I choose to believe that it’s irony.
I didn’t scroll down all the way, so I don’t know if I saw ads at the bottom. I did not, however, see any ads at the top, which I’m glad of for multiple reasons: On the old design, while the top banner ad loaded, the page unpredictably jumped around twice, making it hard to hit the link one wanted.
On the whole, though, I’m not terribly fond of the new design, but I’m not sure how much of that is just because it’s different and change is scary. A fair assessment would need a week or two of getting used to it.
The only concrete thing that I don’t like is that you can no longer see Threadspotting without scrolling down. But that might be made up for by the links to related columns and related threads. I dunno.
Cecil is described as the “world’s smartest humat” on the home page. :smack:
edit: I just noticed someone pointed this out before me. Sorry.
Smartest. Not Most-Accurate.
He’s smarter than the average beat.
On the Message Board main page, yes. But I don’t see that option on straightdope.com
This is like finding out that Playboy had articles.
The new formatting will require us to add some spacing when we use a quote, as it apparently deletes at least one space between quote-and-text. It’s much harder to read a post that contains quotes in the new formatting because of this space-deleting feature.
We can get used to it, but it will take a while.
Note that while the board is switching back and forth, anyone trying to make a post should copy-paste it somewhere before hitting Submit–posts can be lost when the switching happens. (Why is the switching happening so much, anyway? I’m using Chrome on a desktop, if that makes any difference.)
The “Read a random Straight Dope column” seems kind of broken; it only returns a very limited number of articles, all from either this year or the last one.
(looks around confused) Oh, far out man.
You mean like this?
I can’t tell as I’m seeing the ‘old’ version, now (in which your post is nicely-spaced and readable).
It’s been back and forth all day for me. The menu page has, more often than not, been the new version, while the actual threads have been one, then the other.
It hurts … make it stop …
I actually like the design of the new site. Of course I haven’t viewed it in mobile yet, and the “mobile-friendly” revamp of the MB made it completely unusable in mobile so we’ll see.
Sherrerd, it sounds like you’re talking about the forum skin(s). That’s a completely different topic from the www.straightdope.com page, which is what this thread is about.
Wait, Playboy has articles? :eek:
Yes: “the,” “a,” “an,” and “some.”
It’s not bad. I would have preferred a dynamic page that changed its layout a bit for desktop, so it wasn’t so big, but, for a mobile-friendly site, it’s pretty nice.
Does this mean that development time can now be focused on getting the board running on HTTPS and then getting the theme fixed up?
Why on earth hasn’t this been fixed yet? Jebus.
On the other hand, maybe a humat is something really really smart someplace in the world. Or something.
If you zoom out, it looks better.