The RPS Feedback Thread

tipsyMedic 2018-07-19 18:42:31 UTC #1401

This new redesign is absolutely horrid and if I’m honest, will drive me to other sites.

The abundance of white space is not only ghastly and awful on the eyes, there’s so much wasted space. The previous design was nice and compact, with use of sidebars and the like. Now my page is 1/3 white space, 1/3 articles, 1/3 white space.

Why is there so much unused space and why is it all white or barely less white?

Shadoko 2018-07-19 18:53:31 UTC #1402

That too, I had to double-check to be sure I wasn’t on Eurogamer.

alms 2018-07-19 19:02:17 UTC #1403

I reported that issue about a year ago, it’s a remnant of the forum switch.

Det.Bullock 2018-07-19 20:19:36 UTC #1404

Also, why do I need to post a comment for the comments themselves to be visible?
If I don’t it says I have to enable Javascript to see the comments even if it’s already enabled.

And yeah, I find the new layout irritating too though leaving the site over it is a bit excessive.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2018-07-19 21:51:44 UTC #1405

Go look at the trendy vidyagarmez blogs around, they’re all the same. Clinical white with absurd levels of space on either side with no thought given to widescreen monitor desktops (they’re all optimised for mobile and don’t really offer a proper desktop site even though everyone and their dog is running at least 720p by now).

Examples : Waypoint uses 620px for article text width, leaving me with 1940px of wasted space (970px on either side, it’s atrocious)

Polygon uses 740px for article width, that’s a bit better, but it’s still ridiculously narrow.

Eurogamer uses 700px, horribly narrow and infested with lots of wasted whitespace.

RPS sits at, like Eurogamer, you guessed it… 700px.

This is fine for mobile devices where you need to adjust for the limited screen real estate but good god we’ve been able to use more than 700px width since the era of 1024x768 which was back when I was studying in school. If the pinnacle of current design is to leave a mass of white space around wide screen monitor layouts, then clearly I’d rather skip the design classes and try something different because this is bordering on insanity.

Seriously, desktop format needs sorting out. This trend for restaurant recipt style article layouts has to stop.

alms 2018-07-19 23:50:24 UTC #1406

Well, it’s hard to explain, but it goes a little like this.

There was this guy who woke up one day and invented the computer. It was so easy, and the day still long, so he invented the Internet, with all of its sites. After that, he contemplated the beauty of it.

There was so much of it, and it was full of money, and it was a pity to leave it there, and so he came up with an unprecedented idea, something called a music player, whatever that is.

The music player felt unloved, so he created the touchscreen, so that people could fondle their players. Then, it put a radio in it, and then another, and then some more thingies, and then suddenly a lot of people were out of a job.

On the plus side, now everybody wanted to keep a perfectly functional piece of spyware in their pockets.

So, yeah, at some point between one thing and another, he also came up with a line, like ‘less is more more’, and then it turned into an ism-ism.

Lessism or something like that.

but seriously line length is an art and a science, which is why the pages of most books are taller than they are wider, whereas computer monitors tend to like it the other way. Except those meant for typesetting. And mine, which can pivot to portrait for when I’m writing my novel no, I’m not actually writing a novel.

Mulch 2018-07-20 01:47:37 UTC #1407

It’s worth noting that for the sake of readability, line length should be 50-75 characters long. The RPS redesign is actually slightly more than that and is probably right at the limit of what is comfortable to read.

To fill the extra space of widescreen monitors you’d have to either increase the font size to an absurd level or split articles into multiple columns which would introduce its own set of problems (and is also counter to the experience most people expect when reading articles on the web).

Looking at the site at 1080p, I think they’ve got the balance right - there’s enough room for the words to breathe and the ads on the right are far enough away to not distract you while reading. I recognise that on higher resolution displays the balance must skew too far towards empty space but this can be easily fixed by zooming in.

Viral_Frog 2018-07-20 07:50:27 UTC #1408

The problem is that they change things which end up breaking them. I’m fine with things changing. Just not when it’s completely unnecessary and detrimental. Look how many people quit the forums because of that change (I like these new forums, personally.)

The main page didn’t need any format change. Now it looks like shit and functions in a shit manner. I still can’t comment or read comments on any of the posts.

TheDreamlord 2018-07-20 07:59:13 UTC #1409

Graham, I think the video (youtube) links in articles do not adjust width properly when on mobile.

Regarding text line width, I think the balance is correct. You cannot really have paragraphs that span the whole of the monitor, let alone a widescreen one, as reading comprehension is dramatically reduced when line width exceeds a certain threshold. It really is not easy to design a website to cater to both mobile, standard and ultra widescreens. I think the balance in the redesign is fine.

Regarding colour scheme … Yeah ok, it’s not great, but I don’t find it terrible either. If the developer is any good, these things should be changeable by a handful of css parameter values. As for the white background, perhaps offering a dark theme (soon) will alleviate people getting annoyed with a bright theme.

I do not like the new logo I’m afraid. Too generic, lacks identity.

Please add a link too the main site from the forum for Pete’s sake!

TheDreamlord 2018-07-20 08:02:01 UTC #1410

Oh, one last thing. These recent (since a few months ago?) roatating cube ads are REALLY annoying. I mean, really really fucking annoying.

Skyturnedred 2018-07-20 08:24:55 UTC #1411

If I can’t see the first new article without scrolling down on what’s supposed to be a blog, something is off.

BillButNotBen 2018-07-20 11:29:53 UTC #1412

Well…

Normal people… believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.
-Scott Adams

But in more seriousness, I don’t think anyone ever who redesigns something sets out to break things. Sometimes things break when you change or update them, but that doesn’t mean we should never change or update them because something might break.
Every website redesign is likely to have a few teething troubles.
(It was a shame that the forums had some big ones, and that it cost us a few users, because imho the new forums are light years ahead of the old ones).

The main page desperately needed some changes. They haven’t really changed the format that much (personally, I’d have changed it away from the blog format, but they decided to stick with it), it’s mostly a graphical redesign with some small functionality changes.
(mostly good, but of course if the comments aren’t working for you at all then I can see why that would suck).

DrazharLn 2018-07-20 11:41:54 UTC #1413

I appreciate the changes to the comment border-left lines and to the spotlight (though the latter is still too big).

An images to the left, text to the right layout for the article list view would be a lot more compact and looks better, IMO.

Line spacing is a bit too tight for my liking, too. I think 1.6 - 1.8 looks a lot nicer.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2018-07-20 16:44:57 UTC #1414

I’m not long sighted, I don’t have vision impairment (my last visual test put me at 20/10), I don’t need bigger font to read things. I’d like more text so I can read faster within the realestate I have. That’s why I have a 32" 1440p monitor.

When 1440p or worse, 4k becomes the long term standard, this lunacy of having 700px width columns is going to not age well whatsoever.

BillButNotBen 2018-07-20 23:53:43 UTC #1415

Most people don’t have a 32 inch 1440p monitor though… just sayin

Designing web layouts is tricky, because they can be seen on a ridiculously wide range of screen resolutions and screen sizes.
While there are lots of methods for dealing with that, it’s rarely feasible to plan’test everything on every possible screen.
So a lot of web design is about various half-way-houses and best practices that work on the most common screens/devices and hopefully are at least usable on other devices and edge cases.

Since I don’t have a monitor, or even a tv, as big as your monitor, I can’t know how it’d appear on that screen, but at such high resolutions and screen sizes you either end up with ridiculously long line lengths or you need to boost the font size.
I’d imagine most people on 1440p are going to be on 15 inch screens, so even if you plan for that resolution, you don’t know how large things like text are going to appear.

I imagine when 4k becomes the standard, people are just going to use pixel density and media queries as they do with retina displays… so everything will look the same size, but just smoother.

BillButNotBen 2018-07-21 03:07:41 UTC #1416

Having actually had the time to sit down and browse the new website properly, I mostly like it.

(On my work monitor at least) the layout is a lot better on the front page and the individual posts.
The style is much more modern and I like all the little improvements like getting the post author’s pic and title at the top of posts, better styling for sub headings, bigger pictures in the main feed, author bios at the bottom of posts, etc…
The footer looks much more professional, having recommended similar posts at the bottom works well, having the “Have you played?” game recommendations as a box at the bottom of posts works really well, the videos are better displayed, proper clickable galleries, etc…
Lots and lots of little tweaks that work well (although it could be argued that a lot of them are things that other sites have been doing for a long time, so they’re just catching up).

Personally, I quite like the new color scheme. I don’t find the white color as blinding as others, but I get where they are coming from. A dark theme would be nice, but making alternate themes doubles the complexity of making changes to the site. Possibly they could just slightly tone down the white color a little. (That said, given that almost every website I’ve visited today has a white background, I wonder how unhappy people are able to use the net at all )

I get complaints that by making the design more modern and adding the above standard modern functionality they have become more like other sites and possibly that means a loss of their identity. But on the other hand, being unique by having a crappy old website lacking lots of modern functionality isn’t really something to be proud of.
IMHO staff changes have already had an effect on the tone of the site, and we’re never going back to being a no-budget indie-blog run by 4 mates… so there’s no real point maintaining an old-style website just because it gives the impression of being run by 4 mates.
I wonder if they could make a few design tweaks to give it a slightly more unique identity, though I’m not quite sure what. Maybe use more elements from the logo througout posts, such as the fint style/color for post headings, or the Rock/Paper/Target icons for more things. (i like using them for the featured posts)
Or at the very least a funny modernized horace pic for the 404 page

So far, things I’d change would be:

Why don’t the left sides of the images in the feed line up with the left edge of the text? (might be screen dependent though).
Why doesn’t logging in redirect me back to the page I came from? (not a new problem, but now that comments are lazily loading it makes things take even longer. Scroll down. Wait for comments to load. Want to reply to comment. Have to log in. Go back to previous page. Wait for comments to load. Realize you still aren’t showing as logged in. Reload page. Wait for comments to load. Now you can reply.
Ideally, I’d have the login box as a popup modal over the current page, and then when you login it just triggers a page refresh.
Put a “jump to last comment” link at the top of the comments, and a “jump to first comment” and a “login to comment” button at the bottom. Otherwise there can be a lot of scrolling. (though it’s mainly only a big problem on posts with 600 comments like the Site Redesign post. )
While I realise that ads are an necessary evil, personally I’d remove the big horizontal banner ad from the home page. Combined with the larger top bar menu (which I like) it pushes content down a lot and makes things less welcoming/attractive as a first impression.
You’d still have the sidebar ad at the top right of the page, and you could still have the horizontal banner at the top of each post page.
If you remove it from the front page I’m more likely to click on some posts, and therefor more likely to see it on the other pages. Plus, the first page is more about attracting readers who are browsing, whereas if they click through to a post page they’re likely interested in the post content and the banner ad is less likely to drive them away.
I’m not ad advertising expert though. Do split tests.
I feel like there’s a fair bit of optimization that could be done on the back end to improve page loading performance. I think it’s better than the old site (not hard, to be fair!) but could still be improved by things like loading things async, minifying css/js (though some is) and optimizing image compression.
They’ve definitely done some stuff like inlining some of the css, so it seems like it has become something that’s considered now. (yay). But there are a also a lot of external resources now.
I assume the comments are loading through javascript, and some people seem to be having trouble with that. It worls for me, but I’ve had similar problems on other sites.
It might be nice to have some form of non-js fallback button incase it doesn’t work.

alms 2018-07-21 12:04:26 UTC #1417

32" 1440p is basically the same density as a 24" FHD screen.

OTOH 4k at screen sizes that are common on monitors right now (27-29") is positively lilliputian.

IMO, on a large enough screens, it just doesn’t make too much sense to keep one window maximized: the larger monitors of today are effectively replacing multiple smaller monitors from the past.

With a multi-screen setup, the bezels are a stark reminder that you don’t need your web browser to span two or three monitors (or 4, I’m looking at you 40"+ monitors and TVs)

Still, designers predictably cater to the most popular devices, and these days laptops, mobile (which has been going through a trend of taller screens), and 24 inchers and smaller are most common.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2018-07-21 16:11:01 UTC #1418

Why I chose it, I don’t end up with tiny pixel density but I get more screen real estate for doing what I’m doing. It doesn’t mean I want 700px width columns (which I can now fit 3 of the effing things if I really wanted).

For 1440p the articles should at least scale to 1000px width (which isn’t an unreasonable ask).

alms 2018-07-21 16:48:42 UTC #1419

It’s probably just a few tweaks to the CSS, which somebody could look into making. I wrote some userstyles for the forum for those who made a similar suggestion last year.

However, to keep line length readable you’d have to increase font size to an extent, so I’m not sure how advantageous that would turn out to be for someone who didn’t have issues with making out the smaller font.

I don’t get what’s wrong with having two different windows side to side, anyway. I’m a heavy user of virtual desktops and looking forward to a new screen so I don’t need to switch as much as now.

Extra room doesn’t need to be filled by a single site exclusively, not to the detriment of its own readability or sensibilities.

LTK 2018-07-22 12:35:45 UTC #1420

I’m finding that on a regular 1080p screen, the site is easiest to browse at 80% zoom. I like that there are many articles on each page and I don’t have to click ‘older articles’ every two minutes, but scrolling down when the articles fill the screen is uncomfortable for my eyes, and zooming out a bit makes the layout just a bit more similar to old RPS, where everything was much more confined to the middle of the screen.