so it just never would have occurred to me to even do what you did. I wasn't looking for new content.

But it's a totally reasonable action by a 'normal' user. Our best efforts at testing will always miss something like this.

 

[Aurich]

many old articles are broken. (as someone mentioned, the ZFS101 article is a great test case). Will those be cleaned up manually or left to rot?

Sorry, missed this before, do you happen to have a link handy?

 

[Aurich]

Overall the old site had some obvious jank and I know you guys wanted to fix that. I remember previous discussions about certain things being an artifact of the technology used.

I know it's not possible, but you could probably throw me straight back to the 2000-era site that I first started visiting and I'd be quite happy with it - well, if I was on a CRT monitor from that era. I do agree that the complaining seems to come with each redesign. It astonishes me that people just come out of the woodwork to be... just straight up assholes though.

You have to subscribe to get it, but the 2000-era Ars is what "Classic" view is. That old "blog" style view, where you get the start of the story and can click through for more.

Of course back in 2000 some of our stories were so short there wasn't nothing to click through to see more of, our writing is a lot longer on average these days.

Classic was a feature in the last site design too, but it was buried in a menu, and only appeared if you were a subscriber, so a lot of people don't know it's existed this whole time.

That was one of my goals this time, to get the views out of being hidden and easy to use, as well as be able to offer previews of the sub-only stuff so you could see what you'd get if you paid for it first.

 

[Aurich]

@Aurich Really stupid question. But are you intending that this is the place to report on bugs?

There a lot of comments on here reporting actual bugs, but they are repeated a lot. And they are hidden in all the noise of people complaining about the new layout, or just bitching in general.

Maybe you should pin something to the start of this article where you acknowledge what bugs you've actually noted from these comments?

We're logging bugs, though most of it is less bugs and more feature requests. Some kind of inbetween.

The plan was always "get the site live, see what breaks because no amount of testing will find all the weird problems (like Cachefly caching a forum template in a way that did not reveal itself on staging), and then once we get things stable and working start working through user feedback.

As the opening of the article said:

We know that change is unsettling, and no matter how much we test internally, a new design will also contain a few bugs, edge cases, and layout oddities. As always, we'll be monitoring the comments on this article and making adjustments for the next couple of weeks, so please report any bugs or concerns you run into. (And please be patient with the process—we're a small team!)

We meant it about the next couple weeks. We'll keep tweaking things, and listening to feedback. There are two truths that I hold sacred when we do this:

1) Readers will have good feedback, and are worth listening to

2) Change is hard, and will always get a strong reaction from people who care and read us regularly

I would prefer to not get some of the abuse and personal comments, but it mostly rolls off me. I also know that a lot of it is somewhat knee jerk, and people just react without thinking and don't mean to cause bad feelings and try to not take anything personally.

But it can take some time to sort out "good feedback" from "you suck you changed it you're Sonos". There's a lot of noise.

As people adjust, as we fix the more glaring issues, the good comments will tend to rise to the top. As I said earlier, it's clear that people want more density options on mobile. So we'll work on that.

 

[Aurich]

Just as an addendum to what I wrote above, we did the same thing when we moved to this new forum system. We tested as best we could, then got it live. People 'freaked out' a bit, because it was new. They logged bugs for us. We adjusted. And now I think in general everyone agrees the new stuff is pretty awesome.

We'll get there with the front page too.

 

[Aurich]

I like the new design and the improvements seem good.

The one oddity I'm running into is that I'm no longer automatically logged into my subscription when I visit the site. When I click the sign-in button, I get a blank dialog which only gives me the option of closing it. Nothing happens right afterwards, but if I then refresh the home page, I correctly show up as signed in. This is happening on multiple machines.

I would suggest deleting your Ars cookies and starting clean first. Something might have gotten corrupted, and that's always the best way to start troubleshooting.

 

[Aurich]

Thanks for the reply and explanation. As you guessed, I don't read the forums really at all. Maybe because I find that reading forums on the web sucks compared to using my mail reader which is all keyboard driven. But I do appreciate all your hard work here and the time you took to respond.

Here's the real truth:

Ars readers are special. And I mean that in every sense of the word lol. Though I definitely say it with love.

You guys are the hardcore of the hardcore nerds. (And my people, to be clear.) And that means that we cannot possibly take into account the way you all do things. Because you find your methods, and you stick to them.

Using a keyboard-driven mail reader in 2024? It's not normal! But it is here. It's why we added keyboard navigation to the Neutron Star view.

There's nothing we could do to anticipate some of the feedback we're getting. We always knew there was a "fuck it, we'll do it live" component to this. We gotta hear directly from people.

 

[Aurich]

I get it and I assume this was a frequent ask, but the one thing I miss about doing most of my reading in print is stumbling across something interesting that I wouldn't otherwise have looked for. Personalization is great, but its a two edged sword and (in my opinion) it has greatly contributed to fracturing our shared, common experience.

I tend to agree, but tbh if subs want to turn off the (now infrequent) Amazon Prime Day deal articles that's more than cool with me.

It was a popular request, we added it, and I'm curious to see if people actually use it now.

We listen to feedback, honest!

 

[Aurich]

Have article page comments always been in an iframe?

Seems like some of the design issues (like disparate font sizing) may be related to how the iframe is styled.

"Always" since the new forum launched, yes.

The user font settings thing people are finding is for your forum account, it wasn't intentionally buried, nor does it relate to the front page. I don't know how/if it affects the front page comments, it might.

 

[Aurich]

Remember when The Verge did its last redesign? It sucked. I don't go there anymore. This new layout reminds me a lot of that. By all means, add new features but why mess with an already pleasing and familiar layout?

You've only had an account for 4 years, so I don't know how long you've been reading Ars. But the last redesign we did was iirc 2016, so 8 years ago.

People said the exact same thing then. And the time before, and time before, etc. All 6 times over the last 20 years I've heard the same basic comment.

Every time it's the old design was better. Because it was familiar. And then they get used to the new one they said they didn't like, and we change it and it was great. Rinse and repeat.

That doesn't mean there aren't actual issues, or that we aren't seeing good feedback. It's okay to suggest things or complain, and we are listening.

But also, we've done this many times, and we know that we always get the same feedback every time. People don't like change.

Part of my job now is to sort through the feedback, take into account good suggestions, and also discard a certain amount of knee jerk reactions. It will take time for people to adjust. And, we'll fix things too.

I think we'll get to a good place, and keep adding new features people will like.

 

[Aurich]

Aurich said they're looking into changing that so it should conform better with the rest of the site

It turns out it was changed towards the end of things (for a reason) and I missed the change in testing. Was never meant to be that wide, it will be fixed.

 

[Aurich]

Alignment of text is messed up. Look how wide the banner image is and look how narrow the text column underneath is.

The banner scales to multiple window widths but the text just gives up once you go beyond a certain width.

Maybe I
Should f-
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into a mu-
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yout like t-
this? Does
this give y-
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how much
I "like" the
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View attachment 91794

You know why it looks like that?

Because you're blocking ads. That blank space on the right is where an ad would be.

The subscriber view looks like this:

Honestly anyone who complains that their ad blocking is breaking anything has two choices:

1) subscribe for an optimized ad-free experience, that we'll keep working to make the best we can

2) live with it, because we're not fixing anything to make ad blockers lives better

If you don't want to support our work, and just take our content, we're not stopping you. But we aren't going to spend any of the resources you don't help pay for on you either.

 

[Aurich]

So why the hell did it go live while you knew that?

Fucking amateur. You shouldn't be proud of this.

I have an idea. Let's talk like we're both adults. You've had an account here for 20 years, so let's assume you're a grown person. I myself am a grown person.

Do you know why that comment bug happened? Because Cachefly was caching a forum script such that it worked perfectly fine on our staging site, and broke after we went live. So we did not, in fact, know it was broken until afterwards because it was fine in all our testing.

People reported the bug, I said "yup, we're working on it", and it's now fixed, it was a high priority issue.

What is it about the internet that makes adults think this is a normal way to talk to people?

 

[Aurich]

Is the Sign In broken for anyone else?

Not sure what's broken, clearly you're signed in to post this, but if you're having problems please try deleting your Ars cookies and logging in fresh.

 

[Aurich]

I don’t think the internet works at all for widescreen monitors anymore. Too many sites just give up on that format. If you want a good experience with a lot of screen space, get a second 4:3 or 16:10 monitor, spin it sideways, and put your web browser on that. Main screen is for coding.

There are a lot of really rational reasons for that, which is why everyone does it. But I'd love to see examples of the exceptions.

 

[Aurich]

If people are reading sites that they feel are optimized for widescreen monitors could you please link them?

I would be very happy to look at examples of what you feel uses a big wide monitor the way you would prefer. In my competitive landscape research of news sites (and I've looked at a lot) I did not see a single one, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Ars has never been "fill your whole widescreen 4K monitor". The previous designs didn't do it either. It's not a common thing for a reason, it makes for a poor reading experience. There are studies about text column width and what is ideal for reading. It's not something that just appeared everywhere for no reason.

But, if you have some counter examples, I would love to see them and see if there are ideas that we didn't think of, please feel free to share.

 

[Aurich]

Does Ars do trial subscriptions? Might be a good idea once the wrinkles have been ironed out. That way people can try out the exclusive layouts and possibly subscribe to keep them.

Not yet, but something along those lines is an idea I'd love to try.

Basically we needed to get this redesign done to be able to try a lot of things. So we'll iron out the kinks here, and then be able to move on to new ideas.

 

[Aurich]

Mr Prosser: But, Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.
Arthur: Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.
Mr Prosser: But the plans were on display…
Arthur: On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.
Mr Prosser: That’s the display department.
Arthur: With a torch.
Mr Prosser: The lights had probably gone out.
Arthur: So had the stairs.
Mr Prosser: But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?
Arthur: Yes yes I did. It was on display at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard.

While I appreciate the reference I really hope people don't actually think of our forum that way! It's still a great place to hang out and learn things as well as get insights on behind the scenes stuff like this.

 

[Aurich]

Can we add a hideable "Beth Mole Articles About Gross Things Involving Eyeballs" category?

Wait until you see our giant parallax scrolling feature image option.

 

[Aurich]

Designers think responsive means "can shrink down to tiny phone". Very rarely do I see websites that scale to adapt with 4K screens or know what to do with all the space.

I'm not opposed to "doing something with the space", but in general nobody actually wants super wide article text. It's horrible for reading. Which is why you just don't see it.

But as I've said, if people have examples of sites they love that use big wide screens in a useful way I would genuinely appreciate being linked.

 

[Aurich]

Front Page is prompting me to sign in, but when I click on it, I get a box with "Sign In" and no visible way to actually do so.

Seems I am still logged in to the Forum, though.

Try deleting your Ars cookies. I'm seeing some other complaints, hard to tell if it's widespread.

 

[Aurich]

The only (blog) that I read occasionally that seems to go full-width is this one - https://danluu.com/about/. I don't mind it, but I also know that many folks do not like text that goes from corner to corner, so it's kind of a "standard" that width is constrained (I especially can't imagine such a thing on a 38" or 49" monstrosity).

Okay, I tried to read an actual post on that site, just at my normal window width, not even going full screen.

If people are asking for that it's not something we're ever going to do. It's really difficult to read, and not at all a pleasant experience.

Appreciate you linking something though, and I'd love to see more examples if anyone has them.

 

[Aurich]

A couple of things are broken:

1. The Subscribe button shows up, even if you're already subscribed.
2. In Neutron view, it doesn't scroll the view to have the title of the active article at the top, so it's a bit confusing that you're still seeing the previous headline as you scroll with keyboard shortcuts

Showing the previous headline before the open one is a deliberate feature. What we found is without that it was very confusing where you were in the flow of articles. If the headline was all the way up a the top and completely scrolled the rest off it was hard to tell where you'd 'jumped' to.

That said, I'm really interested in taking feedback on Neutron Star, we can try adjusting things after people have used it for a while. It's very much an experiment and unlike anything we've done before.

 

[Aurich]

I have to “reduce privacy protections” to login but I can enable them after login.

iPhone and iPad.

I'm not honestly sure what this means, I'll add it to the list to look into.

 

[Aurich]

My bad. Ignore my earlier comment. I should have tried out all of the options before complaining. Neutron Star is perfect.

Glad to hear it!