Comments on We've Redecorated

Registered commenting! It's an Easter miracle!!

I hate the idea of registered commenting. Leave that chicken shit to the mainstream blogs.

What advantages will registered commenting provide?

Did you guys donate the old menu bar and the other stuff you took down to the Value Village on 11th? I might could use some of those vintage web elements .

Well, currently the commenting doesn't "remember me" even when I ask it to. So maybe registering will be better than whatever is going on now...

I hope those speech bubbles are going to come out of a little profile picture.

Hey, as long as you're asking: is there any way to return the focus of the page to the body after the page and all the sidebars and stuff have finished loading? I'm a keyboard guy, and I wish I could use my Page Down button without having to click once in the article zone first.

Registered commenting will do away with about 80% of what is fun about Slog, and will reduce it to just another boring, mainstream blog. I'd think very hard about that if I were you.

Put a line or some kind of a divider between the posts. They all just run together.

Love the redesign. And yes, please to registered commenting (w/avatars).

@3, I believe registered commenting is supposed to:
1. prevent me from pretending to be Fnarf, Will, or other Slog celebrities
2. reduce the amount of spam / make it easier to moderate
3. Provide enhanced services and forum-like features

In reality, it'll just be sealing the door to the echo-chamber that is slog. /shrug

Hmm, I seem to have totally lost the stylesheets (moved to a new computer).

I hate the speech bubbles and please, no avatars. I'm a human with a point of view which can be expressed in words. Thank you.

I hope they fix the remembering part, but also hope that registered commenting is bound to a login/password match (hint, Fnarf, it's FnarfIsADouche) and allows us to occassionally post with slightly altered "names" like the one above.

Mind you, I sometimes turn off annoying scripts, like any audio/video ads (unless I click to start) and some annoying flash that "pops" up when I go within ten feet of it (NO! No! Get out of my way I'm trying to click on the Music Events you bad bad ad!) ... so maybe that's why it's not working in Firefox on WinXP Pro.

No borders around block quotes please!

5280 @ 8 said it best. Again, registered comments is so safe. Is spamming really that big of a problem? Seriously. Leave the comments free and un-registered!

If Fnarf is a douche...Jesus. What the hell does that make Will in Seattle?

I'd be happy if the article heading in the permalink included a colon after the category so it didn't read "Housekeeping We've Redecorated." That sentence makes no sense to me.

having a button for savage seems odd to me.

I know there's always someone that hates change, but this time it's me. The ads feel really overpowering right now.

Agree strongly with DanFan - the lack of seperators between posts is very strange.

Yeah, I'm still getting plain white backgrounds and no separators.

Mr. Poe, consider the purpose of a douche. That's my job here, where Will is concerned.

He called me a "n00b" yesterday, it was priceless.

@17 -- My hero.

I like the speech bubbles though...

What will Iraq War Spoofer do after we have registration?

The Savage button reminds me of the "Ebert" button at the Chicago Sun-Times site.

Way to chickenshit out with the registering BS.

I guess now no one will get in the way of Sven, Fnarf, and Poe from sucking each others cock on each slog post.

Great...

In general (ha! general!) I like the new look, but dear God, why does the right advertising rail have to be so long? Also, not a big fan of the black background on the pull-down menus. It's a bit...harsh.

I like how everything else looks nice and shiny and new. Nice work. Carry on.

It's a nice redesign, for the most part. A bit cleaner.

Not a fan of the moving "Community" box. In general, things that move on the screen are distracting when I'm trying to read something. I know it's moving so it calls attention to itself, but it's annoying.

For the same reason, I really, really hate some of the ads (this predates your makeover). I know you don't create the ads, but you can choose what you accept and don't accept. The ones that piss me off are the ones that have really spastic movement. There's a Toyota Matrix one that I noticed earlier today. I couldn't NOT notice it. When something is jumping around that much in such a jerky fashion, it makes it all but impossible for me to read placid text. In general, ads that call attention to themselves because they have a really hot guy on them are cool. Ads that call attention to themselves by giving me a headache are not cool, and just piss me off.

I know you need the ad revenue to keep the business running, but don't do it at the expense of alienating your readers/viewers.

Fnarf rocks. That is all.

Will there be a mobile slog version?

I wouldn't worry too much about the obnoxious ads. After they go to registered comments, their page hits are going to tank so badly that they won't be able to give the ads away.

Obviously I'm pro-avatar, but if it doesn't work out, I'll still heart you all. Love the redesign elements -- simple and clean.

As long as avatars derived from anime, celebrities, or containing animated GIFs are grounds for permanent ban, I'm OK with them.

testing preview...

does it actually preview...

basically the old version's preview was totally borked and never looked like what the actual post looked like.

i like the cleaner design. the ads are easy to get rid of in ff, so no beef there.

registered comments would be cool only if you could use them to interact with other sloggers through PMs or something.

actually how could i forget. threads, people. threads. i'd take threads over user accnts.

and make the shit under the speech bubble sans-serif. it's hard to read 10px bold serif font, particularly on xp machines that don't have clear type installed (like my pos work machine).

No, threads are bad.

How dare you make fun of my threads!

It doesn't seem to me like you guys get a lot of spam on the Slog. Now, over at Dlisted (where I am a registered commenter) there are constantly posts from "meet-a-millionaire" and "interracial-dating" web sites touting their wares. So, good luck w/ the registration because spammers will find a way to get through. Or is it that you want registered commenters because you only want posts from people who agree with everything you put in here? In which case, having your own group of cheerleaders is not the sort of thing that speaks well of "Seattle's Only Newspaper Because We Said So."

Don't know if this is directly related to the redesign, but is my memory going, or did "Windsor Knots" move from Enemy of Slog to Friend of Slog?

@40

It moved to "friends". The "friends" blogroll is ridiculously large. Someone should work on that.

what's that smell? it smells poopy in here.

Be sure to let us know when registration goes live, because some of the trolls will probably try to cockblock a few regulars' names.

41. It has actually been trimmed. They dropped my blog from that list at some recent point.

i keep getting this weird / fucking annoying error message asking me if i wish to "debug." i don't even know what that means. i just say no. the page freezes until i answer. and it does it over and over and over again. i guess it wants to be absolutely certain i do not want to debug.

this never happened to me on the old slog, although it is a common problem for me elsewhere. reason #34957 why i should be working instead of fucking around on the internets.

not interested in registered names

but then, censorship is a modern goal in most everything

and when will there be a directive to not use the word FUCK so FUCKING much?

leave well enough alone, it is not broken except to the control freaks, I enjoy the off the wall stuff with phony names more than the regs. who have become predictible

tell the people who need registered handles to go find some beans to count

Comment 38 above is not by me.

All for registered commenting or anything that eliminates posting by cowards knowing they do not have to take responsibility for their posts.

Aaand 47 is exactly why we need registered comments.

The slog policy is "officially" against sock-puppetry but I'm never seen a post deleted because of it.

I once emailed the webmaster here and Anthony Hecht deleted a sock pupped comment within a few minutes.

Well, at least I can see the permalinks now, so that makes things a teensy bit better.

As for registered comments, I admit to being somewhat ambivalent. While I find the trolls and spoofers occasionally annoying, they don't bother me that much. And I do admit it will dilute the overall wackiness to a great degree. Personally, I can deal with the wackiness, so long as you continue to exercise the option to occasionally and judiciously delete patently offensive posts.

But then, I've never had a problem taking ownership for anything I've put on any web site, even if it's made me look like an idiot on occasion; that's what keeps me (more-or-less) honest.

And seriously, can you PUHLEEZE center the fucking text boxes on the page? This off-center crap is above all just so pointless, stupid, and pointless. Just because you CAN change something, doesn't means it's always a good idea to do so.

I'm getting used to the new format but I think the Titles of the posts should be left-justified, not centered, it looks weird and makes it slightly hard to read.

I also don't like all the white space to the left of the screen. Make it grey too.

Great job on the redesign of the site. I like the new features added to the CSS. It gives the website a better feel and is easily more navigable, especially the more interactive menu bar at the top of the page. I also like how everything is much easily organized now. The change to a better and slinder san serif font helps the site look cleaner and less clogged. Placing the ads the right side of the page helps free up the site from appearing too cluttered.

what is the character limit on comments? Is there one? It needs to be shorter. people need to learn to be concise, but until they learn, a shorter character limit will do.

other than that - I am growing fond of the speech bubbles.