Update about Userstyles new design release
Hi All,
I know many of you are excited as we are, about the upcoming release of the new design of Userstyles.org.
The work on the new design was fascinating and challenging. We gained from it some interesting use cases and insights that the front-end developers among might find interesting, and that we hope to share with you soon.
We're planning to release in the coming days. Just a reminder - we’re going with a gradual release (see details here: https://forum.userstyles.org/discussion/54610/sneak-peek-in-on-the-new-design-of-userstyles/p1).
We haven’t had the chance yet to implement changes that some of you brought up when we first announced this is happening. These will be handled in near future releases (we’ll keep you posted).
As always, any feedback is appreciated once we go live.
Wish us luck :)
Comments
Is this something that will appear in a not-too-distant update?
Edit:
Just super! I cant stop thinking about it! Its just the best! Like soooo happy with everything!
I'm also a little fearful of the lack of descriptions when browsing. Perhaps you could implement a button to switch between a list view and grid view. The list view would give more details, but would be less compact.
Also right click seems to trigger links. This is can be annoying when you want to access the context menu.
Lastly there are no donate buttons anywhere.
1. Styles settings vanished from style main page (not edition page), with that you are killing the advanced functionality for styles this site was providing, plus are rendering almost useless a great portion of the published styles.
2. Search results without a list mode and not allowing to adjust number of results showed, nor ordering by creation/update date, number of installs or relevance, so search lost most of its utility.
3. CSS code areas on styles main pages (not on edition pages) are not monospaced.
4. Screenshots feature is ruined on style main pages:
- Doesn't show options for additional screenshots in style main pages (not on edition pages)
- Crops screenshots partially instead of make them fully fitted to their area
- Shows checkerboard pattern for transparences (for example: https://userstyles.org/styles/137140/forced-pre-line-wrap)
- Sometimes don't show the main screenshot (for example, this triple screenshot composition is not the main one https://userstyles.org/styles/86347/tab-bar-buttons-elements)
5. Problems with comments https://forum.userstyles.org/discussion/55373/new-site-design-comment-sorting
6. App category is nicely reordered displaying subcategories including chrome-extensions https://userstyles.org/categories/app but:
- Says "Web App Themes & Skins" where should say "App Themes & Skins"
- Sub-categories are not working, so in fact App styles are currently not reacheable.
7. No reference to the style in question and no link to go back from style statistics page.
What about rolling back to a functional good olde 90's look site while you address all issues?
TIA!
Hope more custom settings for the site.
Is it gonna stay like this or is it just temporary? JS "SPA" with iframes. What a times to be alive.
Also, are all uploaded "Additional Screenshot" images gone for good or is there a chance they will return some day?
Seriously, I really hope you fix that
[mem]¯\_(ツ)_/¯[/mem]
Please add a way to use the old site temporarily while you finish adding functionality to the new one.
Also, when this much feedback is negative and you had no apparent rollback plan in place to mitigate, it shows the lack of experience in many areas from the top down with the management that did not know better than to approve such a mistake, to the infrastructure and appdev folks that are CLEARLY lacking any real world enterprise experience to have dreamt it up to begin with let alone implemented it in this fashion.
Why doesn't the management of this company step back and ask yourself, strictly as a web-user yourself sitting at home with your web-browser open to your favorites website - Who implements a brand new site design without bringing it online in parallel with the old in today's day with cheap and available infrastructure and virtualization especially when it has 1/10th the working features/functionality IN USE by you - the customer? Would you not be pulling your subscription out of such a company if this happened to you?
It has honestly been decades since I have seen such asinine management decisions in a 100% technology-based company and if this was done properly, the rollback should be quick, painless, and you would know that because both the implementation and rollback would have been already well tested. Having owned technology corporations myself and worked up through the ranks to the C levels, if I were in this driver's seat and had a shot at retaining my customers after a mistake like this, you can bet I would be looking for a bit more enterprise infrastructure and appdev experience to help me pull my airplane up out of the trees, fast.
Much of my almost 30yr career in these technologies has been consulting for some of the world's largest companies global infrastructure projects and I will give you a free recommendation because I really do value what this site was offering this community right up until this change - assuming you have the ability - roll this change out immediately and consider humbling yourselves and take a step back to get a better finger on the pulse of what your customers want before making any another drastic changes like this in a complete vacuum.
They don't touch the forum....
:-)
Their lack of damage control and transparency is very unsettling. The new management continues to shoot themselves in the collective foot while stepping the extension and its entire infrastructure into the grave.
Hi All,
First of all, I'd like to thank the community members here that took the time to elaborate on found bugs. It's saving us valuable time and shortening the way to launch fixes for them.
I've composed this list open issues and questions that came up so far here and through other communication channels. There are 5 bugs, 2 issues we couldn't reproduce and 5 reported issues that are not a bug (it's a bit long, so I apologize in advance):
1. Advanced settings section is missing from Style pages - we're giving this high priority and it should be back by sometime next week.
I see you've included different related issues, like choosing additional screenshots, and so on. Everything will be handled in the same scope.
2. Comments in discussions section on Style pages are not chronologically sorted - a quick fix for that should be live today
3. Missing access to install via userscript - we'll add a link to that either next week or the week after
4. Sometimes main screenshot doesn't show in preview section - we're investigating this. Will keep you posted when we know more.
5. Missing donate buttons - @DeathTBO we couldn't reproduce this bug. Can you give us an example of where you're missing these buttons? It's currently appearing on a style page and a public user page, whenever Plegie or Paypal were added an account/style.
6. Missing Advanced Search - this is not a bug, it's by design. We're made many improvements to style discovery, which we believe delivers a good user experience. Additionally, based on our stats, usage of advanced settings was very low.
7. Missing Related Styles section - also not a bug, but by design since it had low usage and we felt the current improved user discovery funnels are enough. We're open to reconsidering this one if many of the community members think it's required.
8. Preview is cropped and doesn't show in original size - since the preview image is bigger than it used to be, we couldn't put the original size since in some cases it looked bad or was blurry. We've added to the style creation page recommended dimensions, and we suggest you follow them to make sure your style is presented in the optimal way.
9. Graveyard issues: install buttons show on archived styles and adult styles are appearing in the graveyard - we're working on fixing it, but since it will take us a bit of time to filter out the adult styles, for now the quick fix is to remove the link to the Graveyard section from the side bar. I'll keep you posted about this one.
10. CSS on style pages is not monospaced - we didn't finish our work on the css sections in the site. The final format of these sections should be out in the next 1-2 iterations.
11. Sub-categories are not working - @strel we couldn't reproduce this bug. Can you send me an example either here or to contact@userstyles.org?
12. Some pages are within iframe - this is a temporary thing since we wanted to be agile with the release. We'll gradually design these pages and take them out of the iframe, until the entire site is aligned.
I've ignored the requests for new featured that were included in this thread, so that we can keep the discussion around the new design. You guys are welcome to continue posting requests for new features in the dedicated thread for that: https://forum.userstyles.org/discussion/52610/vote-on-stylishs-future-features#latest
Let me know if anything is missing from this list and please continue giving us feedback. No need to repeat things that are already mentioned. We're on them.