Reactor Site Update: Fixes That Have Been Made, and Fixes Yet to Come

For all the complaints about the “pizza slice”, here’s a minority view: based on my Web-surfing over the last few months, I consider that icon the single best and most effective implementation of the underlying legal headache that I’ve come across. A lot of much bigger companies have done a far worse job of addressing the Great Cookie Crisis – including, as I think I’ve noted before, the very large corporation from which most of my groceries are delivered.

As has been rather too briefly noted earlier on, the commercial Web’s new concern with users’ awareness of “cookies” (one of the most visible tools Web sites and the advertisers who support them use to follow us around as we surf) is largely a result of evolving legal restrictions on what and how much those sites and advertisers can do with your personal data. A significant portion of these restrictions are coming out of Europe (and are primarily focused on ‘Net commerce); here in the US, the greater focus is on legislation that’s promoted as protecting children from being exploited online, but which has much broader overall implications for personal privacy. (See the Web site for NetChoice for background – and note that among the group’s members, in addition to a lot of very large corporations, is Dreamwidth, a comparatively tiny but remarkable – and mostly volunteer-run – online community that should be familiar to a lot of the genre geeks and LGBTQIA+ folk in the present gallery.)

But getting back to cookies: the thing is, most of the new mechanisms I’ve been seeing for cookie management on corporate Web sites are frustrating as H*ll. They’re intrusive; they pop up much more often than they need to or should, they don’t remember my choices from one visit to the next no matter how often they claim they’ve “saved” them, and in some cases, they ask again every fifteen minutes while I’m attempting to navigate the electronic version of the self-checkout line.

By comparison, the “pizza slice” is small; it takes up very little screen space, and its creators have now got it placed so that it mostly doesn’t interfere at all with navigating the Reactor site – it’s set above the lower navigation bar on my phone, and I can easily scroll up or down to see the few characters’ worth of text it may be obscuring at the bottom of my desktop screen. And the Reactor engine has now almost entirely stopped asking me whether I’m still a teenager (hah!); it remembers my answers and cookie choices rather than making me reconfirm them every time I visit. Unlike most of the cookie-choosing tools I’m being asked to suffer through on the wider ‘Net, it works. And it doesn’t get in my face nearly as much as do most of those other scripts.

Mind you, to my eye the icon resembles an artist’s palette rather than a cookie or a pizza (and especially not a pizza slice, forsooth). But that’s a mileage-may-vary issue that’s trivial by comparison to what I consider a genuinely well-thought-out bit of Web design and coding (at least now that most of the positioning tweaks have been addressed).

A handful of observations, some new and some ongoing:

The “My Comments” panel in one’s personal Reactorspace is gone again. As this seems to be a recurring problem, one would hope that fixing it would be a priority line item.

I observed elsewhere, about a week ago, that the cookie-acceptance robot was broken, and popping the acceptance panel up on nearly every page-click. Further investigation indicates that this is happening only in the Samsung mobile Web browser. (I don’t think it’s related to Duck Duck Go, because I also have that extension in Firefox on my desktop, and both Firefox on the desktop and Chrome on the phone don’t have this problem.)

I agree with Christopher Bennett’s recent observation in the comments to the original Reactor-update post – navigating within the comment-stream in this posting engine is extremely difficult and brain-numbing. In part, this is probably an artifact of the way the new comment index is designed – it’s apparently prioritizing site-wide comment time stamps as its master/default sort order over the ability to organize comments within any given post. I deduce this from the insanely high page count at the bottom of the All Discussions pages. Readers may in turn deduce that I think that design choice was a Bad Idea; they will be absolutely correct. The operative question now is whether it’s possible or practical to convert the ginormous new index to a better and more flexible sort protocol, and the answer to that one is beyond my Web-wrangling expertise.

I’m also in the group that remains literally pained – and yes, I am using the word “literally” in its proper dictionary sense – by the too-small, too-dense typography that’s at the core of this comment engine. It may well not be feasible from a coding standpoint to rejigger the comment index at this stage of the game, but it can and should be relatively simple to adjust the text design to a standard that will let me read more than one article in a session without having to squint and blink and blot tears from the corners of my eyes. The number of comments that have been made about this since the relaunch – and the fact that a high proportion of them have been from folks who identify as Web professionals of one sort or another – should serve as an indicator here; readability matters, and Reactor as it stands is not nearly as readable as it should be.

In this context, I will again cite Dreamwidth’s comment engine as an example of a really well-built discussion framework, which gives readers the ability to organize a comment-stream as threaded or linear on the fly. More, DW account-holders have settings that allow for viewing any journal’s entries and appended comments in the visual style of their own journal – that is, in a font and color scheme that’s most readable for that individual user. If a tiny company with a mostly-volunteer coding team can produce a schema that versatile on the electronic equivalent of a bag of Slinkys, a case of Play-Doh, and a carton of miscellaneous Legos, it ought to be possible to produce something at least half as good with the resources of a multinational media group in one’s back pocket.