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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
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Comments
I'm sure it's lovely on mobile devices, but it totally sucks for me.
One thing that blows: comment numbers in the deep archives are gone -- all comments are numbered zero, which renders much of the conversation unintelligible. I frequently refer back to inflammatory lies I have posted in the past so I can share them with other suffering individuals.
- On a desktop, clicking on the little quote graphic or listed number of comments is a bit harder than the previous design since it's so small. I guess "2 Comments" instead of just "2" is considered cluttered in today's world though.
Also, I don't like the short line length. It really makes me scan around. Plus, I don't like the width of the border on either side of the paragraph. Give it a little bit of breathing room...
Your text is far more legible. You have consistent font usage. The page load is, despite the whines, faster - especially with AdBlock -even on mobile.
Though is would look into hosting all your images on a CDN and that will speed up the mobile load time even more.
...but it looks like you disabled the capability to use it at all now. What?
One question: what is the deal with being unable to zoom in? BBC mobile site has always had it, too.
Otherwise, the new design is an improvement, if not as big an improvement as eliminating unregistered commenters. Good riddance to a certain previously ubiquitous troll.
I can't even get Adblock to stop it, as it reloads itself if I close and re-open SLOG.
Readers: NO
Stranger to it's readers:
Ok, well how about we come up with an app for those phone you all seem to love, will that phone ;love rub off on the Stranger?
Readers: NO
Stranger to it's readers: Ok, well how about more fluffy pieces that bear little resemblance to the Stranger two yes ago?
Readers: NO, Fuck off and stop bothering me asshole.
Stranger to it's staff: Hey! seems they love our new direction here at the Stranger, we had a strong reaction.
Minor annoyances/oddities:
1. I'm now part of the Gay Old Guard, and like dearest Catalina, I don't see as well as I used to. This is one of the few sites that won't let me zoom the screen to increase the size. I can still read it okay on an iPad, but this makes it utterly unreadable for my aging eyes on any smart phone with a smaller screen.
2. I guess I'll have to figure out ad-block for the iPad. I'm okay with ads and photos when I'm on wi-fi at home (I recognize that's how you pay the bills), but I don't want to have to pay the cellular data download if I'm pulling ads on a mobile device.
3. Odd paragraph breaks. As I'm typing this, there was no line space between "Minor annoyances" and "1....", but in the preview, it shows a double line space there. We'll see how it formats when I press "Post" in a minute. (I'm typing this on my Mac, not my iPad, if that makes any difference.)
Minor inconveniences aside, I generally prefer the new look on the iPad using the Stranger app.
Followup to above. It posted just as I wrote it in the comment box, but when i was writing it, the comment box and Preview box did not match.
Please slap whoever decided to use canned stock photos, and never use them again.
Rob Brezsny is so awesome !
Your dislike of him only reveals that you are terrible trolls.
Also also, I like that my comment is highlighted for me, and that the preview updates in real time. Nice work, people.
(a big improvement on phone and tablet - thank you)
All and all not bad though :)
Also threading in the comments would be great....
I'm also not fond of the font in blockquotes being about twice the size of the text in the rest of the article, which seems to have carried over from the old mobile site, or this grey text in grey highlighting I'm getting while typing in the comment box on Chrome for Android.
That's a minor inconvenience though. The part I hate is that it does that fucking thing that when I click a link on the page it pops up an ad page in a separate tab. Really? Are you taking a page from web porn sites? I'll put up with it for porn, but SLOG?
Emma dear, I can do jazz hands on other websites and it makes things bigger, so I don't think it's an Apple thing.
All you have to do is hange the viewport meta tag's user-scalable property from no to yes:
Current, icky anti-user setting:
meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no"
Better, user-friendly setting:
meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=yes"
While viewport is useful, there's no good reason to set user-scalable to no that I can think of, other than hating visitors to your web site. It's frickin' evil, it is.
- view of article and comments in a single page
- old mobile abbreviated view of article list
And I have to scroll through a shitload of ads to see the Most Commented sidebar? Lame.
And you only have a few articles on each page? Amateurish.
I've been here since Day 1, and recently SLOG was borderline unreadable based upon lack of good content. Now it's unreadable because it's just simply hard to read!
It's not adaptive, it's reductive.
There has been little on Slog to catch my interest of late, but this is really the nail in the coffin. It seems like Slog is dying a very slow death, and is now trying to ratchet up advertising with clickbait, as opposed to actual interesting content. But not even doing that well.
Seriously, guys, I've been around since day 1 of Slog. There is little content here; just links to the Stranger main site, which also now sucks. Nothing provocative, nothing interesting. Savage is dialing it in at best, when he's not just posting repeats of previous columns. You've become the Seattle Weekly without the content or community of commenters. You've bored us all to death, and probably yourselves, too.
Good luck with all this.
I think the redesign does not foster the Slog community I enjoy. The redesign makes it harder to follow and participate in the Slog action. If you want to know which use cases have been broken, let me know - I'll kindly share.
The redesign may have improved the appearance of The Stranger on mobile, but it's a big loss to The Slog.
I prefer the comments in a new tab and press Ctrl plus the link to have the two tabs side by side. Before, I always had to resize the overlapping comment window to max. It was a pain to do every single time. The live preview is good, removing the necessity of an additional action.
However, what I believe would help in keeping discussions going is a practical format using REAL threads, each with nested replies. It would help when, now, we have to hope #167 @ MazatlanDiver (I just made that up) is still reading and will respond. Or we have to scroll through (and get entangled in) the seaweed snarl of commenters whose only interest is carrying on a semi-private dialogue/love fest/critique. When there are comments on The Morning News, they're all jumbled up. Very frustrating when the news has many stories.