We announced a big change recently—a renaming from “Tor.com” to “Reactor”—and you very understandably have questions! Now that we’ve had some time to field your questions through email, social, and elsewhere, we’ll explain more about the changeover and see if we can answer some of the more frequently asked questions. In summary: Questions.
Why are you rebranding?
“Tor.com” is a very confusing name. Rebranding distinguishes us from Tor Books, Tordotcom Publishing, and even the TOR browser—3 things that we are not! (Although we started at Tor Books and are owned by the Tor Publishing Group, and Tordotcom Publishing emerged from the site in 2015. It’s complicated.) Our site redesign kicked off in late 2022 and eventually prompted a re-look at our name. The stars aligned around “Reactor”.
Why “Reactor”?
It captures some of what we do: react to genre fiction and related pop culture with articles, essays, etc. Reactors are components in spaceships, which ties in with our beloved mascot, Stubby. Having “tor” in the name is a nice bonus. Don’t forget from whence you came!
Is Stubby the Rocket going away?
No. We love Stubby.
Is coverage of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fic going away?
Absolutely not! SFF literature is still the heart of what we do, and that’s our priority. We’ll just also be open to related subjects of interest, from nonfic to romantasy, pirates to gardening, and so on. For fifteen years, our site has been a place for fans of SFF to gather and discuss old favorites and find new favorites, and that’s not going to change.
What will happen to old articles and links?
All of our 15+ years (!) of short fiction and articles will be on the new site. Old links will forward you to the new link.
What will happen with the short fiction?
Oh, that’s not going anywhere. We’ve got an entire year’s worth of great new stories coming!
Are you using/going to be using AI?
No, and we don’t intend to. All of our articles, fiction, and art are 100% created by humans. This goes for the content and design of our Beacons links page as well. A Reactor employee is making and updating that. (Why Beacon instead of a Linktree? Lots more formatting options in Beacon. That’s all.)
Why are you creating new social media accounts, instead of renaming the old ones?
Social media isn’t always kind to renaming old accounts. We’re excited about a clean slate. You can check out our new accounts here!
When is the change officially happening?
January 23, 2024. Our Tor.com accounts will remain active until then, and while we’ll leave the old accounts up, we’ll be switching to the new ones moving forward from that date.
Will my Tor.com site account/login transfer over?
Yes.
Will Reactor have an RSS feed(s)?
It’s on the list of things we really want, but we might not get to it on the implementation list until a little bit after the new site launches.
Wait! I have a question about _______!
Want to know more? We’re hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit’s r/Fantasy page on January 18. Come over then!
Hi, all–just a quick note to say that we’re seeing all of these comments, we hear you and appreciate the feedback here, and we’re tracking the bug reports being logged through the submission form. Right now we are working on a fix for the broken “Read More” links that are cutting off older articles and stories, as well as getting older comments and favorites back, and there’s much more to come.
Thank you all for your continued patience as we work with our developers to address these issues, and we hope to have more updates for you soon.
So are people looking at the bugs reported through submission form? Because I filled one out a month or so ago and have heard absolutely nothing back. I can’t get to anything I’ve bookmarked. All I see is this error message and a link that doesn’t seem to provide any useful information.
There has been a critical error on this website.
Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.
Please fix whatever styling is causing the words to break in the middle of the comment text (and adjust the line spacing).
It’s absolutely unreadable. I keep trying to come back to the site but after a few seconds of assault on my senses and inability to parse through the comments – it’s just not worth it after a busy day to try and use my mental energy to follow the tangled threads and blocks of text while distracted by images in my face.
Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if it was determined that they no longer want to maintain the site as the way it used to be and this is a way to basically force the old users off and get a completely new demographic. This re-design is downright hostile to users who actually want to read and discuss content.
Logged in just to say this. So this has been an issue for 4 months? Yikes. I really can’t read the comments at all.
Hi, Lisamarie! We are working on a fix right now–it’s a bug that has been driving us all nuts, and we’re hoping our developers can sort it out as soon as possible.
Major props for whoever managed to fix the word-wrap issues! Leading/line spacing is also at least somewhat improved (especially on mobile), but is still a bit tighter than seems wise, especially for relatively small-sized sans serif text. And I’m still seeing a disconcerting variation in font sizes between individual comments – more so on desktop than on mobile, but showing up to at least some degree on both. Some comments are published in extremely small type, and that’s a problem. Based on what I’m seeing, I think this may be an artifact of how nesting has been implemented.
FWIW – and I know there’s conflicting conventional wisdom about this – I would recommend getting rid of the sans serif font for comment text site-wide, particularly if the design is going to continue to publish comment text in smaller sizes than article text. The smaller your base-size text gets, the harder it gets to keep sans serif lettering from running together.
I’m seeing a couple of improvements — comments now show up when you post them, and comment threads now default to making nested comments visible. So it’s good that some fixes are being made. But a new error has been introduced, which is that when I click on links to the latest comments in the home page sidebar, they no longer go to the specific comment but only to the top of the comment thread.
Also, hitting the back button to return to the homepage often gives a “document expired” error for some reason.
This is good to hear. One thought, though:
I’ll agree that getting the “Read More” links back are a high-priority fix. But if it were me, I would prioritize improving text readability over all else. As I understand it, the older content isn’t or shouldn’t be lost, it’s just disconnected…but to the extent that I understand Web design, reconnecting it is a process that may be difficult or impossible to automate.
By contrast, implementing global formatting mods that make comment text more readable and better arrange screen graphics should be much simpler to code, test, and activate. And whereas the archived content ought not be going anywhere, the longer the text issues persist, the less likely it becomes that readers will be willing to hang out till the archives come back.
For the sake of everyone’s eyeballs, I urge you to put the text first.
The My Comments section on my user page lists all my comments correctly, but the links do not go to the article.
They seem to have “fixed” that by removing the My Comments page entirely (darnit!!!), as of a couple of days ago. Which is sad, as that was a valuable feature for me….
A couple of days? I thought that My Comments went away when the Reactor upgrade happened last month and hadn’t come back. That’s the thing I most wanted, so if they brought it back without telling us and then took it away again, I’m not sure which is more annoying.
I should note that “My Comments” was different from the old “My Conversations” page, as that updated whenever anyone commented on a post you’d commented on, whereas the “My Comments” page was exactly that.
Oh, yes, that’s right. It was My Conversations that vanished in the upgrade, and that I dearly wish they’d bring back.
It was there for me post-relaunch for quite some time, but has now vanished – it may have been as much as a week ago, but no longer than that, and was updating with my comments on various posts as it went.
So, My Comments should be back in operation as of a couple of minutes ago–thanks for bringing it to our attention!
Very much appreciated! (Given the bumpy road the site relaunch has taken, it’s sometimes been hard to tell which changes have been accidental and which are/were on purpose.)
Thanks for letting us know–we’re still working out a few kinks at the moment, and we’ll bring this up with the dev team. If you run into any other issues or potential bugs, you can report it using this form!
I’ve just reported a bug via the form, but am mentioning it here as well because it looks to me like a particularly high-risk site security issue. (For exactly that reason, I’m not going to go into specifics in this comment; the Dev team can cross-reference this by way of my very tiny account photo.)
Bug report: there’s no way to report bugs on the site itself. Having to create an account on some third party web site just to report a bug is not acceptable.
I noticed that when I’m reading a re-read, I can no longer go to the next entry from the bottom of the post.
Also being asked about cookies on every single page.
The new site doesn’t seem to have an equivalent of the old Conversations page, which I had bookmarked as the most convenient index for using the site. How can I be alerted to new comments, not just mine but other people’s?
I agree. That conversation tab was the best way to have meaningful discussions on the site.
Exactly.
Were you around for the first redesign, back in like…2012? They messed it up then too and there was a huge uproar about it. I have a feeling it’s not coming back this time, in which case I’m a lot less motivated to stick around as I have so many other internet things that are wanting my attention…if I can’t easily keep up with conversations here I’m not going to stay. I can read/view hot takes/reactions many other places on the internet.
I asked them this question, but then i figured it out from the homepage (not the latest), there is a sidebar for “discussions” and from there viola…
Okay, I found the Discussions sidebar on the homepage and clicked “All Discussion” from there, but it seems to be broken, only showing the first page of most recent comments over and over if you try to advance the page.
Followup: The “All Discussion” button leads to some kind of test site link, and apparently hasn’t yet been adjusted to lead to the final version of the page.
Also, when I post a comment, the page doesn’t refresh, but when I hit “Post” again, it tells me I’ve already posted. I have to leave the page and come back to see my comment.
That’s not the same as the Conversations (and yikes was that hard to find in the first place) – it seems to be ALL of the comments on the site, not the ones limited to the posts you have commented on.
Why am i asked sbout site cookies every time i click a link
Terrible, terrible redesign in just about every aspect so far.
Javascript heavy ‘interactive’ site – which in every site I’ve seen do this, has been slower, buggier, breaks older browsers, and eats battery life on laptops/mobile. The cookie pop-up is a perfect example of the bugginess, and refuses to go away after either granularly setting cookies or rejecting all.
I actually took layout & design courses getting my journalism degree, so I find the main page layout particularly annoying – as I do every time I see a site redesign that thinks a hodgepodge of story boxes is easier to parse than a simple, clean list of stories. The Verge screwed this up, and I stopped reading them. ArsTechnica screwed this up, but thankfully relented by restoring a version of the old list view. Now Tor.com follows with this bad decision.
And that brings up the name. You can argue Tor.com was confused with the other websites for the publisher all you want – it still had name recognition. It stood for something, and had a strong link with the publisher’s brand and the kind of work they release. “Reactor” is a bland, generic name that stands for nothing.
Which brings us to content. Of course the-site-formerly-known-as-Tor.com cares about SF/Fantasy content! It cares so much that it thinks “related subjects of interest, from nonfic to romantasy, pirates to gardening” should be pushed into the mix! Tell us you’re going to mess with the content while promising not to mess with the content.
What the hell happened here?
Other specific detail problems:
Oh, and yet more problems – that was supposed to be a bulleted list of issues, but the bullet list is gone in the posted comment.
One thought regarding the matter of name recognition:
There is an absurdly easy fix to that – one need simply to change the site logo from its current all-caps typography so that it reads…
…wait for it…
…reacTOR.
Or perhaps reacTor, or ReacTor, in a font that allows for a bit of flourish for the capital T. Casual usage in comments will very likely overlook the internal uppercase letter, and it will take some getting used to on the part of staff typing official correspondence, but appropriate deployment of the modified logo should make the intent and the branding clear. I am mildly surprised that the designers didn’t go that route on their own initiative; I certainly would have.
That’s an… interesting idea. ^^;;
I admit, to me that feels like doubling down on the cringy ‘must be cool and hip’ ethos that seems to be driving this redesign. But that may just be me; I can see where others might take it as the kind of language playfulness that defines SFF culture.
Also, is it just me, or is a recent tweak to enforce full justification causing random word-splitting for anyone else?
Yes, I too am getting the random word-splitting.
I can’t even really read the comment text! It’s too close together, and the thin black font against the wall of white just makes that worse.
Also, the link to this page used to be at the top of the homepage, but now after doubtful feedback it has been buried elsewhere…. Again, doesn’t strike a super hopeful tone.
I’ll post separately about my general reactions to the redesign, but while I agree with you (and others) about the cookie/age-verification elements, the core problem there is less a Tor/Reactor issue and more an Internet-wide issue that is affecting many sites beyond this one. See this post from Dreamwidth’s leadership for context (and Dreamwidth proper for a social media site that understands its user base and is doing a yeoman’s job of not succumbing to excessive design flashiness for its own sake), and be it noted that I’ve been running into similar cookie issues on a variety of other sites, not least the one I use for getting my groceries delivered (!).
[Aside to mods/dev team: you might consider adding Dreamwidth to the ginormous list of other social media sites one can link to in one’s profile. OTOH, I’m with you on one point; I refuse to call Twitter by the name its current ownership is using for it nowadays. It was, is, and will be Twitter until the actual implosion happens and the lights go out.]
Thing with Dreamwidth is that the site doesn’t have the money for developers or indeed a large staff which feels the need to look busy by redesigning everything from the ground up.
True, but for full context it should be noted that Dreamwidth’s operating philosophy is the result of conscious choice – they’re very open about not taking advertising and accepting the limits that go with that decision, and they’ve accomplished a very great deal over the time that I’ve had an account there. DW is in fact in the late stages of a major revamp to their posting and commenting interface, and both the new interface and the implementation have been executed in admirably professional fashion.
Which is a testimonial to the skill of the code/design folks responsible for the revamp, because by all accounts the open-source LiveJournal code base on whose foundations Dreamwidth was built has absolutely not aged well over time….
[There is a chance this reply may duplicate itself. The system seems to have eaten a couple of short comments I attempted to make yesterday, and I’m hoping I can spring this one loose.]
!!!!
Huh. And on the second try, the foregoing went through without a hitch, up to and including appearing without the need to reload the page.
I just had a reply go through without needing to reload, so hopefully there are some software fixes starting to happen. There’s a lot left to fix, though.
I can’t add anything that hasn’t already been said above. Who comes up with this stuff? Where do they learn how to do design and human interface? Vast quantities of a confusing mishmash of content requiring that I swipe and scroll and click and gods know what else to find what used to be available in a simple, straightforward list.
It’s a mess, like most of the rest of the web. And it’s a mess on my desktop, which has a nice, big screen. On my phone it’s impossible.
I don’t suppose there’s much point in complaining, of course, since nothing will be changed. These things are done, and they stay done, because the people who implement them always know better and don’t want to be told that they’ve screwed up. There will be little tweaks here and there, sure, but the Big Redesign has been done, and that’s that. We can get used to it or leave. Welcome to the ever-new and ever-improving Web. Very, very tired of it, to be honest.
I had to create a new account and I can’t find the Star Trek TOS rewatch page. I went to https://reactormag.com/series/star-trek-tos-rewatch/ and got a 404 error.
Hi! Rewatches have been grouped under “Columns,” so you can find all of Keith’s TOS articles here: https://reactormag.com/columns/star-trek-tos-rewatch/
And the rest of the Star Trek Rewatches? If I enter the search term “Star Trek: The Next Generation Rewatch” I get large icons for nearly 300 articles. Why is the most obvious one not at the top of the list? i find this a problem on many sites. You enter a precise term for the item you want and it is not the first thing listed. It is often not in the top 100.
To be clear I’m looking for the home pages of ALL the Star Trek Rewatches, as well as Super Hero rewatches. I’d also like to find the rewatch for the Batman TV Series.
A quick suggestion:
Instead of searching from wherever you happen to be on the site, head to the All Discussions page and search from there. (Be sure the page-counter at the bottom of the list shows the six-figure number reflecting the zillions of comments being indexed by that page.) That trick – and the correct rewatch title – got me a straight-up list of entries for “Holy Rewatch, Batman!”, and a click on the “Holy Rewatch Batman” tag at the bottom of one of the column pages got me to the Bat-Rewatch home page.
As noted, having the exact title of the relevant rewatch or other column matters for this. (There is a larger discussion to be had about search issues, but for practical purposes, this approach should be useful in many cases.)
I tried that, and I don’t see any difference in results between searching from All Discussions and searching from anywhere else. There doesn’t seem to be a specific search function within All Discussions, just the same search icon found at the top of every other page.
Hmm. Try this: once you get to All Discussions, tap to get to the second page of comments and try the search from there. (The trick seems to work when you have a search dialog in which the words “Enter your search” appear, which I rarely see from other areas of the site. )
Odd… I see the same “Enter your search” dialog from every page.
I think a box asked me if I was between 13-15 and I clicked yes before realizing it. Stupid yes I know. What was that and how exactly will it effect my time on this new rebranded site?
The same thing’s been happening to me on the old site for weeks. I recommend switching browsers. Brave worked for me.
Where’s the Malazan re-read? It won’t load for me and only shows a jpg image
Hi! You can find it here: https://reactormag.com/columns/malazan-reread-of-the-fallen/
Rereads have been grouped under “Columns”, but also we’ve improved the search feature quite a bit, so typing in Malazan Reread or other keywords/author names should make things much easier to locate!
Actually, as I’ve commented above, the search feature works terribly. It rarely returns what you are actually looking for.
Oh, man, I missed the AMA!
Will you guys be reopening submissions?
Is it possible to get the re-reads in a smaller more compact list? Perhaps sorted by author, I mean, we are all readers and used to search alphabethically.
Or maybe I´m missing it, it´s known to happen.
Also getting asked about cookies every time I come back to the site and whenever I follow any link to an article, or even to this FAQ… or go back to the home page! You need to fix this or it will be too annoying for anyone to keep visiting your site.
The subscribe button does not work in Firefox.
Not going to lie: the prior layout was much more intuitive. This feels like an assault on my eyes…
Where are the Conversations????
This, is the one defining purpose of this site, in my opinion. I was very clear about this when I was part of the UX interviews, and mentioned the original migration (back in 2012, I think) where this was lost and was a huge deal.
If Conversations aren’t coming back, there is no reason to stick around, honestly. That was part of made this a thriving, unique community. Now it’s just a bloated, loud (and frankly – ugly) website. It’s impossible to navigate and has some of the worst excesses of “modern” UX design.
And to be clear – I am not talking about the ability to respond to comments and getting notified for that, but to be notified that there are ANY new comments on a post you are participating in.
Not going to lie, the previous layout was much more intuitive. I have trouble understanding the urge the change a stable platform that works well…
This feels like an assault on my eyes tbh
Like many other users, I’m seeing the Accept/Reject Cookies footer on every page I visit — the site doesn’t seem to remember my cookie selections, despite setting them multiple times.
Regarding feedback on the actual site design, I’ll hold off on commenting for a few days until I’ve spent more time using and exploring the site.
Also, can you bring back a better Archive view?
Using the ‘Latest’ view is incredibly annoying because it’s not arranged in a way that is easy for the eye to scan AND it’s mostly graphics. I just want a concise list of headlines, arranged by month. That’s it. Just text. I sometimes end up away from the site for weeks at a time and that’s typically how I catch up on any columns or other interesting articles I’ve missed.
I like the columns view and the way it aggregates all the different columns together, along with a link to jump into the full list for a different column, but I have the same issue with it – why is it so graphic/white space heavy? I have a small-ish laptop screen and it’s really irritating. I’m just looking for concise, condensed lists to scan to find the article. I don’t need a huge thumbnail. And the fact that your eyes has to go both horizontally AND vertically to find the article titles is a pain.
I have no problem with the rebranding but the site redesign is not great. As a former Web and user interface developer, I’m disappointed. Also, dudes, you’ve still got lorem ipsum text on publicly viewable pages. Not cool.
Edit: the latest comments should be at the top, not at the bottom behind the Show More button
Having witnessed many beloved internet sites “rebrand” over the years, I will confess to feeling a bit of trepidation over this rebranding, even while I recognized the editors are probably excited about the change, and have probably recognized that the collapse of so many other online publications, big and small, has left a void that they might fill. What made almost all of those other sites originally worth reading, before endless rebranding and eventual collapse, was the community they fostered and the quality of articles they wrote. And also, it was the feel of those places. When I came to Tor.com, I never felt like I had to dig to find an article I wanted to read, and I never felt like I was missing out by not reading all of the articles available to me. It was bare bones in a good way– a quiet, mostly distraction free corner of the internet, which is just slowly going the way of the dodo. So, I will reserve my judgement and give this site the benefit of the doubt. And I will give it a try. But honestly, having seen this same thing unfold so many times in the past, I’m not sure how to take this news and am not reassured by talking points that I have read in other places before about how this is needed / great / exciting, etc.
What happened to the “one email a day” option at comment subscription ?
has that become the default, or am I now flooded with an announcement per reply ??? Hope not !!!
Are you going to open to fiction submissions at any point?
Oi, I’m going to add my voice to the chorus about the redesign. Very clunky, and the comment text is too close together and hard to parse.
[WARNING: This will be long.]
Like several of those who’ve already commented, I find myself disappointed with the site redesign. The thing is, from a purely graphic perspective, it’s crisp and shiny and likely runs much more smoothly under the hood than the old code did. (One of the first things I noticed was that the bio section of my user profile – about which I sent a never-answered bug report a long while ago – now actually lets me input a bio. )
The trouble is that what has made Tor.com/Reactor wonderful is not and never has been about the graphics. This site, like GEnie and SFF.net and Making Light and Dreamwidth, is first and last a community driven by text, and far too much of the new graphic presentation overshadows or gets in the way of text rather than emphasizing it. Had anyone asked me, the mission statement I’d have given the designers of the Reactor interface would have been “The text is what matters; do NOT let the design get in the way of the text.”
This was not, clearly, the mission statement with which the designers were actually supplied. From my perspective, almost every graphic element on the desktop home page is too large in proportion to the text associated with it (notable exception: the “Latest Columns” title cards). At the same time, the default size of most text has shrunk, and the article pages I’ve viewed begin with a photo or image that takes up my entire window, such that I have to scroll down by about 25% of the desktop screen before I can read any text at all.
Meanwhile, on my phone, the default text size for comments – formerly exactly equivalent to article text – has shrunk by at least half in portrait view, and if I flip the phone sideways into landscape view and start scrolling, the top and bottom menu bars combined expand to take up fully half the height of the screen, so that I can see at most three or four lines of comment text at a time in the scrap of space left for content in the browser window. Happy Book Girl is also right that the default comment text is too tightly leaded to be easily readable, especially at mobile-device size.
Having now taken time to wander around the Web looking at several other online-magazine sites (specifically io9, Wired, Locus, Newsweek, and Analog), I find every one of those sites more text-friendly than the Reactor redesign. That said, most of these sites are designed to resemble newspapers as opposed to magazines, Analog being the notable exception – and Reactor’s content is skewed strongly toward the magazine end of that particular continuum. On a practical level, though, the Analog design engine may lack the depth to cope with the sheer quantity and range of content in Reactor’s archive. Of the rest, Locus strikes me as the most text-friendly, although Newsweek does better at providing timely content atop its home page. (Points to Analog and Locus for making best use of drop-down menus, and to Locus and Newsweek for putting their thumbnail graphics beside rather than above text headings.)
What’s perhaps most significant, though, is that the redesign fails to really address the real challenge involved in a proper and thorough rebuild of the Tor/Reactor site. The issue is that Tor/Reactor incorporates – even before broadening its scope per the rebranding – a range of content both wide enough and deep enough that one can’t effectively fit it all on a single Web page. I recall past instances when I’d get to the bottom of the old front page to find that an article posted that very day had dropped below the “load more content” button. And I’d argue that the solution to that problem is not to try and cram several extra acres of content onto the front page.
The better answer is to build a solid, well-organized front page that combines dynamic lead elements with a full, user-friendly section index…and then build out a brand new layer (or layers) of front/index pages for each section and subsection. [Note that this has an additional advantage on the business side, as one then has more pages on which to put advertising.] And while I grant that it’s probably too late to start over from zero, it might well not be too late to retune the present design in this direction.
And that’s more than enough verbiage for one screed. I may have more thoughts later, but this hits the high points.
I agree with everything you’ve said. The site as a whole rejects my attention now, where it used to engage it. Your point about text is so, so important, and I hope someone listens to you.
I totally agree – I made a similar comment about how difficult it is to parse through the graphics when I’m looking at the list of latest articles or the columns pages (which really is a cool feature, it’s just hard, visually, for me to process).
But the crux is that – now, looking at these comments – they couldn’t even use a CSS class that correctly WRAPS TEXT in the comments!!! Notice that the lines break in the middle of a word. It’s clear that whoever designed this doesn’t care about text at all, and as somebody who processes text much more quickly than graphics, that’s an issue for me.
Regarding the “Accept/Reject Cookies” footer issue, the functionality finally worked for me this morning. I’m not sure if something was changed/fixed in the site since yesterday, or if I just stumbled upon a workaround, but I no longer am being prompted to accept cookies on every new page I visit in the site.
Here’s what I did differently today:
When I initially opened ReactorMag.com this morning, I was not yet logged in to the site. From the Cookies pop-up footer on the home page, I selected Customise, deselected Advertising Cookies, and then confirmed my choice. Now after logging in to the site, I no longer see the Cookies footer on any pages.
Here is a positive thing as I AM capable of being positive – I really like the dynamic search at the top. I was trying to find an article I knew I’d favorited a few months ago (and didn’t transfer over with the residesign) but as I mentioned, the actual article list is hard to navigate.
But, the search is nice and I like how it suggests articles right in the search bar, and the best thing is – it’s just a list of text! Sometimes my search found the article I was looking for, and sometimes it didn’t, at which point I had to go back to the UI (ugh) but I do think the search function is a little nicer now.
Also, it would be really nice if when you posted a comment it actually refreshed or gave you some indication that your comment had posted. Do these designers not understand responsive UI?
I’m a software developer who works specifically in health care software. I know what it’s like to be screamed at by doctors and nurses for any little change and how sometimes even well researched changes are not met well at first. But if anything, that makes me realize how important it is to actually be cognizant of these usability issues.
That there is no indication that your comment posted is even worse if it’s in a reply to a comment behind the “Load More Comments” button (like this one is).
To see if this comment posted, I’ll need to refresh this page, scroll down, click “Load More Comments”, scroll down, and click “View Replies”. That’s not exactly user-friendly.
EDIT: I had to click “Load More Comments” twice to get back here! That’s not cool.
I really want all comments loaded by default.
Yes, on the comment showing afterwards! How bizarre. It should refresh instantly. That’s a pretty basic comment section functionality. Also, not wrapping the text? Again, that should never have been a thing and should be an easy fix. Really not liking the formatting of the text in the comment section, either.
Anyone else having problems scrolling through the new site with their mousewheel? I know I am. I’ll be scrolling along, and then suddenly the scrollwheel will only let me wiggle up and down by a single line. I have to move my mouse (to what seems a different element of the site) and then the wheel scrolls properly again. Not having any mousewheel/scrolling issues outside of reactormag.com.
Also, I couldn’t get my Tor.com login to work, so I reset my password. Now every time I login, it takes to me the screen to reset my password. (And if I try resetting again, it throws an error.)
I may have found the cause of the scrolling issue: the site renders in Chrome with two scrollbars on the righthand side. The outer scrollbar lets you scroll the entire site, but the inner scrollbar only just wiggles up and down. The inner scrollbar goes away if you get to the bottom of the site (and the Back To Top button appears), but comes back as soon as you scroll back up.
The site renders two scrollbars in Firefox as well.
Yes, very bizarre. There’s a small area, about 1/3 from the right edge of the monitor, where the scroll wheel seems to get stuck on that inner scrollbar. Scrolling works anywhere but that one specific area of the screen. Bizarre.
Bugs:
The “answering your questions” link at the top of the site doesn’t go to the Answering Your Questions article (this one), it goes to the Welcome To Reactor article instead.
When posting a comment, no feedback is given to indicate that one’s comment was actually posted.
Text wrapping on individual comments breaks single words across multiple lines.
Why do I have to click to open every reply chain? Is there a way to always open all? Linear comments are better anyway, this way it is difficult to see where new comments are.
The newest comments are at the bottom, but the comment box is at the top, you first have to scroll up again to post.
The line breaks in the middle of words make comments unreadable.
The site is very slow and the pictures in rows and columns instead of a simple list are a bad idea.
Why do I have to click stop to get rid of the silly animated footer on every page? I want to read, not be distracted by animations. That is probably a performance killer anyway. The designers obviously don’t understand that a book site is for reading, not for pictures and animations.
Why do I have to constantly hit ‘load more comments’ to load about six comments at a time? Unless there are several thousand comments the whole lot should just damn well load all at once: unless there is a simply unbearable amount of JS associated with each one this will work fine on even the oldest and slowest browsers.
(Not that the comments are very readable anyway any more, due to the ridiculous need to manually expand each reply and the horrible leading, tiny size, and word-wrapping problems. Oh and also the way that it occupies only the left hand half of my screen even though my screen is vertically oriented and thus much taller than it is wide: I can’t imagine how awful it must look for people with the more common widescreen configuration.)
I wish you’d kept the old blog archive page. Clean and easy to navigate. Just a list, by year and month, of every article.
The Lord of the Rings reread isn’t accessible anymore. It’s just a LoTR topic, in possibly semi random order.
The link https://www.tor.com/series/lotr-reread/ used to go to a page with all the entries in order.
Also, the font is too damn small.
It’s… maybe? Probably? A byproduct of the email bringing lots of people in but WOW is loading taking a while. Like, just ‘liking’ a comment takes 6 or 7 seconds of a wiggly ‘…’ line before loading the page back up again. It’s… Bad.
…i miss Tor. :(
[edit to add] Also when you post a comment? It doesn’t clear out of the comment box, to let you know that the comment posted. It just does the weird wiggly line thing, then… nothing? Wtf.
I like the new name! But… that’s the only thing I like.
As others have pointed out, this new design is clunky and confusing to say the least. What exactly was wrong with the old design? One article on top of the other, straight up and down. Different articles on wildly different topics, yes, but that was fine. Variety is good. At least it was easy to READ.
As I mentioned in one of the nested replies below (which are easy to overlook because the site design bizarrely hides them by default, something that really ought to be changed), the “See All Discussions” button on the home page’s discussion sidebar goes to a “tordotcomdev.wpengine” test page instead of the real page. I made a lucky guess and determined that the correct address is https://reactormag.com/all-discussion/ — however, the page-advance buttons at the bottom do not work, since even when the address says “page 2” or after, it’s still just the first page of replies.
I don’t care that much about giant graphics, but this is not very readable font-wise, and also I want to see the newest content at the top and not some weird amalgam involving random speculation from 2020.
A lot of comments in recent columns seem to have been lost.
I suggest that when you republish an article you link to the previous version so people can easily refer to the previous dicussion.
Quite aside from all the graphics clutter, the new site is so hard to read! I loved the font sizes at the old site. Here the articles are tiny and the comments are miniscule and don’t seem to have standard spacing between the lines. i would have expected that a site redesign would meet professional standards for user interfaces – this one obviously does not.
Whoa.
What a mess!!
Name change is one thing, but this redesign is one of the worst I have seen in a long time.
Line breaks on my Android device are completely borked, and the main page is just an uninviting and *very* ugly jumble.
Too bad, Tor used to be one of my favourite places!
UGLY, clunky, and way too busy. I want to read articles in order of publication, while easily being able to scroll past what doesn’t interest me. I also want to easily see new comments on articles that interested me.
One major problem for me that I hope can be fixed: line breaks. I see a lot of line breaks in mid-word. That bugs
me no end (and I am deliberately writing with hard returns to try to avoid mid-word breaks). So I will be reading
along and see someone writing something about “…with the act” and the next line begins with “ion….”
It takes me a bit to realize that the intent was “action” instead of “act ion.” There’s gotta be a way to fix
that. Still, I don’t have many other complaints; I have found a lot of the things I look for, so far.
Thanks for making this site and keeping it free; we complain a lot, but I think we mostly all love it.
(Speaking for myself, but I hope others feel the same way.)
Now let’s see if my hard returns prevented mid-word breaks…
First of two rocks, now that we’re several days into the changeover.
I don’t mind a nested comment system in and of itself…but this implementation of nested comments (and indeed, the comment engine in general) is one of the most frustrating features of the entire redesign. Others have called out most of the serious issues already, but I’d add at least two more: the near-microscopic size of the “number of replies” typography, and the peculiar behavior of the links that jump one from one’s “My Comments” profile to a given comment on a particular article (which inserts a copy of your comment at the top of the comment section on reaching its destination, rather than jumping down to the comment’s actual location). This is almost as baroque as the word-fracturing justification protocol, which someone should suggest to Teresa Nielsen Hayden as an alternative to disemvoweling when a commenter commits extreme misbehavior.
Now, having said that…I think implementing nested comments here was a mistake. One of the virtues of non-threaded comment systems (GEnie, Making Light) is that they tend by their nature to be less susceptible to topic drift, and readers coming in late can follow the full discussion more easily than one might were they having to jump up and down through reply threads. [True fact: the in-universe coordinates of the Babylon 5 space station correspond to the coordinates of a particular message-stream on the GEnie Science Fiction RoundTable, or SFRT, where JMS himself hung out and posted updates on the show’s production.]
I will also once again refer interested programming folk to Dreamwidth, which gives its members a commenting engine that can actually be configured *either* as threaded/nested or in a flat view – on the fly – by users, which works as quickly and efficiently as one might wish…and is operating in an environment where many if not most of the codemonkeys are volunteers. [I do not recommend trying to clone that system directly; while the site’s baseline code was originally a straightforward fork of the open-source code behind LiveJournal, the present site has been very heavily modified and updated over time in order to keep pace with the rest of the ‘Net, and you probably don’t want to see how the relevant sausage was made. OTOH, the fact that DW’s techies can build a stable comment engine that can handle being morphed back and forth between flat and nested is proof of concept that the thing CAN be done, and done well from a user perspective.]
Second rock:
Before I go further, I need to make a couple of things clear. A number of us, myself included, have been pretty harshly critical of major elements of this site redesign – and before I’m done here, I have one further anvil left to drop.
However.
The people with whom we’re interacting – Chris, the site moderator(s), and Tor/Reactor’s various contributors and columnists – are content creators, and while it’s likely that at least some of them (like some of us) have at least some experience dealing with elementary Webcraft, it’s very UNlikely that any of them have been directly involved with codewrangling the site redesign.
That being the case, a good many of the comments posted here probably read as if we’re shooting the messengers, which is never a good thing. To the extent that I may have come across that way, I regret it and hereby apologize. Moreover, I want to emphasize that I’m not angry with anybody – I’m just very, very frustrated, and have just enough understanding of present-day Web design to be dangerous as opposed to technically competent.
[pause, deep breath]
There’s no diplomatic way to say this, but what the past few days say to me is that – at least with benefit of hindsight – the Powers That Be pressed the big red RELAUNCH button too soon. The site wasn’t sufficiently ready to go live on the 23rd, and arguably still isn’t. By NASA standards, Stubby the Rocket is in danger of falling out of orbit, their onboard comms are partially borked, and critical parts of the library computer’s archives are inaccessible. You don’t launch a spacecraft with those kinds of issues unresolved, and the same principle should have applied here.
To the designers’ credit, some of the issues folks have raised have been fixed. My early problem with expanding landscape-mode graphics on mobile went away very quickly, and the “like” symbols now respond promptly when clicked. OTOH, the weird justification issue persists, and I note on glancing at the “Teen Horror Time Machine” column listing page that the tags bounce randomly back and forth between calling that series a column vs. a reread/rewatch. [That one may well not be a tech/coding issue, and may not even be strictly connected to the redesign, but it’s the sort of thing that one expects a full-scale site makeover to address.]
Where we are, realistically speaking, is somewhere in the beta-testing phase. Which would be OK if it had been announced as the beta-testing phase rather as a big shiny relaunch. [Note that the Archive of Our Own has been in “open beta” for years now – and have been doing a very professional job of documenting bugs, code updates, and other technical aspects of running a beta.] The practical thing to do now is to acknowledge that this site is in beta, and move forward on that basis.
I was thinking the same thing. They should’ve left the old site up while they worked out the bugs in this version behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, I’ve just discovered that one thing this new site does not have is better spam filtering. I just flagged two spam posts in the same comment thread to DS9: “Duet.”
Gonna add to the pile of comments – the UI is a definite downgrade, the font size for comments is too small, the “reactive website” is a thing that should have died 10 years ago but unfortunately didn’t, and what’s up with all that empty white space on the right? This is a mess that should have been fixed after usability tests in beta.
The name change, eh. You’re never gonna change it back so it is what it is, but it definitely doesn’t have the brand recognition of Tor.
Also, RSS/Atom feed is not a priority? On a website for *writers and readers*? Are you serious?
Also(2): having to “load more comments” over and over just to see my own comment is ridiculous, and the subscribe button doesn’t work for me on Firefox.
The empty whitespace on the right is where a huge advert goes, rendering the site utterly unreadable (to me anyway) unless you have an adblocker.
(If you do, it’s not too hard to use the content picker to delete the relevant div and make the thing flow better, but it’s not done by default because it’s not the actual ad.)
I can’t help but note that the huge ad goes next to the text we actually want to read, distracting us from it, but does *not* go next to the top-of-article graphics (which is not what most of us come here for).
… I suppose it could be worse. They could have “pivoted to video”.
A modest suggestion:
Have someone in the Tor office get a PC with a monitor (you know, those things we had before smartphones) and look at how the text is formatted in this comment section. What do you see? Does it look right to you?
Seriously, did anyone even bother to do that before making this disaster go live?
Not just PCs. Word wrap is broken in the comments when viewed on a tablet too.
Oh man, what a mess. To add to all the other issues raised above (which I fully agree with), let me add two more:
word-break: break-allfor the comments, which causes all line breaks to cut words in half, leaving dangling letters on each line? UGH.Okay, now I’m suddenly getting some kind of security-check page from something called Cloudflare that makes me wait until it ensures the connection is “secure” before letting me reach the site. I’ve never seen that anywhere else — is that legit? It’s just one more annoyance to add to the ever-growing pile. Let’s see…
No “My Conversations” page to follow posts. The “All Discussions” page linked from the homepage sidebar is broken, only showing a single page of days-old comments on every page.
No way to set comment threads to show every comment by default instead of forcing you to click through.
The “Comments” link in the top right (the voice-bubble icon between “SAVE” and “SHARE”) does not scroll all the way to the comments, but only slightly down the page.
In the “Subscribe” option at the top of a comment thread, the “Submit” button doesn’t work.
When posting a comment, it goes through, but the page fails to refresh, and one’s own comment doesn’t load if one manually reloads. I have to leave and come back later to see my posts.
Text in posted comments does not wrap properly but breaks in the middle of words.
The bold, italic, etc. buttons underneath the comment window are permanently greyed out. They work when pressed, but there’s no visible indicator that they’re active. Also, there’s no way to increase the size of the text-entry window to more than 8 lines.
Some older posts only show the first few paragraphs and the “More” button doesn’t work. Some posts got the wrong comments attached to them when they transferred over. (Both these things are true of the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Rewatch, for example.)
Please, please tell us you’re listening to the complaints and are going to do something to fix them in the near future.
The old site was usable. This site is actually painful to read. I’m not going to bother listing all the problems because we already have almost a hundred comments.
If things are not fixed or reverted, people will leave out of frustration.
Oh, yeah, someone must have said it already, but there is no confirmation that a comment actually has been posted other than an error if one hits Post Comment more than once.
If I look at the browser’s progress indicator after posting a comment, it shows that the page has *started* to reload… and then it just hangs there, until I manually reload the page – not by hitting the reload button, but by clicking in the address bar and hitting Return (i.e. telling the browser to go directly to that address).
So my conjecture is that the site *tries* to refresh the page after posting a comment, but there’s a bug in the refresh code that causes it to hang.
“Oh, yeah, someone must have said it already, but there is no confirmation that a comment actually has been posted other than an error if one hits Post Comment more than once.”
This was an occasional glitch on the old site, but it always happens on the new one.
So far, the only thing about the new software that seems better is that it lets me copy and paste text with bold/italics/etc. in Firefox, or copy/paste more than one paragraph at a time. Although I hope I haven’t jinxed it by saying that.
Does this post look truncated to anybody else?
A animated footer on every page sure is a choice.
And what is it with every website nowadays hiding their latest articles away from the frontpage? At least you put a guide on how to find it in your FAQ. Which, also means you knew it was a unpopular and unwelcome design. :(
jaesus chroist this is an awful design. it’s harder to navigate: a cluster of boxes is not as friendly or navigable as a simple list. it’s uglier. it’s slower. the comments have no space between lines, so they’re harder to read; also, words “break” in the middle and there are letters on the next line, so readability is impacted badly in that way, too. the name is extremely generic, and the fact that the name has to be appended with mag shows this. the “back” button doesn’t work as expected to: it doesn’t take me from page three to page two of the search results, no, I must scroll to the website’s own in-built bar. naturally, there aren’t enough ‘stories’ showing on the list of results.
I have a problem with a few articles. Here’s an example.
https://reactormag.com/star-trek-enterprise-rewatch-the-forge
The summary of the episode being reviewed has a “(more…)”. I click on the more and don’t get more. Nothing more loads although the URL now reads https://reactormag.com/star-trek-enterprise-rewatch-the-forge/#more-756548 but looks exactly the same as the page I was on before. This doesn’t happen with the whole series, but does happen with a few episodes. Is there something I can do?
(Platform: Windows 11, Firefox 122.0 64 bit)
In general, rebranding has more downsides than upsides. but I’m going to try and be positive and overcome my preconceived views.
Holy crap are the images too large. On a monitor with 1920×1080 resolution, I cannot even read the title of the primary article on the page without scrolling. In the “Books” section, I can’t even get the title of the section and the comments links on the screen at the same time. I would think that each section of the page should mostly be digestible at a glace, especially since there is a horizontal scroll button in that section. The smaller images in the News section or the half-size ones next to the primary link at the top are much more appropriate.
Also, comments are link breaking in weird ways instead of forcing text to a new line or hyphenating (which is dumb, just force it to a new line, this isn’t a newspaper column, it doesn’t need perfect justification).
Those aside, the commenting system looks a lot better. Really, a huge improvement here.
submitted a few bug reports over some issues on the accounts page (no way to upload avatar image, no descriptors on radio buttons)
The “latest comment” glitch I noted 3 days ago has been fixed, but there’s still no progress fixing the “All Discussions” page: https://reactormag.com/all-discussion/ This is the closest approximation to the old “My Conversations” page that was the most convenient way of using the old site, and it doesn’t work at all. This really needs to be fixed, or better yet, replaced with something that works like the old My/All Conversations page.
I know others have mentioned it, but I thought I’d bring it up again;
What’s with the line breaks in words at the right margin? Readability is sometimes almost impossible. Why can’t there be better controls there?
One more bizarre thing about the new software: hitting the back button on the browser rarely works here, instead giving a “document expired” error message. This is inconvenient, because the site currently doesn’t allow opening a link in a new tab by hitting Ctrl-click — a problem the old Tor site had in recent months but then fixed.
On the plus side, the All Discussions page finally works, and I’ve made it my default bookmark here. It’s not as good as the old My Conversations page, but it’s good to have it at last. Unfortunately, I was wrong about comment links now correctly going to the actual comment. That works when the comment is near the top of the list, on the first screen of displayed comments, but not when it’s further down. It looks like the rest of the list doesn’t load until you scroll down to it, and that seems to interfere with the link scrolling.
Also, I noticed today that a spam comment flagged six days ago has not been taken down yet.
On the last point–which flagged/spam comment are you seeing? We’ve been following the incoming flags/notifications and don’t currently see any spam on our end, and want to make sure this isn’t a glitch of some sort…
I can’t find it anymore. I flagged a second consecutive spam comment in the same thread this morning, and I can’t find either spam post in any of the columns I visited this morning, so I guess they were both dealt with at once sometime today.
Christopoher mentions that the All Discussions page works. Where is that? I cannot find it anywhere and searching for “All Discussions” doesn’t lead anyway but a list of articles.
BTW, I HATE the way the articles are displayed now. The list with newest first from Tor was far superior to seeing what’s new to look at.
There’s a button for it at the bottom of the sidebar on the homepage, but here’s the direct link: https://reactormag.com/all-discussion/
For those curious about the new site’s developers/designers (which I suspect includes a lot of us):
Here is a link to the design firm’s blog – posted, says the entry, a week before Reactor went live – describing their work on the Reactor relaunch. (This link will take you straight to the company’s home page.)
For my part, I will say only one thing at this point. Based on what I see on those two pages, had I been making the choice of design firms for this project, I would have eliminated this one fairly early in the selection process.
Two notes: (1) I should add that I didn’t have to do any Web searching to get there – there is a very inconspicuous “Site Credit” link at the very bottom of every page now. (2) There is a chance this will double-post. I have been seeing a phenomenon lately where a very quick click of the “post comment” button produces the “snaky dots” processing graphic but then stops without actually accepting the comment – which is essentially what was happening in the first day or three of the relaunch, except in that case the system actually had accepted the comment but wouldn’t show it to you until you’d at least done a page refresh.
Ye gods. Only just today read this post and clicked that link, and now wonder why in the world anyone would pay that outfit money to design anything? Utterly horrific.
Yeah, I’ve been having trouble getting some comments to load, even when I hit the button more than once. I generally have to copy the comment, reload, and paste it back in before it will go through.
On the first occasion when this happened, I got some kind of error message about invalid data (I forget the exact words) and then found I’d been logged out somehow. I don’t know if getting logged out was connected to the error or an unrelated glitch.
The redesign is awful. The text is actually painful to look at and the home page is too cluttered.
Also, the search function doesn’t work properly. Searching for “hugo” did NOT bring up the Jan 31 post.
Hi, loved the redesign. Please fix the embeded video player. It takes a huge portion of the screen, but the actual video is miniscule. Also, the controls do not work.
Is it possible to just use the YT embed?
Thanks for a very clear explanation of what’s going on!
I went to the page (via a saved bookmark) for a favorite short story that Tor.com published a few years ago, and thought “what is going on?” and then saw the
banner. And it got me here where all my questions were indeed answered! Thanks! It is going to be less confusing for me to refer to the right publication outlet when talking to other people, and the Original Fiction page now better highlights illustrations that give me a sense of the story to help me decide whether to click.
And thank you SO MUCH for preserving and forwarding old links.
Thanks again!
Hmm — I tried to use the blockquote functionality to indent the “Answering Your Questions” line in my comment above, and that didn’t actually render properly in the posted comment, even though the indent showed up in the WYSIWYG editing interface. Something I suggest you look into!
I would love an rss feed!
There already is one, which I’m subscribed to, though the icon graphics show up ridiculously oversized in the reader feed. Maybe it only shows up in certain browsers? (I’m on Firefox.)
Where can I find details on original fiction submissions? It’s not mentioned on the Submissions page. It was difficult to find on the old site and I’ve been trying without success to find it here. Searching for “fiction submissions” produces hundreds of search results, which I don’t have time to sort through.
At the bottom of the FAQ page it states that Reactor doesn’t accept unsolicited fiction or art submissions. (This was also true for some time before the relaunch.)
I would agree that this information is harder to find than it should be on the current site.
Where do we access the latest comments now?
I thought I used that function recently, but can’t find it anywhere now.
Not sure how much I’ll be coming back. I’ve tried. The red is jarring. The amount of space devoted to pictures on a site that was originally -I think- about the words, stories, publishing, plus about related visual media, is overwhelming now.
Where did all the beautiful, interesting, thoughtful, words go?
Also the ‘Newest’ button is not working when trying to view the newest comments on this thread.
The new board format is very bad at jumping to comments. When you click on a link to a comment in “All Discussions” or “My Comments,” the board briefly jumps to the comment in question, but if there’s more than one screen’s worth of comments, it then jumps to the top of the list a split-second later. The easiest way I’ve found to bring up the new comment I was trying to read is to toggle from “Oldest” to “Newest” in the comment menu bar, but there’s no way to set it to “Newest” by default. So it takes at least two steps to do what should take one.
Also, it’s a little annoying that the headlines displayed in the aforementioned lists don’t show italics but instead show the italic code markers around the text.
Oh, and one other glitch I’ve noticed: If I spend too much time writing a reply (I don’t know what the cutoff is), it won’t go through when I hit “Post Comment.” I have to copy the entire reply, reload the page, and paste the reply back in to get it to post.
Hey, I don’t seem to get mailing list entries… I was subscribed on tor.com and just last week resubscribed here, but it’s unclear if it took. What should I look for (and how often does it send) in spam, etc in case I’m filtering it?
Hi! So, if we’re talking about the newsletter, it’s normally sent once a week on Thursdays (around 12 PM, Eastern time). Let us know if it’s not coming through!
Any word on when we might get the selective RSS feeds back? I enjoy the emails, but for my feed I only want to receive notifications for the Pratchett Book Club.
Subscriptions appear not to work at all. The “Submit” button does nothing, and none of my subscriptions from tor.com seem to have carried over.
There seems to be a hidden limit on comment length. I wrote (according to a word processor) 1070 characters in response to https://reactormag.com/the-weirdness-of-ambrose-bierce-from-owl-creek-bridge-to-horror-and-satire/, answered the Captcha, and clicked “Post Comment” — and nothing happened, not even the waving line of circles or vertical lines that I now see when the system is thinking over whether to accept my post. There were no links or special characters that might have upset the system. When I broke the comment into two pieces, both posted. Has anyone else seen this? I’ve seen it in other articles, and reported on the Contact form, but haven’t heard back.
That sometimes happened on the old site with really long messages, though I don’t know if that’s relevant.
I haven’t kept track, so I’m not sure whether the system doesn’t like me (having the death sentence on it in twelve systems) or I’ve just been trying to comment on the wrong threads — but I see long comments do work in some places (e.g. here), so it’s not 100% consistent.
I think I already mentioned it somewhere in this comment thread, but I’ve found that if I spend too much time writing a post, it won’t go through and I have to copy it, reload the page, and paste it in the fresh window. So maybe the problem isn’t the length of your comments, but the length of time it takes you to write them.
I just tried copying to a second window onto a page and was still blocked; carving the comment into pieces worked in the original window, except that I also had to take out a link before the last piece would post. I’ll try stowing the comment somewhere, refreshing the original window, and pasting in it, but I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s something wonky about my account.
The cookie-acceptance robot seems to have lost its memory. I’m logged in, but twice in the last five minutes it’s popped up the acceptance box and doesn’t recall what I told it several times this morning and twice last night.
The button for flagging spam posts has disappeared.
This should be fixed/back to normal–thanks for the heads up!
Why did the button for seeing your comments disappear?
It should be back/visible now–thanks for letting us know!
Regarding subscribing to a comments thread:
1. It would be great to have the option of receiving only one email notification a day when new comments are posted rather than separate notifications for each individual comment (and perhaps with a link that would take me right to the first unread comment). Just today I received 25 individual notifications about new comments, most of which involved a currently very active post (namely krad’s post about this week’s Babylon 5 rewatch).
2. It would also be great to have the “SUBSCRIBE” link appear after the most recent comment, i.e., at the end of the comments. I may sometimes decide to subscribe only after reading through all the existing comments, and right now this requires scrolling back to the top of the comments to get to the “SUBSCRIBE” link. I know, it’s a small inconvenience, but still.
At any rate, with respect to both of my suggestions, that was more or less how things worked with the old site, IIRC.
Hey, any thoughts on making a Fediverse (Mastdon, Plemora, Sharkey, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc.) account?
I see you have a Threads, but there are a lot of instances that have Threads blocked on principal. I’m not going to get a mastodon.social account just to follow y’all from threads.
A whole bunch is going wrong with this misbegotten new software lately. That bizarre “Verify you are human” thing that shows up before you can get to the site was refusing to let me through a while ago; instead of verifying automatically as it usually does, it only gave me the manual check box, and when I checked it, it just reloaded the manual check box and wouldn’t let me into the site. It’s cleared up now, obviously, but who knows if it’ll happen again? Frustrating to have that pointless barrier to entry, especially when it reacts so inconsistently.
Also, the notification flags on comments and the “My Comments” option in the user profile have disappeared again.
And the system for displaying comments works terribly and needs to be completely overhauled. In the All Discussions page, when you click on the direct link to a comment, if the comment thread is more than a couple of dozen comments (maybe less), it takes you to that comment only for a split second, then jumps to the top of the list, so you have to scroll down and search for it manually. You can try setting the list to display the newest comments first, but there’s no way to set that as the default, and it doesn’t help you find a new nested reply to an older comment. Sometimes I try searching for a keyword like “minutes” to find the newest comments, but since the site doesn’t load all the comments unless you scroll down, that doesn’t always work either. It makes it frustratingly harder to follow a discussion thread.
Still encountering lots of dead links as I read through the Star Trek TNG reviews. The links to reviews of other episodes.
What’s happened to Jo Walton’s older blog posts, including among others the ‘What Makes This Book So Great’ series? None of the links seem to connect or be redirected to anything any longer.
Some of her essays on Tor have ideas which have become fundamentally useful to discussion and review of the field of SF&F and literature in general. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that her essay on the ‘Suck Fairy’ has made it a very useful shorthand in discussing how books have aged. (Yes I know she didn’t originate the term, but she popularized it.)
And, while I know the ‘What Makes This Book So Great’ reviews/essays are now collected in a book, those essays introduced me to a number of authors and fascinating books which have become part of my mental landscape. (There’s no way I would have started Sarah Monette’s Melusine series, for example, due to the entirely misleading original covers.) I would never have run into them if I had to first buy the book of Jo Walton’s essays sight-unseen
An example of the broken redirected link for the one I was looking for:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/09/the-suck-fairy => redirects to
https://reactormag.com/blogs/2010/09/the-suck-fairy => leads to
ReactorMag 404 page
the moment I find out the change happened on my 50th birthday =)
As there been any analysis done on engagement before and after the switch? I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it difficult to find the posts that I used to follow and harder still to be motivated to comment once I find them. It feels like some of the communities are drying up, with the Star Trek/B5 one at least still doing okay– but that seems as much by Keith’s force of personality than the site.
Not that it would be possible to go back at this point, but I miss the old design more and more every day. This was once one of my favorite places to read and now it’s just a clone of DenOfGeek.
If you just wanted to change the name to Reactor, you could have done just that. Changing the website format completely was the silliest idea. Now, it feels cringe to even look at the website. Its not simple and easy. Earlier, I would visit website almost daily. But now, a couple of times in a month. If possible, change the template back to the previous one.
Per Farscape. I liked it and I’m “old” Forbidden Planet…..
Since this change i am unable to move onto the next chapter in the malazan reread
I just received today’s newsletter. I wanted to read “Five Vintage Works of SF from Women Writers” by James Davis Nicholl but the link in the newsletter took me to an entirely different article. Then I tried searching on the site using the author’s name, which also failed. Then I searched for the article name, which also failed.
At that point I googled the article and Google took me to it right away. If your search functionality isn’t operational, a note about that would be helpful.
In addition, the text at the bottom of the newsletter says “Follow Reactor.com to get updates on all of our original fiction”. Your URL is reactormag.com, which I shouldn’t have to tell you. Perhaps you should consider purchasing reactor.com, as it’s available.
Strange how that annoying “check if you’re human” screen the new site software forces us to go through (which often fails to work at all and just prevents me from reaching the site) is apparently no better at preventing spam comments than the old site was.
I was in the middle of a Patrick Rothfuss re-read of “A Wise Man’s Fear,” but I can’t find it any more; the link is broken. Is it stashed on the web somewhere that I can access?
Hi! You can find the full index of the reread here: https://reactormag.com/columns/patrick-rothfuss-reread/the-wise-mans-fear/
(For the record, if you’re looking at the Rothfuss Reread page, you can scroll to the book you want and you’ll see a link that reads “See All The Wise Man’s Fear” (for example) in the top right corner. Clicking that link and then hitting “Load More” at the bottom will let you see the full list of reread articles for a given book!)
I know you meant well: but the old site was significantly easier on the eye, was much easier to navigate, was better in pretty much every way.
I do not visit nearly as much now… for whatever that is worth
I try to be a level-headed guy and open to change. I don’t want to be one those “Back in my day,” type of people. I want to give everything a fair shake. I have given this new website a fair shake.
I hate it.
I don’t care about the name change (though you guys should have gone with ReacTOR). I hate engaging with this website now. It’s the obnoxiously large tiles on the front page, which also are not in publication order. It’s the miniscule text that strains the eyes. It’s the type of text where you can’t really tell a difference between bolded word and regular text. It’s the “All discussions” page that has a link for every single comment on an article, instead of one link to an article with recent comments (as was the case on the old website). And clicking on that link is a crapshoot, as it might show you the comment or it might instantly refresh and bring you to the top. Who knows.
I’ve been a loyal reader and commenTOR (grin) for years, but ever since the rebranding I have felt like I fell off the map! I got two or three brief emails announcing all the changes, then nothing!
Fortunately (or unfortunately) I have had an extremely difficult and trying Q1 and 2, but I finally had time to come hunting and re-entered my name to the subscription list, but waaahhh – all the stuff I assume! I missed make me wanna cry!
DOES THE REACTOR ACCEPT TRANSLATED STORES FROM ARABIC Language?
Is there a way to turn on Dark Mode for your website? This white background causes headaches and eye-strain. This really is an accessibility issue for many.
Your search function is, to say the least, suboptimal. What is your response to that when I say it can’t find the article “The Profound Emptiness of Battle: The Forever War” from 2016, by Jay Allan. Not even when I write the whole headline of the article. #suboptimal
Are we still commenting here to communicate difficulties with the new site? I’m having trouble finding older articles through the writers’ Bio pages. Emmet Asher-Perrin, for example, I already know has the 2011 essay “Under the Covers with a Flashlight: Our Lives as Readers;” however, their bio page only has articles going back as far as 2020, making it much more difficult to establish a broader picture of their involvement as a Tor.com/Reactor editor and contributor. There’s no way for me to go back and see what they wrote prior to 2020, let alone prior to March 2011.
What happened to the Star Trek rewatch blogs?
Just joined, seeing some problems when I try to edit my account bio. Trying to edit my account info I’m asked to enter my name 5 times (all “required”!) Also, can’t see a way to upload a photo. Thanks
Hi! I have wanted to create an account for quite some time now, but have had no luck completing the process. The website says I have an account, but I need to complete the stages to set it up by checking my email. Unfortunately, I have never received an email to complete the setup.
Can anyone help me resolve this????
Just dropping in to say I hadn’t read anything on Tor.com/Reactor for ten months because of the rebrand! I hope the rebrand is bringing in a new audience, because neither myself, any of my former co-workers in the largest library system in the Midwest (who read it regularly), and a few other publishing folks I ‘ve chatted with have had the same issue: we don’t think to click on “Reactor” branded links. Don’t know why, but there’s absolutely NOTHING linking the brands anymore. Separation is nice, but the site doesn’t even look REMOTELY similar and neither does the sour-red branding. I’m VERY thankful a fellow writer shared she had a story here with the HWA Facebook group–it was the first Tor.com–sorry, REACTOR story I’ve read since the rebrand, apparently. Just, yikes. Maybe there’s TOO much separation now? But hey, if it’s just me and your site numbers haven’t been declining (I’d be surprised if this grew them) then maybe it isn’t a big deal. Just two cents from a stranger. Only critiquing because I care. Aaaaannndd this effectively erased Tor.com from my life for 10months.
Why is Jo Walton’s blog so hard to find? I don’t know how I found it the first time but the only way I can find it now is to do an actual search for “Jo Walton”. I am afraid many people aren’t even aware of it.
I’ve been meaning to comment again to say, like some above, that I hope the redesign has been worth it by whatever metrics are important to you because I find myself coming here much less frequently and hating the added hassles every time.
While I applauded when Blogger finally allowed for nested comment replies, I’ve realized now that Reactor’s gone down that road how important searchable date-&-time stamps are rather than just “x hours ago”. The old site’s model with one master roll of comments did necessitate @‘ing numbered comments above but at least I could reload the page or jump over from an E-mail notification and know that all new comments would be in order at the bottom. Now I deliberately wait to read comments, if not the actual post in question, often for days — because I know I’ll have to subscribe to comments once I do, unless I want to at minimum skim all the comments again in search for new-to-me replies, and clicking over to the site for every E-mail notification when there’s heavy-ish discussion makes for a fractured, frustrating experience.
I guess the silver lining there is that conversation isn’t as robust as it used to be, which can’t have been the intention but, hey, congratulations.