The RPS Feedback Thread

Mikodzi 2018-07-24 06:24:55 UTC #1421

Hello,
Im not sure where to report the bug so I will leave it here

All images on the website are in bad quality when browsinh on iPad Air 2 Safari. It makes me tomleave the page as soon I see it.

I can make a screenshots later today if needed.
Cheers.

Graham 2018-07-24 21:24:26 UTC #1422

You nailed most of the thinking behind the things you commented on liking. A relief! I’ll respond briefly to a couple of your suggestions…

The text and images should be centered, but the images are a big bigger which is why the left edge doesn’t line up. We wanted to display images as large as we reasonably could, but as someone else here mentioned, pushing the body copy width much further starts to hurt readability.

Agreed and this is on our list to fix. Hopefully in the next week.

This is a good idea, and I’ve noted it down. We might not get to it in the next week while we continue to tidy, fix and tweak, though we are going to revisit comments to move the comment posting box back beneath the list of those previously posted.

Yeahhhh. We’d lose revenue, so can’t do this. We did tweak the spacing in the new header to cut down on some of the padding, along with changing the article spotlight, so there’s more content visible on the homepage without scrolling. There’s no getting away from homepage ads though.

(Unless you become a supporter )

Agreed. This redesign brought with it some backend modernisations, but by-and-large it was a frontend focused upgrade. We’ll hopefully be changing the backend sometime next year away from Wordpress, and that should bring a bunch of improvements to performance (and to workflow and things for staff.)

This is on our list to fix this week, and might already be fixed now. If anyone is still encountering the problem, let me know!

BillButNotBen 2018-07-25 01:09:50 UTC #1423

Sounds like they need retina versions of the images?

Logged in today and this seemed to work, though it jumped me to a comment box at the top of the comments, rather than replyinig to the comment that I’d clicked reply on.
But it’s still progress, and if it’s implemented, or even just being worked on then I think that’ll fix a longstanding annoyance from the days of the old site.

Side note: I love having an inline comment reply box.

You’d have the analytics data to know, but I can’t help but wonder if removing the front page top ad wouldn’t lead to more clicks on other articles that would lead to more ad views in the long term. That’s probably wishful thinking on my part though.
I guess moving the front page top ad down below the first story wouldn’t fly?

PS/ I’d love to become a subscriber. Financially, I don’t think I can swing it at the moment, but if and when I have a comfortable income it’s something I’d like to do.
(Monthly small charges might be more palatable than an annual lump sum, although I still don’t know if i could swing it right now…)
I disabled ads on your site a while back to support you, which is the best I can do atm… even if it does mean spending lots of time looking at dodgy anime ads.

Graham 2018-08-01 15:14:48 UTC #1424

Because we’re blog format there’s a lot of people who scroll down the homepage, read the first two paragraphs of every post, then leave. That’s absolutely fine but we’d definitely lose a lot of ad impressions by removing it.

Likewise, if we moved the banner lower down we’d lose revenue as well. People want to know that their ad is visible as soon as the page loads - and there’s a fair few users who land on the site and close without scrolling at all. You could argue that’d happen less without the ad there but I think it’d be marginal.

Being able to offer monthly packages/payments is on our todo list. We can’t do it right now but hopefully in a year or so that’ll be an option.

Eep. Hopefully nothing too dodgy? If so, please email me with screenshots, your location, and if you can where the ad links. (Right click > ‘copy link address’ or similar so you don’t have to click it yourself).

We’ll remove any dodgy ad, but because adverts are programmatic (served to readers based on their location, etc.) we don’t see everything that’s on the site ourselves. (We have various filters and rules but they are not 100% effective.)

BillButNotBen 2018-08-14 04:08:12 UTC #1425

Just an observation, but I feel like the last 3 or more days I’ve checked the RPS homepage I see the same three stories with the green boxes (PUBG, Monster Hunter, Dead Cells).

Now that the 3 boxes and big header (which I mostly like) push the chronological stories down the page and below the fold (on my pc at least), if the stories highlighted in the box don’t change very often it can give the impression that nothing has changed since your last visit.

Not sure what the solution is, as real estate is in demand.
You could just change up the highlighted 3 stories more regularly. Maybe keep 2 for big posts and have one that gets updated with a new post at least once a day.
Or have the 3 stories randomly picked from a pool of tagged stories.
Or put a list of Latest Posts to the right of the 3 stories (but that might cost prime ad real-estate)
Or swap one box for a list of latest posts (but that’d look a bit unbalanced imho)

Seems to be more of an issue over the weekend. Maybe Jay doesn’t have the rights to change them?

Anyway, just an observation.

lazer 2018-08-28 23:33:39 UTC #1426

I think that instead of changing the website to meet your crappy new magazine format, you should change your crappy new magazine format back to a blog format to match the old website.

rustic 2018-08-29 19:25:30 UTC #1427

Hi,

I’m still getting the “You’re using an ad blocker. We wondered if you might not?”-pop up. I have, and have had, RPS whitelisted forever but the site doesn’t seem to recognize this. I’m using AdBlock.

Det.Bullock 2018-10-03 03:33:23 UTC #1428

Could someone do something for that War Thunder ad?
Having the ride of the valkyries blasting at full volume out of the blue is really, really annoying.

BillButNotBen 2018-10-03 05:00:22 UTC #1429

I’d email (or @Graham) because I don’t think anyone with true power checks here very often.

PS/ I don’t know if this will work, but if you are on chrome you could try:
Right click on the padlock icon on the left side of the address bar and pick “site settings”.
Turn off the Sound permission.

I’ve never really messed with the site specific permissions though, so I don’t know how effective/sticky/buggy they are.

Det.Bullock 2018-10-03 17:39:13 UTC #1430

I’m using firefox, though I should see if it has a similar option.

pedanticparsnips 2018-11-20 06:43:03 UTC #1431

I just wanted to say that you guys putting an ad in front of videos is pretty gross. If you were hosting the videos yourself I wouldn’t have an issue with it (it’d be annoying but understandable), but you put it in front of all youtube videos, regardless of if its your content or not. I prefer not to use adblock on sites I frequent, but I also pay for youtube premium meaning that you’re actively removing the benefits of a service I pay for.
I really hope you change that, or it was a bug rather than a feature, because I like the site and want to support it, but I’m also not going to watch ads when they’re implemented like that.

BillButNotBen 2018-11-20 23:59:32 UTC #1432

Not to mention that half the time on those ads, when you click the little “skip ad” link, it takes you to the ad page… which is hopefully a bug, but if not dishonest.

(plus, since my work PC seems to block half yourtube videos, I end up sitting through the ad, only to find I can’t see the video… though that’s not really RPS’s fault).

Synesthesia 2018-12-15 17:16:26 UTC #1433

I don’t know if this is the place to do this, a 1400 post long thread doesn’t feel like the right place.

Anyway, here it is: I think the moderation team for the comment threads on the main site need to be more responsive. I understand that certain articles attract shitty kinds of people. But often, i see altright and similar talking points are left up there to fester and cause flame wars.

Right now, for example, there’s some twat spewing white supremacist, white genocide bullshit on the UK games union article. His comments have been sitting there for 8 hours. Maybe we need a flagging system, or a only-supporters-can-comment, a la metafilter? I don’t know, but I remember fondly when the comment section of RPS was something to look forward to.

alms 2018-12-15 23:29:28 UTC #1434

Don’t quote me on this, last time I’ve heard, there wasn’t literally a moderation team for the comment section, as in, people dedicated to that task specifically, neither paid nor unpaid.

Usual disclaimer that this is mostly pointless, unless looking to chit-chat with forsaken RPS forumites.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2018-12-17 20:04:25 UTC #1435

Forsaken RPS forumites of a forsaken RPS forum.

This place feels very tumbleweedy

Risingson 2019-01-16 18:01:45 UTC #1436

I see that comments were removed from the last Riot games entry. I understand why, and I feel this is the future: no comment sections anywhere.

I welcomed the removal of the comment sections in Resident Advisor a few weeks ago (for the same reason: every time anything that has to do with women is mentioned the bunch of harmful guys come with their army) but now I miss it so much.

ThatFuzzyTiger 2019-01-16 21:34:50 UTC #1437

Heaven forbid the readers of the site voice an opinion.

That said I presume most of it happens on the community run discord at this point, so I’d not be surprised if more of the comments sections get shut down with the intent of moving everyone over to Discord.

BillButNotBen 2019-01-17 13:17:02 UTC #1438

Well, if the discord is community run then I’m unsure whether RPS would want to move people onto it. But maybe.

I’m also pretty much at the point where I think that the pros of having comments are outweighed by the cons, and it might be best not to have them at all.
Though of course there are sometimes comments that are incredibly useful and we’d lose out on those, plus the pun threads.
I wonder if AI is smart enough yet to only allow comments that have puns?

Plus it always sucks when some idiots ruin it for the rest of us, but this is the internet and that’s kind of unavoidable at this point.

alms 2019-01-18 22:12:43 UTC #1439

Since forum administration is most definitely not community run, it should, at the very least, receive basic technical support, don’t you think?