@marmot mine, too? I didn't want to use strong language (awful isn't strong language, is it?). Though I admit that my criticism wasn't always in a constructive manner.
There is a lot of real anger about the changes here, and I think it's important to convey why this is. I'm going to try to do that from my own point of view: as a moderator, I'm not at all happy with the way things have been handled by the Powers That Be.
We (the 'TeX-sx community') have always ...
6
I'd appreciate thoughts on my answer to the 'design changes' question: I've tried to summarise what I think has gone wrong at a 'concepts'/'engagement' level
@JosephWright But you do know that there is a mobile version of the site? I'm using it on my smartphone or when I have not much space and it works imho quite fine. You can access it through the "mobile" link at the bottom (and get back with full site).
@UlrikeFischer I do know about the mobile version :) That works quite well, but is of course very much 'cut down'. Perhaps you could comment that they've managed to make the mobile site preferable to the main one!
@TylerH People get passionate when they feel that things which amount to "5 second changes" seem to not have been considered at all or when things as prominent but as easy to adapt as link colour are just overlooked altogether. When you have a design that has been well-thought out and working for years, then you get angry when people do a half-assed 1 hour job on it. The natural removal of some things isn't a problem. The (seemingly) careless way it is done with is. When it seems like SE thinks users won't notice or care and thus doesn't put care into the work, that's what gets people. — Christian RauJul 10 at 16:18
@JosephWright It isn't preferable, it is an option. On my smarthphone I'm always using it, on my pc normally the full version. There I switch to the mobile only if I really need side-by-side for some reason, e.g. to better compare outputs.
@JoeFriend sorry that really is not an acceptable response. Even at full screen the central content is too narrow and preserving the sidebars at the cost of distorting the posted content is frankly an insult to those of us who have freely given thousands of hours of our time to supporting this network. Please see our site mod Joseph's summary just posted. You should back this change out now and come back with a usable design when you have one. — David Carlisle1 min ago
@egreg Seems like your job as spurious space hunter is not in danger :)
@DavidCarlisle I just encountered a problem with xcookybooky which internally uses tabulary. I think it boils down to the same issue reported in tex.stackexchange.com/q/437957/36296. Are there any workarounds or do I just keep an old version of array.sty until this is fixed?
@samcarter it won't be fixed as the old behaviour was wrong, it really didn't make sense that the amount of space added by \\[zz] was different if the last column was m instead of c it should apply equally to the whole row. If you have no vertical rules you can use \\ \noalign{\vspace{2cm}} or use one of the booktabs extra space commands, otherwise you need to do as you have always needed to do if the preamble had been Lr rather than rL
Btw, I just realized how stupid the {TeX} logo loots like when it's not centered. Maybe we should switch to \TeX{} instead.
Btw, design makeover summary: People hate missing customized tags (wasn't only us, the UL site had /tag design, also very nice), missing serif fonts (especially on Mi Yodeya this is an issue as sans-serif hebrew looks very awful), missing customized vote arrows (this has appeared all around the network), and last but not least, people actually hate one of the reasons for all of this: the responsive design. This is simply too bad.
@boycott.se-yo' People don't hate responsive design, they hate how it is done, that they see the left and right columns in their original width while the central column gets squished into nothing.
@BAYMAX after an error message it is best not to even look at the pdf output, tex makes essentially no attempt to make sensible typeset document after an error, it just takes the simplest route possible to get back to a state that it can syntax-check the rest of the document.
@samcarter I don't know how you change the size of the window, but I normally use the windows-key + arrow to split the screen and place the windows left and right. I now tested the new site with it and it works perfectly if reponsivness is enabled: The windows is halfed, all bars disappear and I see only the questions. This looks as if I no longer need the mobil version on the pc.
@UlrikeFischer yes same here actually, it's just then if you make the window a little bit bigger the massive right sidebar comes in and squashes the content) (unless you have customised the css to stop it)
@UlrikeFischer Ok I was just checking that's what you meant, I have css in ff that makes it shrink as window shrinks,but I run an uncustomised setup in chrome so i can see what the default looks like
@UlrikeFischer This depends on the screen size. On my primary one, half the screen is just a bit too large to hide the sidebar, so the central column is squished. Without the responsive design, I'll see the central column in full width and can scroll to the side bar if I like.
@samcarter well we all agree I think that the size of the bar is too large. But disabling responsivness completly is probably overkill. Did you try with a smaller right bar size?
@UlrikeFischer disabling is the only thing they offer as a built in option, using a user script or user stylesheet isn't that hard but isn't really relevant to the discussion of the site design as (especially if you use a user script) you can make almost arbitrary changes.
@UlrikeFischer Not sure it is worth the effort. I see the main column in full width and if I want to see the right column, scrolling is very easy with arrow keys, touch pad or mouse.
@DavidCarlisle also that's not the point, because if the site is unusable, it's simply unusable and you need to change it for all users, not for yourself :-)
@boycott.se-yo' yes exactly. And the sad thing is it's basically usable (if not pretty) with half a dozen lines of css, so really this all could have been sorted out on day one.
@DavidCarlisle @boycott.se-yo' user.css are fine to add a personal touch like ducks to the site. There are also ok to test how changes would look like and as work-around of temporarly bugs and problems. But naturally in the end the site should be usable without them.
@samcarter The question is if "give the right bar a width of 20%" is a sensible solution or if works only on my system and something more elaborated is needed.
@UlrikeFischer This will still depend on the screen size. I think think the only good solution is to make the right bar collapse earlier - preferably before shrinking the central column.
@samcarter probably. But I would say a smaller right bar is first priority and a shrinking right bar would be a bonus. Btw: I changed my left bar, the many ducks were too distracting. Now I'm using this:
@samcarter I don't want to many on the page visible at the same time. But I will probably try later to get more space around the duck then I can make them a bit smaller.
@UlrikeFischer I think ideally the width of the central content should be preserved (as long as possible) and the sidebar shrink as the window shrinks, until some cutoff point when it is dropped, as in the mobile site, so not a fixed percentage
@DavidCarlisle But how do you then get a "not so wide" central content without loosing the sidebar first? Imho it would be better if both shrink until the side bar reaches the point where it is better dropped.
@UlrikeFischer @Skillmon's useContent.css answer goes some of the way but I see it just uses max-with 20% for the main control of the sidebar I may sketch out something but I have been distracted with family issues recently. several ways you can use @media queries to adjust the percentages based on window size, or you can (in newer browsers) use css calc calcuations so that space, or perhaps just the simple 20% is enough in practice:-) clearly they want to keep it simple....
@DavidCarlisle I'm using the div#sidebar { max-width: 20%; } and suitable mainbar-setting from @Skillmon and for me it works fine both on the pc and on the smaller laptop. I can find with the mouse a few window sizes where the result looks a bit odd but all the standard sizes are ok.
@UlrikeFischer actually I almost never use the facility to snap a window to half the screen width I more or less always have it either full screen or a more or less arbitrary size depending on how many windows I'm displaying.
There is a lot of real anger about the changes here, and I think it's important to convey why this is. I'm going to try to do that from my own point of view: as a moderator, I'm not at all happy with the way things have been handled by the Powers That Be. (I think Rollout of new network site them...
@boycott.se-yo' I've tried to sum up the 'big picture' problems: the minor design/colour stuff is not where the real issues lie
@boycott.se-yo' I notice on the network-wide meta that we are not the only people raising exactly the same points. But we are perhaps the only ones with other structures that might support a 'lifeboat' if the Powers are too pigheaded to act reasonably.
@Skillmon I just got so mad at marginnote trying to be clever when positioning the note that I implemented a much simpler version which doesn't work in all case but at least does what I want it do in the special case I had to handle ;-). Sometimes simpler but not perfect solutions are the better choice.
August 2018
Done in July
Welcome Wagon (aka the inclusive project)
Final Code of Conduct: Rolled out across the network
Comment flagging improvements: Deployed. Check out the details here
Left nav and site themes: Posted designs for first ~10 sites. Prepared to push designs live (this slipp...
Powers work on a Network wide site satisfaction survey -- maybe not the best time for them to do this :)
@samcarter actually it is probably a very good time for them to do that. End result likely to be half a dozen vocal people complaining, half a million users say it's Ok enough. End result: no changes needed.
@JosephWright maybe offsite issues mean I'm not really in the mood for being passed off with trite answers.
@DavidCarlisle Maybe, depends on the data analysis. If they would weight the survey with your, micos and others reputation, the image would drastically change.
@Skillmon and actually the world would carry on, we feel it more on this site as some of us claim to have learnt a few basic principles about typographic design over the years, but for most technical sites, if you can ask a question and get an answer, people do not care if the page is painfully ugly and the design is completely unbalanced so as to make the advertising banners as prominent as possible.
@Skillmon see the replies from JoeFriend under my answer in the meta thread, the right sidebar is stupidly wide, and they will not shrink it on smaller screen sizes as it carries image based adverts that they have sold at "industry standard size" and can't shrink .
@Skillmon tex.sx only has "community adverts" so non-paid adverts for editors or context or tugboat etc, but stackoverflow has real adverts for real money and that is their main source of income...
@DavidCarlisle I wondered how they create revenue all the time, thanks for that bit of information. Now a lot of the stuff going on makes more sense in a way.
@UlrikeFischer Estimated I inform you that with great difficulty I installed MikTeX again for the third time but with the same problems. The MikTeX icon does not appear on the list of programs installed on windows 7, and this has made me alarmed.
@UlrikeFischer In fact as soon as I installed my two additional favorite fonts with the console classic.tds and mt2pro lite version not only did not process the files but not even any other .tex files. I had to repeat the old updmap.cfg procedure with the DOS command prompt and everything worked perfectly in the end. I hope with the new update of MikTeX something can return to normal. Thank you always.
@DavidCarlisle Hi, David from hot temperature in Sicily.
@Skillmon as I said in the first line of my answer to the meta question: "I realise the middle section is just the boring bit where the users chat about their interests and the sidebars are the interesting places where stackexchange can insert revenue earning links"
@DavidCarlisle The thing with the 'industry-standard' adverts is that a lot of people block them precisely because they are too intrusive ... I wonder why they've not picked that up
@JosephWright so far they did very well, you don't have any animated ads, no popups, reducing ads aggressively with rep points etc. This is the first case when I really think they crossed the boundary between accptable
And not acceptable. Moreover, they are hiding their true motivation from the users, or at least it seems so, which I hate.
@boycott.se-yo' Well even just the right area is probably someone one could live with, if properly explained (after all, the main site has it for exactly the financial reason that's driving the changes). It's all the other stuff too, plus not saying what is going on.
@boycott.se-yo' As I've said on meta, I think in the end most of us do get the 'the money has to come from somewhere' point, but they need to be up-front when that drives changes
Yeah, well, the userbase is different here after all; I'd bet that on avergage, SE user (or even visitor) is sinificantly higher educated than a FB one...
@boycott.se-yo' no, it doesn't not in the grand scheme. the people who block are the people who don't click on the adverts anyway and they are not a loss.
@DavidCarlisle, @boycott.se-yo' Now, the interesting thing of course is what adverts are we talking about: I can see them being viable on say the Apple site, but for most of the network it's hard to see it being worth the effort
@UlrikeFischer but I get correct vertical alignment without that \smash{\parbox{ construct in your MWE (which I assume is so simplified that the issue doesn't show up)
@CarLaTeX @egreg @Sebastiano buon ferragosto a tuti ^^^^
@Skillmon marginnote is doing a lot of resetting of box depths and height and moves it around and as I said I got so confused and mad that I simply dropped it for this project.
@rjoshinano Unfortunately the authors are not sharing their numerical data, so I cannot replot it for myself.
The resolution of the figures in their paper is also not high enough to direct read off the data points.
August 2018
Done in July
Welcome Wagon (aka the inclusive project)
Final Code of Conduct: Rolled out across the network
Comment flagging improvements: Deployed. Check out the details here
Left nav and site themes: Posted designs for first ~10 sites. Prepared to push designs live (this slipp...
