So, I guess the site redesign is live?

I want the number of comments to appear above the fold. Though it was clutter, so if few people were using it, whatever.

My only major issue with it is that posts on the main or discussion page no longer show the number of comments they've received, or even that they've received new comments. Being able to tell this at a glance was an extremely useful ability.

I do not like the icons. I want them to be words.

The colors will take some getting used to but I don't really hate them.

The extra linebreaks on the right sidebar annoy me.

And we still can't view upvotes and downvotes separately on comments argh.

komponisto pointed out earlier that "Hall of Fame" has connotations we may not want. I'm surprised that got changed when nobody seemed to disagree with him. I suggest that be reverted. (Obviously this is minor, though.)

Also, I'd like to repeat my suggestion that the "New on OB" sidebar section have "Overcoming Bias" as a link so I can jump to the blog rather than individual posts.

I'm disapointed with the new graphic behind the lesswrong logo.

I always used the territory vs the map graphic to explain to people what lesswrong is about.

I really don't like the reply icon. I see it and think "ah, that's something for sending a reply via a private-message facility. So what do I have to do to reply here?" Any chance of changing it to something that doesn't feature an envelope?

(Also, I agree with Alicorn: the all-caps username is bad. Does it have anything to recommend it at all?)

Positive:

• Meetups have its own bar.
• Sizable karma buttons.
• No visible difference between promoted and unpromoted posts. I suppose that promotedness biases my choice what to read.
• Header design. Looks cleaner now (although the old design was certainly not bad).
• ETA: Retracting instead of deleting.

Not sure about:

• Not clear what nearby means when attributed to a meetup. I see Melbourne, which is on the opposite side of the globe.
• Icons instead of words.
• Dropdown menus.
• Graphical distinction between new and read comments. I like the idea, dislike the way it looks.

Negative:

• Own user name in all caps. What's the reason?
• Blank lines separating comments in the recent comments and posts bars. Needs more scrolling and reduces the amount of visible information. The items are already visibly separated by colour and bold font, there is no need for those gaps.
• Too large indentation of nested comments.

The comments have become significantly farther apart. Too much scrolling is required to read them.

Looking at the discussion and main pages, the number of comments for each post doesn't seem to be displayed anymore. Does that mean I have to separately open each post I'm interested in to see if there are new comments? Meh.

Given that we want:

• The ability to delete comments that have accidentially been posted multiple times, or such
• To retain comments that are a part of a conversation

The solution seems simple. If there are no replies to a comment, allow it to be deleted. If there are replies, retract instead of deleting.

Also, whatever happened to the idea of havng separate buttons for "agree" and "vote up". I think this is an important distinction to make -- it is very useful to know both:

1) which comments are agreed with, but not necessarily high-quality ways of arguing for them, and

2) which comments are disagreed with, but are regarded as articulate and worthy of response.

And IIRC, the voters in favor of separate buttons were coming out ahead.

Bad: There is no longer any visible difference between promoted and non-promoted posts (all circles are green).

Extremely Bad: It is no longer possible to delete comments, only "retract" them (with usernames remaining displayed).

The borders on comments are fairly ugly, and far too thick. When I go to view all my comments, the way they are listed there is much more aesthetically pleasing.

I like the new header. The footer is a great improvement.

Mixed feelings about the thumbs up/down icons. I like icons, and they are smaller than the text "Vote up" and "Vote down", but they actually end up taking more space than the text, because their vertical height is greater. Perhaps they can be shrunk a bit and placed in the title line of the comment, along with the permalink and reply icon? You could potentially hide all the icons unless you're mousing over the comment, to avoid clutter.

Because my username is fairly long, it overlaps with the "Create new article" button, which is annoying.

As a somewhat casual reader and participant, my immediate reaction (regardless of functionality, which I really haven't tried out yet) is that the new design is horrendously ugly compared to the old one. I was intending to go through the Sequences soon, but the visual change is a pretty strong disincentive.

If at all possible, I'd like the ability to view posts using the old interface.

I had a stack of business cards printed for myself, using the (old) style of a comment box. They arrived yesterday.

This is a poll. Vote up one of the choices below, and downvote the karma sink.

More than anything I greatly miss the ability to see the number of comments on a post without having to click through to the post. Number of comments is - to me - even more important information than Karma. Please put back!

Hah, you can retract a comment, then edit it. But you can't un-retract it o.o That doesn't even make sense to me.

I'd seriously suggest allowing for "delete", and reserving retract for comments that have replies.

Overall conclusion: This redesign is an utter abomination. Yes, the Karma bubble fix is useful and the 'Nearby Meetups' feature is of interest. But every other intervention seems to be a bad idea. I particularly despise the removal of the delete feature.

Yea, at first I thought it looked cool, but after the first 5 seconds the whole thing seems problematic. Not only is there mystery meat navigation, but it's also really hard to see which links you've clicked before. And the whiteness is way overdone to the point I get snowblind and have to squint in order to see where one post ends and the next begins.

The whole actually doing things in practice and so is admirable... but sorry the execution sucks, please revert and have it opt-in until you've worked out all the quirks.

Some of the links are a black-ish color, which is a problem, because the "visited link" color is gray. The usual convention is that a visited link is darker, so this is very confusing. I also personally find the two colors to be a bit too close even if they were swapped.

I accidentally clicked the little eyeball at the bottom of a post, which hid it. Now I can't even see it if I browse to the permalink.

Also, there's no number of comments on posts on the front or new pages, nor link to the comments.

I understand that the changes are still ongoing to some degree, but I will be fairly upset if there is no modification to make it easier to access users' comment histories, as I described here in the redesign suggestion thread.

In addition, I had to flip through my comments one page at a time to find that link, because the "load more comments" link at the end of the main suggestion thread is not functioning properly, i.e. it does not appear to be loading all of the comments.

ETA: The new "load all comments" link appears to function correctly, but does not sort correctly. For example (using the above-linked suggestions thread), the last comment after loading all when sorting by new is one of mine, and the first comment when sorting by old is one of Louie's.

This has made me realize that switching the sort option for one thread switches it for all threads. This is not preferable behavior. Switching the sort within the thread should only switch that thread at that time, and users should have a global preference to set for default sorting behavior.

I preferred when there was a prominent, single-click link from the main page to recent comments. It's always been the main way I've navigated the site, and I think it may have helped draw people to the site's content, much of which is in the comments, including comments on top-level posts that don't in themselves look interesting.

Apparent glitch I've found: on the Wiki page the header stretches all the way horizontally on my screen, in contrast to the Main and Discussion sections where the pages are horizontally bounded. Now, I have 22' widescreen monitor with 1920x1080 resolution and the Wiki header appears to be not big enough to fit my screen and thus it abruptly ends around 90% of the screen on the right side, leaving the SIAI and FHI logos with a partially white background.

Does "NEARBY MEETUPS" sort at all? The Austin, TX meetup I made that's a few miles down the road is displayed second after a meetup in the UK (which is actually spam). (Note: I have set my location to Austin, TX.)

Once a polling system is implemented, I would like to see a poll that lists all the changes with "better, worse, or neutral" so that we can get a more accurate representation of what people like and dislike. I hesitate to write my own response of "I agree to X but still like Y" whenever somebody lists multiple likes/dislikes. It would clutter the page and not help very much unless many people responded.

It would have been nice if somebody took screenshots of the old version so we could compare. Some things are much easier to tell the difference, but it is very difficult to pull up memories of how easy to read/nice to look at the old site was, when comparing things like the color scheme.

My personal preferences:

Positive dropdown menus Comment layout and visual representation: better than it was

Negative: Comment number not appearing Header: I like the old one and it's map/territory artwork. When in the discussion section, the header is ugly (3 different fonts in 3 different colors). I would like to see a picture of how it was. I feel like this is a case of "why fix what isn't broken? (WFWIB)" (it makes some sense if it didn't go well with new site changes.) Hall of fame rather than top contributors WFWIB

Neutral comment icons vs. words Color scheme: background SIAI /FHI links: seems reasonable

Thanks for working hard at making the site better! The negative comments are probably rough, but we appreciate you.

Edit after a few days: I really like the new layout and graphic design. Except for the header. Not being able to delete comments is interesting, since I used to hesitate and delete what I wrote directly after writing sometimes. I was going to do that again, but wasn't able to, and my comment got a few points, so it may have been worthwhile. An uncomfortable, but probably positive change.

A couple of points / whining:

• On the main page, it is not clear whether the up/down/save/hide icons belong to the post above or below it. I would suggest removing the line above these links.
• I would like a link to the article or to the comments at the bottom of the article, but I suppose this has been mentioned already.
• Give me back my text links instead of icons, I liked the simple look it gave the side, and it is easier to understand. The vote up/down buttons are easy enough to understand, but the other icons are not. When I want the permalink, I don't immediately know what to look for. Also, the pop-up balloons are annoying, and would be unnecessary if text links were used.
• Also, it is not immediately obvious if an up/down vote icon has been clicked. It turns green, but there is already lots of green on the page.
• Why are the text input fields in ugly blurry gray? I would prefer a crisp edge.
• Why is the text of buttons gray on a gray background? I would suggest using black text for a better contrast.
• The green border for new comments is a bit much. I would prefer it if it just said "new" somewhere. Or with an icon if you are so inclined.

It'll do. I like that it highlights new comments (but I'm not too keen on how the highlighting is done -- the thick green border looks pale and fuzzy).

There are a few glitches (even after cache-clearing):

My username is long enough that the end disappears behind the "Create new article" button.

The number of comments on a post is no longer displayed except in the page for that post.

Loading lesswrong.com gives a page in which none of "Promoted", "New", "Top", or "Saved" is highlighted.

"Nearby meetings" shows a single meeting, in Australia. I am in the U.K. How is the site deciding what is "nearby"?

Is there any page I can go to to see all forthcoming meetups, regardless of location? If I was travelling, I might very well want to know of meetups not currently "nearby".

The foot of each comment seems to have too much empty space in it, especially for nested comments.

"Main" feels way too bright and washed out. "Discussion" strikes a better balance.

(ETA2: ah, strike that - I was having the same weird caching issue many others have mentioned.)

This will take some getting used to.

ETA: also I regret that the tagline "a community blog, etc" has been rendered all but invisible in the main masthead (insufficient contrast) and in discussion (type too small). Either remove the tagline entirely or make sure it can be read - don't sit on the fence.

ETA3: so the tagline is OK on the main site, but my comments stand for Discussion.

ETA4: I don't know if that's a recent change or yet another cache issue, but that also looks fine in Discussion now.

A bug: in the previous design, comments on the old posts that were imported from Overcoming Bias could only by sorted by "old." The new "Sort By" dropdown menu now allows the user to select the other sorting methods on the old posts, although they don't change the actual sorting of the comments. There should probably be some flag added to those old posts to prevent the dropdown menu from appearing to prevent future confusion.

I like the icons, the karma bubble fix, and the meetup section.

The new layout and colors are neutral to me - neither better nor worse than the old ones.

I'm not sure how I feel about the lime green border to highlight new comments. It's slightly useful, but mildly ugly.

I'll miss the map-territory header. I'm not sure what the new one is supposed to be. It does look better, though.

Not being able to see the number of comments on the main and discussion pages is annoying, even if aesthetically pleasing.

The new retraction mechanic is silly. I wish deletion was back.

I still think it's an improvement overall, and I support a policy of "when in doubt, experiment" and "it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission".

Better:

• Meetups!
• highlighting of unread comments!
• Retracting comments instead of deleting them!
• The icons are a bit better than text - well, except for the "reply" one, which looks like a "send PM", but overal I think it's better, it makes it slightly easier to quickly scan through the comments
• The karma bubble is slighly better

Temporary setbacks

• Some people have css cache problems, that should clear up soon
• The comment counts have been lost :( But it should be fixed
• Some bugs in comment submission - it doesn't accept accented characters in locations, which is blatant discrimination against nous les français.

Worse

• The header is uglier than before :(
• There's a bit too much spacing between comments, but that may just take some getting used to (it's not as bad for comments you already read, it's the new ones that have a lot of spacing).

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

This is a test to determine my ability to ban my own comments as a stopgap measure for the inability to delete, until this horrible, horrible oversight is corrected.

My input: what the fuck happened to the site???

Edit: This was just intended to convey my immediate, gut reaction to the site. Of course I can find out what happened, I did so, and I elaborated in other comments. I leave this here as a reminder of my initial expression of shock.

"AAUGH! LESSWRONG IS USING MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION!!!"

Not exactly mystery meat, the icons contain some information. A real MMN would have all icons looking the same, or at least having shapes unrelated to their function.

By the way, the Web Pages That Suck site is amusing, but since I have seen it for the first time I wonder whether the site itself has a fairly sucking design on purpose.

I am seeing a few glitches - the "+" and "-" icons are cut off at the right, so they are surrounded by Cs not circles - but overall this a big improvement. Thanks to the people at Tricycle for a great job!

There are definitely some wrinkles to iron out. Make the images the right size and readable, maybe also increase the contrast in some of the colors. Actually I'm seeing a lot of wrinkles. We should probably make a laundry list and see if there's any way the community can help.

I'm very happy that there's a meetup system now, so the revamp is definitely a good thing overall. But there's still work to do.

I'm not a big fan of the big green ovals. Maybe it would be better if it remained circle for two characters and only expanded for 3 or more? People's karma reaches high levels, but posts usually only have double digit karma. Then a list like the main discussion page would be uniform.

Hmm, after using it for some bit I notice that I seem to care less about karma, and be a lot more prone to up-voting things. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing.

Presumably this as somehting to do with the interface, maybe somehting as simple as attaching less weight to a thumbs up than to a vote.

For some reason, the new design is (sometimes) very sluggish on my iPhone. Can the tricyclists look into this?

Another iPhone bug report: since the post buttons have mouseover behaviours, you need to tap it twice to actually click it, which can be annoying. Though I'm not sure what the best alternative would be, since people on mobile devices should still be able to see what the buttons do before clicking them. Maybe just show them as text on mobile browsers?)

(Actually, a whole mobile-formatted version of the site would be great, but I know that would be a larger project…)

Also, the Singularity Institute logos and FHI Institute logos in the upper right corner aren't visible at all until I mouseover them.

EDIT: The problem went away when I hit "Refresh". It looks just fine now.

Plus: the new reply icon is a big improvement over the envelope. It looks like a public discussion now.

Minor bug in the highlighting of new comments, though: clicking on any link to a comment (e..g in the recent comments or your inbox) causes you to go to a partial view of the containing post, and it resets the "new" status for the page, meaning you can't then look around for other new comments on that page. The newness should only be reset when you view the page proper, if it can't be reset on a comment-by-comment basis (and I'm assuming it can't.)

(I still think the "parent" and "permalink" icons need improvement, but I don't have any concrete suggestions. Also, it appears that redacted comments show unredacted if they've already been sent to your inbox.)

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Retraction test.

Test

Test

Hah, you can retract a comment, then edit it. But you can't un-retract it o.o

Yet Another Comment Retractation Test

Overall conclusion: This redesign is an utter abomination. Yes, the Karma bubble fix is useful and the 'Nearby Meetups' feature is of interest. But every other intervention seems to be a bad idea. I particularly despise the removal of the delete feature.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

Too easy to double post. ie. I saw an entire page in recent comments in which there was not a single single post evident.

This is a test

this is still a test

• testing

This is a test to see how retracting of comments works.

This is an edit.

This is an edit done after retraction. It appears, but the comment is still retracted. Strange that one may edit a retracted comment, but not unretract (tract?) it.

Some edits done to a comment after it was retracted

This is a test.

This is me testing if the "Retract" button does anything more interesting than deletion.

What happened to the agree/disagree buttons that were voted on, and why?