And here's some positive feedback: the background now looks very nice indeed. Some personality has returned to the Escapist's appearance.
The New Shiny Escapist
- Thread starter Trujkin
- Start date
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Borders are much better! Thank you! Please...NEVER go back to pure white :|
My issues have been solved ^^ although as a recommendation, make the light blue nav bar a darker blue, it suites the Escapist better, the blue that is used for the "Quote" and "Reply" button would suit it a lot better!
My issues have been solved ^^ although as a recommendation, make the light blue nav bar a darker blue, it suites the Escapist better, the blue that is used for the "Quote" and "Reply" button would suit it a lot better!
I agree whole-heartedly with the suggestion about the blue, that would work a lot better than the new one.arc1991 said:
It took me a while this morning to realise that the blinding snowwhite side panels had been replaced with... actual snow. Irony, it is delicious. Kudos! 
And I can see the occasional snowflake falling. Nifty
And I can see the occasional snowflake falling. Nifty
HMMmmmm... has anyone else found that the main content body of the shiny new website won't load under Firefox 8.0.1 if Adblock Plus is running? It only seemed to crop up after the borders were added, and even adding the domain to the list of exceptions couldn't fix it. I had to resort to using IE. Yikes.
Edit - Fixed. If anyone else is in the same boat, you need to define the site filter exception as '@@|http://www.escapistmagazine.com' in Adblock Plus.
Edit - Fixed. If anyone else is in the same boat, you need to define the site filter exception as '@@|http://www.escapistmagazine.com' in Adblock Plus.
The new background has a nice colour theme, but the image quality is poor ? the JPEG compression artifacts are very visible. Also, the motto of the moment is now nearly unreadable, as it is gray on bluish gray.
Also, the bottom bar does this as I edit my post (IE8):
Oh, and hope the snow goes away soon. It takes too much CPU.
Also, the bottom bar does this as I edit my post (IE8):
Oh, and hope the snow goes away soon. It takes too much CPU.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/profiles/forum_optionsJesse Kilgore said:
You can turn it off here.
Jesus christ, you do realize that you're obligated to at least to pretend to act with some level of maturity, right? Why the hell are you deliberately pissing people off who help pay for this site? More importantly, how the hell are you keeping a job doing shit like this? At the very least you could just not respond to him, rather than mocking him for getting fucked over, like you're some sort of MMO scammer. Is this really The Escapist's response to unsatisfied customers? Seriously?Kross said:
It seemed a response with the same amount of rational thought as a rant tossing random accusations borne out of some sense of Internet entitlement.adalekplunger said:
We've been very obviously responding to feedback throughout the new site launch. The theme has changed to some degree every single day except the weekends (actually, that's a lie, we worked on it then as well - just not all day). There's now more customization options, and more features are in the works. The site performance has also been improving throughout the past few weeks, despite lag or timeouts due to traffic and new site features. I'm sorry we are not working fast enough for you. We will be hiring more programmers at some point, unfortunately we have other things to spend money on first.
The site performance has been steadily degrading for a while now. The new site added more load on top of the existing situation. That's why you have been seeing various slowdowns and timeouts, as traffic touches off a bottleneck to some back end service and the web servers fall over behind it. I've been rewriting some of our worst queries (the first was the thread/group view query) to take advantage of some fancy nosql thing that uses magnets or something for speed. I think you'll notice that while there are still random traffic spikes that stall the servers, the performance currently is better then it has been in quite a while.
Anyway, I have very little respect for people who post comments like the one I replied to, although I did consider it better then my initial impulse to just firewall him the fuck off my servers. I try to be civil where I can, though not everyone can see such gestures. :/
EDIT: WHY THE GODDAMN FUCK ARE MY BADGES BROKEN
EDIT2: It's Christmas, nobody's working right now. Except when I get a text telling me the new stupid magic database thing is lagging and I should restart it.
EDIT3: MERRY CHRISTMAS
I was going to do a wall of text, but thanks to this person I can just use the quote button. You didn't seem like a completely irrational dick who doesn't care about the people who use this site, it's because your only responses were short trolls, when there were legitimate complaints. If you do make tiny changes addressing complaints, but those exact same complaints are rolling in, the reasonable thing to do is to spell it out with something along the lines of "I know you guys don't like this, so were doing that to change it". Keeping silent about everything and just tossing out "We're working on stuff" just pisses people off.Bob Kyuss said:
Still, I will admit I've noticed that the loading times aren't as much of a pain in the ass as before, so definitely good work there.
**DISCLAIMER: I WAS A COMPLAINER!!!**
Back after a few days of silence, work, and observing. I can see improvements so far. The use of a picture for the side borders is the first, and best, fix so far. Great work.
The servers seem to be handling traffic and database queries a bit better than when the new site went live. Good work Kross.
I think one thing people have to remember is that the IT staff, like Kross, are under immense pressure from above. I work as a IT Support/Server Admin at a school with 1000 students and over 100 staff. Each and every student has a laptop, same with teachers. And the rest have desktops. Do we always do things right? No, of cause not. Do we always do what we think needs to be done? Of cause not! Do we do what management wants us to do. YES!
I believe that the responses are getting through, but have to work through the various levels in a business, which the Escapist is, a business.
I think if they made the latest news more noticeable, and near the top somehow, then the site would work. The main itemssection at the top has been tweaked with Escapist-grown stuff. Random sections of the site aren't being shown as SQL queries, and I don't have to wait 5 minutes per page to load. Seems like progress.
A separate article explaining what has been happening lately would go along way settling the masses, and make the people feel more included in the process besides just a one way yelling match.
Also, a word the the wise to Kross. Don't make fun of the userbase. I did that once...and...yeah...the kids mum was a cop. Nuf said. (He should have NOT been looking at porn all day...)
Have a good Christmas, or other festive/religious time of year.
Back after a few days of silence, work, and observing. I can see improvements so far. The use of a picture for the side borders is the first, and best, fix so far. Great work.
The servers seem to be handling traffic and database queries a bit better than when the new site went live. Good work Kross.
I think one thing people have to remember is that the IT staff, like Kross, are under immense pressure from above. I work as a IT Support/Server Admin at a school with 1000 students and over 100 staff. Each and every student has a laptop, same with teachers. And the rest have desktops. Do we always do things right? No, of cause not. Do we always do what we think needs to be done? Of cause not! Do we do what management wants us to do. YES!
I believe that the responses are getting through, but have to work through the various levels in a business, which the Escapist is, a business.
I think if they made the latest news more noticeable, and near the top somehow, then the site would work. The main itemssection at the top has been tweaked with Escapist-grown stuff. Random sections of the site aren't being shown as SQL queries, and I don't have to wait 5 minutes per page to load. Seems like progress.
A separate article explaining what has been happening lately would go along way settling the masses, and make the people feel more included in the process besides just a one way yelling match.
Also, a word the the wise to Kross. Don't make fun of the userbase. I did that once...and...yeah...the kids mum was a cop. Nuf said. (He should have NOT been looking at porn all day...)
Have a good Christmas, or other festive/religious time of year.
I'm not entirely sure where you're getting [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.335457-Dear-Escapist-This-site-is-getting-slower-and-slower#13546166] your [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/6.333298-The-New-Shiny-Escapist?page=32#13536106] information [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/6.333298-The-New-Shiny-Escapist?page=30#13525652] from [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/6.333298-The-New-Shiny-Escapist?page=12#13500960]. (Never mind the various posts and responses in the Tech [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Tech-Team] and Redesign [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Escapist-Redesign-Information] group - and all the other various staff responses)Bob Kyuss said:
Not particularly. I don't believe I implied anywhere that I thought everyone else who supported the site was spewing irrational anger at the staff who worked hard on it. I have nothing but respect for those who show us respect. I believe my posts and dealings with the community have pretty consistently shown that. Treating ill conceived rants as the jokes that they should be, is out of consideration for the poster - rather then assuming they are either short sighted and incapable of reading other responses or exhibiting simple patience while we deal with a tedious process over the holidays; OR assuming they are just a troll and banning them outright.Bob Kyuss said:
Really, what person who claims to want to support the site thinks "fuck you I'm leaving" is at all useful to the people who run the site that purportedly means enough for you to pay purely to donate. As all of the still functioning (and even added upon) Pubclub benefits aren't enough to stop a demand of a refund for philosophical reasons? I don't know what other positive light I could view his comment other then the joke I treated it as. We don't hate site traffic. It's kind of a nice thing.
Things are updating, and I'm sorry if it is not quite as fast as you would like (we'll have more coders someday, that day is not today). We are listening and things will be improving towards wherever we can find consensus. I personally try not to directly comment on the color scheme because I have nothing to do with the color scheme of the site. Other staff has I believe, and there are alternative colors in the works. Adding other backgrounds (like the blue) require we make sure all the other elements of the site show up against it, which takes some time. We'll have more background selections added over time, but we are still working out the exact details of the implementation.
We do like the community (why wouldn't we?), and are working to make things fall into line with what you guys want. We've never had any tolerance for parts of the community that have nothing better to do then spew hate on our forums without thought.
So I've held myself back from commenting and much other Escapist stuff for a bit, aside from LRR-related content, so I thought I'd jump back in with some updated feedback!
I... Really fucking like the new layout now! Well, kind of. Sort of. Maybe? I dunno.
The image that's set as the background is MUCH better than the blinding white! I personally think a random background per month would be pretty neat! Maybe the biggest game of the month could relate to that somehow?
I can understand the concern about the snow hurting CPU speeds, but my CPU kinda sucks and I'm not getting much slowness from the site.. Good thing there's a Turn It Off function though!
There's still a few things I have some problems with, but it's really not bad enough to require a "CHANGE THIS RIGHT THE FUCK GOD DAMN NOW", y'know?
The front page still looks a bit cluttered and stuff, but it seems to be getting there! The few things I said earlier about the news ticker, etc could still be awesome to see fixed up though.
I also tweaked my monitor's contrast settings as well as some overall graphics options and it's boosted the quality of everything else as well, so.. Go Team?
I... Really fucking like the new layout now! Well, kind of. Sort of. Maybe? I dunno.
The image that's set as the background is MUCH better than the blinding white! I personally think a random background per month would be pretty neat! Maybe the biggest game of the month could relate to that somehow?
I can understand the concern about the snow hurting CPU speeds, but my CPU kinda sucks and I'm not getting much slowness from the site.. Good thing there's a Turn It Off function though!
There's still a few things I have some problems with, but it's really not bad enough to require a "CHANGE THIS RIGHT THE FUCK GOD DAMN NOW", y'know?
The front page still looks a bit cluttered and stuff, but it seems to be getting there! The few things I said earlier about the news ticker, etc could still be awesome to see fixed up though.
I also tweaked my monitor's contrast settings as well as some overall graphics options and it's boosted the quality of everything else as well, so.. Go Team?
So the layout stil sucks, the content displayed is still disorganised and uninformative as to the content, the loading times are still a joke and we've replaced the 'flashbang' white with a bandwidth killing flash background...
If you like I know a guy from my university days who used to do web design a lot more competently than this. I'm sure saving the ass of a major website would look good on his CV.
Site navigation is such a pain these days that I only come on to see if a sane person has taken over and fixed it and to check here to see if there's an explaination for why said sane person hasn't stormed in and saved the day.
Eventually I'll get tired and stop coming here, catch the video content when it eventually filters down to youtube and eventually be able to keep up to date when your content providers abandon you for other site... because you can no longer pay them... you know because the ad views will have dropped off and you'll be recieving too few subscriptions.
If you like I know a guy from my university days who used to do web design a lot more competently than this. I'm sure saving the ass of a major website would look good on his CV.
Site navigation is such a pain these days that I only come on to see if a sane person has taken over and fixed it and to check here to see if there's an explaination for why said sane person hasn't stormed in and saved the day.
Eventually I'll get tired and stop coming here, catch the video content when it eventually filters down to youtube and eventually be able to keep up to date when your content providers abandon you for other site... because you can no longer pay them... you know because the ad views will have dropped off and you'll be recieving too few subscriptions.
I whined before, so it seemed appropriate to also give credit where credit is due. The holiday borders are easy on the eyes, and appreciated.
