When introducing people to Hubski I have repeatedly run into three complaints/small annoyances. The first is that the URLs aren't "pretty". There is often a "?id=" on URLs, which only saves four characters when removed, but it's an annoying four characters. Obviously, I don't know how your systems work so I assume this is more complicated than a bunch of RewriteRules. A few past posts indicate that it's not that simple.
The second is that the number of comments is far to the right of the links, tags, and so on. This doesn't bother me, I like the spacing. But it is annoying to some. I guess the way to fix this would be move it towards the other information. Maybe make the whole column thinner based on the max title length. Opinions?
Finally, a live preview of how your markup will look when finished would be nice. Although editing afterwards works just about as well.
Thanks for considering these.
For me, the content is far more important than the stylesheet. That said, I wish the stylesheet were a bit more customizable. White people problems, of course: Reddit looks like Reddit, while at least Hubski lets you make things look like a Vellum scroll. Speaking as a serial abuser of markup, Hubski's markup will be hard to preview successfully because Hubski's markup borks rather a lot. I've requested we switch to Reddit-style markup a couple times but have been assured that it's a star-spangled pain in the ass to do so. The important thing, I think, is to remember that you're on a hobby website. Everyone involved in it has some other job paying for them to spend their free time on this place. Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and it looks like Reddit. Hell, Craigslist pulled in $166 million last year and it looks like Craigslist. I don't know how long the crew spent on "Illuminated" for April 1, but it wasn't quick. And it's totally awesome. And it's not without its flaws. And I think that's pretty much the spirit of the place - not perfect, but a damn fine effort.
Minimalism can go a long fucking way.The important thing, I think, is to remember that you're on a hobby website. Everyone involved in it has some other job paying for them to spend their free time on this place. Reddit is owned by Conde Nast and it looks like Reddit. Hell, Craigslist pulled in $166 million last year and it looks like Craigslist.
Yep, definitely looks (and works) better than a ton of (better-supported) forums out there. I'm glad it does. There are always things to tweak and stuff to improve...and some changes not everyone will agree with which makes them hard. This place is impressive.
mk, forwardslash, insomniasexx, b_b weren't we just playing around with a live preview option? Also, thanks to you and mitvit for providing this feedback. I would be very appreciative if more established Hubski users would introduce people they know to Hubski and provide new user feedback. I have been known to quietly sit behind people as they use Hubski for the first time while taking notes. It's eye opening.
Yeah, we'll have live markup previews in the future. http://facebook.github.io/react/ - scroll to the bottom
I very much understand the want for pretty urls. Some urls are probably just a few rewriterules away from being pretty but we have some legacy issues preventing us from just implementing it. We use nginx as well as HAProxy for hubski, and then we use piwik which is using apache, and both of these need to be accessible from the hubski.com root domain, mostly because we didn't shell out for a wildcard SSL certificate. Also we do some weird things with custom feed and such. We could probably write around these edge cases but I'm just putting that energy into a rewrite of hubski which will have pretty urls.The first is that the URLs aren't "pretty". There is often a "?id=" on URLs, which only saves four characters when removed, but it's an annoying four characters. Obviously, I don't know how your systems work so I assume this is more complicated than a bunch of RewriteRules. A few past posts indicate that it's not that simple.
+1000 I complain about this to myself mentally nearly every time I use the site but for some reason I've never brought it up. I wish so much that we could have hubski.com/user/flagamuffin and hubski.com/tag/goodlongread at the very least, with expansions from there. Is that remotely possible?When introducing people to Hubski I have repeatedly run into three complaints/small annoyances. The first is that the URLs aren't "pretty".
I like the openness, re: number 2, and the prettiness of links is something I can understand, but not on my priority list. Live markup would be dope, however.
Oh, I thought three common complaints from new users would be 1. kleinbl00 2. me 3. who wants to volunteer? Frankly, although I can understand why this feature is currently excluded, I'd like to have a "posted when" visible from the main page for each post. However I think we've abstained from that because we encourage reanimation of thread corpses and the date tag could potentially encourage people not to comment (oh,this is old, why bother, no one will see what i have to say).
posted when
I don't use it, but i am pretty sure you can still toggle on "post times" in your settings. Does that help?
I'll look into it when I'm not on mobile. For the record the problem I have with the new mobile is that on the iPhone it's impossible to get to the bottom menu bar without selecting the top menu(URL) bar. This seems to be an iPhone/iPad problem. The consequence of this is that it's not easy for me to navigate using back/forward buttons and/or open up a new "tab" (page); I can't do so without first basically telling my browser I want to type in a new web address, which I don't. No one else has complained about this though so I wouldn't worry too much.
This has been annoying me too. insomniasexx have you noticed this?
Ohhhhh I know why too. remove "minimal-ui" from Also, FWIW, _refugee_ it's a Safari only thing (for now)
I just copied and pasted the meta tag from my site where you can't go back and forth so it gives users more screen space. <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=yes, minimal-ui">