Timeline for MathOverflow updated site theme is ready for testing!
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 17, 2018 at 16:14 | comment | added | Sándor Kovács | ...and the rest is silence | |
| Dec 17, 2018 at 2:31 | comment | added | Sándor Kovács | @Catija ps: I'm pretty sure that the color scheme had nothing to do with whatever was broken. You can say that this way it is easier for you to maintain it and that's a totally acceptable position. Cheers! | |
| Dec 17, 2018 at 2:30 | comment | added | Sándor Kovács | @Catija OK, maybe it was broken. I should not have included that and then perhaps you would have felt compelled to respond to the main point of my comment. What is discussed in this post has nothing to do with all that you are conjuring up to support your decision. But it's OK, you have the power and you are exercising it. I am just saying that it would be easier for all of us if you didn't pretend to ask for our feedback if you are going to ignore it anyway. Unfortunately, this seems the way it works. I don't even know why I even bother with saying all this... | |
| Dec 17, 2018 at 2:10 | comment | added | Catija Staff | @SándorKovács It was severely broken, in fact. Every time we added features to the network, something, somewhere ran into problems. We were under a mountain of technical debt that kept piling up, making it impossible for us to implement features so many users had been asking for for years. If we didn't make these changes, the site would remain stuck as it was. While many of our users are perfectly happy with the site as it is, many are not and have a variety of feature requests they'd love to see active on the network - and we'd love to make those happen. | |
| Dec 17, 2018 at 1:58 | comment | added | Catija Staff | @HarryGindi It was not my intention to ever imply that that was the only reason. We have many reasons for this change - the simplification of the code is one of those - and probably the most critical one. We wouldn't be doing any of this if it wasn't going to simplify updating the network. As part of that re-design effort, we're unifying the sites somewhat. These two go hand-in-hand, though. Using the same base code everywhere means that all the sites start looking more alike. My omission was due to brevity, not dishonesty. | |
| Dec 17, 2018 at 1:35 | comment | added | Sándor Kovács | @Catija It seems that as usual when the programmers ask for feedback, they don't really want that. They want cheers, but not complaints. It doesn't matter what we think, you are going to do what you wanted to do in the first place. It would be a little more honest to just say that and forget about this charade of "asking for feedback". By the way, you could also follow the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" maxim... | |
| Dec 15, 2018 at 1:34 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | @Catija Then I think it was a little bit dishonest to say that this was only for code portability and ease of updating. I'm not a programmer, but exporting a few numerical variables for configuration is not a serious technical hurdle. | |
| Dec 14, 2018 at 23:43 | comment | added | Catija Staff | Note, we're also concerned with accessibility and the scheme we have now (no border, border, dark background) is more accessible than colors, which may not be discernible to all users. Using dark colors for all three cases means the user has to rely on the numbers telling them whether the post has been answered or accepted. | |
| Dec 14, 2018 at 23:41 | comment | added | Catija Staff | I completely understand that they seem like a really easy way to make the sites different. And I agree with that. But I also agree and accept that, as a network, we should have an identity, too. I don't know whether this will change in the future or not. If the concern is less for site identity and more for having an immediately recognizable difference between unanswered, answered and accepted questions, we might be able to look at that on a network-wide level. | |
| Dec 14, 2018 at 23:38 | comment | added | Catija Staff | So, part of this is that we're attempting to create some network-wide identity. Elements of the network, things that make us recognizable, @HarryGindi . The intention is for these answer indicators to be one of those things. They're part of the core that is Stack Exchange - you're here to get answers. How that's indicated should be consistent on the network... that's the idea. There are a few other design choices like this - for example - headers are the same size/font/color on every site, even sites that use serif fonts. So, by design we want them to be the same everywhere. | |
| Dec 13, 2018 at 6:57 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | @Catija Echoing Tim, this seems like it should be nothing more than loading a few hex values. It wouldn't need custom styling. | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 16:11 | comment | added | Tim Campion | @Catija I can understand taking a wait-and-see approach, but it seems to me part of the beauty of allowing customization of this element would be that it's a very generic screen element shared by all SE sites, so any site could take advantage of it pretty straightforwardly. Plus, because it's one of the most commonly-recurring screen elements on the front page, it has the potential to add a lot of character to a SE site at (what naively seems like) little cost. | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 5:01 | comment | added | Catija Staff | We'd like to try leaving the questions list page answer boxes (and the accepted answers) as they are for a little bit (a month or so) to see if your opinions change. Both of these elements are fixed on a network-wide basis (the box shapes/colors used to be per-site) so making them unique for y'all may introduce bugs when we update the sites, which is why we're trying to unify the themes - to avoid bugs and make it easier and faster to introduce features without necessitating a lot of bug fixes on per-site bases. | |
| Nov 20, 2018 at 22:42 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | @JonEricson --- yes, in the old scheme I can spot the unanswered questions at a glance; in the new scheme I cannot. | |
| Nov 20, 2018 at 22:40 | comment | added | Jon Ericson Staff | So that I understand the problem, is the concern that it'll be harder to spot questions that need answers? Follow-up question: if so, would something like custom question lists help? | |
| Nov 20, 2018 at 12:31 | comment | added | Dirk | I agree with Emil here. The brown background always appeared to say "something boring here - do not look closer" to me. Now it says "nothing here yet - have a look!". The empty frame says "there is still something missing" which also fits. | |
| Nov 20, 2018 at 10:43 | comment | added | Emil Jeřábek | I find the new scheme to be more clear than the old one, actually. | |
| Nov 20, 2018 at 10:38 | comment | added | Denis Nardin | I'm going to agree: the old color scheme was much much better than the new. And I say this as a person that usually does not care about these things. | |
| Nov 20, 2018 at 9:35 | history | answered | Carlo Beenakker | CC BY-SA 4.0 |