Oh sweet fuck, tell me this is a joke

[branchandroot]

*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.

Comments

[dancing_serpent]

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

[branchandroot]

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

[edenfalling]

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.

[branchandroot]

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

[synecdochic]

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

[branchandroot]

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

[the_rck]

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.

[branchandroot]

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.

[hydrangea]

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.

[branchandroot]

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.

[ysobel]

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

[branchandroot]

You and me both! *cries*

[annotated_em]

Jesus fucking christ that is fugly beyond words.

[branchandroot]

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.

[helens78]

*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.

[helens78]

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.

[krait]

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.

[krait]

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

[mitsuhachi]

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

[branchandroot]

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.

[shiraume]

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

[branchandroot]

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

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

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.

[branchandroot]

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.

[musyc]

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?

[branchandroot]

*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*

[jorockz]

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.

[branchandroot]

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.

[taithe]

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.

[branchandroot]

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.

[qem_chibati]

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.)

[branchandroot]

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

[highlander_ii]

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

[branchandroot]

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.

[foxinthestars]

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??)

[musyc]

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.)

[lorax]

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.

[branchandroot]

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

[killing_rose]

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?

[branchandroot]

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)

[neotoma]

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.

[branchandroot]

*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.