Putting comments on a seperate page from the posts is way worse than anything ISIS ever did.

I don't like the new, all squished to one side, portrait format. Is it designed to work on phones, rather than on my laptop which prefers a landscape layout?

@2, what this country has done in war (declared and otherwise) to civilians is far worse than what ISIS has done. They just put their atrocities on YouTube

Times have changed and we must also change to adapt to societal expectations

Wow.

So this guy in NC shoots and kills three students, ostensibly over a parking dispute. A 2011 post from his fb page:

"I guess after the horrible tragedy early this week in Arizona, all Glock pistols will officially be labeled "assault weapons." While I never cared for Glocks personally, it stinks that anyone would blame a firearm rather than the operator of such firearm for such a terrible act. I think I'll start blaming McDonalds for my weight problem, Christianity for the Ku Klux Klan, and Islam for terrorism."

I'm guessing this scumbag is already regretting shooting those kids, probably a heat of the moment decision. I just think this is good example of another responsible gun owner (until he wasn't) who owned a firearm for the supposed protection and safety it would bring but instead the gun has ruined his life (and ended three more.) We all experience bits of insanity and rage from time to time. The ability to act on those passing feelings immediately and irrevocably is a very dangerous thing. I agree with his sentiment that we should blame the operator of the firearm but that doesn't change the fact that without that gun he would be at work and those kids would be in class and everyone would be better off.
Read more at http://www.wral.com/chapel-hill-police-p…

Also this:
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/politics/a…

@3: Yeah, it feels like I am using a phone app despite being on a computer. I liked Slog becuase it was about content and not colorful pictures, but I guess that is changing. I will never understand the urge to make something that is simple and functional more complex without adding function. It is the signal of bad design.

The overuse of crappy stock images is one of the worst parts of this blog, and they have chosen to showcase it apparently.

@3: What browser are you using?

The new look looks spiffy in Safari on a macbook, okay in IE on a laptop. I agree with @2 that comments were better in a little window before.
The new you way write, preview, and post comments is nicely improved.

@6. You nailed it.

If you follow the link to the gentrification article, there is an interesting phenomena they note in poverty rates. Census tracts where poverty went up, did so because the tract lost population as higher income and educated people move out. In the tracts where poverty rates declined, population increased as higher income people moved in. So it exposes the limitation of a poverty rate as a measure of the relative welfare and economic mobility of poor people in an area. The rates are changing because of what is happening to the denominator in the calculation, total number of households, rather than the numerator, which is people in poverty.

@4 - That's like saying because we've harmed our environment with pesticides I'm going to let these misquotes flourish in old standing water in the backyard.

For once I agree with raindrop (@ 11), although I'm not sure the simile is successful.

@8: I am on a Mac, using Firefox. I tried Safari, since you said it looked great there, and all I got was the exact same squished portrait effect, but with added adverts (because I have Adblocker Plus on Firefox). Safari doesn't make any of it wider. I want my paragraphs to be more than a couple of words wide :-(

Putting comments on a separate page provides space for more ads, even if you've killed them with AdBlock on the story page. But it only takes a moment to kill those too, which then works on all comments pages. However, it's annoying to open comments in a new tab just so you can refer back to the story when writing a comment.

The new format looks better in Chrome (auto-hiding header, among other things) than my years-old Safari version, so Chrome just became my default and I happily threw some more money at AdBlock for the Chrome plug-in.

But I miss the old super-simple Slog Mobile, which now automatically redirects here. Hate the forced phone/tablet-optimized proportions. The old Slog Mobile would pour text into whatever screen width you had, filling from edge to edge.

Hmmm new comment system breaks the greasemonkey plugin that allows me to block users like sgt_doom, raindrip and the such. grrrr

@16 - Nested comments were nice, too. Oh well.

Horrible change to have comments on a separate page, unless the goal is to reduce commenting and reduce traffic to Slog, in which case it's a great change.

Never change, dear raindrop @11 :)

This new redesign feels like it was meant for 2 years ago. The headline text, on the phone, is too big and overwhelming, and you can barely get two paragraphs on the page at a time. The line length feels too short and broken up.

And there's so much white, but not enough white space. Let the website breathe.

Hmmm the site is now much harder to read (mobile) but there's less content so I guess it evens out.

Why did you guys push comments off of the article page itself? Ugh. The discussions were half of the fun to trivially follow.

Wow, the ads sure got big!

Ugh, Stranger. Please create a separate posting announcing the redesign so we all can share gripes and praises and tricks and tips and ux philosophies there instead of cluttering all these other posts.

@22 & 25

+1

The statement from the police union rep sounds more like "We need to start being more careful to keep our fascist opinions secret, because when we talk about what we believe, it pisses a lot of people off" instead of "we need to start figuring out why our beliefs are so out of step with the public we're supposed to be serving."

The Nobel Peace Prize winning prez is going to bomb some more folks into a modern democracy. It'll surely succeed.

Everything is big, big, big. The font on Google search results keeps getting bigger, too. In fact, this reminds me of that redesign quite a bit. LOADS of white space. It's a tablet world now, I guess. I'd like it all to be 8 point myself, thanks to my nearsightedness.

@27, my thoughts exactly.

What would it take to have this morning news become a video feed with a reporter spewing this news? A kickstarter? Has slog considered this? I would support it and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

@3
Well. It looks terrible in my phone, but I guess what @22 says.

NEW PAGE LAYOUT/COMMENT MECHANICS IS SHIT
ALL IS LOST

on the plus side, I like the preview window to make sure I've got my tags working properly
hmm, either tags were disabled or the preview doesn't work. time to find out!

35

Well, tags still work. Better close that one.
Preview frame doesn't account for them. What's the point of even having the preview frame if all it does is show you what you're typing in a second place? That is LITERALLY ALL IT DOES.

Hey everyone.. thanks for your feedback! So we can look into any issues more completely, please email webmaster@thestranger.com with any comments or complaints, and please include the URL of the page you're on, what OS and browser you're using (including what type of phone if you're mobile) and screenshots if appropriate.

Thanks!

These are not new societal expectations. People have always expected our cities to refrain from hiring racists, homophobes, and power-tripping assholes to work as peace officers. What is new is that it's now easier for cops to publicly express views that indicate they are unfit for the job than it previously was.

Times haven't changed, it's just that SPOG still lives in a universe where it is still 1919.

And the new layout is very 2005 retro.

It all looks the same in a feed reader (e.g., Newsblur). I come to the site to read and post comments, then subscribe to a comment feed if I want to keep up with it. I definitely prefer the old mobile view to this.

And all links should default to a new window ( target="_blank").

This redesign strikes me as a desktop that has been ported from a mobile site. I like the mobile site better - it doesn't look like a free Wordpress blog mobile plugin (I like that each entry incorporates post images and features long excerpts rather than the previous text-only design), but as has been said above, the 40px headings for the full article on the mobile sites is Kanye-sized.

I also sympathize with the editorial choice to sequester this motley band of Slog troll/nerds to another window. We are like regulars that show up at every Slog party, drink half the booze (while complaining about the offerings), and then stumble out the door.

@36 Can we lindywest the webmaster? Without the rapeyness, I mean?

Christ, did you dummies do any usability testing first?

Feels flat

Gah

Good fucking god this format fucking sucks shit!!

Anthony, instead of making an announcement like that 36 comments deep inside a "Morning News" post, why not make a separate post about the redesign?

I'm guessing you guys want to pretend that there was no redesign so we don't talk about it amongst ourselves.

What. The. Hell.
Do not like redesign.
For one thing Most Commented is now just that. Threads with the most comments, so the second one down is a dead conversation from last November.
What use is that? I want to know what threads are active now.
I am displeased .
And stinkbug is right. Go write a separate post explaining the redesign and why on earth you all thought it was a good idea.

Maybe someone is getting a jump on the regrets issue for next year.

why won't my comments post from my phone? Why are they yellow? Why are they sitting on my phone as though they are here for all to see and yet are not here for all to see?
I'm really not liking this at all Anthony.

@ansel the CD was ineligible because it was genterfied in the 90s by that wave of tech/artists. Look at the data in the link, a lot of Seattle was already genterfied in the 90s. The poor have been pushed out of Seattle for over 20yrs now, the middle class artists are just paying attention now cause it's just affecting them now. That's why I keep saying don't lay all the blame on the new crop of tech, this shits been going on for a while an the people here have been the ones who could've votef to do something.

Also the comments on a new page sucks

I am going to label this the "Honduran Beauty Queen Redesign".

@stikbug: Yes. Perfect! And it's like I didn't have a lot of fun in The Honduran Beauty Queen thread, but it's time to let go now.
We'll see if this comment shows up. I like doing this on my phone and if they fuck it up for me I will be very unhappy.

So, I just sent this to webmaster@thestranger.com and tossing it out here. This is a slightly clarified and expanded list, Anthony, than my email.

1. Please, please, please put the comments back at the bottom of the article itself on one page. If you can. I hate the trend of hiding comments. It's one thing on the NY Times, but… c'mon, put them out there.

2a. Where's our threaded comments? Like this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/201502…

2b. Bottomless threading please. Like Reddit. Give us an "expand button" for the whiners who don't want to see past the first few levels of depth.

3a. Email notifications to respond to comments: add a "Reply to" option on every comment. So, I see a comment by Fnarf and I reply on the site, and it gets posted. He gets an email alert saying, Joe said, "This bullshit. CLICK HERE TO REPLY TO JOE."

3b. For advertising bonus points, my clicking "CLICK HERE TO REPLY TO JOE" takes Fnarf back to the Slog comments thread to reply, exposing Fnarf to more advertising. The email link should take him back to MY SPECIFIC REPLY.

3c. Give a "subscribe to discussion" option to get mails on EVERY REPLY POSTED. Some masochists will appreciate this, or people into the deeper and more exhaustive arguments. Have a clear UNSUBSCRIBE option also.

#2 and #3 could drive a LOT of traffic back to the site in a brain dead manner. You know how 100+ comments are a rarity still, or at least very uncommon? 2-3 could make them much more common.

The overall look of the changes otherwise is VERY nice.

Isn't anyone going to remark on the permanent disabling of unregistered comments? That's a definite plus. And if Cato hates it, you know it isn't all bad.

Good thing Android allows me to override the zoom control, otherwise I'd never be able to read any of this on my phone.

@55: That is fucking awesome, but it happened about a month ago, didn't it? I remember a lot of people saying it was great when it happened.

Good god this page looks more like a plain word document to more I look at it, so flat and sterile.

@ 57, I remarked on it and Dan Savage answered that it was a "test." They still had the option of allowing unregistered comments, but apparently the test results are in and unregistereds are out.

I often delve into the archives or use the search function because my weird brain recalls snatches of discussion from years ago, while not always recalling errands I need to do today.

So I'm glad that the current Slog iteration does not erase unregistered comments from ages past, which were often important for continuity of the conversation.

But it's odd that the comment numbering is destroyed (all set to zero), though they are in order by date and time. Links to individual comments are therefore broken.

Random example: http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/20…

@59 Anthony said they're gonna fix that in a few days. Presumably they just need to patch the older database stuff to whatever new schema they're using.

Thanks, Joe.

In non website formatting news (who really gives af?), Joe Bidden misses his old butt budy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNxYLgUg…