Pe’el! BIpIv’a’?* The redesigned Tor.com is now into its second week of life and we’ve been pretty busy behind the curtain fixing bugs and functionality issues. While we’re still working hard on fixes, here’s an update on the progress made so far.
- Conversation tracking: We’ve heard your feedback on restoring conversation tracking and are working to get that back as soon as we can. [Update 6/30: Based on your feedback we have prioritized the return of the “conversations” page. We plan to have that completed by the end of July.]
- RSS feeds: Apologies to our regular subscribers for the brief interruption. All the RSS feeds should be back up, with full content. We’re still working on a bug in some of the new series feeds.
- Comments: These should be fixed now. Please let us know in the thread below if you are still experiencing disappearing comments; having problems with preview; or seeing discrepancies between the sidebar and comments in the post, or errors with the “new comments” button.
- Important: Don’t check for new comments while you’re still writing yours. It will reload the page and your comment will be lost like Thorin’s wish for a restored dwarf kingdom.
- (Too soon?)
- Important: Don’t check for new comments while you’re still writing yours. It will reload the page and your comment will be lost like Thorin’s wish for a restored dwarf kingdom.
- Login: The site should remember you through multiple browser sessions. Please let us know if you are being logged out.
- Broken links for stories: All of our old links should now be working smoothly, including stories.
Please continue to let us know what you think, and if you encounter any new or persistent functionality errors. Comment here or in the original welcome thread so that we don’t miss anyone’s feedback.
*Klingon, we hope, for “Enter! Are you healthy?”
I doubt this is going to get changed since it seems like ‘designed behavior for a purpose’ (keeping load times down), but I’m really, really annoyed that after 50 or so comments you have to click “More comments” to see anything else… because every time I refresh the page, I have to do it AGAIN and then find my way to the newest post one more time. And if I’m following a thread with that many comments, it’s probably because I’m interested in the discussion (or it’s a long-term thread like the Agents of SHIELD discussion thread), so having to click-scroll after every refresh is pretty frustrating.
Very excited to get conversations back. I am sure there are several threads which could benefit from my wisdom (ha ha ha. Honestly I just miss being able to see what thoughts other people have).
One thing I have noticed – the comment box gets r e a l l y slow and unresponsive the more text gets entered. Tor’s way of telling me to shut up, already?
You know, I never thought about using the check for new buttons while writing a comment, but that could actually be useful, if there was a way to do that WITHOUT refreshing the box itself.
The trick for checking for new comments is a quick Ctrl+A Ctrl+C before and Ctrl+V after – copy your comment and then check, then paste your comment back into the wiped comment box. It also backs it up before you click Post, in case something goes wrong and you need to retry.
Nicely it seems to preserve embedded images as well.
I found the keyboard commands have consistently worked in the comment box, while noticeably under the old system a right click-copy would often fail as it wasn’t allowed by the browser.
Actually the embedded images in comments are now rather good and easily modified so congrats at getting that right.
Still VERY slow on page load though – I find it up to 10 sec to load a page – and clicking through to my name then Activity is painful.
Would you be able to put the About/Activity/Messages/Preferences into the drop down window under your name? That might be useful. The repeated icon and name link at present is rather superfluous.
It is definitely better in terms of posting and not eating comments, and I haven’t been forcibly logged out in a few days.
Search is still rubbish though as detailed in the other thread, and none of us know what the random p is for under the comment text box. Is is a spacer so the /| resize triangle sits in the right place?
@1 Don’t forget, you can click the skip to newest/skip to unread link that is just above the first comment. It’s pretty handy in the longer threads, as long as there’s not loads of new comments.
@3/Mayhem: The “p” was actually there before, in the old box. That’s a display that shows the mode you’re typing in. The “p” is for normal paragraph mode, and it changes if you try different functions — for instance, if you type in bold it reads “p >> strong”, italics is “p >> em” (for “emphasis,” I guess), and so on.
And yes, the site is still extremely sluggish for me too. I recall that happening here a year or two ago when there was some kind of repair work going on. I hope it clears up before much longer.
Glad to hear that conversation tracking will be returning, though I still can’t understand why it was removed to begin with. I hope that it shows up on the “front page” of our personal pages, since that initial “About” thing that it lands on by default seems utterly pointless. And I hope it shows more than the past five updates, or at least includes the ability to click a link and see more than the past five. The sidebar boxes for recent posts and comments no longer have that option, though — another odd removal that I hope will be corrected.
No bookmarks? The dozens of short stories I saved for later are gone?
Are “hot bookmarks” definitely gone? They were so useful to me and allowed some interesting, but but overlooked pieces to get some exposure, even long after the posting date, when somebody managed to re-discover them, as well as provided convenient shortcuts to popular topics. It is really a pity, IMHO.
Also, why not show more of the “Recent comments”? There is enough place.
I still frequently find that no comments load at all on any thread. (And neither does the “Post a Comment” box at such times). The problem is intermittent but can last for an entire day at a time.
Also, am I missing something, or is it now impossible to get extended “Latest Comments”/”Latest Posts” pages?! Because if so, it is extremely inconvenient. I know that the new site is a work-in-progress and can only hope that this is not a conceptual oversight.
The initial load still seems to be behind the times, as well as slow.
I brought up the page, and the most recent post was the one about “Zoning ordinances for starships.”
I refreshed almost immediately, and several newer posts showed up.
I mostly read Tor.com via the RSS feed from LiveJournal. Before the redesign, posts over on LJ (and I assume everywhere else) only showed the portion of the post before the cut-tag, or whatever you call it. Now it shows the entire thing. While this is nice for the posts where I do want to read the entire thing, I really don’t want it for all of them, and I’d rather click through for the ones of interest.
I’d really appreciate it if it could get changed back to the way it used to be.
@10: We definitely need expanded recent posts/comments listings. I made a comment just an hour ago and it’s already fallen off the Recent Comments list. Clearly that list isn’t very helpful if it can’t be expanded.
Another glitch has turned up: I tried posting a link to an address that had two equals signs in it, and for some reason they got turned into commas, making the link invalid. I tried fixing it, and the fix didn’t take — the equals signs were again converted to commas.
Not sure if there’s any way to fix this if the symbols are just gone, but I noticed on several of KRAD’s older reviews (haven’t checked other posts to see if the problem exists elsewhere) every em dash has just disappeared, so the words that any em dash used to separate are pushed together without any spaces.
On my slow mobile connection comments and the comment box don’t load at all. In the beginning they at least appeared occasionally, but now they no longer do. That makes the phone useless for this site, I can only use it on a computer with a fast internet connection.
I’m still getting the newsletter twice.
Comments are no longer appearing on my phone either. It’s not an isolated problem.
I’m finding that when clicking on a comment in the sidebar, I usually get left halfway down the comment thread – possibly at the point I left off last time. Particularly common on the book cover thread. It may be to do with how images are loading?
Side note – the speed of displaying an image heavy thread is pretty similar to loading a text only thread, so it isn’t page composition time that is holding the site back.
The RSS feed is posting the full article content instead of just a teaser with click thru’ to the full article.
@14: ChristopherLBennett beat me to it: I’ve also noticed this when people have tried to post links to youtube videos. The equals sign remains in the text of the comment, but the code of the hyperlink converts the equals signs to commas, and the link doesn’t work.
I’m having a different problem with the RSS feeds: neither the old full article feed or the new one show the top image in the article any more. And given the, shall we say, rather undescriptive titles of some of the roundup posts, I’m missing their being labelled as roundups in the new formatting.
So is it possible to change it back to an option for keeping you logged in after a browser close? There used to be a checkbox that said, “keep me logged in” or something to that effect. Now it just keeps me logged in without my consent.
And barring that, the ability to delete comments would be really, really nice.
Is the “skip to unread” option device-specific? It seems to go to the first comment that I haven’t read on the computer I’m currently on. Since I use several devices to read comments, this behavior is really annoying. (I’m guessing it’s cookie-based rather than account-based?)
The button to insert images seems to have disappeared from the comment box. That is inconvenient for the posts about covers.
Is there a way we can embed images in a post rather than hotlinking to random other sites?
A number of sites hosting cover images for example do not support deep linking, and to be fair it isn’t polite.
Also, when I log out, it takes me back to the homepage instead of staying on the page I was on.
@14 and @20: Just a quick update that the issue with broken links (equal signs converting to commas for no apparent reason), has been resolved. Thanks!
Glad I found this post again…
I’ve been trying to use the site on my mobile devices: Android phone and a Kindle Fire.
WTH, Tor!!?!!?
1) Super slow to load
2) Skips around on the page – badly and often
3) Click on “Comments” – none of them show.
4) Then I click on “Skip to Newest Comments” – Nothing loads. Even after hitting “refresh.”
5) This is especially noticeable on the threads with more than 20 comments, such as the Spoiler Thread for GRRM.
I keep wanting to like the new site, but I really don’t. I miss having all the major re-reads listed on the main page. I really miss my “conversation tracking”, so looking forward to getting that back.
The only thing I still like about the new site is spell check in the comment box, even if it does slow it down.
@@@@@ Moderators
I’m not sure if it’s just more growing pains with the site redesigns or if it’s how active the comment section of Tom Doherty’s letter has been over the last 30 hours, but Tor.com is almost unusable to me right now with how slow pages are loading, and I have a 100 Mbps connection with no other active devices and no other open web pages.
I’m also not able to see any posted comments on Leigh’s latest WoT post (including my own) but my RSS is spamming me with more letter comments every update.
Currently on regular browser (IE (I know)) my profile icon isn’t visible or accessible, no comments will load, I have no ability to post comments and there is a small -1 below “Subscribe to this thread”. To post this, I have had to log on again in InPrivate browser. Please advise.
ETA: Fixed it myself.
ETA II: Not working again.
ETA III: Seems fine at the moment…
It’s been a month since the redesign took effect, and there’s still no trace of conversation tracking or any of the other promised fixes. The only improvement so far has been that the site is no longer as glacially slow, though it’s still sluggish compared to the old site. Are we ever going to get this site back to the level of functionality it used to have?
The links in latest comments are inconsistent with whether or not they link to the comment or just the article. It may have something to do with whether or not the comment thread is long enough for the more comments button.
It would be nice if clicking on a latest comment link would jump to the last unread comment, even if it’s not the more recent one.
I’m still having trouble with displaying comments at all, much less new(est) comments. I mostly use Firefox or Chrome (latest version) on a mac, and I really struggle to get comments to show. It usually takes at least 3-4 attempts, refreshes, clicking on the “skip to latest” comment link (which isn’t usually what I want anyways since I want to continue from where I was). It’s incredibly painful to use now.
Im using firefox on a windows 7 PC. When I hit “post comment” sometimes (not always) the site takes minutes to reload the page (usually I interrupt the process by stopping the loading, deleting the special comment-reference of the adress after which it loads all right. It also occured several times, that then the comment shows, but after my last comment the comments start with Nr 1 again (showing all comments double, which is confusing).
Also the website sometimes struggles with me minimizing the firefox into half-monitor-width, especially if I don’t do it with the mouse, but via “minimize” button on the top right of firefox.
And: could you please make the seize of the text in this box, where I’m typing my new comment a little bit bigger? I can hardly read what I’m writing :)
Ever since the redesign I’m permanently logged in, this works quite nice, thank you. (Though I’m fearing I might forget my password because I don’t use it every day anymore :)
In addition to the above: when I hit check for new comments, the site loaded with no comments at all, showing only the count of the comments and then te “subscribe” part.
I have a print-screen of some of the bugs for illustration, but I don’t understand how to insert the image.
If I click in the picture icon above I get a box with “source” “description” and “dimension”, but I don’t understand what i have to enter into source to upload a picture and Ctrl+c / Ctrl+v doesn’t work either.
@36: In “source”, copy and paste a direct URL to your image, such as
, to get something like this
“Description” is just optional text about the image. You can enter exact dimensions in pixels or just click and drag to resize once you’ve clicked OK.
@37: can’t I “upload” something directly from my computer?
Any word yet on the return of conversations?
Thanks for being receptive to feedback. Here and elsewhere on the site (unrelated to the OP subject, generally) TOR is getting comments about slowness/page load/how the site works now; those are the ones I would agree with. I tend to skim and minimally read much of the site, but where I do read and want to follow or spend a great deal of time on particular areas of the site, it tends to be a lengthy posts, with many comments, and thus an issue.
@38: I’ve been trying to do that with a Windows sample picture but I haven’t managed anything except the standard white cross in a black box.
@38, 41
Yeah , their new system doesn’t support embedded images, only hotlinked ones.
Which means you have to find somewhere to host your image before you link it.
It’s possibly a legal liability requirement as part of the design, but it is rather irritating, especially with the big cover image comment threads.
I realize that some tasks, such as reinstating conversations, may take some time, and I appreciate all the efforts the staff at Tor.com put forth to resolve such issues. Still, it may be considerate to post another update so people can be aware of what progress is being made and to know that they haven’t been forgotten.
Hi everyone,
Thank you for your input and your patience. We have a quick update for you.
Based on your feedback we have prioritized the return of the “conversations” page. We plan to have that completed by the end of July.
Concurrently, we have been working on various bugs and fixes as they come up.
Please feel free to let us know as new issues arise. We are monitoring your comments here and appreciate your help in making Tor.com the best site we can.
Another update for you – using Safari on an ipad mini 3, there seems to be a bug with the responsiveness of the pages – they almost always load when the tablet is in landscape, but usually crash when the tablet is in portrait. I think it might be something to do with a minimum width being set which the mini doesn’t meet. I regularly have to reload the entire page to view the comments though – often it stops displaying page contents mid word and you have to do a full refresh to bring the rest up. This is particularly common with loading in the background – I tend to open half a dozen at a time and then work through each one.
Testing with a full size ipad 2, it crashed once trying to convert tor.com > http://www.tor.com. On explicitly asking for http://www.tor.com it loaded the title bar but crashed loading the page at about a third of a bar. On the fourth attempt it loaded fully and displayed the page contents.
These issues are much less frequent on the desktop version of the site, though I have seen the stopping mid word thing before.
THANK YOU STUBBY :D
OK, this is something that’s been happening a lot lately. Everytime I post a comment, it takes forever for the page to reload. If I navigate away, my comment posts still, and if I navigate back, the page is instantly reloading.
Should I perhaps clear my cache for Tor, and see if that helps?
@45: thanks about the conversations…
I usually leave some tor-“pages” open in my browser (thunderbird), and they automatically re-open when I reopen the browser. Prior to the re-design the page showed as i’d left it (e.g. with comment 35 at the top). Now, after the re-design, it ususally shows a “-1” where the comments are supposed to be, when the tab automatically openes. And I have to refresh the page to see any comments again. (at least this happens with the WoR reread).
@44/Stubby: You said end of July for conversation tracking, and it’s now August. Any news on this?
Also, the site is still glacially slow and the comments often fail to load. Nothing has been getting better.
For those who have waiting for the return of the Conversations page, it is now up and running–here’s all the information on the new version. The page took our designers a bit longer than they anticipated, and we wanted to test it out and make sure that it was working properly before we shared it on the site–thanks to everyone for being patient, in the meantime.
It’s a good start. Nice to have it back. Hopefully some of the other problems will be fixed soon as well.
I can’t see the comments on any thread consistently (I can’t see them on this one, for example).