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

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".

/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.

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.

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?

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.

*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*

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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!)

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.

*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.

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.)

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