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We pushed a change today that addresses embedded tweets. The site will no longer load and run the javascript widget from twitter, rather just get the tweet content from twitter’s JSON API.
Better option: screenshot the tweets and keep them locally, with an external link in case someone wants to click on it (also prevents deletions from affecting your content, because people delete stuff when they mess up all the time). FTFY, YW.
BTW have you by any chance managed to get a copy of wireshark and look at your pages with that stuff loading? Ask Morgan for help with that maybe?
A right-click still functions as a left-click (and right-click) on the Facebook, Twitter, and comment icons (but not the email icon), the hamburger menu icon, and the wide blue band that is clicked to toggle the display of comments.
The reason for this is so those buttons respond immediately on touch devices. I’m wondering for which buttons this is and isn’t okay. I feel the share buttons and the hamburger icon aren’t necessarily “links.” The comments button and purple band the author’s name should probably act like normal links, I’ll update those.
Working on this!
That makes sense. If it’s not really a link, then all that’s lost is “Inspect Element”. But it’s kind of ugly if the right-click functions as a left-click and also displays the context menu, so maybe that should be fixed. Thanks for the explanation.
I’ll look into if we can have the best of both worlds.
A right-click on the author’s name in the “Contact The Author” section (located beneath the article) still functions as a left-click (and sometimes opens the context menu).
Tom, I’m sure you know that after posting a comment, the comment isn’t being located because the URL is being generated in the old format. I just want to remind you that there are lots of links to comments embedded in old comments that are also in that old format.
I’m surprised that a site founded by Glenn Greenwald would be trying so hard to look like Vox.com and Medium. Please drastically reduce the size of the header images and headline text and go back to something closer to the well-tested and well-reasoned format of a normal newspaper.
Yes, the new design is loud and ‘on-trend’.
No, it isn’t good for reading news.
I want to read good journalism (which is much appreciated), not be distracted and bothered by bad, faddish “design”.
There seems to be a weird imperative where management has to take something that isn’t perfect, but is decent, and totally destroy it in the name of the almighty redesign.
The new logo is nice though. Good job on that.
Ah very nice.
As someone who uses an old browser (FF 11; later editions mess with my old cpu), the whole background covers all the articles, so I have to disable Javascript.
It’s always good to know that the old Google disease of unneeded lay-out changes and needless Javascripting, continues to spread all over the internet.
Thanks for letting us know about FF 11. There was a bug causing layout issues in older versions of Firefox which has now been fixed.
These ‘improvements’ and ‘adding in later’ are all reasons you that should have put this site in a BETA/separate machine. It’s rude to use your users as your main and only test bed. You’re not remunerating them — look at barncat, he’s given you a lot of advice. As has Dan, and as have I. Your long-term readers/commenters have all been trying to help because you aren’t really giving us a CHOICE if we want to stick around. Which is to say you should appreciate your users for doing this but learn from it, too: THIS BELONGS IN BETA. ON A SEPARATE BOX.
Have you hired someone to check the security on this site, btw? Or is that something you plan on doing after your live recreation of the site is done?
Nail, bang.
Incidentally, I hope you don’t think I’m deriving any pleasure from this. It feels like a horrifying, grueling, shitty task and I’m pretty irritated every time I come on here — probably far more than you are by my pointing this stuff out. I am not nor have I ever been a troll. This isn’t trolling.
If you have discovered specific security vulnerabilities you can email our security team (morgan@firstlook.org, micah.lee@theintercept.com) and we’ll address them promptly.
You just don’t get it.
Well, I just said you didn’t get it, but I, in my terseness, didn’t say what you don’t get: Security is something you build into the dev process — so is HAVING an ACTUAL DEV PROCESS, not making the dev process something that’s live, on live servers, basically at an alpha stage (assuming this isn’t anything like a beta, but might be approaching one — and it’s terrible).
Sometimes people screw security up, yes — it happens a lot — but the point is to actually try to get it right, from the get-go; people screw this up a lot from the get-go too, but I’m holding you to standards that you should be holding yourself and your organisation to; that shouldn’t need to be my position. But it should be my EXPECTATION — and it should be all of your users’ expectations.
By suggesting I just email(!) people about any specific security vulnerabilities, you’re not only trying to change the dialogue and ignore best practices of ANY development shop or team — and I would be MORE than happy to suggest some books or tutorials — so would Dan, I am sure, if he hasn’t been scared off yet… and foist backend security on the users. That’s not how security works. Ask Morgan — maybe he’ll tell you that. Read his tweets. Better, still, ask Brad Spender or Dino Dai Zovi or Tom Ptacek. If you can’t get them to respond, let me know and I’ll give you a few more names. And then a few more. And more after that.
Security isn’t glitzy. Privacy isn’t glitzy.
Either way you’re once again suggesting other people should be somehow doing your work for you. AGAIN. Conveniently, you also seem to forget that hacking is illegal, and that any bug that was found is CERTAINLY not something someone would EVER SEND IN AN EMAIL (pgp or no, but hey, you didn’t mention encryption either).
Why did T//I hire a dev team that doesn’t understand its own adversaries?
Why did T//I not, I dunno, hire the equivalent of a consultant or red team to tell them how they might be exploited and, maybe, possibly, try to consider that and mitigate it as much as possible?
You don’t “add security in” later. That’s not how security works. It never was. Sometimes that’s just how people try to fix bugs — but the reality is you’re supposed to care about actually preventing them.
I’m hesitant to even reply to such hyperbole.
Your point is and has been received, loud and clear, long ago, but I do find it intellectually dishonest to presume the new site is not secure (particularly, less secure than the previous site?) without actually showing any evidence—as well as the presumption that we neglectfully ignore security during development?
We’re actively working to address various issues you’ve already mentioned, like loading external scripts. Note that this issue specifically has been inherited from old content. You should have noticed that we no longer load DocumentCloud javascripts.
PGP is secure enough to send us details of vulnerabilities and exploits, you can find staff member’s public keys on the Contacts page.
Using your community to do your dev process, not betaing, and not segmenting your beta system is not at all responsible or secure. There’s no development process that could ever be considered secure that is deving the way you’re deving. You don’t address issues after the development process. You look for them before you push them live.
I’m sorry if you consider that hyperbole. But you don’t know your threat model.
Of course we test new features and look for issues in staging environments before they go live. And as I’ve said, the “issues” mentioned have existed before this new iteration of the site. The changes I’ve been pushing mostly address functional and user experience issues and no one can pretend to discover these without real users interacting with them. Feedback from the community is imperative in discovering exactly what those tensions are. Feedback is not “doing our job for us.”
But that’s what people hire QA people to do: Have real people test a site as a user. Not just run automated testing. Have you ever audited websites for security flaws btw? Why do you believe you’re qualified to know what a secure dev process is when you’re repeatedly doing things that violate the definition of such a process? I’m not trying to insult you, although I know it may seem like that is my intent. It’s been pointed out to me, and I won’t disagree, that I”m not going about this in the most persuasive way. But I’m asking you to take a good, long hard look at your capabilities and question what your strengths and weaknesses are. Not assume you don’t have them. For instance, one of my weaknesses is I’m being blunt and rude. What you’re expecting isn’t feedback. And feedback should happen in a beta stage, on separate servers, that have been segmented and not foisted on people by surprise.
If you can show me you have vast experience in auditing website security and understand secure dev processes, then please, by all means do. Just don’t assume you do, don’t assume others assume you do when we know better, and don’t think that feedback has anything to do with what’s going on. Feedback is “I don’t like this colour scheme”, for example, or “the new site gives me a migraine”. We appear to have different definitions of ‘feedback’ and QA. So maybe we should start there?
I meant “And QA should happen in a beta stage, on separate servers, that have been segmented and not foisted on people by surprise,” obviously, not “feedback”. See my definition of ‘feedback’ in the second para.
You’re arguing that I’m incompetent but without demonstrating it—the only reason you give is there is no rolling public beta? Well unfortunately we’re not going to invest in building this (it’s not as trivial as you make it seem). We have an internal QA process that we are refining to avoid pushing bugs we admittedly should have caught earlier. And unfortunately you’re stuck with me. If you want to provide constructive feedback I’m more than willing to engage and implement changes, as you’ve seen me doing in this forum. Important feedback is “this thing doesn’t work how I expected it work,” and is a lot more valuable than “I don’t like black.” People don’t like change, and implementing a public beta will do little to mitigate that fact. The feedback we got on launch (like the right click bug) were fixed immediately, and I will continue to address problems like this swiftly.
Well that was funny. I spent about 10-15 minutes writing a long reply to you and my network died, and since this is javascript and the site was malfunctioning I lost the reply. I don’t have time to do this again (maybe it was ‘a sign’, j/k), so I’ll just point out that you didn’t answer any of my questions.
That was not ‘the only reason’ or even the main reason. The public beta was to avoid stuff like all the things I’ve mentioned in the past two weeks.
My conscience is clear here. You don’t know what you don’t know. I can’t teach you and you don’t want to learn — what’s more you seem to have no interest in addressing the multiple issues I did bring up that had nothing at all to do with look and feel. I get it. You’re a web designer.
This stuff has nothing to do with ‘web design’, and what I’m talking about has nothing to do with look and feel or ‘right click bugs’. I couldn’t give two hoots about the right click issue.
As I mentioned multiple times one of the things that bothers me most about this is that you basically changed peoples’ exposure overnight and without warning. You MUST have noticed you were loading third-party sites, and if not why? You must realise those track people. You must realise the gravatar stuff tracks people (but I knew about that for a while and dealt with it, because I KNEW ABOUT IT).
My point was always that you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t want to know, you don’t want to learn, and you don’t want help.
I never called you incompetent. I do however believe you’re completely and totally unopen to hearing criticism and acting on it appropriately — especially given the nature of this site and the fact that this site is supposed to be teaching people how their privacy is invaded (by the government and by corporations). How is feeding into that and basically subverting the message that the site supposedly is trying to put across helping? How is it HURTING? Take that as you wish.
BTW what do you know about lateral movement in networks?
BTW, do you believe it might be possible that the fact that you still seem to think this has anything to do with “People don’t like change” is preventing you from even seeing what I’m saying and have been saying for weeks for what it is?
I’ll also point out that as I am NOT on your local network if I saw any bugs or things I found suspicious I most CERTAINLY would not attempt to exploit them, and PGP to send that stuff has nothing to do with it. The fact that you don’t realise how dangerous that is is probably not at all unusual, but it is. You don’t want people live testing your network over the internet. You just don’t. You almost certainly have people doing it constantly (and I’m curious if you’re doing any back-end network monitoring, etc) without invitation, but honestly — if someone’s looking for bugs in your site and finds them… and then sends them to other people, GPG or not, the damage was done, and hiding it in an encrypted message does nothing about it.
That testing should be done locally, on a local, segmented, non-externally routable network, and the source code should be audited before it even gets to that point. Which is why I asked if you’d had experience auditing websites.
I’m bringing this up not to say anything about YOU but because it’s so dangerous to suggest what you suggested that I wanted to warn how dangerous that is. If you’re only fixing ‘bugs’ that people *see* because they’re that obvious then you don’t understand how systems and networks get exploited. Code that’s not audited shouldn’t be pushed live, and code that’s in a constant state of being updated isn’t being audited. By default that’s almost impossible, at least with the skeleton crew you have.
You seem to think I’m suggesting this stuff is trivial. Why are you thinking I believe this is trivial. I know it’s complicated. I’m suggesting you don’t understand that that complication is precisely why people take the easier route, not knowing they screwed up. That’s not a personal affront. None of this is. Even my dislike of the site design really doesn’t matter because THAT is a matter of taste. The stuff I’m talking about IS NOT a matter of taste.
I’ll ask a non-technical, supposedly easier question here, which I’ve been grinding on but which hasn’t been addressed, and which I never asked as a question, though you’ve never directly replied to any of my questions:
Why did the site NOT tell people ahead of time that it was switching to a new site design in the first place — one that exposed them more, used up more data, loaded third party sites, added more tracking, and added in a WHOLE lot of active content?
Tracking is sneaky, Tom. I don’t expect you to know any of this and I’m not expecting you to learn overnight. I’m saying if you don’t have the mindset to think that way it really is a good idea to find people who do and who can stop these sorts of blunders from occurring, because I’m obviously not in any position to influence things any more than I’m trying to. Someone behind the curtain has that power, but I don’t, and someone needs to do some hiring to fill in gaps that you might not be able to fill yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it should have been done BEFORE this went live. :)
(To be clear, that means I refuse to look for exploits on this site, and certainly not randomly; I have enough problems).
I have temporarily allowed scripting in order to comment. Perhaps Morgan and Micah can write a Guide to Enjoying the Intercept’s New Look Securely. Let’s see. Use Tor, as Micah has several times suggested, then disable scripting, … Really, it would be a good tutorial for using most parts of the web, using the Intercept’s New Look as a case study in all the security pitfalls.
Heya tortoiseshell, while I am addressing the javascript issue, I’m at this point trying to impart to Tom C that building security into a site’s model, architecture, and dev process matter.
If the servers get owned, then how is anybody private or secure? Moreover, if and when there is an (and there’s always an inevitable) hack, what does that do for the reputation of this site (of all sites)? I’m saying that while he can’t obviously guarantee security, T//I should have web devs who know about how to do dev processes and implement web services with an eye for security from the ground up. Doing a live site rolling dev update is the very opposite of that and all of those principles.
I keep saying everybody needs to have their own threat model; T//I needs to know what theirs is. They don’t seem to (or they’re ignoring it). I don’t really expect Morgan or Micah to do this, because it’s not their jobs. I can link to dozens of articles on how to do this or at least better ways to approach it. I can offer book suggestions. But none of that’ll matter because it’s just going in one ear and out the other. Sunk costs.
Tom C seems to think he knows what he wants. Betsy seems to think she know what she wants. Neither are understanding that their credibility lies in the balance, and neither seem to have the background to analyse or address what the risks are. I never said they should be perfect. I never said they should try to do something they don’t know how to do (actually I’d stridently recommend against that — that often makes things worse). I suggested that, since this is a site with considerable funding, it ought to the responsible thing and find an ethical person or two who they can pay to come in and do a security audit on their code before they roll it out. Which they didn’t do. And I could’ve lived with that limited amount of mistake if they’d accepted that they made mistakes instead of constantly doubling down on their mistakes instead.
Could you recommend some articles and books? I still believe knowledge is power, even though you are disillusioned. :-)
And sometimes the knowledge needed isn’t just knowledge of the problem at hand, although that is the basic requirement. I know plenty of people, including myself, who lack the knowledge of how to persuade. Even if I finally achieve my objective by pounding away at people with photographs of the evidence, graphs of the data, p-values, and quotations from the universally acknowledged standard works, I leave a residue of animosity. In contrast, I have a friend who just naturally says “Let’s make an adjustment” instead of “You need to fix this error.” He has knowledge of the discipline and also knowledge of how to persuade. Would that I were more like him.
I know how to persuade. I just refuse to feed into what’s quick become the standard: just another person who manipulates people to get my way. He never asked to have the conversation in private — and this site never wanted other peoples’ opinions on any of it. Look at how much pressure and aggravation I had to go through — any of us had to go through — to even get ANYBODY FROM THE EDITORIAL OR TECH STAFF TO COMMENT. And we got Tom C. That’s why I was being so sarcastic when I quoted what Betsy said the first day. And that’s why I pretty much don’t care: They don’t care, and I’ve watched this sort of thing unfold too many other times. Heuristics exist for a reason.
Besides, there wasn’t time; that was sort of the biggest sneaky part of all of what they did. It was already game-over as soon as they pushed things without warning or testing. There’s no real point in trying to convince him/them. I have no power here, and certainly not with him; none of us do. He has no requirement to listen to me because I have no stake in his mind in the outcome; only those behind the curtain do (and I don’t even mean the writers).
Some people can only be persuaded or convinced of certain things by evidence showing they’re wrong and they’ll probably never get someone saying that to their faces from this site’s biggest adversaries. Some people never even realise they’re tools. We’re all tools, though, in one way or another. Shrugs. It’s just how things are.
It’s not that I don’t get your point ;) — it’s that my point would never come across, so instead of trying to be smooth, I just figured I’d hammer on him/them. He was never going to back down. I did my research. I was always eventually going to give up but not until I made my point in a louder way than I’d usually do. I fully know how rude and adversarial I’m being. I fully know, but I should never have needed to.
I warned people (who are now no longer even there any more) about certain things well over a year ago. In private, encrypted, no shame, no blame. I’ve seen things get destroyed in the past. Repeatedly. I tried doing things the ‘right’ way. I said, over and over, be careful. They weren’t.
In the end everyone has to take responsibility for themselves and their own security. They can’t do that if they don’t know what they don’t know. I’m talking about readers of this site. At least (ironically at least partially due to people on this site) people who visit WL know about at least some of their exposure by visiting that site.
People behind the curtain are either deliberately or accidentally refusing to take responsibility, and nobody learned a thing despite multiple accidents.
How do you persuade something that’s broken that it’s broken?
That’s not in ANY way to say that I think the journalists or whatever are broken. I have great respect for the majority of journalists here. But I also think they have, without even knowing it, been pulled into a centralised black hole that, like it or not, has wound up making these stories matter less, not more.
The system is broken. The website is a symptom of a bigger problem.
I’m sorry for saying all of this. I know I shouldn’t. And it’s probably not even my right. I have no desire to rip this place to shreds. But when a system is broken you can either call attention to it and attempt to suggest how to repair it or you can watch it continue to push past its load-bearing capacity and take a whole lot of other things down with it.
To fix a system you have to start somewhere.
As to the other part (not sure if that was a segue or not) I can’t suggest articles and books to you unless I know your background. I don’t think you’re a webdev but if you are, then I can point you at stuff in that direction. If you’re not then one would need to start somewhere else. The books I had in mind were/are technical. I don’t know how technical you are. :)
Not computer technical at all. Life scientist. Learning Python. I used to function as the webmaster of a site because nobody else wanted to do it. Had some fun designing web sites, but it was definitely at the level of wanting to make it look nice and making what were back then fancy touches like slicing up a background photo so that mousing over different parts would activate links to various things. I would check which browser and screen size the visitors were using in order to make things look at least decent for most viewers, but it was long before the current environment of designing things that look good on all sizes of “devices” as well as on desktop monitors. I never worried about the government snooping. The government was paying for it. And back then the expense and physical limits of storage capacity made it seem unlikely that anyone would store *everything* on the off-chance that small amounts of it would be useful later. How times change. So definitely I will need to start “somewhere else.” I’ll never be a computer expert, but I can learn more than I know now. What’s a good starter book or web site?
It depends on what it is you want to know. What do you want to know?
My comments to Tom C were about backend stuff. How to code securely, how to implement web sites with security in mind, how to create a dev system that builds security and good policy into its model — stuff like “The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications” by Zalewski, “Threat Modeling: Designing for Security” by Shostack, “Software Security: Building Security In” by McGraw and “Art of Software Security Assessment” by Dowd. But even if he read all of those I’d still say they need to bring in someone who actually knows how to test for vulnerabilities (and someone trustworthy, which I admit limits their options, but it’s not impossible; and that should have been done long before this point; once things are deved they’re not just going to write things off; they’ll cling to it.). Learning security takes time; not knowing they don’t know something and being unwilling to address it doesn’t help them, it harms them. Creating a security-minded dev process, though, IS within their reach if they ever want to. I don’t like the idea of those CDN servers getting breached. There’s also a decent book on javascript security (called, I believe, “Javascript Security”), he might want to check out, but c’est la vie. All web devs should at least know the stuff in Tangled Web like the back of their hand and have a decent familiarity with secure dev/design principles. End of speech. :P
Now, as to YOU:
If you want to develop an eye towards looking for fragile points (in tech and the sciences) in general, “Normal Accidents” by Perrow, “The Logic of Failure” by Dorner, and “Drift into Failure” by Dekker.
Good luck with the Python btw; it’s a fun language. :) I assume your web dev experience was a while ago, image maps and the like? I used to love how tech and the sciences overlapped years ago… Back then things weren’t ‘active’ so that snooping wasn’t going to be nearly as prevalent or cross-site anyway. The snooping was going on to some end on the backend — just not like… this — and yeah, part of that was because the tech wasn’t there for it to be yet.
For a general book on thinking about computers on a lower level, try Petzold’s “Code”, and “Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving” by Spraul (rather good but you probably would be in a better position to understand it once you had at least some python or another language under your belt (his examples are in C++, a compiled language, but it’s more about how to approach thinking about computing problems in general than writing code)).
For the python, if you’re just starting from scratch, if you just want to script some stuff grab “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python” by Sweigart. For something more in depth, if you really want to learn the language, then “Introduction to Programming in Python: An Interdisciplinary Approach” or the Downey book “Python for Software Design: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist” and a copy of O’Reilly’s “Python Cookbook” are a good combination. I’d check them both out and see which feels like a more natural fit. “Python for Data Analysis” (another O’Reilly book) might be useful if you’re looking to take things in a bioinformatics direction and/or need a scripting language to help you crunch experimental data.
I’m not sure if this is useful or if you were looking for different suggestions, so I just tossed em all out there. I find books on failure analysis to be some of the most fascinating stuff out there, and it tends to be practical and useful for anybody in the sciences (or really anybody at all if they can understand technical domino theories). “Deep Survival” and “Surviving Survival” are two great books by Gonzales which delve more into the human aspects of choices and their part in how catastrophes tend to domino based on one or two bad decisions… As a life scientist you might find them interesting too.
Thanks a billion, both for the book recommendations and for the links.
I agree that analysis of mistakes and failures can be one of the most interesting and useful endeavors in science. In my experience, the first step is noticing/admitting that something isn’t right. That seems to be the biggest hurdle, psychologically. People are motivated to interpret data in the pattern they have been taught to expect, and they tend to pretend that things fit the desired pattern because that’s the easiest way forward toward completion and reward. Once the mind is able to admit that something isn’t right, the actual fun starts. Figuring out what went “wrong” is challenging and exhausting, but enjoyable. My pals and I usually are laughing in almost pure joy when we finally “see” the picture of what happened. I suspect it takes a quirky mind to enjoy that sort of thing, because mistakes and failure mean wasted time, starting over, not getting the reward. So many people are focused on the reward, not on the understanding. But understanding how things work is a kind of reward.
Thanks again.
Any time. :) And I do mean that.
I don’t get angry when people make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. I get angry because I’ve been through this so many times with so many organisations as an employee and as a user and when I see that there’s no QA process except for ‘fixing things when we see them’ … it doesn’t really take genius to see how the future of a site or organisation will likely map out unless it takes a course change.
I’ve always been willing to admit I’m wrong, even (or especially) here.
I think when you’re in the middle of things it’s very difficult to see what’s going on. I suspect it’s only later, with the benefit of hindsight, most people learn anything at all. I just kind of was hoping that this site would have foresight instead. Process matters, because, and especially, when it affects other people — not just your own organisation.
I know I’m being a right cunt. I’m not even all that frustrated or angry. It’s not going to be my lesson to learn. I just think we only get so many shots at trying to change things in certain ways — look at ‘Occupy’ (no ‘demand’, too many ‘demands’), “Anonymous”, and a whole lot of other things that just don’t work out. WL almost went that way. If we only get so many chances to do things, and if we blow them, (and in this case I’m talking about getting the information out there to promote privacy and decry surveillance) then we lose the chance to gain by them. We lose the debate. There is no debate. The opponent gets to keep the tempo.
It’s disingenuous to assume that this site isn’t monitored six ways from Sunday (or whatever the idiom is). The site devs can’t stop that, but they should at least acknowledge it and try to mitigate as best they can how much they expose their users to scrutiny.
As a starting point, noone was even made aware that the site WAS going to change on the 15th or whenever it was. One day they just came here and ‘poof’. Our threat models were changed on us, too, without warning. And they’re constantly being changed by constantly ‘fixing’ bugs that we both know (and most people here know, even if they have a difficult time admitting it) shouldn’t EVER have shown up on a live site. That, to me, demonstrates a lack of standard of care and an inability to accept responsibility for making mistakes.
I’m not even saying they should have known (though I will say it); I’m saying having made the mistake I know how hard it is to backpedal from it, but it needed to be done and someone didn’t just drop the ball: they’re refusing to pick it up.
I just don’t know why other people aren’t saying something (I do, I know psychology, just like I can tell you most people would conform, which is why it’s important to never let irresponsibility get taken to this stage in the first place. I could have brought sockpuppets on here but I didn’t, and I could have brought other ‘real’ people here to agree with me but I didn’t; enough of those, and maybe someone would have listened. I know how social psychology works).
Yes, I am strange and all, but that, on a site like this, a lack of self-awareness in staff members basically charged with their users’ safety worries me deeply. There’s no TIME for learning this stuff on the job, not on a site like this. There just ISN’T. And I know it “doesn’t really matter” if I just let it not matter, but it does matter — it matters PRECISELY because they brought a LOT of journalists here from other publications and basically bought up the best, most trustworthy talent, eliminating a lot of the natsec journalism diaspora that guaranteed it found more voice in more places. I won’t call that a conspiracy, but it DOES create such a single point of failure that it becomes all the more important to care about how the site itself is run.
– Some useful links:
* http://www.tutorialspoint.com/developers_best_practices/index.htm
* https://buildsecurityin.us-cert.gov/
* https://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/healy/consequences.html
* OWASP
– Non-web-centric programming security overview book, if you decide to go that far: “24 Deadly Sins of Software Security: Programming Flaws and How to Fix Them” by Howard, LeBlanc and Viega
The way the site is running now there really is no way to do that. If you use a user-level firewall with a private browser window you’re stuck with your IP if you want to block site by site and only allow theintercept to load (even then it’d be a massive pain in the butt to deal with the third party resolution issues, which’d occur anyway — you’d have to go deep and basically make it all resolve locally, and to do that you need to know what to set to resolve locally to begin with — you’d never know what you had to deal with though til you had the data necessary to know what that is) — and if you go with TBB then you’re stuck letting every site track you that the backend permits it to. It’s a bit of a sneaky design flaw, and part of why loading third party content, NOT JUST scripting, is problematic.
This sounds convoluted. It is convoluted. But that’s kind of the problem, and why it’s a backend issue. The only *possible* way for it not to be would be to only visit via Tails and even then that’s no guarantee — because we can’t do anything to stop bugs that we might not know about (which isn’t to say there are unknown bugs in tor/tails, only to suggest that, in the past, things have been done to deanonymise people, and the minute you screw up even a little bit any opsec you may have practiced goes right down the drain).
And I’ll just put this up here too:
By being a site that exposes the government and corporations spying on users and then making javascript *optional* means you’re deigning to serve us instead of serve as an example that you’re putting your reputation where your mouth is. I’m don’t understand why you aren’t willing to have this conversation. Sunk costs? Being somewhat new to the job and not really feeling like you have latitude? Securing sites is hard. But increasing privacy by default for *all* users is pretty easy: T//I was doing this better on its older site. You’re accustoming people to the very thing that this site is saying is a big problem. I’m going to keep pounding that nail until I can get some sort of explanation as to why that’s not a concern — especially since this isn’t supposed to be a commercial site, for profit; there’s no reason for the privacy-killing bells and whistles. You’re not getting ad revenue. Isn’t the goal to get the information out there? In the best way possible?
I’ll keep pressing on this because you haven’t given any REASONS.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Here’s a little glitch. If an article is loaded without comments displayed, then comments are displayed by clicking the Comments icon, then a link (embedded in a comment) to a comment under the same article is clicked, the comments are reloaded. After that, clicking the same link will go immediately to the linked-to comment, as it should.
At https://firstlook.org/theintercept/ the pictures are way too big. It slows browsing. Look at bbc.com for an example of better design.
Thank you for making the main navigation available to those of us who don’t want to use javascript. At least I can get around even if I can’t comment.
It’s a definite improvement. Simple, intuitive and about as geometrically elegant as web design gets.
Nice work.
Pushed several changes today including:
– Comments and the main nav are now accessible without JS
– Comments: are linkable, can be ordered by ‘latest’ (JS only), and the threaded layout no longer shows nesting level (instead shows a link to reply’s parent)
More often than not, when clicking on the parent, the full parent is not completely visible. Sometimes it’s not visible at all.
With “Latest” displayed, clicking on the permalink (timestamp) of a comment should switch to “Threads” positioned on that comment.
Highlighting the parent when hovering over the parent link is slick! You did the Guardian one better!
Ah, thanks
Looking into this…
The problem here I suppose is when you copy/paste that URL you see something different? Wondering if switching the layout when you click the timestamp is the right solution to that though
No, I wasn’t seeing a problem just making a suggestion. The general principle is doing what the user (reasonably) expects when he performs an action. Why else would the user left-click on the timestamp in that situation? I know that’s what I would expect. What other action can you take that’s useful?
As for “seeing something different”… I just checked, and the Guardian isn’t carrying state in the query string. So, I guess they’re using cookies. A comment link contains only the comment id (e.g., http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/55758966), which is nice. You don’t want to use cookies? Well, rather than trying to work through this right now, I’ll just leave this as a suggestion. (The Guardian doesn’t do what I’m suggesting.)
With JS disabled, clicking on the parent link seems to work perfectly! Not so with JS enabled.
With JS disabled, it’s not currently possible to reply. That makes sense, you’d have to write out a hidden input form under every comment (and reply), no? And then how would you make it visible without JS? CSS hover?
It’s a shame all the space taken up by the Reply links. Maybe the links can be hidden, then displayed when hovering over the comment (reply) div. No JS required. That would be nice.
Reply link without JS might alter the top input (“replying to …”)
Re: reply links, thought about doing this but revealing stuff on hover doesn’t really work in the age of touch screens.
And I think you make a good point about the timestamps/permalinks, imagining users of Latest wanting to see those comments in context.
Ok to all that. Reply without JS seems like a tough one.
But here’s one last vote for 3 or 4 levels of nesting - with noticable indentation - combined with the current design. Those 3 or 4 levels will make a difference. The conversation will almost always be much tighter, much more focused, on deeper levels than it will be on the first level, and it will usually involve fewer users, often just two going head to head. This makes the current method much better suited for deeper levels. Even two levels would probably make a significant difference. (As discussed, the current method would be used on the maximum level. The automatic addressing, with a link to the parent, would be used on all levels.)
Don’t you hate to throw out good code? What you had was pretty good. If you coded the hybrid, and didn’t like it, you could just set the maximum level to 1. You could even make the maximum level a user option. But if you were to go this route, I still think the previous design should be modified to make it easier to visually trace the vertical lines up to a parent (as I’ve said below). With a limit of 3 or 4 levels, increasing the indentation shouldn’t be a problem. But if it is, I think using different types of lines for the different levels might work, or even just alternating between solid and dotted or dashed.
Thanks for the replies, Tom, this has been fun.
Actually the HTML is unchanged (still nested recursively), so replies won’t appear strictly in chronological order (wondering about this). Thinking more about how we can improve comments section, like how particular long threads (often unrelated to the post content) dominate the comments area, likely discouraging newcomers from reading anything. Nesting comments using margins makes reading comments on phones impossible, even at four levels deep you end up with impossibly narrow text columns (the vertical lines aimed to solve that, but ended up not really being useful at all, as you noticed).
I noticed this too and it seems to be a browser problem to do with client-side routing (history.pushState) and hash fragments. Hard to solve without trapping clicks which it turns out is a bad idea :)
Wow, I hadn’t noticed that (it’s these drug store glasses). So, you’re sorting chronologically by “branch”, right? My first thought was that if you’re committed to one level, you should probably just sort all replies chronologically. That seems to be what the Guardian is doing (just checked). But maybe something can be added to make this sort superior to straight chronological (maybe it is already). I haven’t come up with an idea like that, but perhaps a thin horizontal line at the end of each branch (whether or not chronology has been broken) would be helpful. The line needn’t be too conspicuous. (The line would indicate that we’re moving up one or more nesting levels. Maybe something can be done using a small bit of vertical space, and no extra horizontal space, to (unobtrusively) reveal the full structure of the conversation….)
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A glitch… Load the article without comments, then load comments. Click on “Latest”. Click the timestamp of any comment; the display mode is switched to “Threads” and the comment is shown in context. Click “Latest” again. Click the timestamp of any comment; the result is not the same.
Ok, indentation is out (along with hovering). But before I gave up completely on the old method, I would have tried two differently textured lines. If you’re tracing a dotted line with a solid line to its left, your eye will trace both lines with the small space between them. So, the width of what you’re tracing is twice as much as before plus the width of the space. As you trace up, if lines appear to the right, the leftmost line will always be solid, so it will be easy to maintain the focus. It’s the same concept as using different background colors for odd rows and even rows in a table. I’d have given it a try.
Test
Tom, I gave some thought to the sort order issue, and I think that replies should either be sorted chronologically, or enough information should be added to reveal the structure of the thread. After trying a couple of half-measures, I doubt that anything else will be meaningful and useful to most users. This page illustrates a possible design using the current sort.
Sorry, but I do not like the new look at all! And, it’s not a matter of being used to the previous look. It’s simply unappealing.
Not content to only have T//I load javascript (and pull avatars from gravatar), T//I allowed twitter to load javascript. When twitter wasn’t enough, it allowed google/youtube/et al to load javascript. Seeing that was clearly not enough exposure, we have the exciting introduction of allowing VINE to load javascript on T//I.
It’s all just so exciting.
Hey, what happened? Clicking on the Comments icon no longer refreshes comments. Immediately after the rollout, it was, or at least it was trying. It was nice not having to reload the page to refresh the comments.
Not a fan of the “new look”. It seems to follow the trends of the moment and is in no way an improvement visually.
The waste of space negates the advantage of a large monitor.
As I am not a web developer it concerns me that some with knowledge of such things are concerned with your choice of technologies (Javascript, for example).
Thanks for bringing back the timestamps! For one thing, it’s often useful to know the order in which comments were posted….
(I mean comments that are not in the same branch of a conversation. Those are displayed chronologically, obviously.)
I agree, considering more options for laying out comments. The Guardian does it well.
Tom, thanks for the reply. You saw my comment below about the vertical lines? I think you guys are really close. Imo, what you’ve done is really smart. Now that I’m more familiar with it, I think it’s good enough. But, with the same amount of indentation (or maybe just a little more), I think it might be better if you just eliminated the arrows, and slid each line to the right to where the point of the arrows are now, or farther. I don’t know how you’re producing the lines now, but with my design, I’m pretty sure you would just need to set a left border on the reply divs. (The problem now is making a long trip up to the parent on a line that must pass through closely bunched lines to the left and right. The user is pretty much forced to count the lines to the left of the reply (nesting level), and travel up until the count decreases by one. Maybe that’s not so bad, but I think it would be better if the user never had to count the lines, but was able to just trace the line visually, which would be much easier if the lines weren’t bunched together.)
I’m glad you agree that the Guardian has done a good job. But I think most users would prefer a few levels of nesting. For most conversations, 4 or 5 levels will suffice. A few more might be better. You are setting a limit, right? Then the Guardian method can be used on the maximum level. But the automatic addressing would be nice for all levels, and it would take up no extra space, and it would be easy to implement.
Anyway, no one can complain about the responsiveness you’ve shown the last few days. Thanks.
Actually, just thinking out loud… Another possibility would be to use a different colored line for each level. That would certainly make the lines easier to trace visually. But I guess you wouldn’t want to do that because it would violate your grayscale scheme, of which I personally totally approve. Ok, forget that. How about alternating solid lines with dotted lines? That would help. Or solid, dotted, dashed. Something like that, maybe…
Correction to my first comment… It seems that currently the amount of indentation is equal to the distance between two vertical lines. So, my design would require that the indentation be increased by a factor of 3 or 4 probably. My key point is that the lines will be easier to trace visually if there is more space between them.
So basically by building out this javascript thing, you’re saying (without saying it outright) that we should all go shove it, then, and your comment about removing the javascript is a load of hooey? Just to clarify. Because all this feature-pretty-boo-boo stuff is doing that. You have NO intention of making this site more privacy or security conscious. Just admit it.
To be clear, I’m not going to *remove* the javascript, but rather make the site more accessible for visitors with javascript disabled. We are actively addressing privacy and security concerns.
To be clear, you need — NEED — to hire someone who really understands security. Now.
Tom, as a first move in that direction, perhaps you could make the three parallel lines doodad functional without the need to enable javascript.
I’d probably suggest as a first step letting people at least view comments without javascript. Thanks for (at least for the time being) listening about the third-party loads. I still insist that you’re doing this backwards (I don’t mean that in the colloquial sense, I mean you’re trying to do the age-old mistake of adding ‘more security/privacy’ later instead of in the creation process — and this is a rookie mistake that’s beneath T//I) — and that it’ll wind up kicking you in the rear — not because you’re special, but because it kicks EVERYBODY in the rear.
I will say, once again, that this should have been a beta offer/option. It bothers me more that you haven’t explained WHY you didn’t make it something beta — because you’re suggesting that you’re somehow correct, that those of us making these suggestions are wrong (and many of us have *decades* of experience in software and security), and that you’re indulging us for our widdle concerns. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes. I get that. We all get that. But not properly responding and admitting it and instead trudging in the same direction more closely resembles the people the journalists here criticise than it does an adult organisation willing to admit it made a mistake and listen to its users.
Sorry, tortoise, that was meant for Tom C.
That should have been directed at you, Tom, not tortoiseshell. Just in case you have magical comment search powers:
I’d probably suggest as a first step letting people at least view comments without javascript. Thanks for (at least for the time being) listening about the third-party loads. I still insist that you’re doing this backwards (I don’t mean that in the colloquial sense, I mean you’re trying to do the age-old mistake of adding ‘more security/privacy’ later instead of in the creation process — and this is a rookie mistake that’s beneath T//I) — and that it’ll wind up kicking you in the rear — not because you’re special, but because it kicks EVERYBODY in the rear.
I will say, once again, that this should have been a beta offer/option. It bothers me more that you haven’t explained WHY you didn’t make it something beta — because you’re suggesting that you’re somehow correct, that those of us making these suggestions are wrong (and many of us have *decades* of experience in software and security), and that you’re indulging us for our widdle concerns. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes. I get that. We all get that. But not properly responding and admitting it and instead trudging in the same direction more closely resembles the people the journalists here criticise than it does an adult organisation willing to admit it made a mistake and listen to its users.
As an example that you’re doing your own thing regardless of your users, I won’t even talk about security. I’ll mention that despite it only basically requiring changes in a couple of tags and a 30 second to write shell script, you still are foisting white print on a black background to mobile users despite people telling you how excruciating it is.
By being a site that exposes the government and corporations spying on users and then making javascript *optional* means you’re deigning to serve us instead of serve as an example that you’re putting your reputation where your mouth is. I’m don’t understand why you aren’t willing to have this conversation. Sunk costs? Being somewhat new to the job and not really feeling like you have latitude? Securing sites is hard. But increasing privacy by default for *all* users is pretty easy: T//I was doing this better on its older site. You’re accustoming people to the very thing that this site is saying is a big problem. I’m going to keep pounding that nail until I can get some sort of explanation as to why that’s not a concern — especially since this isn’t supposed to be a commercial site, for profit; there’s no reason for the privacy-killing bells and whistles. You’re not getting ad revenue. Isn’t the goal to get the information out there? In the best way possible?
I’ll keep pressing on this because you haven’t given any REASONS.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Betsy, at al — do you not find it odd that Jacob (Appelbaum), any of your other sources, or anybody else that you’re affiliated with has commented in either a positive or negative sense about this debaucherous spectacle of disaster?
In a way even me doing it has had me questioning my own motives — because the motive is to further privacy and security not detract from some sort of sense of unity we’re supposed to have; busting that sense of unity DOES work to destroy communities. I’m hoping you’ll read this and understand what I’m trying to say: Just because I’m one of the few people bringing this stuff up doesn’t mean that other people aren’t thinking it. Nor do I want to detract from the message. I’m trying to FIX the site and KEEP YOU ON MESSAGE instead of make you and this site a laughingstock that only pretends to care.
‘Working on removing the javascript’ (or anything else, and I’ve commented on a lot of issues here that are security and privacy related) isn’t done in-situ.
I’ve been trying to be generous. I’ve no intention to be ungenerous or to work against things. Glenn’s said he has no interest in helping people do more than get informed and I get that. But you can’t even say you’re doing THAT if you go against core principles.
I’m not commenting about the content. Even the awful Gawker stuff. I’m commenting because your readers matter, and if you don’t do something, these things I’m mentioning will be things your opponents use against you, not just things your friends warn you about.
Best wishes.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.
White text on black?? That’s just really bad ergonomics. Also, the font sizes are all wrong. If I set the front-page text to be readable, article text becomes ENORMOUS. And no matter what settings I use, at least some things (like authors’ names) are too tiny to read. There are huge areas of ‘whitespace’ (most of it in black). How about a nice simple front page that lets me see all the headlines with the minimum scrolling around… and without adjusting display settings?
On top of that… Gravatar?? So, you’re okay with some third-party corporate entity tracking everyone’s comments here, and correlating them with what they do on every other site?? Good grief.
Worst of all, I now have to enable scripting. JavaScript is the mother of all vulnerabilities and privacy violations – I’d have expected at least the Intercept to forgo this pernicious technology.
As in the old video game Gauntlet, ‘Welcome, warrior.’
What duffus decided to use JAVASCRIPT Rollover for your main menu? Y’all better have a talk with Micah on that. Not everyone will run JavaScript. Just another avenue for the NSA+World+Dog to access your system. But Y’all know about that don’t you? Have a heart and make your site SECURE for the rest of us.
If you use a reloadable hashtable a lá <, > with String keys with the types of user-agent:’s hitting TI and as Integer the related indexes of command objects taking care of rendering the pages you will make everybody happy very easily. I wonder from where you got that “great” Orbis Unum kind of design for all kinds of devices. Why should someone using a desktop look at a page obviously designed for a handheld device?
You will also need to strategize around the cases of devices without specified user-agent:’s (wget) or with newly defined ones with some pattern recognition (avoid regexps and keep in mind that kind of strategy could be targeted by DOS attacks)
Also, TI needs fora, among them technical fora in which, based on the device they use, they would tell where the shoe hurts. Do not rely on just this threat. I wonder if you had been paying attention to the many and diverse comments and qualms people have had with the functionality of TI pages.
Also, letting people define their own presence, will enable them to contact each other and have private interactions instead of using your comment sections to communicate with each other and then having you block their comments. I am so against censorship of any kind that I only pay attention to certain authors and have even considered to drop TI from my ongoing attention.
RCL
a lá
right there you had another problem
I will check if <code /> tags work right below:
a lá <, >
RCL
a lá <<String>, <Integer>>
We won’t serve different content based on the user-agent string—instead we check for the availability of specific features and implement fallbacks on a case-by-case basis [1]. We are currently investigating problems on older browsers and fixing bugs.
As for desktop vs. handheld, the site switches to a desktop layout for viewports larger than 1200px, but defaults to a handheld layout. It’s currently impossible to reliably determine if a device is a touch screen or not [2].
[1] https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Optimizing_content_for_different_browsers:_the_RIGHT_way
[2] https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/issues/548
I wasn’t taking about content but its rendering
Thank you very much. I got bored of coding before the handheld devices took over the Internet it seems
I would still use heuristics in which the user agent and all other aspects would be accounted for; probably a similar hashtable in which all other aspects will be considered in order to serve a “current” page that is kept in cash
You definitely have a site to work on visited by some users! As Sting says: “if you love somebody set them free”
Give your users manageable freedom, For example, like il Duce, I don’t care about pictures and as many have have already said TI should make JS an option
RCL
Another site drink the tablet Kool-Aid. Sigh.
White text on black is a NIGHTMARE to read, and it gets harder as you get older. For the love of god, eliminate the bloody black backgrounds.
check out the kerning of the ‘t’s, ‘x’s … in that “new” type face of yours
Probably, checking out the kerning of Verdana (Windows) and Bitstream Stream (Linux) will help
RCL
Unique kerning is another method of De-Anonymizing you. It’s their way of putting a unique fingerprint based on your gpu, software, os and monitor and various alterations from other applications. It’s a tracking device that can ID you among “the billllions and billlions” (sorry sagan) of other internet connected devices. Surprised? Nah… As they say in Texas: All Hat, No Cattle. Just another tracker among all corporate trackers for which the NSA is extremely happy.
‘Welcome’ to you too.
We serve the same font files to all users
That’s actually not the relevant part.
The arrows connecting nested comments to their parents are difficult to follow (on chrome). Also, typing in this text box sometimes slows down a lot depending on what else I have running. I presume there’s some event capture on each keystroke…
I really like this design. The typeface is awesome. Suggestions would be to allow closing of the sidebar by clicking anywhere in the exposed article area — as intuition would tell you and opening comment links in a new tab. The comment nesting could use some design refinements, I’d say. Overall, it’s neat.
As predicted, out of sight, out of mind. Make ‘cosmetic changes’ then just let people get used to being more exposed. Nothing changes, not anywhere, for the better, it seems. Adding another notch to the pessimism belt and bailing. See you in another life.
This informal committee of the commentariat on The Intercept’s New Look is too unwieldy. Just hire the few people who did the look at the Jacobin. It’s gorgeous in a minimalist way and so easy to maneuver. The content isn’t bad either.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/
Pretty enough looking, maybe, but look at all that third party stuff. I can’t really give an opinion on commenting as I can’t. But it is at least viewable without javascript. Looks-wise it’s not a bad compromise.
(But this site shouldn’t have any javascript at all, either)
I like black as well. About the only way to improve the look would be to place black text on a black background. Feature articles could be highlighted to stand out, possibly by using white text on a white background. The photos also distract from the look – they provide too much information. So they should be eliminated too. Until now, this site has prioritized content over style, so it will be nice to see the balance restored.
It’s not that I dislike the content; it’s actually very good. But a site shouldn’t cater exclusively to the minority of visitors who actually read the articles.
I love your comments, as always.
Ha, ha, ha!
Duce, your kind of sarcasm is so sharp that I don’t think most people can see the inside of your messages for what they mean
I don’t see what is the point of having those large blocks with images, showing or proving what exactly?
RCL
It seems it was designed for iPad and mobile use than desktop use. Even so, I’m not too keen on it.
I suppose in time it will get better. Regarding the logo, well… Of all the fonts in existence, I’m sure there is one that could better reflect the feel of what this site offers and especially the writers and journalist who make this web site an exceptional one.
Well, it *looks* good – but the black background/thin white type is really hard to read, especially if you’re in a relatively bright environment. No more laptop or iPad Intercept reading on the balcony or in the park for me :-(
The vertical lines indicating nesting depth are a wonderful idea, but the way they’ve been implemented isn’t going to be helpful. Indentation is needed. If your thought is that by minimizing the indention, you can maximize the nesting levels, I think that’s a bad way to go. You’re going to have to choose some maximum, and a number like 7 or 8 is fine. A number like 4 or 5 is fine. The most important thing is to be able to quickly identify the parent of a reply. The Guardian has a superb comment system and they decided on one level of replies. The trick is that every reply is automatically addressed to its parent with a link that will jump to the parent. With multiple levels, this same approach can be used on the maximum level (or all levels, the automatic addressing is nice).
The primary purpose of the vertical lines should be to find the parent. It should be possible for the user to easily trace the line immediately to the left of a reply up to the parent, but this is very difficult when the lines are bunched together as they are now. That’s why the indentation is needed. (I don’t think the arrows you’re using should be necessary.)
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One other thing… in the previous version, there was no Reply link under replies on the maximum level. Now that you’re prepared to show additional nesting levels, it should be apparent that that was a mistake. Information you should now have was not captured. The need to limit the number of nesting levels is a constraint imposed by the display, therefore it should only be imposed at the time of display. The maximum nesting level should be stored in a single variable that can be changed at any time without any other changes to code or the database. (The variable can be sensitive to the screen width.)
(Just my 2¢)
For cell phones users display real estate matters
Say you have 5 users interacting, whose initials (or shortened naming tokens) would be usr1-5 (I use, for example, RCL)
Why not using a referenced breadth-first strategy for traversing the DAG created by replies looking like:
The section symbol § is used denoting reference
Like this:
usr3 1:
|
*-usr2 2§1:
| |
| *-usr3 4§2:
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| *-usr2 6§4:
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| *-usr1 9§4:
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| *-usr5 10§9:
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| *-usr2 12§10:
…
(Now, if usr3 wants to reply to usr2 12§10, the indentation would be reclaimed and continue like):
6>*-usr3 13§12:
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*-usr2 15§13:
…
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*-usr5 3§1:
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| *-usr2 5§3:
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| *-usr5 7§5:
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| *-usr2 14§7:
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*-usr3 8§1: expanding on his own comment
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*-usr5 8§11:
~
just by hovering the mouse over (or whatever they do with cell phones), say, “usr5 8§11″, user could know the user name, date stamp (or diff) of comment and access her presence …
~
user comments should follow the colon.
The new line should be before the new comment
~
RCL
Well, it didn’t look right, but I think you got the idea
Also, why can’t people edit their own messages if they found a mistake?
RCL
Hovering requires keeping javascript. As I’ve said earlier, look at how ycombinator works. That’s clean, scriptless, and nests flawlessly (and trackably).
It doesn’t strictly require JS; hover effects can be done with pure CSS3. Most people do it via JS, but they don’t have to.
http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/sel_hover.asp
Thanks for pointing that out. As I said, I’m not big on web dev. All the more reason, then. :)
PLEASE, make the INDEX pictures smaller (Look at Salon’s smaller index pictures) – they are overloading my 3-month old laptop.
And BLACK looks good … for an undertaker’s web site.
The paragraph bottom margin has been increased by to 0.5em from 0.2em, but does that really look like enough space to you? Maybe if the line-height (space between lines within a paragraph) were smaller it would be, but as is, 0.5em doesn’t look like enough of an improvement. Why such a large line-height???
In addition to the (at times seemingly contradictory) feedback, most, if not all, of what have been done is cosmetic (what I really wanted to say is “silly”); but well, web designers seem to think of web sites as a new form of TV and consider “new” things to be “cool”, even “necessary”. I wonder who actually cares about such things as “a new typeface”, which to some “fanciful” designers “captures the essence of The Intercept”, it seems … Or, probably I am too old for that kind of cr@p.
Also, the Intercept has an essence?
Don’t take it from me, you may easily test what I mean. You may be deeply disappointed if you run a survey to actually see what matters to TI users and you weigh a bit that data; stratify and correlate it based on the kinds of devices people use to access TI, the type of users …
In a sense your style of work parallels the style of reporting at TI and, no, I am not trying to educate/”change” you, but at times I wonder if you notice it yourself.
Anyway, I think disagreeing in a explicit, articulated way is some form of healthy, profitable respect. Here are some of my suggestions from most to least important.
1) TI should translate many of the documents, at least to the language of their proper constituencies. If they are talking about, say, Dilma, such documents should be translate to Portuguese and Spanish. I have littered many pages with that very opinion, but I seem to be the only one at TI pushing for it. No one had mentioned it! We would do ourselves a favor if we stop thinking of the @ss of the Universe as being Anglocentric. Why is it that everyone “welcomed” at TI is Anglo?
2) Users should be able to default to a none Javascript version of TI or at least have an option to opt out of Javascript without any functional impairment (or they should be informed in case they care)
3) Users should be able to login, be able to:
3.1) set their preferences regarding presence (their avatars, contact options, …)
3.2) chose from a number of templates they could use to render their pages “whether from your desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device” (you designers may not like that idea, but quite honestly you should not shove your “designs” on people, let them decide for themselves)
3.3) look at their previous comments and their replies, a lá:
https://id.theguardian.com/profile/GiovannidiPietro0714
4) If you need to be reminded you should listened to JFK’s speech about how dirty and unhealthy secrecy is for society. I think, next to secrecy, sits her cousin, -censorship-.
There is some level of sectarianism that gets at time very disrespectful here (in a sense, that is bound to happen in such a site), but I am not the only one who seems to have been puzzled at times and has protested about censorship at TI. Let people do that for themselves personally. For example, I mind “Il Duce’s” comments and the replies they generate and there are other users like darling Mona ;-) who would prefer if I stay away from her line of sight (of course those should be pull, not push options), so it would be nice if I don’t even read her comments and those of like minded people.
Those kinds of things should be made based on user decisions regarding other users, as well as on certain topics coalesced as corpora. I tried to get some feedback on this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31106584/foftn-friends-of-friends-and-topical-networks-any-implementations
in order to see if there is an extant RFC. If there isn’t, I would like for a group of technical people at TI to work on such a thing. I could start coding a proof of concept in Java in two weeks, but in order to implement such a thing some back-end changes may be necessary.
RCL
I do not mean at all, users should login in order to post!
I just meant it as an option
RCL
Also, please don’t commit suicide by instituting ads here!
RCL
and, of course, other people are able to choose not to read mine, but still I would like to view some metadata in order to have a sense of how many messages I am not reading, with the option to drill down into them specifically if I so choose. You can see something similar to what I mean at:
http://slashdot.org/
Also, I hope you are keeping your designs perpendicular to the comments, otherwise the implementation of §4 will be complicated greatly
RCL
based on the selections they’ve made themselves (of course, if they have mutually selected each other …)
RCL
We pushed various improvements this afternoon.
Non-JS fallbacks and improvements to infinite scroll are coming soon.
Thanks, Tom, that’s really good to hear. The non-JS fallbacks probably involve a fair bit of work, so appreciate that you’re taking this seriously enough to invest the time and effort. I was convinced you wouldn’t bother, and I’m glad I was wrong.
Pushing this to beta stage and reinstituting the old design would have been no work at all. Forcing all of us to expose ourselves until they do it and excusing it as ‘a fair bit of work’ may seem an equitable trade-off but it’s not. I put up with the gravatar stuff for what, years? But this?
Hi Tom C. –
I’m glad to know there might be solutions coming. Especially to infinite scroll. And PLEASE, we need to open each story in its own window.
Quoting Becky: “We welcome feedback to help us further improve the experience of reading and navigating The Intercept. Ultimately, our goal is not only to create public-spirited journalism but an engaging experience that you are inspired to share.”
I hope you really welcome feedback as the changes have totally failed to improve this reader’s experience of reading and navigating TI.
BTW, if you want an idea of how comments can be done cleanly without scripting or third party loads, look at ycombinator. And noone can say they don’t get traffic. Or well-thought-out comments.
I am really pleased with the new site design. I felt it was well overdue, as the number of authors and content being posted had exponentially grown, but the old template was only displaying a fixed amount of content. The bottomless content feature is thus really great and I’m super happy with it. The purple/electric blue text is fun, and the black-and-white stuff is so common on the net that I’m not sure why people would be so passionate about it. We deal with a lifetime of reading black on white… hardly something to take issue with this specific publication over.
Re the JS issues – there should be a no-JS fallback to every page. Javascript should not ever be compulsory. For most it won’t be an issue but for those who are browsing with JS disabled, they should be redirected to the no-JS fallback page by default.
As for all the carry-on about the comments window – I personally believe people who obsessively comment on a thread are a sandwich short of a picnic (or being paid to do so). Having your comments section be low on your development priority list would be acceptable to me. The vast majority of users won’t comment at all, ever. Some will comment once in a blue moon. Only those with an agenda will obsessively comment over and over again, or be particularly miffed about design changes that relate to a comments window.
In fact given the prevalence of state-sponsored commenting directed at websites/people who publish dissent, I would be more inclined to inhibit their activities through site design than to listen to their every moan and complaint about how hard their jobs are now! Boo hoo, seriously.
Anyone who has a beef with the triple line menu function also needs to spend more time on the internet. It is intuitive and instantly recognisable as a menu function.
I agree the menu content, which was fine when TI was launched but is now long outdated, needs to be reworked.
While Greenwald was the initial drawcard, the full staff list with bios needs to be brought forward to this menu. Contact should be a separate page from About and both should be present in this menu rather than lumped together. There should be a Media page for appearances by Greenwald and other authors, talking to other media outlets about their stories and/or instances of TI hitting the news/breaking into MSM at various times. Or at the least a videos section where video content can be aggregated.
Most of all, if you click anywhere outside that menu window it should close the window – you shouldn’t have to click on the X to close it. This is simple to effect and highly desirable.
Furthermore the search function needs to have a panel of a different colour as relying on people to click on the icon and see the cursor is a stretch at best. It is in the right location but just needs something to differentiate itself from the rest of the panel.
For those obsessing over seeing the comments rather than seeing more content – it’s not that big an ask to require one click to view the comments. And if you ask a whole lot more nicely perhaps TI will allow you to sort comments by most recent.
Overall I think the company is evolving and thus so must the website. I think this is a good step in the right direction. And yes I am a ‘design professional’ though that shouldn’t really give my words any more weight than those of the average reader. I also have six articles open in new tabs right now so clearly that has been resolved :)
I think this is my first comment ever and will probably be my last. I will continue to be a regular reader and advocate however. Thanks T.I. :)
“Only those with an agenda will obsessively comment over and over again”
I’ve commented a lot in this thread. What’s my agenda?
Thanks for mentioning the scripting issue. ;)
As for the commenting thing, my big beef is the scripting but also the removal of actual timestamps and ability to reference individual comments — something necessary at times to call attention to people (in the former case) keep track of who said what when and (in the latter case) call people on their bullshit.
I don’t like it. The old one was way clearer to read, easier on the eyes and all-around better.
No more ability to link to specific comments.
No more ACTUAL timestamps. If you want fuzzy timestamps that are impossible to use to participate and are embracing a lack of privacy anyway, you may as well just employ Disqus.
Since I’m making strange security wish lists, here, that’ll never be listened to anyway, let me just make one more blue-sky: Get rid of the gravatars. I won’t bother saying why, since I figure it’s pointless.
I had to look it up. I’m not with it when it comes to social media. Could you elaborate a bit. Is a gravatar entirely voluntary on this site? Or is someone going to make one for me whether I like it or not? Ten percent chance that a gravatar can be deconstructed to reveal email address and IP address, it says on Wikipedia. My default, anonymous, unisex off-white/gray avatar looks the same on this page as it always did. Is the gravatar something one must opt into? Or should I be worried that something will start appearing without my consent? Thanks in advance for spending your explaining about such things.
There are a few issues, some seemingly more arcane than others.
(First a sidenote: your comments, in js, get saved when you save the file. Booboo, webdevs — that shouldn’t happen on page save at all til after POST, but I’m no web dev — Dan, if I’m wrong correct me).
(1) It may or may not bother people that every time they comment they have a specific (that is not generic, one-size-fits-all) off-white/gray avatar that is associated with them; even though it may seem generic, you have your own avatar stored on the site.
So, let’s say your post, above. (Test posting to see if this actually posts as the code — To be continued next comment):
Replytortoiseshell • 2 hours agoI
Yup, that didn’t go anything like how I expected, which I guess is what I expected. This will be easier if/once you have a copy of the page source to look at. For intents and purposes, your avatar value is in this section: img class=”Comments-author-avatar” src=”The%20Intercept%E2%80%99s%20New%20Look_files/c20bd1c3541b579483a463f8e042d434.jpeg”. This means you have a unique avatar, no matter what it looks like to you (or anybody else, unless they look at the source or have a copy of the html/directory (which anybody can get by saving the full page, scripts and all). As do I (5ad83e34d08c8131a823cd8488b9b3f6.jpeg), like it or not. There’s no good reason or purpose for this. They should do away with these altogether, wp lovers that they are, and have a default pic used by EVERYBODY that doesn’t have/want a specific avatar. BTW, that hex before the jpeg is a hash.
(2) This sort of predictable loading can make deanonymising and traffic correlation easier.
More if desired.
Thanks a billion! I’ll always take more if you have the time. But I don’t want to impose on your goodwill. So whenever and as you have spare time.
One thing the past couple of days have done is gotten me using Tor again. No visits to TI unless I’ve got Tor open. From one perspective, it’s funny that TI, with all its railing about privacy and all its stories about how to maintain one’s privacy on the internet and all its staff members who are specialists in computer privacy, handed over the job of redesigning the site to a couple of people who didn’t read the site content and made every rookie mistake in the book. That’s like hiring people who have never heard of “alt text” to design a site for the Web Accessibility Initiative.
I’ve given up commenting everywhere except TI, and now I’ll have to consider what course to pursue on TI. And just when they expanded the comment box to six lines! Darn the luck! :-) But it’s a good exercise in self-control, yes? Thanks again. Knowledge is power.
Without saying anything to further correlate online and other online identities, I’ll say anybody who’s kept a firm eye on the tor development community can tell you that once you enable javascript on a tor site, you’re opening yourself up to far far easier denonymisation. For various reasons I’ve repeatedly disagreed with, the default is to keep NoScript off. I hope you’re enabling it immediately. But as an example of denonymisation, take a look at what was done last year in cases such as http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/11/07/how-did-law-enforcement-break-tor/ .
This is far from exhaustive. The more active content sites have the easier they are to break — and by break I don’t just mean not work. I’m not sure how aware of this people are that aren’t writers on this site (I suspect awareness varies wildly/widely) but it’s not only governments that would enjoy that sort of thing. A lot of media sites get hacked, often. What happens after that varies widely depending on the purpose and the people behind it — in an ‘ownership’ position, though, one would probably just prefer to stay stealth and hidden — that’s worse than a defacement. The fewer openings and exposures available for stuff like this the better. As I have repeatedly said, if they wanted to beta, on a different network, with no connection between the sites, that’d be one thing. But they’re not. I’m not trying to stir up fear but the longer these issues aren’t fixed, the more likely for that to happen, or have happened, already. And that doesn’t just mean access to the website. I’m not just trying to protect the USERS.
I liked Mussolini’s comments — he was spot on about the look/content thing.
I have NoScript enabled except on sites where what I specifically want to see requires scripting. Like commenting here, these days.
Yup. Benito is a gem. Too bad the occasional newbie doesn’t understand the schtick.
Yup. At the time of the “break Tor” seminar cancellation, I would have bet that the university was worried about research ethics, legal trouble, and possibly the failure to give top billing to an administrator with sharp elbows. But it makes excellent sense that the government was not in favor of making publicly funded research available to the public that funded it.
BTW, re: “all its staff members who are specialists in computer privacy”, journalists who report on privacy issues aren’t generally technologists who have a deep understanding of the nitty-gritty of security. And few web devs have any idea what makes websites secure or insecure. I’ve made repeated suggestions of people to use as sources. Maybe I’m just wrong and they’ve attempted to reply to this (I hope) nonexisting email address, but I doubt it. I never got responses to those suggestions. That’s frustrating, because it makes me think they care more about looking like they’re helping people be more secure or protect their privacy. I don’t like criticising but it’s signs like that, or the length of time to fix the MAIN problems (not the interface problem) and/or move this to beta that tell me priorities aren’t what they should be — and that’s not a ‘preference’ thing or an ‘I’m so smart’ thing. It’s something any software *dev* would say who’s ever seen betas (and let’s be honest, this was maybe an alpha, not even a beta), and definitely something a security person would say. I get concerned because people come to places looking for advice they can trust and they often don’t know what’s safe or not safe (or safer versus less safe, to be more accurate). I kind of think it’d be better to avoid those sorts of articles at all than have errors and have sites be at odds with even their own tech peoples’ conclusions.
Nice. The
tag worked. But yeah, see all those off-site loads? Two parts to that: 1, known past issues with gravatar (including proxy respecting on certain browsers, but lots of others — do a web search about concerns), and 2, third party loads. That lets third parties know who’s loading what. Now see how those static assets of their icons are? That’s what the generic icon should be: A plain old static icon, locally. As much as some people might like their gravatars, it introduces multiple vulnerabilities.The gravatar thing made me think about Retraction Watch (where I used to post occasionally) and the geometric facet-y things they would insist on making for people who refused to upload an avatar. They must have been contracting with some outside service to produce and archive those. Apparently a screen name was not sufficiently recognizable. Always seemed odd to me that right triangles would be more memorable than clever screen names. But the anonymity threat would be in the outside service knowing the info even if the Retraction Watch folks were sincere. Glad you brought this up.
It’s not really deliberate — it shows they’re using out of the box ‘free’ software without putting any thought into how it itself works or probably having any IDEA how it works. WordPress, piwik, the gravatar stuff, etc… Again, I have refused to give any real scrutiny to this site. All this stuff is stuff I just noticed in passing without looking for anything — looking would no doubt show bigger problems. No point in looking for esoteric when obvious exists.
Maybe you should message the (you hope) nonexisting email address to see if it exists. And if it does, you could ask the owner to forward to you all the techie messages from folks he doesn’t know. :-) Just joking. It is admirable that you want security sites and security journalists to dish up correct advice.
I don’t want any comments I wouldn’t make on this site publicly to exist behind the scenes via email — that’s just a recipe for disaster (I don’t use email at all; make of this what you will). While I believe in privacy, I also believe in transparency when it comes to stuff like how to better enable privacy for users; there’s nothing secret about that (and if other sites learn from those comments, all the better). I just want to do away with hypocrisy — or call people on it and call attention to it not being remedied; one standard.
With re: the email, though, if someone IS using this email address, then they have my apologies; as long as I don’t try to find out if it exists (and I never try to access it — why would I?) I can plead honest ignorance (whether it’s believed or not, though, I guess, is another story).
Farg. I left out an important part, and the reason I pointed out gravatar specifically. Let’s see if it posts these as links or if it goes into a never-to-post comment queue:
https://firstlook.org/assets/static/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png
https://firstlook.org/assets/static/apple-touch-icon-60x60.png
https://firstlook.org/assets/static/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png
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https://firstlook.org/assets/static/favicon-96x96.png
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https://firstlook.org/assets/static/favicon.ico
https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/07/TI_Launch_02-article-header.jpg
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And you’re quite welcome. I’m always willing to give my time to help others as long as they are sincere. Incidentally, this site pretty much doesn’t load at all (or much at all) on lynx (text-only browsing), via wget, or via curl. That’s also the javascript — and it relates to your alt text comment (as the earlier web sites had alt-text for cutting down on traffic size, which meant not loading images. You can turn off image loading but it’s a pain in the butt to manage it on multiple sites (unfortunately I wouldn’t advise adding many add-ons to TBB, though).
I flirted with Marcy Wheeler’s site but it’s mostly commenting on other peoples’ articles which is frustrating to me (and doesn’t address much). I’m not a big commenter. This is my one bow to much of an online commenting fingerprint and I actually keep it limited but semi-transparent on purpose.
I wish knowledge were power. I know it used to be. It doesn’t feel that way to me anymore. Maybe because knowledge itself has been redefined too, not just power.
What’s really funny (or sad) is that it wasn’t dissent, trolling, governments, drama, or whatever else that drove me off. Oppressors, take note. There’s better ways to drive people away.
Went away for a day or two, thinking maybe the person who replied was sincere. Give em a chance, I thought. Came back even more frustrated. I want to put my energy into fighting injustice and overreaching systems, not fighting a site and leaving exhausted and totally unable to keep an eye on the commenting or stories. I’ll try again in a few days. I learned the hard way sometimes people/places just need to learn for themselves they made a mistake.
I feel distressed there is no search function on The Intercept. How do we get an overall view of more than a day or two?
I really like the fonts and the color. What looks odd are the white spaces.
I should add that a lot of this awful design – the huge white spaces, the gray text, the utter lack of color, the infinite scrolling nonsense – was proposed at Wikipedia as part of their “Flow” comment design. The users rebelled against this awfulness. I have no idea why it is allegedly so popular, unless publishers have identified that their biggest problem on the web is that people actually read their content.
In a word: Smartphones. Scrolling down the page with a finger is the reason for all this. Entire websites are now designed primarily for smartphone users. The reason is that they predominate web usage these days. The white spaces and other oddities all are the consequence of designing a website that “squeezes down” to the size of a 5 inch screen. It can be made to be acceptable by both large screen and small screen users, but usually only after the kind of back and forth you are seeing here.
Smartphones don’t need javascript, just properly non-breaking/flowing text. They certainly don’t need their data caps blown away, nor special formatting. There’s a reason m.sitename.com is still a convention (though that’s going away; it shouldn’t; sites should load FASTER, not have faster speeds be an excuse for pushing massive amounts of data down pipes. There’ s no good reason or need for it. I’d be cool with this if it were an art site (maybe not so much with the javascript, but if I could turn it off I wouldn’t bat an eye). This is suitable for pic a day type sites. Not the endless scrolling. But I mean any site that’s mostly about graphics, not content — especially not content that people in the tl;dr group fall into.
Sorry, but I hate the new design pretty much completely.
* I hate having a tenth of my total screen stolen by a black bar whose main purpose is to push the Facebook and Twitter logos in my face. Trust me, I hate those companies all on their own. Nor do I get the purpose of the little three bars… I try clicking and see a few redundant navigation tabs, but why? I want it the hell off my screen.
* I hate “infinite scrolling” in general. More specifically, I hate not being able to scroll down to the end of the comments, or to gauge my position in the article, etc. Beyond that, I hate that the thing sticks for a second while I’m just trying to scroll down in the plain article text reading it the first time, and all of a sudden I’m plunged into the middle of some other article with no idea how I got there! And I hate that they’re all the same articles … no matter what I scrolled down from, I’m someplace where I was – it’s just, the page started somewhere else, or ends somewhere else (unless I scroll down further) or something. Do I sound lost? YEAH. I sound lost.
* I hate needing to enable Javascript to read comments. Javascript is a time-wasting suck that rarely delivers anything good and usually sites that require it are up to something no good. I’m not saying I haven’t written some very basic Javascript code or that it can’t do some cool things for custom applications, just that I don’t like to depend on it when all I want to do is read a static file.
Re: persistent fixed headers: I’m with you, but we’ve already lost this fight. I wish I could offer more support, but it’s entrenched now, and we’ll have to wait 3-7 years for someone to feel like it’s trendy to rebel against it. I’ll throw a party when that happens, and you’re invited.
Re: infinite scrolling: we can still win this one, but it’s going to be rough. Hang in there. Also, I’m pretty sure we’ve already lost this one, too. Dammit.
Re: mandatory JavaScript: you (we) are objectively correct.
In web design, there’s this thing called “graceful degredation.” It’s a noble concept. The idea is, you design your site so that a browser from 1994 can still display it. Then, you add on treats for users who keep up-to-date. This bottom-up approach ensures content delivery to the least privileged (read: most stubborn, including me, but also people with legitimately formidible obstacles) followers while offering turtleneck-tasteful goodies to the arthouse crowd. It certainly can be win-win, but you’ve got to be smart and realistic about it. Pulling it off necessarily involves embracing the plurality of your audience, and I don’t think that’s happened, here.
We’re an odd bunch, and while I appreciate the difficulty of pleasing the non-demographic of free thinkers to whom this site caters, I do think too many concession have been made to ephemeral web trends. You really can’t please us all, it’s impossible. We’re cats, we are, and we shall not be herded. But embrace that. Don’t hide your own hasty conclusions amid the character flaws of your detractors; be better than such easy outs. When I visit The Intercept, I want a sense of Edward R. Murrow gravitas. The reporting on this site is impeccable. I feel *genuinely privileged* to read the fearless journalism presented here.
I’m a history buff; I’ve learned about how hard it was to defy conventional wisdom in times past. We’re so lucky. All of us. As I type this, I feel completely overcome with fortune I don’t deserve.
(You’re still talking about some bullshit stylesheets, right? Because I feel like this conversation has taken a sharp turn, just now.)
I get that. Reasonable people can look at this and see nitpicking, or obsessing, or just taking this too seriously. I can see how it might seem trivial, but in all honesty, I take this really seriously, and will cheerfully accept any condemnation on that basis. The Intercept is really important to me. Of course every little thing matters way more than it otherwise would. I can’t quit. There’s no one else who does what TI does, the way TI does it. You have no competitors, and I feel it’s incumbent upon you to live up to a higher standard in dignified acknowledgement of that.
Lastly, on a selfish note, when The Intercept looks dumb, it’s harder for me to win arguments, because I cite you as a reputable source. Just FYI.
Thanks for a detailed reply. I hope you are wrong about the fixed headers, but if not, then we need a user/browser rebellion like there was with pop-up ads. Somebody just has to write a plug-in that gives you check box (next to some of the pointless options like “start page” and “share this page” on your browser menu) to conceal all fixed elements on the browser window/tab. (If they’ve done it already, someone let me know)
If anyone thinks I’m being harsh by comparing the fixed bar here to a pop-up ad, I must emphasize that I have always seen the Facebook and Twitter logos as ads, not as services. Sure, the site is hoping to get something in return, but the quid pro quo is that they are advertising the Evil Empire, with the implication that this sponsorship can be taken away. If it’s important enough to be liked on Facebook that you’re willing to sacrifice a tenth of your page to it, then it would be pretty bad if Facebook decided to ban all links to your site as “malware”, “hacking information”, “terrorist apologism” or whatever. If you can sacrifice one-tenth of your page to these companies, maybe you could afford to sacrifice one-tenth of your news stories to that same cause, no? Spike something now and then if it would be too infuriating to the undisputed owners of Generation Y or Z or whatever they’re up to now, just to be safe, no?
If the medium is the message, then that’s what I hear every time I look at your page, because I see that logo every time I look at your page, no matter what the story, no matter what the comment.
While I share your frustration with the arguably excessive influence of social media, unfortunately, it’s irresponsible to *not* push your SM presence, because of how it impacts search engine results. No SM presence means lower search engine rankings, which means lessened overall visibility. It’s pretty much impossible to tell a client “sure, you’ll get fewer visits, and fewer people will know you exist, but the ones that do will be marginally less annoyed with you.” I really don’t think it reflects anything about TI’s journalistic integrity.
Wikipedia is near the top of search results everywhere, and yet — no Facebook and Twitter links in sight. So it can be done. And the problem is, “SM” doesn’t refer to a general practice, like creating the comment community here on The Intercept – you’re using it to refer to “doing whatever it takes to be in with these two companies”, I think. And those companies come up with more and more reasons to exclude content all the time, so I don’t think the journalistic integrity part will remain hypothetical for long, even as a matter of open policy (let alone what might be intimated in private conversations among company officials). I’d love to see The Intercept improve its visibility, but not through subordination to specific companies.
Wikipedia’s a poor example, because they have a special relationship with Google and other search engines. If you can get an in-person meeting with Matt Cutts, then yeah, you don’t need to push your SM presence to rank well. Everyone else needs to play ball.
You don’t need to be “in” with any companies to leverage SM. If all my Facebook posts are critical of Zuckerberg, nothing bad happens. If I have no Facebook posts at all, something bad does happen: I rank lower in search results. There’s zero subordination to any company. What we’re all bowing to, is public pressure. People use social media, and walling yourself off from them only hurts your public visibility.
I’m definitely very concerned with journalistic integrity, but I don’t see the connection between that and a Facebook icon. What could Facebook or Twitter do to TI? Ban TI’s accounts? I’d like to see them try. Censor TI’s posts? I don’t think that would work out well, either. What’s the lever? If I’m a social media giant who wants to undermine TI, how do I get the ball rolling on that?
I don’t believe google/search engines are the correct way to get clicks here. Knowing who the proper movers-and-shakers are (and I don’t mean just the journos tweeting) and having relationships with them is how you bring attention to issues. If they’re already pushing heavy on twitter but only getting positive responses on their user interface, that’s strange to me. It means they’re not reaching the people they’re intending to reach — which is to say as many people as they can. I found it so strange to see NO negative feedback in the twitter replies. Getting stuff viral on twitter (much as I *despise* the platform) is the way to go, probably. Not SEO. You can’t game SEO now without money or influence. It’s a wasted effort.
Almost all of the criticism I’ve read in this thread or written myself, is difficult or impossible to express in 140 characters. I think that’s probably the main driver in that phenomenon.
As for passing on search engines, well, I don’t think that’s wise. It’s not about about having “the” correct way to self-promote, it’s about exploring all feasible, popular ways of reaching people. Having less presence in search engine results pages helps no one, and if the price of having improved presence is a couple of stupid icons, I, for one, can live with that.
It’s true that it’s increasingly difficult to *exploit flaws* in SE algorithms (called “black hat” SEO) but it’s not hard at all to improve your positioning by leveraging social media. The more Twitter followers you have, the more relevant you seem to more people. Search engines want to serve up relevant results, and one of the many metrics involved is Twitter followers, and FB likes, and so on. That’s part of “white hat” SEO, and it has a strong effect on your ranking.
Sorry, I didn’t mean the comments should be done on twitter (bleh twitter); I meant that links to the articles should be done on twitter. Certainly they shouldn’t be making the button-thingies. I understand they want exposure but like most sites they want shortcuts that wind up countermanding their desires and contradicting the very sorts of things they (maybe more were) talking about.
But let’s say, Twitter. Most peoples’ stances can be stated in a sentence or two (if needed — but most people just tweet links now and don’t bother since their filter bubbles and friends already expand what they believe the other person is trying to tweet about usually (for most values of ‘social media’) and expanded upon in a real forum (which would be the comments section, in a better world).
I’m not really saying they should ‘pass’ on search engines so much as realise that the way to get that level of exposure is to either make sites hot, or pay to get the page rank. This isn’t the sort of thing that organically gets ‘hot’ on its own (it may have been in 2010, but attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
That’s one part of why the *design* of this site rankles me: it invites a similar level of fast, 140, poof, gone. That doesn’t bring change. It makes people become accustomed to things, not fight them (not in a way that matters — I haven’t seen any of those crappy ‘online petitions’ change anything real, just bring back a TV show or two ;)).
If people want to tweet things, it’s easy. Go into the address bar, copy the link, and tweet it.
Adding, I don’t mean the twitter and facebook buttons here, which I personally find evil and contrary to the message (especially the fb one). Copy/paste is pretty easy. Get people to want to make those 2-3 hand movements, 5 seconds. If you’re not, better to ask why not.
Wnt, the three little bars are the only way I know how to get around in the site, so I would be sorry to see them go. But, yes, the space devoted to the header is excessive. Ironically, on my screen the space devoted to the header is exactly (and I do mean exactly) the same height as the space allotted for typing a comment. I can see three lines of my comment at a time. I recall more than a dozen complaints, over the months since TI launched, asking for a bigger comment box. I recall no requests for a header. Can we use reverse psychology here? Should we demand infinite scrolling and social media icons while staying mum about thumbnails (for me) and right-click tabs (for everybody else)? ;-)
I like it. The design is clean and spartan; the typeface is very readable; and images are showcased very effectively without getting in the way of text. I’m very impressed with how well the site scales to different window sizes, switching layout at key points. The text always keeps a suitable size and column width for great readability.
The layout of recent stories on the homepage seems much improved; it seems easier to distinguish the new stories now. It’s great that the links to author-pages are gone from the homepage; now I don’t accidentally open the Glen Greenwald bio when I intended to open his article. At some large sizes the serifs on TI Actu look slightly too heavy (on Windows8/Chrome), but overall, very nice, very slick.
“images are showcased very effectively without getting in the way of text”
The opening image sure gets in the way of text on my screen.
Yeah, it’s WAY too big on my screen, too. Maybe because I use a higher zoom to read online. Please folks, realize not everyone has 20/20 vision.
Oddly, when I try to open the site on my cellphone, I get a security warning: “The name of the site does not match the name on the certificate.” The certificate is issued to common name “*.cdn.firstlook.org”, organization “” [blank], issued by COMODO RSA Domain Validation on 29/06/2015.
The page itself at https://firstlook.org/theintercept/ is a 302 redirect. I haven’t figured out how to get the redirection address out of the android browser, and I’m not going to follow it in case it’s a (clumsy) man-in-the-middle attack. I’m in Auckland, NZ.
Perhaps this is a strange question, but what are the start and end dates of the certificate, if you view/inspect the certificate? I know it’s kind of a pain in the behind to find out on Android, but if you get a chance.
(Also, their SSL isn’t configured right, anyway (well from what I’ve seen); never immediately attribute to malice what can easier be attributed to error).
Does the site leak user data like IP info? My HushMail account won’t show pictures because it would leak user data. like IP info.
Is you javascript library being delivered by a CDN or served from your own site? Which CDN?
Do javascript libraries get audited for security? Which javascript library are you using?
I only took a literally 3 second look at source on one page, but they list all of their CDN production (and iirc test?) machines fqdn’s. They’re internal. That source though. Painful.
Submitting a comment closes the comment area and takes the user back to the story. Is this a feature or a bug?
Yup, whichever, it’s SUPER annoying.
Or the next story, if you’re SUPER lucky or try to reload.
Looks like shit. But that’s ok since it fits the content perfectly, so well done.
I finally agree with you about something. It does look like shit. But why do you keep coming here if you dislike the content? Is this your assignment? Pity the unfortunate “influencer” who finds that his/her target has changed overnight to a format that makes him/her scroll forever to find the particular stories on which s/he is paid to leave comments.
That, tortoiseshell, was the one idea I had myself that made me chuckle a few days ago when this switched over. But it’s easier for them to modify and adjust their systems. They’re not limited to memory.
Which CMS are you using or is that a secret?
Does it support themes? URL rewriting? MVVM?
I like the new darker look the only problem is when switching from the landing page to the actual article, the system inverts to black on white and I get flashed. Another thing is that the pictures are too big and glossy. With a thumbnails/headline view I can scan the headlines quickly to see if anything new has dropped.
Also, I wish there was an index along the lines of Craigslist accessible from the navigation panel. With headline dates, number of comments etc. Eventually maybe you could add a grid to allow grouping by subject matter, writer, date, etc.
It looks like you are getting rid of newlines being used as separators. Please consider indenting the first line of paragraphs. The current situation make the text appear very dense, without any breaks for the eye to track.
I know you all worked really hard on this, and I know you’re working to fix bugs and such. And I really appreciate that. But I would also really appreciate if you could fix the fact that we can’t open links in separate tabs while reading an article. Maybe you’re already working on that, I don’t know. But either way, thanks for reading these comments and keeping us ingrates happy!
On a PC, CTRL-click to open in a new tab. On a Mac, Command-click to do the same.
Tried it and it didn’t work for me.
I like the look but I really miss the “print” option. I save a lot of your articles for future reference and having to copy, paste, and then edit out all the nonessential ads and links is a pain.
What a unpleasant surprise. This design is unappetizing and plain ugly. It look like a cheap version of a tabloid newspaper site.It going to very hard to take the content serious since it looks like the work of a 5 year old.
Yeah, but they’ve pre-immunized themselves from this criticism by telling themselves that some people just hate change because it’s change, and then assuming that any critiques of presentation flow from that. They’re backing off of some really egregious, insulting decisions (such as trapping right-clicks) and I commend them for that. To some degree, they really are listening to feedback about functional failures. Sadly, they can’t hear us when we say it looks sloppy and unprofessional, because anyone who says that is just a hater who will, they’re assured, eventually get over it. Sigh.
I agree with Dan. It’s true that some people dislike change just because it is change. There are also people who like new things just because they are new. The rational task is to ignore all the comments that come from those two groups and to concentrate on the comments that come from people who like or dislike things for a good reason. Is the typeface easier to read, or not? Can readers find what they want to find, or not? Is the layout attractive, or not? Do images contribute to the appearance and the message, or not? Not every reader will agree that gray-on-white is difficult to read, but at least that’s a preference with some objective functional reasoning behind it. Acres of black pixels are just so cooool!!! Not so much, as the kids say today. I’d vote for blue if I have to look at acres of any color. Black is my second-least-favorite color. But it could have been worse. The designer could have chosen orange.
It remains to be seen whether the architects will shield their egos by insisting that all complainers are just people who hate change. But I’d sure like to see the research that says eternal scrolling leads to better understanding of the content, or that readers don’t want a table of contents.
It’s only the broadcast news that makes its audience tread water for unpredictable amounts of time while waiting for a story of interest to be served up. Media outlets that have all items available all the time usually try to let their audience members move as quickly as possible to whatever items are of most interest to each individual. That’s why, for example, a newspaper might put local news in section A every day, national news in section B every day, and want ads in the final pages of section D every day. Readers know where to find the items that interest them most, and can go directly there. Internet newspapers usually reserve a location for items of different types: editorials in the upper right corner, for example, or two screens down from the top, or whatever. And they usually display two or more headlines on the opening screen, to show readers that multiple items catering to various tastes are available. The message is, “Don’t go away if this one doesn’t interest you. We have others that you might like.” Print magazines advertise their contents on the front cover. Books include a table of contents right after the title page. Of course it is possible that all media products for hundreds of years have been following the wrong pattern. Maybe readers would rather be shown items one at a time, in no particular order, so they can say, “Nope, not interested. Next, please,” until random chance serves up a story they want to read. But I’m guessing not.
Not sure what all this fuss is about. White on black is fine for very short runs of text. Grey is fine for elements that you want to recede because they’re only rarely of interest.
I haven’t found it hard to reach what I want to read. Perhaps the site requires more scrolling on the home-page than it did previously — but this doesn’t seem to get in the way for me. (Of course, I’m a regular reader and so mostly read only today’s stories at the top.)
And why all this speculation about ego-trips and not accepting criticism? They’re asking for feedback, aren’t they? How about showing a little good faith?
Good questions, Ben. Now, I think that when you say “good faith” you’re referring more to “benefit of the doubt.” Everyone here is operating in good faith as far as I can tell; I detect no deceit. Some of us may appear to be assuming some negative things without basis, and while I can’t claim to speak for all, I can certainly explain where my cynicism comes from: I work in the web design industry. I know how insiders defend substandard work, and it’s almost always a variation on the “haters gonna hate” theme. Overtly soliciting feedback, and acting quickly on some of it, is a key part of this tactic. By fixing stuff that’s objectively broken, you can be seen to accept criticism, which gives you room to ignore issues that negatively impact the site without completely ruining it.
Now, there are things that amateur or very-recently-turned-pro web designers do, which most quickly mature past. Trapping right clicks is one of them, and while TI admirably walked that one back in a hurry, it’s *HUGE* red flag. I’ve never seen anyone try to trap right clicks and *not* screw up other major portions of the project. Users hate having their intent thwarted, as evidenced by the complaints in this thread about not being able to open stories in new tabs. Designers *immediately* learn that this was a mistake, and never try it again. Add all that up, and it torpedoes the benefit of the doubt, because you’re either dealing with a rookie, or someone who doesn’t learn from past mistakes. You’re also dealing with someone who doesn’t beta test. You may feel that I’m jumping the gun, or reading too much into one single decision, but I’m sure you can understand where the worries come from.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ll repeat it here briefly for convenience: following TI’s own secure browsing recommendations renders the site nearly unusable. That implies a failure of technical oversight, and is also worrying. The site should work without any JavaScript at all, and be prettier and/or offer interface conveniences for those with JS enabled.
Now, credit where credit is due: the responsive design was, for the most part, well-considered. The front page is a hot mess, but the internal ones are very pretty. I dislike the color scheme personally, but I don’t expect TI to share my aesthetic sensibilities. I do expect TI to share my technical concerns, because I got those concerns from TI in the first place.
Trapping right clicks was not intentional, it was a bug.
Thanks for that clarification. I still think it should have been caught before launch, but I’ve made mistakes like this myself. Live and learn.
Sometimes the cynic in me thinks they’re just trying to get other people to do their work for them out of anger, frustration, or something manipulative like that. I realise that sounds horrible, and probably isn’t true, but it does feel passive-aggressive.
Betas exist to protect sites, protect users, and point out bugs that should have been found and fixed long before beta testing, in alpha testing. It makes me think nobody did any QA.
Exactly correct. Professionals know this. There’s even a cute saying in coding culture for it: “if at first you do succeed, try not to look too surprised.”
Thank you for sticking on this (with me or otherwise). I appreciate it. I think I need to stop, at least for a bit. They said something about removing the js but I think they haven’t learned the lesson. I don’t think I can teach them the lesson, I don’t think you can teach them the lesson, I don’t think anybody can (kindly) teach them the lesson they should have taken away from this the first day (though it’s a lesson they should’ve known long before that point).
I know your saying well… Coding, I know. Just not much web dev (well, not in the last decade; I really do loathe js and css).
There is a lack of technical professionalism here that largely can only result if there’s noone with enough power and technical knowledge to be able to know what is or isn’t technical professionalism. If someone’s there at T//I who’s been saying this stuff and not being listened to, leave or demand to get listened to; if you aren’t, it won’t get better. If nobody IS there who’s saying it, then those at T//I need to ask themselves why.
Sorry, Dan, I’m feeling preachy; that wasn’t directed at you (though I think that’s obvious). I’m just trying novel approaches and spinning wheels.
You’ve a good head on your shoulders, sir.
Thanks, man. I’ve appreciated your contributions as well. But, I, too, also feel that I’ve said what I had to say, at least for the next little while. TI has some difficult decisions and a lot of work ahead of them. I hope they do the right thing. I’m going to let them have some time to work on that.
Thanks. My issue now is that they don’t realise that in the time they’ve allowed all of this to continue, they have effectively already let the horse out of the barn (I think that’s how the American idiom goes). I don’t go in for some peoples’ (cough) conspiracy theories but I’m often struck by how ‘unintended consequences’ often wind up creating things that can easily look very much like intended ones.
It’s been an honour.
“Grey is fine for elements that you want to recede because they’re only rarely of interest.”
Hm. Like the comments? I suppose that’s one way of reducing the name-calling on this site. Make the comments recede. They’re rarely of interest. If readers can’t see them very well, they won’t get into so many disputes about them.
I’m actually probably such an early adopter that I’m a pre-adopter (in part because I automatically go into take it apart mode). So let’s just say I have no problem with change. When change is good. But since I do automatically go into ‘take it apart’ mode, I also can see exactly how badly this can go (and perhaps will go). I despise the look but I’ve kept my comments on that limited. This isn’t a ‘change is bad’ tirade. This is a ‘THIS change is SO bad that WITH ANY LUCK it’ll drive people away before they get hurt’ tirade. And I never wanted to drive people away from here. It resembles a lure that leads right into a terrible trap. Why do this to users? If the editors and site managers had ANY good intentions they would have IMMEDIATELY rescinded ANYTHING that could be used against the visitors that this site draws. It’s irresponsible and immature of the leadership NOT to put things back until safer changes are made. That’s not even ‘more work’. It’s less.
You have something there, Dan. It seems that so many businesses, orgs, etc. really don’t listen to customers/users very seriously.
And I wish they’d finally hear us when we say how awful the new look is.
I suppose that’s also why some members of the commentariat are prompted to make imbecilic comments indicating their own mental age of about 5.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but personal insults may not have a positive effect on one’s perceived maturity.
Commentariat, huh? You must be one of those hip people.
Agree 100%.
Good news! They seem to have fixed the RSS feed! You can get a usable list of stories from https://firstlook.org/theintercept/feed/?rss and then just feed that to an offline reader. It’s not ideal, but it’ll let you avoid this design disaster for the most part.
Oh. Wow. Dan. No, it’s not — not really. Look on your browser bar. If you’re in Firefox, where the lock should be. Yes, with the https.
You’re right, it’s broken again, but I swear it worked when I posted that.
It takes a pretty grisly/gristly type of something I won’t say (to avoid violating a standard behavioural rule of mine) to have a site link as https and show as https in the address bar but not have SSL.
(If they’re so inexperienced as to not even test this sort of thing, then I basically consider the site as having probably been compromised in some way. I’m not auditing it (even superficially); I’ve no interest in being in that kind of crosshair — but I’m quite sure other people are, less formally, and continually.
Nobody’s listening to me, it was too late to audit it the minute they put it up in place of the original site instead of on a separate server/network, and I wouldn’t bother because they don’t seem to care.)
If you’re seeing a page on firstlook.org there’s no way it’s being served over HTTP without TLS.
Did you click his link? Look in your addressbar. If you’re on Firefox, you’ll see a greyed globe instead of a lock. If you click on that greyed out globe, you’ll see it’s not at all encrypted. Click on more information for … more information.
I’m kind of weirded out I have to point this out several times and then have to give a step-by-step, Tom (no personal offense intended). Did you even check, or did you just say ‘there’s no way’?
I haven’t actually checked this out, but I have seen browsers behave that way while hotfixes are rolled out. I never got 100% to the bottom of it, but it always smelled like a caching mechanism got confused. I’m not saying for sure that TI didn’t make a mistake with this, but if the problem went away on its own, it really might be a client-side caching thing. Just throwing that out there as a possibility.
This link: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/feed/?rss
despite the https is still NOT being served over an encrypted/SSL connection. No lock. No nada. Inspection’ll prove it. It’s been a few days so I don’t believe it could be client-side; I’ve cleared things out and that doesn’t really make sense to me since the content does change.
This must be a firefox bug
$ curl -v https://firstlook.org/theintercept/feed/?rss
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
* Trying 4.53.16.143…
* Connected to firstlook.org (4.53.16.143) port 443 (#0)
* TLS 1.2 connection using TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384
* Server certificate: *.firstlook.org
* Server certificate: COMODO RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA
* Server certificate: COMODO RSA Certification Authority
* Server certificate: AddTrust External CA Root
…
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897
I appreciate your response.
Not to nitpick but on the subject of SSL you might want to tweak your cert so Organization is specified (you want the ‘green’ lock on FF, not the grey one).
The emphasized rule is causing the problem with spacing between paragraphs. It’s overriding the rule defined for the paragraph tag:
.Comments-content blockquote, .Comments-content p
{ font-size: 1em; margin-bottom: 0.2em; }
p { line-height: 1.5; margin: 0 0 1em; }
Why such a large line-height?
“Stéphane’s design has materialized thanks in large part to Tom Conroy, First Look’s product technology lead.”
Start packing, boys…
Where is the print function for the articles?
You’ve taken something that was clean and easy to navigate and needlessly complicated it. The navigation is now getting in the way of the content.
Readability and easy of use should win the day every time. If your audience has to think to navigate or think how to progress, you’ll reduce repeat visits simply because it’s not as enjoyable to visit and consume the content.
The black background with the reverse type will also loose its appeal quickly.
Am sure lots of folks worked hard and with the infinite scroll your desire is to be ahead of the curve, but the execution and implementation need work.
Let the content speak for itself. As it now stands, the site design is speaking louder than your editors words.
I have to agree with Jen – view you mostly from the desktop on a good size monitor. The redesign reminds me alot of Wired’s horrific redesign – which is so painful to use (whether its trying to quickly extract information from the front page or the flowing articles after you select a specific article), compared to its old design, I stopped going there. These tiny comment boxes are a pain as well.
The gigantic picture page for the lead story is so big you can’t see other stories that come online below it without scrolling and that’s on a big monitor. I use thumbnails to determine if something good has popped up on a site & I want to go there – that’s useless. Lots and lots of scrolling is required (1 article per page up/down) to see what articles are new / available where you could just see 3-4 at a glance before without scrolling.
This is much less functional on the desktop – which doesn’t match your journalism (which is substance over style).
I agree with Jen. It’s now a chore to see what the content is. With all the oversized photos and scrolling, it takes away focus from the articles. In other words, there was nothing wrong with the old system. Please put it back the way it was.
I agree with Jen and David. It is difficult for me to see what the content is. A huge photo associated with whatever story you have chosen as the top story of the hour is all I see when I go to the site.
Agree. Big monitor, loud, unwieldy content.
Hi Jen –
I totally agree. This new design is a) both UGLY and messier to even try to navigate. It certainly makes coming here less enjoyable for me.
Love the aesthetic and simplified navigation. A few notes:
– Below 1200px images don’t support hi-res displays. Above that images on crisp, but below they’re pretty fuzzy.
– Between 800px and 1200px the text stretches nearly from edge to edge, making lines of up to 125 characters, which is very hard to read. From what I’ve gathered in the past, 35-90 is optimal for reading, 45-50 being good for the largest subset of people.
– The shift from white to black background on the front page at 1200px feels odd, and the black background with fairly small white text isn’t the best for readability.
– Infinite scroll is a matter of preference, but it’s odd that yours doesn’t update the browser url once you’re into a new article. That’ll make sharing troublesome for a lot of people who don’t realize they can’t just copy the browser url.
Just wanted to congratulate you on you current visual iteration of the site. It looks great and evinces even greater, more sophisticated website improvements to come.
I love the new design! Keep at it!
The Guardian went through all this with their new page. Similar issues with the responsive design. Your comment section seems to work fine though.The Guardian’s is still buggy, for what seems like forever. Does random weird stuff some times. But they also handled a comment section with over 20,000 comments on one live blog, so it is getting there. I think it’s great that you are reading the feedback and being responsive to it.
I think the suggestion of some smaller pics at the top of the page to choose stories would help not having to scroll the whole page to find what you want to read is good.
Dear Betsy and Tom C. –
I HATE the new design, just HATE it. I hate the black background. I HATE that if you click on one story, it melds into another with no break. I want EACH story to have its own tab/window – that may be what many others have also said. Yup, J Yan, infinite scrolling is wrong.
I had a difficult time finding where to click to access/ add comments. The links were too small and way off to the left. PLEASE REMEMBER that not all of us are 21 and have 20/20 vision (Hi Liberal inCalif… we think alike…)
The print on comments could also be darker.
As far as security, not being a real tecchie, I am glad UI pointed out some flaws. I think they are supposed to be addressed. I hope so.
I would also favor bringing back the old site. I don’t know if you’re trying to be trendy or not, but the so-called improvements are horrible. Can’t overstate that enough. And please LISTEN to your readers!!!
Another gripe: when I click on a story now to check for new comments, it’s way too easy to scroll right by and be two or three stories down and it’s then almost impossible to get back without going to the homepage and starting again. YOU NEED TO CREATE A LINK just to the comments for each story. PLEASE!!!
I agree with everything you’re saying, feline16. This is now a site designed to impress with its trendy visuals, NOT to be easy to access for people who are actually interested in the content. I hate pretty much everything about it – the way comments collapse when I click submit, the way articles flow together, the harsh black-and-white design… you name it. I’d rather read scrolling green courier text on a black CRT.
Infinite scrolling is so, so wrong.
Absolutely agreed. It’s a parlor trick that impresses the naive, generates anger, frustration and browser crashes for experienced users. Kill it!!
I would only add that grey text, while appearing extremely hip, is difficult to read compared to a darker color. Not everyone is 20 years old with 20/20 vision.
We’ve fixed bugs with the default click behavior and comment order. More coming.
Launching and letting readers comment was a great idea and I don’t sign on to those saying you should have done more “beta testing.” Staff seems responsive to input, and that’s awesome.
I want to add this to my comment below: I really hate this bottomless page feature. It’s disorienting. I want to be on the page of the article and comments I’m participating in, and to bottom out at the bottom of comments, please!
The bottomless feature is OK when you get used to it, although it does remind me of the opening credits to Mad Men. For that matter, I’m adapting to this new format as best I can. I’m finding it tolerable, but I’ve just had a root canal, so it’s a matter of perspective.
We hear you!
Hearing and listening are two different things.
“and I don’t sign on to those saying you should have done more “beta testing.” Staff seems responsive to input, and that’s awesome.”
I hope you’re getting paid for this. I can think of no other reason to be so blatantly disrespectful of what your friend(‘s(‘)) site is supposed to be all about promoting.
PS: We didn’t say *MORE*. We said *BETA-TESTING*. As in, any of it. But whatever.
Well done developers. A responsive design that is both minimalist and retains a unique style.Fantastic work.
I use the highlightable reading aid on almost all of my articles. It’s a cumbersome ordeal if the text contains several links. I just read some of the article below and it seems fine.
Nice lettertype for the articles, but -constructive criticism- the letters for the comment are too small. I am a fast reader but here in this lettertype/size that does not work, have to read word for word to not get lost. At least for me it asks a big part of the attention span. Also be aware when using large pictures that some readers will be on slow internetlines in 3th world country’s nobody has ever even heard of. Those places are better for security against all evil but for megabyte’s they ain’t the cheapest. Some solidarity is appreciated, size can matter. Not really charmed of oversized frontpage pictures anyway. Dear designer, good luck
Just enlarge the size of the print on your computer when reading the comments. ctrl +
ctrl +
1. I hate not being able to open an article in a new tab.
Why do you feel it’s necessary to intercept mouse clicks? That’s just mean.
2. I can no longer save a private offline copy of your web pages
With the old format I could, and when opening them offline they displayed correctly. Now, with the new format, whenever I open my saved web page, the page starts to display, but then is immediately replaced with a blank page.
3. I absolutely LOATHE bottomless web pages!
———————————————————————–
Other than the above the new format LOOKS great.
But the functionality SUCKS.
Bottom line:
I hate it. >8-(
Where’s your “staff” page? I mean, the tab you had on the old TI, with profiles of the TI staff and hyperlinks to their articles? It isn’t under the /// link next to “The Intercept_” and it isn’t what you’ve got at https://firstlook.org/theintercept/staff either.
Coda: I go to //// and then to editorial, and I find it there. A subpage of a subpage, but it still exists, though it’s a little harder to find.
Click the three horizontal lines doodad in the upper right. You get a page with several options. Choose “About & Contacts” and you get a page where you need to scroll down to get a list of people. The photos and names are clickable, although that clickability is not indicated by anything that I can see. It was just a random guess on my part that allowed me to discover this. Once you get to the individual’s page, there is a brief job history and then the list of that person’s stories.
I know this because I have repeatedly searched for the announcement about the new look. This seems to be the easiest route.
That’s what I meant by “///” is that thing to the left of “The Intercept_” in the upper left logo, the horizontal lines. I clicked “about & contacts” and then “editorial”.
As someone who reads every single article you guys publish, this new layout makes that way way harder. Middle clicking no longer opens the link in a new tab and I need to search through multiple pages to find everything, often scrolling by story snippets. Am I missing an RSS feed or something that will actually let me find things? The whole redesign feels like it was made for my phone.
BTW, do your technical people know that your site also makes browsers far more fingerprintable now?
“We welcome feedback to help us further improve the experience of reading and navigating The Intercept. Ultimately, our goal is not only to create public-spirited journalism but an engaging experience that you are inspired to share.”
You say you welcome feedback yet you do not engage or respond to feedback. In another day or less, those behind the curtain will call this story ‘stale’. I stuck around all day hoping for a response of some form on here. I’m disappointed.
We’ve been reading all the feedback and are actively addressing valid issues.
You’re not giving any indication as to what you might consider valid or invalid. Bit of a judgment call?
In case they don’t get around to editing and previewing functionality any time soon, I’ll post a link to my own little comment editor/previewer. It uses javascript, and it writes cookies, if cookies are enabled, to save options, but no data is sent to the server; all processing is done in the browser. It’s ad free, and no third party code is loaded. (If you click on ‘Overview’ with text in the input window, the text is preserved below the overview.)
http://commenteditor.altervista.org
Why change something what already looks good,it was simple and beautiful.
But no…there is always someone who wants to complicate things,similar thing is happening everywhere. Like on Flickr or even in some programs,like Photoshop,they even change crop tool(incredible).
There should be an option for “dinosaurs” to choose old layout,there is one old saying from Woody Guthrie.
“Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”
Looking at the new site at work, I have to say I’m not a fan so far. It seems as if your responsive break points might be askew. Where I am, the monitor only allows up to a 1024 to 768 display, but I am obviously getting a layout more in tune with a mobile device, meaning everything is in one wide column, which makes the line length a little too long. When reading to the end of a line, it’s harder to track back to the beginning of the next line. I’m getting over 90 characters per line at the article font size, and 125 per line in the comments. Like-wise I get the mobile style menu at this size as well. It seems to miss the point of responsive design, instead of responding to my browser, I’m getting dumped into a design more in line with a device 1/3 the width of mine. It really does make reading the articles less appealing. And not having the ability to right click articles to open in a new tab is very annoying. I generally look through all of the article teasers opening all the ones I want to read into new tabs. Not being able to do that is really annoying. The design may have enhanced a mobile experience, but it has done it at the expense of a desktop experience. I’ll try it at home on a larger browser, but I’m not liking it so far. It has nothing to do with the newness of the design, but the poorness of its execution.
Oh, man…the look itself isn’t bad, it’s the awful inability to easily open stories in new tabs so that I can have each story in its own tab. Who thought it would be a good idea to have right click open the story rather than give the user the choice? Even shift-click doesn’t work anymore.
Come on, staff, I love this site but making it this difficult to use is going to scare people away just like what happened to Firefox, Windows 8, and Slashdot.
The black…awful. Really ugly design. I guess someone has nothing else to do but try and “prettify” a news site. It is news dammit not some ….oh hell it is just bloody awful
I’m missing the ability to open stories in browser tabs, though this seems to work in the ‘Documents’ section. Otherwise using the ‘back’ button and scrolling 6 screens to the next story is uselessly a pain.
It’s kind of interesting playing around with the browser window and seeing how the menus magically reconfigure depending on the width of the window.
Those complaining about the “cryptic three-bar thing” should know that that is now a common icon for a pull-down “main” menu. It’s like that on mobile device interfaces, and Firefox and Chrome browsers have used it for quite some time also.
I’m not a big fan of tailoring everything to mobile devices either, I think it looks goofy and I can’t imagine someone who wants to read in-depth articles that tend to run long (or watch TV shows or movies!) on a tiny smartphone screen…but that’s what’s popular these days. Just roll with it.
Rob’s right. The three lines symbol is commonly called “the hamburger icon” and in visual language, it means “find the menu here.” It’s one of the few specific changes I _can’t_ fault.
Oh, also, that trailing underscore in “The Intercept_” looks like you’ve failed to balance your ASCII underlining. Like, you’re just not attentive enough to realize that you meant “_The Intercept_”. I know it’s unbalanced on purpose, but it looks childish.
suggestion: how about a link in the main nav. for ARTICLES you only have FEATURES.
Wow, a lot of negative trolling going on here. The user ‘Useful Idiots’ seems like a right cunt. Don’t listen to that scumbag. I like the design and feel browsing from the UK on my tablet. Well done First Look and The Intercept.
Useful Idiots is upset because the new interface requires enabling javascript, which doesn’t get to happen on secure machines.
Greenwald, one of the co-founders here, thinks it’s just that people don’t like change. There is always some of that, but he’s been on quite a few fora before, his own, then Salon, then Salon beta, then Salon upgrade, then Guardian, the Guardian beta, and then here and now here upgrade. He says that every upgrade.
It’s only partly true. People who don’t like a particular part of an interface for a particular reason, usually fears about security, or sometimes actual reading clashes, complain only when the interface gets changed and that’s why the people changing it get the impression that they stop complaining once they get used to it, and therefore that the change itself is why they complain. But in actuality, their commenter base gets changed each time to some extent.
When Salon went to Salon beta, I literally could not read the articles without putting a piece of cardboard or similar screen (book, piece of cloth, etc.) over part of the window. They had multiple columns, or columns and advertisements, with no separators and I have tracking overshoots. So I kept switching my interface back as long as I could and then visited a whole lot less often. When they finally rolled out the complete upgrade, there was nobody who could guarantee the anonymity of the users, no privacy policy that protected information that had to be given to get an account from the public. So myself and probably quite a few others just left. Didn’t read or comment on a Greenwald article there or any other Salon offering ever again.
Greenwald moved to the Guardian, and I started reading him again.
So it really isn’t trolling. If, as Useful Idiots says, javascript and the lack of security that comes with it is too much for a lot of security experts, then they will actually stop reading and commenting here, and a lot of the open source-like checks and balances for the tech articles by Micah, Ryan and others won’t really exist anymore.
So yeah, call Useful Idiots a lot of names and yell trolling. And eventually, either the interface will upgrade security or the value of the tech articles will decline, whether you notice it or not. My guess is you probably won’t. I do javascript but am not an expert in it, but AFAIK, calling someone a right cunt as a response to comments on javascript being not secure isn’t a term of art. So you are not a replacement for a lost pair of expert eyes on the tech articles. Maybe that won’t bother a soul among the true believers here. But it should bother the tech authors, who profess to want their output to be better than the mainstream, and profess to want open source, and profess to like peer review. Glossy visuals always make a site look better and users always adapt to the interface. That ain’t the point unless this is just an art show.
Thank you. You had the patience I lack (and far better words). I think I was already close to my frustration point before this site change. While I don’t believe I am overreacting (if this site were about anything else, I’d just depart or make less of a deal about security (probably both)). My feeling is neglecting security and privacy on a site professing to be journalistically inclined to ridding the world of invasion of privacy (which goes hand-in-hand with security) as much as possible is irresponsible. People come here often because they don’t know how to do things. They come here because they trust that the site’s editors (and writers) won’t lead them astray. I don’t think that happens deliberately (at least most of the time), but when it happens corrections should be graceful and swift.
I find it difficult how I can be a ‘right-cunt’ when I’m arguing for a secure site so that your beloved GCHQ (or any other acronymic agency) cannot manipulate you to their heart’s content. Though in some circles (including mine), ‘right cunt’ is actually considered a compliment. I’ll take it.
Correcting myself, ‘more secure’. Not ‘secure’.
(It’s also downright unusable)
It *IS* however commendable that you’ve managed to scroll this story right off the front page in like a day. Kudos (/s).
Sorry, not a day. I think it was off the front page in 6 hours.
It’s ironic that one of your current top stories encourages the use of Tor, but because of the excessive use of Javascript this new site is pretty much completely broken in the Tor browser (or any browser used by security conscious users with scripts blocked). How ridiculous it is that you would require your readers to allow scripts to run in order to read your articles about mass government surveillance… you know that js can be exploited, right? What’s next, perhaps some Flash videos?
Java games.
Better than Flash games…I really hate Flash.
I still remember the very first Flash content (back when it was really just called ‘Shockwave’) pre-2000. Is it sad that I miss that?
This is just what happens when you let amateurs do anything high-profile. That this wasn’t beta-tested or given any sort of technical review, indicates that no web professionals were involved. A lot of the complaints could have been addressed quietly in the beta phase (right-clicking, JS requirement, page footprint, comment sort order, and others) and this rollout would have been successfull.
I mean, I find it aesthetically distasteful, but reasonable people can differ on beauty. Many of the changes to the site can be debated in good faith. What can’t be argued, is that if you follow The Intercept’s browser security recommendations, you can no longer browse The Intercept, and that is a fundamental failure of The Intercept’s integrity.
I sincerely hope that in the future, professionals will be consulted, for these amateurs have made some really embarrassing, really easily-preventable, rookie errors.
We’ll be rolling out fixes that address these issues very shortly.
Might I suggest you revert back to the old site completely and move this ‘update’ to a rolling beta stage?
I think it’s great, a huge step up from rag-mag appeal of the former site, I like it!
But I do think, I mentioned it on a post, that the Editorial Staff and the Mission should be in the main navigation not carelessly thrown under the catch-all About section where one has to click and click and scroll to find them. For me it sends the wrong message about the Intercept.
You commented. I’m curious if you’d be interested in seeing if an article you commented on had other comments? Because you have to load the whole article page (and other pages, besides) just to see how many comments there are each time. I’ve decided to try to convert you. Have you done a data size difference between this site and the old site? Do you care that you are now exploitable?
Hum! the comments with number of comments is to the left under the logo and main nav. button and above the article so I didn’t have to load all articles and one can comment without looking at all other comments, the comment box appears at the top of the page.
No I haven’t done a data size difference. What would be the reason for doing that?
Exploitable? Please explain.
Thanks
To do that you have to open the stories one by one. In the older version, you could see the number of comments on the page listing all of the articles. If you were so inclined to comment on half a dozen articles, with nested threads, while it was always almost impossible to do so without a lot of digging (there’s no comment tracking), you could generally know on the stories that were getting older (read: more than 1-3 days old) with a quick scan if a new comment had been made or a reply posted. The current format basically prohibits those who don’t wish to scroll through multiple pages of stories and go through one-by-one a couple weeks at a go from having any chance of replying or keeping track of comments (as in, worse than prior site).
Some people are on mobile data plans that have data caps (or are pay by the xxx MB, or both); excessive loads of pages that are multiples of the previous page load size adds up fast. Especially with the problem above and other problems mentioned elsewhere.
Additionally, there’s no way to load the site and use NoScript (which isn’t ‘best practices’, it’s pretty much a necessary practice for some of us — and maybe for people in your demographic more than mine (since those in mine tend to have more experience in sandboxing, obfuscation and mitigation (if we’re not too lazy to practice it)).
If you want me to get more specific about anything, let me know. It’s difficult to get too specific vis-a-vis the security aspects without background; despite my hating the ‘just trust me’ argument, I’ll ask you to do so, but if you cannot, or will not, I’d ask you to start with a web search first. I’d be happy to answer any questions from there. Reasonable?
I loathe your new web site. Whatever bit you? One must to scroll down past the first story to see whatever other new ones there are this day, the display jumps, it’s difficult to see where one story ends and the other one begins, etc. etc. etc.
I can’t even open a story in a new page, because some clever […] SABOTAGED the right-click functionality with Javascript. Talk about forcing your esthetic choices onto your readers…
WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?
Tonight the ctrl+left-click and the right mouse button functionality are back. Thanks, the thing is already a great little bit less loathsome.
Now, if I open an article in a new window, I would like the page-end or whatever logical combination to take me to the bottom of the article or to the comments, and not to some “random” other article.
I never saw the white on black til I changed to a different browser and made the window more of a mobile size. Egads.
But let’s hope that the right mouse click functionality being back doesn’t mean the js doesn’t go away.
Well F**K. There goes reading the Intercept.
Bring back the right click context menu so I can “open in new tab” or I’ll only be reading you from external links. You do know it’s possible to detect what type of device is requesting your pages, right? I think it’s called “user agent” or something like that.
I can live with the god awful color scheme and continuous scroll, but having my reading restricted to a single tab, and being forced to give up my “this looks interesting – open it in a new tab while I continue to browse the articles” – is a deal breaker.
I’ve been reading Glenn since his days at Salon. Guess I’ll have to learn to live without like I have with the closing of Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish”. Damn shame, I was just learning to enjoy some of the other writers here.
ARC
P.S. This three line comment input box is a real pain too.
Wow. I almost did a spit take with my coffee when I realized that this beautiful new site lurking within my morning bookmarks was in fact The Intercept. This redesign is a massive leap forward. It’s a beautiful, focused reading experience that radiates thoughtfulness and attention to detail with every decision, both aesthetically and functionally.
In this age of horribly cluttered and sluggish websites whose designs are driven by ad revenue desperation and loaded with click bait headlines, listicles, affiliate links, and other assorted sleazy design tactics, it is a genuine pleasure to visit a publishing website that is so clearly designed purely from the reader’s perspective. Maybe even more impressively, it absolutely nails the ineffable qualities of The Intercept’s journalistic character; bold, skeptical, aggressive, and rigorous (with a pinch of covert and dangerous).
I can only hope that you’ll get some constructive feedback from cooler heads than the crusty luddite hating that seems to be dominating this comments thread. (Seriously, what is up with you guys? Y’all need to settle down and clean the steam out of your ears, because you are looking a beautiful gift horse right in the mouth). I’m sure that there are valid criticisms about aspects of the redesign, but I’m confident that they will be ironed out in short order. If this redesign tells us anything, it’s that The Intercept cares A LOT about how it presents it’s journalism to the world.
Of course there are going to be some usability and functionality issues. That’s always the case with a major overhaul like this, but they certainly don’t need to be called out with sneering temper tantrums—save that righteous indignation for the next infuriating Intercept article about our government’s overzealous security state and imperial overreach.
This is some seriously impressive work, Interceptors! Kudos to everyone involved with the project.
Much of the feedback has been constructive, such as “please don’t prevent me from right-clicking or managing my own tabs; it’s irritating and condescending.” There’s a recommendation in there; namely, turn off the right-click-disabler. Ditto for the ones that want graceful degradation instead of mandatory JavaScript; the recommendation there, is “make sure the site works even if I have JavaScript disabled because I am very security-concious, a view informed in large part by The Intercept’s reporting.”
Also, the term “Luddite” usually refers to people who resist change because it’s change, not people who have legitimate issues to raise. If your house burns down, and I see that you’re sad, I don’t get to call you a Luddite for disapproving of the change your house has experienced. Your grievances aren’t with progress in general, you’re just unhappy about direction of the change.
Luddites resisted change because it was costing them their jobs and their corresponding place in society.
As a point of historical fact, you’re absolutely correct. That’s why I used the “usually refers to” weasel language. :)
Part of the problem.
Speaking of ‘in this age’… http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3460998681/
FYI: in Chome, right-clicking to get a context menu is broken (on the home page at least – haven’t checked everywhere), as is ctrl-click. Firefox seems fine.
This new layout is suffering from putting form before functionality. Something that we are seeing a lot of these days in the design world. Grey or blue on black is a no no in my book. Very hard to read.
I like the layout but, more importantly is the quality of your reporting. I sincerely hope that more and more people visit your site and read what your investigative journalists are reporting and learn the facts. Your reporting is what true journalism is all about. Keep up the great work and show the so called “main stream media” how to do it!
Thank you,
Peter Ryan
Halifax, Nova Scotia
The layout is better and it’s easier to navigate. The story font looks good — is it some form Caslon? The comments font, however, is one size too small — and a sans-serif font isn’t easy to read, especially a thin one like this.
Is there a way of embedding hyperlinks and italics? Many comment forums will allow you to block text and hit B, I or Quote, and even hyperlinks, and I imagine it’s not so much for user-friendliness as it is to avoid users getting the DIY HTML formats wrong.
It seems a minor point, but one service the readers can provide is point to related stories or important source material. (One tip: the hyperlinks should open a new tab and not pull the reader off the TI page).
:( I expected you to agree with those of us decrying the lack of security. I won’t say conform — your right to dissent, obviously… Just disappointed, Coram.
Oh, go whine about security somewhere else. There is no security on the Internet. Clearly you haven’t been paying attention.
If you want security, secure yourself. Don’t expect others to do it for you.
Few venues are as amenable to whining about security as The Intercept. I think UI has a good point, and is expressing it in an appropriate forum. The fact that this site doesn’t work if you follow its security recommendations, is not unworthy of mention.
I mostly come here to try to help others learn how to do it themselves. If I cannot comment here in a secure way, and others cannot comment here in a secure way, it removes any impetus to help others try to do so — just offering technical advice here becomes hypocritical. You’ll likely see the few other technical experts (yes, I went there) that are still here also leaving as well (just probably not as loudly). One cannot have it both ways; one cannot proclaim to be a site about invasions of privacy and espousing security (and offering articles on the same) and at the same time make one’s very site inaccessible and non-privacy-conscious according to those standards. Or rather, one can, but then it winds up being hypocritical as well.
I didn’t say anything about the security, just the look.
Reloading a story page doesn’t do what you want it to do if you have comments expanded. It jumps you to the next story. It shouldn’t have any knowledge of the next story. And there SHOULDN’T BE JAVASCRIPT.
Another problem: Using an url shortener may seem like a good idea to you but how is it necessary in an email, and do you know how many people just click things blindly like that without checking? No url shortening. Use the full URL. Or are you trying to help the Phishers of Men.
They’re pretty clearly more concerned with seeming trendy than with being responsible.
Leave trendy to the people who retweet the content. Then again, when that story snuck in months ago on the front page of firstlook (not t//i) about how they were looking to commercialise, I had a suspicion something like this would happen. I have no idea if it’s related, though. It could just be a coincidence.
Finally got to all the other comments, and I have to say, I am impressed at the number of new commenters you got. I bet a lot of ‘new commenters’ are pleased with these ‘improvements’.
I like it, usually a hybrid design is hard to use or bad looking. One thing, you can’t open a new tab on a story by right click (at least on a laptop).
You’d have saved yourselves a lot of embarrassment if you had tested it before throwing it over the wall.
I have to go. The glare is horrible.
Looks good! How about a dedicated phone app?
I have a FREE offer for T//I. Give us back the ORIGINAL T//I format, and I will PERSONALLY code an app that works on tablets and mobiles. For free. Really. I’ll make it opensource and put it on fdroid and everything.
Interesting. My time is expensive. Not even a reply to this, huh?
Wow, someone saw you coming. This kind of design is meant to boggle the user’s mind. It’s mean to impress them with how unorthodox and rebellious you can be. While The Intercept may not be the embodiment of conformity, it is a journalistic publication, and making it harder to use and harder to read is probably a poor decision. This is a major step back, and I do hope someone in a decision-making position will come to his/her senses soon.
“The new site and logo reflect the creative vision of Stéphane Elbaz, the head of product design for First Look Media. Stéphane captured the essence of The Intercept in his rendering of the new logo and the wordmark that lives on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the typeface, TI Actu, which he designed for The Intercept. Stéphane’s design has materialized thanks in large part to Tom Conroy, First Look’s product technology lead. Tom sought to create a site that loads rapidly on any device and provides a smooth and reader-friendly experience”
You should have picked someone with security experience. Also, someone with half an eye and a clue. The fact that TWO people were responsible for this monstrosity which supposedly ‘loads rapidly on any device’ but often never loads at all on a stripped down linux system with FORCED javascript(!) is so much worse than the html5 bugs I mentioned months ago (which are now being published). I guess now’s a good time to mention that fonts can be exploited too, and it’s never a good idea to push fonts and typefaces on users. I said I was leaving, but I decided this fight was worth fighting for. The site was already almost unnavigable, now it’s beyond that. I happen to believe that the journalists who are at the mercy of this godawful monstrosity deserve better. Hell, I’d take John back (sorry, Betsy) if this is what it’s gonna be like. At least John listened to feedback (albeit slowly).
Betsy,
Did anyone even beta what the new interface looks like on a typical desktop/laptop monitor? Spoiler: It’s terrible. It looks as if the beta was performed only on phones, tablets, and possibly a 60″+ monitor.
Issues:
1) Header graphic is impossibly large.
2) Reducing page via zoom in attempt to accommodate enormous header graphic renders ridiculously small text and way too much white space.
3) Reliance on javascript to navigate site (if you don’t know why many security-minded users find running javascript undesirable, please go ask Micah Lee).
Solutions:
1) Reduce header graphic.
2) Article blurbs should expand horizontally to better fit available space without reducing text size upon page reduction via zoom/browser resizing. Overall, there’s just way too much white space – use the real estate.
3) Allow site navigation without having to run javascript (again, if you don’t understand why is extremely desirable for some, please see Michah Lee or go read the NoScript site).
Sincerely,
Loyal Intercept Reader
“The Intercept was founded in 2014 to report on the Snowden documents. Today’s redesign reflects our ongoing effort to craft a visual identity in sync with our journalism.
Unofficial Sources
If you want the truth, don’t ask the official sources / tips@theintercept.com
See all ?
ACLU Sues to Stop Bulk Phone-Data Collection, Even if it’s Only Temporary
Jenna McLaughlin — 2015-07-14T17:34:49+00:00
The nation’s secretive surveillance court should not have reinstated the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone call data even temporarily, because an appellate court ruled that the program was illegal in May, the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.
For American Psychological Association, National Security Trumped Torture Concerns
Jenna McLaughlin — 2015-07-14T13:13:12+00:00
A new report in the New York Times tells in greater detail than ever before the story of how APA members colluded with the CIA when it came to the application of brutal interrogation techniques.
Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI
Dan Froomkin — 2015-07-13T21:10:59+00:00
In a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, didn’t start making shopping lists for weapons until after he met an FBI informant.
Laura Poitras Sues U.S. Government to Find Out Why She Was Repeatedly Stopped at the Border
Jenna McLaughlin — 2015-07-13T19:29:50+00:00
“I’m filing this lawsuit because the government uses the U.S. border to bypass the rule of law,” Poitras said. She filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2013.
Recently
Announcing Our Matching Fund Donation to Chelsea Manning’s Legal Defense
Glenn Greenwald — 2015-07-15T15:00:38+00:00
Manning’s whistleblowing redounded to the benefit of all of us, and it’s incumbent on those who are able to do what they can to help her defend her legal rights. It’s in our collective interest to ensure that she is able to mount a full and vigorous defense of her rights.”
If you mean shitty, full of holes, insecure, and terrible, then yeah, you just succeeded. CONGRATULATIONS.
Neat, another bug: That’s what supposedly selecting only that text and copy/pasting it from the front page output in my comment.
I’m counting 5 different fonts, many in different sizes and little consistency – good luck making that look anything other than a dog’s dinner.
The mysterious icon with 3 lines top right looks like it should be a drop-down but its a menu that flies in from the other side of the page, obscuring everything else.
As pointed out, the total lack of tabbed opening is terrible for connected reading. If I can’t click on a link in an article or a comment and get a separate tab when I’m in the middle of reading, it is bad enough. But when I do read the linked information, and click back, I’m not even in the same place in the article / comments. I have to go back to the main menu, find the article, open the comments and find the comment with the link to continue (perhaps the 553rd comment on a popular thread). This is complete madness. And we’re all familiar with how hyperlinked GGs articles generally are.
What a disaster!
I totally agree, but that’s not new. Links in articles have been opening in the same tab from day one. Links in comments should also open in a new tab.
For anyone who’s reading that doesn’t know, you can right-click on a link, then select “Open link in new tab” from the context menu.
In theory that’s what right-clicking used to do (and generally did). In practice, that’s not what it does now. It loads the story — and if you’re really unlucky, all the stories (oh, the scroll). The only time that doesn’t happen is if you turn off scripting on the homepage (but then you can’t load all the stories), right click to open in new tab, turn on scripting, allow reload, turn off scripting.
Bad kitty. ;)
I reported that bug below. But it doesn’t happen on all links. It doesn’t happen on links embedded in articles or comments.
Given the problems on the FRONT page, I’m less concerned about internal. Heck, I’d be happier if they’d kill the scripting and stop the scrolling. I can deal with migraines (I get them all the time anyway) — but I don’t need headaches on top of em.
Ernst, you make some very good points. I’ve worked in publishing for decades, and this site violates just about every principle of readable design. I’m astounded and hugely disappointed that First Look would sign off on it, even as an early prototype, let alone something that’s ready for public eyes.
The look is better, but the layout is less functional. A better feature of the old layout was that all the current / most popular articles could be viewed “at a glance”, so there was no need to memorize titles as (in the new format) one scans down the page.
Yeah I agree with thus. The announcement for Chelsea Manning’s fundraising, for example,is the first article under “Recently” but it would be so much better if we could just view “Recently” immediately instead of having to scroll down and possibly miss it.
I’d finally gotten used to memorising only the previous comment count. Now I can’t even do that (requires page loads, javascript). Forget about trying to keep track of the articles or actual comments (or commenting — requires javascript, more pageloads).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowblind
Um, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person with occasional migraines…
The article font and formating doesn’t leave near as much glaring white as the comment section does, where yes I probably spend too much time. Maybe just a bit of help there, you know, for optic nerves everywhere…?
Apologies if anyone thought from my link I’m actually blind other than by the combination of migraines and bright light. Not so.
Stephane may be a very creative individual, but this is absolutely the worst interface I’ve seen since UseNet.
As I commented on one of the other articles, the reason that a lot of people use an “oldest first” comment layout, especially for replies, is the same reason that Copernicus delivered astronomy out of the dark ages: No epicycles.
Scrolling may be a lot of fun and good finger exercise for those people with their heads stuffed in their phones 24/7, but the amount of scrolling here could probably qualify with the CDC as enough exercise to end diabetes.
And finally, Please implement MathJax in the comment fields. It’s free, it’s far better eyeballed open source than anything else you’ll ever see, and it allows people to express themselves concisely on technical subjects.
Why not let the user decide? The Guardian has that option.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/make-break-moment-greece-mps-vote-austerity-proposals#comments
That’s a possibility. In that case, may the user decide not to pretend to be using a cellphone? People always make claims like,
In reality, the “whether from your desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile device” claim only really means it’s amenable to the very smallest of those interfaces, the “mobile device,” and it doesn’t work nearly as well anymore on the desktop or laptop. That has happened over and over and over again (think Windows Vista, e.g.) and the fact that when cellphones were enabled the interface went to shit everywhere else is blithely ignored with mental defenses like thinking those who use desktops are age-impaired. And the javascript is causing an extra 100 megabytes of memory load for these pages. The only “fresh reporting” invitation I see is that to get to any article, or even see the comment you’ve just written, you have to scroll through all the articles newer than the one you were reading to find the article you were reading again, and then find the “Comments” field and then re-open it just to see if you need to write a reply to yourself to correct your editing which can’t be corrected.
I use a desktop as a primary interface for many reasons, like security (mobile devices have lots of “user preference detections”), like being able to tell the machine what to do instead of the other way around, like choosing between multiple operating systems, and just because, well, all those years bringing the interface of the television from its original 10″ oval to its current size were viewed by many people as improvements of technology.
I realize that millenials like to throw out anything understood more than 30 years ago as “not of for and by us”, but actually Copernicus had a good idea: Sometimes the universe is easier to understand if you don’t insist on putting yourself at the center of it.
Wow. It removed some of my paragraph formatting. That’s the interface equivalent of a short order cook mixing up the orders.
One more thing to transfer here from where I had originally written it:
Is the fact that the comment interface no longer says that the email address will not be disclosed intended to have meaning or is it just a programming oversight? Changes in privacy statements, even short ones, have been known to cause reader revolts, and a site that prides itself in being an authority on privacy should kinda know that.
Crimini! Doesn’t the hex string 0x0D 0x0A mean anything to the new new new wonderful? I realize you’re too young to know what a typewriter carriage is and why it returns, or what a line printer is and why it feeds paper, but this is ridiculous.
Hey, wavelet — care to gang up and try to get ourselves banned for being outspoken in an attempt to try to get things back to just ‘bad’? :)
The old format also dropped a lot of paragraph formatting, notably any double-¶¶ attempts. That was why I would sometime put a period between paragraphs, simply to make sure they separated in the TI format. That seems to be an ongoing issue.
That’s true, but they want to maintain a single code base, and they want to program for the device that’s being used by most visitors (and they’re looking forward on that point). That said, as a desktop user, I share your disgruntlement.
I don’t get this. I have an old, hand-me-down iPhone, and the browser (Safari) allows multiple pages (tabs) to be open. You have a mobile device with a browser that only allows a single page to be open?
No, I was looking at it on the desktop. It has different interfaces depending on the size of the window you open, and the features were being updated quickly as we were writing comments.
*Nods*. And it’s far easier and more common to write lengthier replies of a technical nature on a desktop/laptop than it is on a soft keyboard. Generally the more ‘designy’ a site gets and the harder to comment, the more the commenting suffers.
Usenet was useable. And regexable. ;)
So is vi. But upgrade means you’re supposed to get emacs, not xedit.
Vim was my vi upgrade (with a good rc file). I feel like I got pico.
Actually, rescinded/amended. I feel like I got a first year CS student’s java interpretation of pico. Yes, I know there’s no java here. ;)
Your new mascot?
https://pearlsofprofundity.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/lipstick-on-a-pig-1.jpg
I like the new color scheme, but I think the best option would be to have a full dark interface and allow users to choose between the old and new style.
I agree with the white space comment. There is way too much of it and that would be a huge improvement if it used larger screen size.
The new larger font by default is much nicer for reading on the eyes.
Overall a mixed bag but I can see the potential in the new look.
I think the white space is an artifact of the responsive design. On a large desktop monitor, the responsive design stretches the webpage out. You can see what I mean by narrowing your browser window to the size of a smartphone screen. It squeezes smaller to fit the (apparently) smaller screen.
Could you allocate a little bit of the opening screen to thumbnails of a couple of the top stories instead of just the single huge photo associated with one story? Or, failing that, how about an option to click on a list of the headlines? When I click on that doodad in the upper right corner, I get taken to a list of links to several options, like “Unofficial Sources”. Maybe you could put “Headlines” as an option there. I’d be happy with just a list of text headlines. I don’t need pictures.
The new look is not good. I don’t feel strongly about the logo but the scripting is annoying and the endless scroll is a bad trend for news sites that needs to end. There’s white space everywhere. The header is too tall. I agree with “thelastnamechosen”.
I like to open multiple stories in different tabs by right-clicking. The new design prevents me from doing this: if I right-click, the story immediately opens in the same tab.
I assume this is a bug.
Good work. Speaks so much about the vigorous efforts to bring this platform to next level of success. Well-done!
The new look is sleek and daring — it’s in keeping with The Intercept’s mission. The previous red/black with those “//” things struck me as Nazi. (Really.)
That said, the comment counter is not working. Also, html icons for formatting commenting are a must, along with edit and preview functions.
http://thecoolnessfactor.com/wp-content/uploads/33839.jpg
//Nazi? It is programming syntax for an “inline comment”.
The new look is daring, but not sleek. It is a lumbering pile of scripting and whitespace. It’s not good.
I (obviously) don’t know squat about “programming syntax.” But I like the new design and assume it is still a work in progress.
Works in progress belong in a beta stage where people can click and check it out and offer suggestions before foisting it onto an unsuspecting and possibly (actually probably inevitably) disgruntled userbase. Had there been a beta I could have taken my comments about javascript and other concerns there, as could many of us. It would have been a community effort. Not a decision to violate a trust or request an extension of that trust (depending on your viewpoint).
(nb: Inevitably because most big UI changes do bring an inevitably disgruntled userbase — that stands on its own but is also a part of the larger whole).
I take back anything nice I said about you, -Mona-. I’m half-kidding. The other half isn’t, if you’re advocating for requiring javascript on a site that has every single government in the world interested in its users. That’s beyond horrifying. I’ll use the word I accuse others of misusing: It’s a frigging atrocity.
Too much javascript. Too dependent on javascript. Does not degrade gracefully at all. More “design”–less information. What little collaboration and participation this site encouraged has been diminished even further. The endless scrolling page of refreshment is wrong on so many levels. Killed tabs (this takes effort). Is there even a search function?
From the hierarchal presentation of information you would think The Intercept is selling stock photography.
Pretty much your standard crappy corporate redesign.
Now, if you could only do something about the content…
…of Lou Marin’s posts
I really like the new layout (I liked the old one, too), but this one isn’t as easy to scan through and open up the articles in separate windows/tabs. Each time I right click, or ctrl+click it just opens the article as opposed to doing it in a separate window.
Also, I read almost literally everything from The Intercept, and layouts like these make it more difficult to track back and make sure that everything — from Unofficial Sources, Greenwald’s blog, and the other sections — was read. What about adding a page that’s just a timeline of all articles, blogs, and so forth? The Guardian had that, but when they redid their site, they got rid of that feature and now it’s near-impossible to truly scan all of their content. Thoughts?
Use Pocket or Instapaper or something like that. TI’s articles may not be readable online right now, but if you can manage to get the story’s URL into your address bar, you can save it to an offline reader, and still get the content.
What goodz a counter if it doezn’t count, right?
I would expect other sites to count even those commentz they do not post for the admobsters’ skims, but youz guyz ain’t even wise to what we can seez. Sure you gotz control over your contentz? Just buzzing…Why only three accounted for but so many more to see? What’s up with thee?
Neato. As in neater. Not that it was a mess, but look at those edges! Cut to black.
I like the new layout. But where is the print function for your articles. I am not able to read online.
Replies on the first level under a comment are sorting newest to oldest, which is a bug. See my comments under this article for a demo: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/09/10-years-1b-later-little-progress-establishing-rule-law-afghanistan/
Clicking on Comments no longer produces a new URL (for example, the link to this article with comments displayed would have previously been https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/15/intercepts-new-look/#comments) which means that to refresh comments, users must scroll down and click the Comments button each time.
On The Intercept home page, the entire listing for an article, including the photo, functions as one link. Is that what was intended? A right-click on the listing functions as a left-click: the article is opened. That’s a bug. With an article displayed, right-click on the author’s name. Same bug.
The comments no longer have timestamps, which were sometimes useful for identifying comments. Timestamps included in old comments are now useless. And the new version was released without comment permalinks.
The problem with spacing between paragraphs is a simple CSS error which can be fixed in a few minutes. Has the problem with paragraph spacing within a blockquote finally been fixed?
Reply 1… Actually, it appears that the problem is not with spacing between paragraphs, but spacing within paragraphs (that’s line-height, I believe). It’s hard to tell if the blockquote bug has been fixed.
Reply 2
I was wrong about refreshing comments. It can be done by clicking the Comments icon in the panel on the left. That’s a nice improvement.
What panel on the left?
Oh, got it. It only appears when the interface is full screen. I have 4 other windows open on my desktop, am I supposed to just suspend all activity elsewhere in order to see the intercept interface? How 1970s.
Testing unicode chars
€ = € (€)
™ = ™ (™)
♫ = ♫ (?)
✰ = ✰ (?)
Testing html tags
<u>underline</u> = underline
<ins>underline</ins> = underline
<s>strikethrough</s> =
strikethrough<del>strikethrough</del> =
strikethroughThis link should open in a new tab
Testing multiple links
NYT, WashPost, Intercept
The sort order bug was fixed. Yay!
I hate the new look. Graphic designers and artists love posters with lots of dark colors.
Please provide less color.
And why black?
I love the new layout. Keep up the great work!
Horrible for my large desktop monitor. It’s like I have a giant, bloated tablet on my desk. Might work if I scrunch down a separate window just for your site, but it doesn’t fit as a browser tab with other web sites.
Very nice and very innovative layout!
I do miss a button to print a single article. When I open an article and do Ctrl+P, it also prints the articles below the one I want.
It’s hard for me to look at with all that black. The previous design was more accessible for me.
Really nice new logo – the typeface is awesome, and the trailing underscore gives a sense of action.
Loving the new design, although I do miss being able to open an article in new tab – with the new style, if I right-click, it’ll act as though I’ve clicked, so i’m unable to easily open multiple articles in multiple tabs.