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Answering Your Questions About Tor.com’s Change to Reactor

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Answering Your Questions About Tor.com’s Change to Reactor

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Answering Your Questions About Tor.com’s Change to Reactor

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Published on January 11, 2024

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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!

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178 Comments
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Admin
1 year ago

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.

Avatar
9 months ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.

Avatar
1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.

Avatar
7 months ago
Reply to  Lisamarie

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.

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Admin
1 year ago
Reply to  Lisamarie

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.

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.

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1 year ago

The My Comments section on my user page lists all my comments correctly, but the links do not go to the article.

John C. Bunnell
11 months ago
Reply to  rpresser

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….

ChristopherLBennett
11 months ago

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.

John C. Bunnell
11 months ago

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.

ChristopherLBennett
11 months ago

Oh, yes, that’s right. It was My Conversations that vanished in the upgrade, and that I dearly wish they’d bring back.

John C. Bunnell
11 months ago

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.

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Admin
11 months ago

So, My Comments should be back in operation as of a couple of minutes ago–thanks for bringing it to our attention!

John C. Bunnell
11 months ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.) 😏

Last edited 11 months ago by John C. Bunnell
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Admin
1 year ago
Reply to  rpresser

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!

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.)

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1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.

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1 year ago

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.

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago

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?

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1 year ago

I agree. That conversation tab was the best way to have meaningful discussions on the site.

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1 year ago

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.

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jer
1 year ago

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…

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago
Reply to  jer

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.

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago

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.

Avatar
1 year ago
Reply to  jer

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.

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J vaughn
1 year ago

Why am i asked sbout site cookies every time i click a link

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1 year ago

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?

Avatar
1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

Other specific detail problems:

  • When you upvote a comment, something that should be instantaneous – as it is on most other sites – takes so long that the system has to put up a ‘marking time’ graphic.
  • And then there’s no visible indication that you, specifically, upvoted a comment; so if it’s several hours’ old and you don’t remember, you have to click on the upvote button, see that the count decremented instead of incremented, then click on it again.
  • After posting a comment, the system appears to be trying to reload the page to show it, but instead the reload hangs; I’ve waited at least 60 seconds with ho response. Manually reloading the page is the only way to get the comment to show.
Avatar
1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

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.

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

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.

Avatar
1 year ago

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?

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1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

Yes, I too am getting the random word-splitting.

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Happy Book Girl
1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

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.

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1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

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.

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

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.]

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Bright
1 year ago

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.

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago
Reply to  Bright

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.]

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago

!!!!

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.

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago

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.

NomadUK
1 year ago
Reply to  tbutler

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.

Avatar
1 year ago

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.

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Admin
1 year ago
Reply to  EmJJ

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/

Avatar
1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

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.

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago
Reply to  costumer

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.)

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago

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.

John C. Bunnell
1 year ago

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. )

ChristopherLBennett
1 year ago

Odd… I see the same “Enter your search” dialog from every page.

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ANemo
1 year ago

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?

nms72
1 year ago
Reply to  ANemo

The same thing’s been happening to me on the old site for weeks. I recommend switching browsers. Brave worked for me.

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Eoin
1 year ago

Where’s the Malazan re-read? It won’t load for me and only shows a jpg image

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Admin
1 year ago
Reply to  Eoin

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!

Avatar
1 year ago
Reply to  Moderator

Actually, as I’ve commented above, the search feature works terribly. It rarely returns what you are actually looking for.

Jacob Silvia
1 year ago

Oh, man, I missed the AMA!

Will you guys be reopening submissions?

Avatar
1 year ago

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.

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