branchandroot | Oh sweet fuck, tell me this is a joke

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design: ao3: argh

Oh sweet fuck, tell me this is a joke

*looking at the "new and improved" archive skin in horror*

Gray! The background is GRAY!

And the "this is one of your own things" background is PINK!

*horrified beyond words*

ETA: A Quick Fix Skin I ran up is available here until it actually goes public.

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It looks awful! And my neat little code to hide the kudos doesn't work any more.

It's a godawful mess, and the background CSS is just as screwed up as before. *bangs her head against the desk*

Okay, my skin was disabled - at least that explains it. *sigh*

They are making it really really hard to like the AO3. And I want to, because it seems to have become the place to go. But oh, my poor eyes.

I have no real room to talk, but man, that's not what I'd call an improvement. Also, the little square of warning icons keeps intermittently hiding parts of the header info when I am scrolling down a list of stories in any given fandom, which is just badly done code whatever you think of the aesthetics.

I can't /believe/ they let this go live.

I spent most of my childhood viciously insisting that I hated pink. Hated, hated, hated. Because otherwise eighty percent of everything I owned would have ended up pink, just by the pressure of "oh, girls like pink, it's cute!" that sloshes around in contemporary American culture.

I do not actually hate pink. But I think it is a color best used in moderation, and only when people actively choose it. It is NOT my idea of a good default.

*wry* De-pink-ified skin coming up as soon as someone reviews it. I couldn't stand it any longer.

*wince* Ouch. What's with those margins?

I don't /know/! I mean, the margins have always been a bit screwy, but /dude/.

Boy do I feel sorry for the team behind this; they're going to be taking a lot of flak. :(

Yeah. And it's not exactly undeserved flak, both lim and novik should have asked for /way/ more user-eyes on this new layout before rolling it out. But I do foresee a bit of a shitstorm, especially considering how wound up a lot of people already are over elections.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's a reason we ran the new update page through at least three separate trials in mockup before we did any of the backend; people care a lot about how things look.

I can't figure out how to see the rest of the fics I've written. The twenty most recent display, but there's no way to page into seeing the remaining seventeen. I shouldn't have to do acrobatics to see the full list of things I've written. Right now, I can get to them by displaying in reverse of posting date, but if I'd written more than forty stories, I'd be completely at a loss.

The navigation that used to be at the bottom of the page is now hiding under the filter sidebar. See, every fucking thing is now floated (first thing I howled about in feedback) so everything in the footer rides up the page uncontrollably. Seriously a hot mess.

Thanks for telling me that.

It's a stupid place to put the navigation. Usually, one wants to page forward or back from either the top of the page or the bottom of the page. Putting the link somewhere in the middle is ridiculous.

Oh, it wasn't in the middle on purpose. That's just the /result/ of the decision to float every module and index box. It's a snafu of major proportions, but at least it wasn't deliberate.

That was my reaction when I saw the change as well. I just spent an hour trying to get the red disappear and the buttons go away and everything just kept going wonky. Ended up Adblocking and then increasing font-size and turning everything black/white in NoSquint instead. Not quite what I had hoped from a new skin.

Yeah, I'm tweaking my favorite skin so it mostly works again. I'll comb it out properly some time when I'm not quite so outraged.

.......what is this I don't even. /flees in terror/

You and me both! *cries*

Jesus fucking christ that is fugly beyond words.

It really, really is. It wouldn't be quite so bad without the godawful pink, I mean the buttons are really quite handsome. But the pink and the overwhelming gray really kind of kill it dead.

The colors are fairly washed out on my monitor, so I can only assume that whoever put these layouts together must think they look good, but... oh my god, no no noooooooo.

*weeps in horror* *clings*

I'm having to start from the ground up with my neat, tidy white background/black text/sans-serif font. FROM THE GROUND UP. Oh, God.

I'm very excited about the fact that I will, eventually, be able to create a mobile stylesheet. That's fantastic. But. URK. OH GOD.

ALSO ARE YOU KIDDING ME. ALL THAT SHIT ABOUT HOW WE WON'T HAVE TO USE !IMPORTANT ANYMORE. AND WHAT HAPPENS. I HAVE TO USE !IMPORTANT TO GET MY FONT FACE TO SHOW UP. OTHERWISE I AM LEFT WITH HALF SERIF AND HALF SANS-SERIF *FROTHS AT MOUTH*

Er, sorry about the caps, but I am so pissed about that I can't even tell you. The entire reason I came up with a custom skin was to get rid of serif fonts. And then I tried putting sans-serif fonts in and WHAT. WHAT.

Oh my god, I know! I've already had to use important twice! For fuck's sake, this is just a mess, and clearly still shot through with "oh, no, that's a /different/ class than all this other stuff, for no clear reason".

*pets you soothingly* I so totally hear you. I'm just trying to make something readable, myself.

And I'm grateful that you are. I look forward to having something that makes the stories on the archive readable again. I'm usually pretty indifferent to layout -- one reason, no doubt, that I've never learned how to fix it for myself -- but this is really grisly.

I don't suppose skins will do anything to fix whatever the hell they've done to navigation? Which looks just as dysfunctional as ever, but is now unpleasantly in your face about it?

*wry* Depends on which part of the navigation is getting on your soul. A skin won't do a whole lot for the dashboard sidebar, but the buttons something might be done about.

Or is it the page nav, which is supposed to be at the bottom of the page, and (thanks the someone's lack of testing and bright idea to use float in just the wrong way) is currently living scrunched underneath the filters? I can do something about that, though it's a bit counter-intuitive.

Part of it's the page nav. But I just went to look again, and found to my considerable discomfort that my lack of knowledge about this stuff is so thoroughgoing that I can't even tell you what's bothering me about the new layout. I'm vividly aware that I'm not comfortable with it, and that applying the skin that supposedly makes it look the way it did before the upgrade doesn't fix whatever it is that's making me uncomfortable. But beyond that? I've got nothing, beyond a nonspecific sense that everything is simultaneously too crowded and too in my face. All the metadata stuff -- headers, navigation boxes -- are huge and unavoidable and in the way, while the text is laid out in ways that exaggerate the problems with the last system. Lines that go on forever, across the entire width of one's screen; maybe some change in whatever the default typeface was; I don't know. All I know is that I always had the feeling layout could be better, from the perspective of pure readability, but it wasn't so bad I was twitchy whenever I tried to look at a story.

And now I am. And whatever it is that's getting on my nerves, switching to some other public skin doesn't seem to fix it. I feel a little like a patient who comes in to see a doctor complaining of pain, but is unable to say whether the pain is in her foot or her head, let alone whether it's a stabbing or a throbbing kind of pain. Not being able to answer that kind of question makes a diagnosis difficult, and a fix even more so, but I can't help it. I don't know what's wrong! I just know I want it to stop.

Hmmm. Well, the quick fix skin I'm working on does give more elbow room to most all the elements, so that may help. And I up the size of the story font, which was made smaller with this release and that undoubtedly isn't helping you.

I'll see how fast I can get my modular skin hammered out too. That one's got godawful messy code, because half of it only applies to the old html, but as long as I can make the bugger work I don't care. That one has a dark background and puts all the blurbs and stories in light boxes, which I find makes reading a lot easier.

I... think I need to go look at the archive! I closed all my tabs a few hours ago when it went down, and didn't realise they were doing such, er, physical updates, so -- off to investigate.

Well, first things first: what happened to my purple!? *sighs*

Yeah. All skins disabled, because the new code breaks them, and if you go and reactivate it count on it being really quite broken.

/facepalm. I want to love AO3. I really really do. But that is seriously flipping godawful.

User testing, people! It's not a hard concept! Just wave on a blog post and point people to the testing server and put this up live! It would have made things so much better.

Ow, my EYES. >.< First gmail, now this. Whyyyyyy?

Because some people should never be allowed to color any web page, and I'm afraid lim is one of them.

I'll...just avoid AO3 until someone makes a skin that's easier on my poor eyes. Eeek.

That...that was actually my second thought when I saw the changes. :(

You know, I tried to read that intro to skins that's linked on the front page, and it makes the kind of sense that . . . oh, all right, I admit that it probably does make sense. To someone who has studied web design, and writes CSS, and is not a mere end user.

But, isn't an archive of this kind supposed to function for people who are not particularly interested in writing code? Maybe I'm being a big entitled baby about this, but life is short, and while I respect and admire you folks who code and design layouts and such, I've come to accept that coding is far, far down on my big list of things I want to learn to do some day. Behind cabinetmaking, and lost wax casting in precious metals, and pharmacology, and racecar driving, and a bunch of other things. So odds are good that I'm not going to get to it any time soon. Is it really unreasonable for me to want things like AO3 to work without my having to know what the devil a skin is? And to be able to do simple searching and simple formatting of anything I might want to archive there without having to acquire a whole new set of nearly-professional-level skills?

It probably sounds as if I mean those questions to be rhetorical, but I don't, really. It could be that I'm wrong about where the technology of the Internet really is in relation to end users -- that is, that we're not yet at a point where it's reasonable for people like me to expect to be able to not know these things. Once upon a time, if you were going to drive a car you needed to know a fairish amount about how the machine worked, and some basic things you could do for yourself when yours inevitably broke down. Now, you mostly can't fix one yourself if you want to, and there's no reason for you to know much about how one works if you're not a professional. It's just, I had thought that the net had gotten to a point where I really, really could forget about learning to program and not spend much time tripping over my own ignorance.

I certainly don't think it's unreasonable. I've been mentioning in my feedback that the site default is supposed to be the simple, lowest common denominator look. Telling people to just swallow this redesign because there's a black and white skin available really doesn't cut it. And telling people all cheerily to just go make their own skin with this snazzy! new! (really not intuitive to the novice) interface... doesn't either.

I'm very unimpressed with the lack of thought that went into this re-design.

Came across this on my network and was ridiculously relieved to finally find a place of commiseration. Hardly anyone I've talked to in the past few hours understands the pain. My frankenpasted skin is borked, and I have NO idea what to do to fix it, (see as read, frankenpasted from various sources I can't even fiiiiiiind now) and OMG, I can't view one damn thing on my mobile device *grrargh*.

I was very excited about new skins and after the deploy I nearly cried. Maybe this will give me the impetus to finally make things purple like I prefer them, but until I have the energy to do that, whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Were these skins tested AT ALL?

*sympathy* As best I can tell, no, nothing was tested, up to and including the default itself. There are a number of really obvious glitches that should never have made it into production.

As for the "won't need !important" any more... *laughs hollowly*

I've already discovered the importance of !important. *joins in the hollow laughter*

GRR ARGH. 75% of what I'm putting into the skin requires bloody important tags!

On the plus side, I have managed to:
*get date posted, authors, and titles on works in a large font (I skim by date posted first on the rarely-posted fandoms I follow)
*get relationships to stand-out (skimming to avoid pairings/characters I don't like)
*turn all the FRICKIN' red to purple
*get rid of the logo and my icon in the header
*put commas back into the tag lists
*PUT SOME BLOODY SPACING BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS OH MY GOD WHY ARE THEY SO CLOSE TOGETHER
*narrow margins on works so the lines are only 75% of the screen
*get rid of all those drop-shadow 2.0 nonsense things

Next up, figuring out how to align all my header nav buttons to the left where they belong AND shrinking that stupid footer, seriously why is it 800 feet high. I'm aggravated that my filters have somehow ended up on the bottom of the page, instead of a sidebar, but I only ever use them to remove non-English fics from the list (I mean, YAYYYYYYY for multiple languages on the Archive, but I can't read them so I don't personally need them in the list), so it's not AS big an issue.

Of course, nothing I do whatsoever makes the site usable on my iPod. Glad that wasn't my primary fic-reading device or anything. *headdeskheaddesk*

*cheers you on*

Yeah, I got a skin run up with some really basic fixes to color and font and margins (including the footer, omgwtfbbq). Now... now I'm back to wrangling with my modular skin. *buckles her DOM inspector on grimly*

Some skins only got a cursory brush, the default skin was tested by quite a lot of people on different systems. But test feedback needs to be heard and fixes need the time for implementation and re-testing. Preferably without Yuletide breathing down one's neck, because Yuletide wasn't to be run without tag sets and tag sets already used the re-designs.

And some things did actually get changed before they got onto beta.

I saw this post linked by someone on twitter (lost who sorry) and I am so happy there are people who also hate it. I don't get who thought making the font smaller and shrinking the margins was a good idea :(

And the 1.0 skin doesn't change either of those.

I agree with the person above- I use the AO3 to read- why should I have to spend hours learning about skins and coding (it all looks like gibberish to me!) to make the site readable? And they make it sound so easy "if you want to make a new skin just browse this!" when it clearly isn't.

There was only one thing I wanted changed-and that has stayed the same.

Sorry for the random person ranting-just happy to find other people who also aren't happy.

The font, oh my god! The whole thing is a mess! And the pink! And the margins! Argh.

And yes, the "just make a skin" cheer is, um, really not the way to make people happier when the interface is still so non-user-friendly. The /site css/ is non-user-friendly, and I say this as someone who /does/ code.

Please, feel free to rant. It'll keep me company while I try to find all the places where they screwed with the /opacity/ of all things to change the background colors.

Yea, I know there will be people who like coding, and understand it-but I am not one of them ;). And it's one thing to say 'hey if you like coding, here's the instructions and hints for making your own skin' and quite another to be like 'hey everyone! go make your own skin if you don't like the default!' which is what I feel like they are insinuating.

Just-did anyone LOOK at that font before uploading the new design? So, so tiny.

You say you code-are these things normally just uploaded or are they user tested first? This feels like someone did it without asking anyone else input (this may not be the case, but its how i feel.)

(Seriously- the only thing I want changed is that stupid blue bar that tells me whenever I click on my fandom's "this search has returned 1000 fics. refine your search to find others". That blue bar irritates me EVERY TIME because it reminds me that there is no way to search all the fics in a fandom if there is more than 1000. And if you are like me, when I discover a new fandom, I actually do want to go through every single page and read every single summary. But I can't. And that blue bar reminds me of that every time! Sorry, slight derail - i think it's rant about AO3 day.)

They /should/ be user tested. This new default should have been announced in the testing stage on the blog, for people to poke at, if anyone had their head screwed on straight. It appears that no one did.

(Oh god, I hear you. And there is no good reason for it! I mean, it's not like the archive needs to return all 2000 at once! And all I've ever gotten is a chirpy "well, use the filters and advanced search to refine your results!" Which misses the point, because that's not what I want to do. I just want to browse!)

Oh, I HATE that "only 1000 fics at a time" bullshit. I mean, if goddamn fanfiction.net can return me every last fic they have in a single fandom, then surely AO3 ought to be able to manage the same trick? And I DO want to go read (or at least look at the summary of) every damn fic in a an archive when I stumble into a new fandom. *seethes*

I can't code beyond ultra-basic html to do italics and stuff. I don't really even want to learn how to code; I have other things I would prefer to spend time on. I should not HAVE to learn how to code to get a functional archive interface. The old one wasn't perfect, but it was for sure a hell of a lot better than THIS. *seethes more*

Yeah, this was seriously not an optimal trade off of /anything/.

At least it's not just me! I don't get how every other archive can at least show me every single story- but not AO3.

Doesn't that suck for authors as well? Say your story is the main pairing, average length, uploaded a while ago and say hurt/comfort or angst-in a big fandom there is no way your story will show up in those 50 pages.

When I find a new fandom, I got through all 50 pages (which will get me the last 1000 fics uploaded/updated) then I sort by order of size and go through that. Beyond that, I won't see you story. And I shouldn't have to sort by date updated-all 50 pages, then reverse that-all 50 pages, then by size-all 50 pages, then reverse size-all 50 pages and so on. I'll end up seeing lots of the same stories and still missing lots.

And that blue bar is there, taunting me about it :(

Well according to the email I got regarding my feedback, they say they tested it. They don't say who or how many.

Of course that email also contains several paragraphs about how to use the MEMBERS ONLY wizard to make a new skin...completely ignoring the part of my email where I made it clear that I'm NOT a member, so I'm relying on the default to not be horrible?

Very quick to get a reply though.

*shakes head* Some testers were asleep at the wheel, then. I mean, the pagination menu glitch alone would make me sink of shame, to have put that live.

I'm getting some "yes, we've got a lot of feedback, we're, um, collating it" messages too. I'm hoping this results in at least a slight reduction in the horrible.

I have F.lux on and it really didn't help the washed out look of AO3. :( I hadn't even known they were going to change the archive skin. I wish there was a function that'd allow you to switch to the old if you don't like the new. My biggest annoyance is with the margins. Maybe it's the result of being trained to stare at documents with margins with 1 inches or greater...

...for now I'll just try downloading fics and reading them on a .pdf instead.

There's a sort-of old version in the public skins. Me, I'm figuring I'll see if I can get something up for the public tomorrow with more significant margins and a basic white background.

Me, I'm figuring I'll see if I can get something up for the public tomorrow with more significant margins and a basic white background.

You would be a HERO. Man. I'm having to take this in 15-minute chunks because otherwise I get too ragey to deal. Needless to say, I'm not getting very far (although I have managed to get almost all of the fonts wrangled into shape). I'm not looking forward to redoing all the colors. One thing at a time, ugh.

*salutes* Working on it! I think I've got a basic fix about ready to go, so I'll probably submit it before I hit the hay tonight. Hopefully someone will review it fast, since it's a nice short one.

*\o/* :)

So far I've managed to wrangle the fonts and, largely, actual work text pages, so I can at least read fic (although it looks like ass on my phone, ugh, and the index pages are un-navigable -- a mobile stylesheet is going to be non-negotiable, which, sigh, argh, sigh, shouldn't-complain-at-least-I-can-make-one). I will not complain if I get to throw all this crap out and start over with yours, though! :D

The one I submitted is /really minimal/. It just changes the colors and gives everything wider margins, and navigation a bit more elbow room. Well, and ups the story font size and gets rid of the pink. But based on that you should have an easier time adding on the fonts you want!

You say "really minimal", but I've been digging into this crap all evening, and I know how many places that pink is lurking! :D *\o/*

I only have mobile devices available, and it's ok for me on the iPad. (just as well. I have no idea how could quick fix on this thing). But it was a nasty surprise to fid on the phone.

The blog post are basically unreadable and none of the public skins could fix that.

I wished we could have something as good as ff.net, but at least it worked before. :(

(also. Omg. Panda madness skin. Awesome idea, horrifying to look at.)

*rueful* Yeah, the execution leaves a lot to be desired all over. Pretty sad when you're wishing for the ff.net interface.

Yeah - I opened the AO3 to do Yuletide noms and had to go change it to something that didn't make my eyes bleed before I could nom' things. The pink? WTF? PINK? There are so many things wrong with that, not the least of which is that it's kind of offensive in a 'all girls like pink, right?' kind of way. Ugh.

And way to fail on the page navigation 'hovering' over there under the filters in a little square. *headdesk*

i'm too tired to be more polite than that

The pink is just... omg, there are no words. I went and took it out of everywhere I could find, even for my "quick fix" skin.

I /think/ I got the navigation to play well. But yeah, that one was /major/ fail, and fixing it was way more difficult than it should have been.

I just don't really like pink that much anyway.

And I hate that there is no navigation at the top of the pages. WHY? If I already KNOW that I need to go to page not!1, why do I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to go to the page that isn't 1? WHY?

I actually liked the old look quite a bit. It had a nice, relaxed, "step out of the way for the user content and give it room to breathe" feeling that seemed appropriate to the project --- not that it was perfect of course, but it was more pleasant to look at than it is now (and the "Default 1.0" skin does not bring that feeling back). I can probably get used to it, but... Ick. And things getting randomly hidden under their own identifying icons, happened to me once while browsing the public skins...

(And this is their idea of how to appeal to Anime/Manga fans??)

I briefly wondered if someone on the site was COMPLETELY confused about what anime/manga fans liked, and if the "PANDA MADNESS" skin was actually an attempt at attracting said. If so, WOW, more problems than CSS are afoot. (Not that I actually think this could be accurate, but my first horrified thoughts of staring at skins led me there.)

Well, I don't recall seeing it in the public release notes or anything (yet), but like in the election candidate chats/Q&As there was a bit of "How will you outreach to Anime/Manga fans?" "They like graphic design and we're getting these skins!" I was personally unimpressed by that, to say the least --- before I saw these skins we were getting.

It's been confirmed that the panda skin is not the anime/manga skin, by the way.

*still shaking tablet and hoping the bad mobile things will magically go away*

Well thank goodness for that much, at least. Good grief.

*wry* Yeah, I think today is "try to make a decent mobile skin" day.

I surely hope none of this was billed as something to "increase diversity". Because, um. No.

The default colors were pretty dismal, but I actually thought it was fine, once I picked another skin. Until I looked at it on my phone and it was unreadable. Ouch.

Yeah, I saw someone's screencaps from a phone. /Really/ bad.

Here via unfunnyfandom.

And. I'm so glad I'm not alone. (My reading page and my roommate's cries of horror told me that I was not alone, but it's nice to know that people outside of my immediate sandbox are also upset.)

I've implemented the various stylish scripts, but holy god, I should not have to do that in order to not get a migraine. And I don't even read on Ao3; I flip over to it to pull off Kindle-formatted fics. In the five minutes it takes me to assemble a day or two's worth of fic, my head started pounding. Not okay. (And I know I cannot possibly be alone. Isn't the OTW or Ao3 committed to accessibility? Because grey on grey is seriously inaccessible. And let's not consider the panda skin. I'm trying to forget the panda skin.)

I have to ask: What were they thinking?

Yeah, honestly, I have no /clue/ how they could have thought lowering the contrast that much was a good idea. The old background was about the best compromise possible between high and low contrast. If I'm being charitable, I can suppose they were only getting complaints from users who need lower contrast and didn't do their accessibility research about just how low you can go before tipping the other way (not very).

Fortunately, there is word of an emergency deploy in the next few days to fix it back to white!

(*just kind of cries over the panda skin* It could have been good! Not something I'd use, but good for the unspeakably cute crowd! Now, if someone would just realize that anime/manga does not equal unspeakably cute crowd, we'll be getting somewhere. *sighs)

My problem is that I am an end user and while they have a create-your-own-skin options, there is no easily identifiable FAQs/tutorial on how to do it for someone who doesn't code and has no idea where to start.

I just want the old margins back and a font that is a little bigger and easier to read. I'm nearsighted and eyestrain is already a problem for me -- the changes as implemented just make it worse.

I'll try copypasta-ing your Quick Fix Skin in later, when I have the energy to fight through the unfamiliar process.

Here from

celli, btw.

*nodnod* There's supposed to be some permanent fixes coming in the next day or two, but hopefully loading up the quick fix skin will help in the meantime. I did try to adjust the font back up to browser default, at least for the stories.

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