Dear readers, on January 23rd we became 1.) Reactor and 2.) A new website, and in that time, we’ve been working on fixes, features, and the kinds of unexpected heckstorms that tend to occur to newly launched websites (especially ones with 15+ years’ worth of articles and fiction).
We want to keep you updated on the progress we’ve made on fixes so far. We’ve been monitoring the bug reports you’ve been sending in via our contact form, as well as comments you’ve left on articles here. We’ve been working with other folks, as well, who are scanning and testing for bugs even as you read this. We’re not done with the fixes (not by a long shot), but we are actively listening to your feedback, and we want to thank you for being diligent and patient as we make improvements.
Some updates on what we’ve tackled so far:
- Un-froze the All Discussions page.
- Stopped the “accept/reject cookies” pop-up banner showing up incessantly, no matter what you clicked
- Upped the number of comments that load into an article at first scroll. (This is why you’re getting those three dancing dots once you start scrolling. We’re going to test this again and may cut the number of loading comments back a bit.)
- Switched comment threads to auto-expand because otherwise it doesn’t look like any comments are in response to each other.
- STOPPED THE COMMENT TEXT FROM WRA
PPING LIKE THIS. (As you can see, squashing this bug felt very, very good.) - The glorious MALAZAN REREAD OF THE FALLEN index page is now back! We have to manually update these index pages, but The Wheel of Time Reread, the various Star Trek rewatches, The Stormlight Archive, Jo Walton’s classic columns, and various other VERY BIG fantasy rereads are next.
- Corrected various pagination and link errors.
- Addressed various issues with the Contact and Newsletter pages.
- Also, various inconsistencies with Bookmarking.
- Speaking of Bookmarks, all of your Favorites/Bookmarks from Tor.com are now back in your user account!
- And speaking of things that are back from the old Tor.com site: Comments from articles in October 2023 and onwards have been restored! (Some comment bubbles may still be showing the numeral 0. Still working on that bug, but the comments themselves are actually there.)
- We’re still cleaning up a few stragglers, but most of the articles affected by broken “Read More” links should also be fully restored. (If you’re wondering why other fixes took so long, that bug is why.)
What We’re Tackling Next:
- Ennui
- RSS feeds.
- Bringing the Archive page back.
- Working on the site Search’s accuracy more. Like, a lot more.
- Fixing that weird video player.
- Some reclassification of articles so they show up in the appropriate spots. (“Books” is missing a few things, for example. We know why. It just takes a little time to set right.)
- Lots of clean-up of small things, like images, bad links, incorrect names, dead icons, automated emails, and such.
- Lots and lots and lots of other small and mind-numbing fixes that are important but not meant to be super apparent.
That’s the short version of it all. If this is your first time seeing that Tor.com has become Reactor, we answer a lot of the basics here. If circumstances permit, we’ll update again after the next wave of improvements. Thank you for sticking with us!
That annoying pizza slice is still impossible to get rid of.
We’ve updated the post to clarify: we’ve fixed the “accept/reject cookies” pop-up banner that was initially appearing on every page. The green “Manage Your Preferences” icon at the bottom of the screen is a legal requirement, and not something we’re able to change.
Fair enough, but why is the alt text/caption “Do Not Sell?”
Why does no other site I’ve ever been on have it if its a legal requirement? Who requires it?
As of August, Macmillan requires it on all of their websites, in order to comply with current privacy laws. It’s not a part of the redesign.
Curious. I assume it has to do with something with publishing? I’ve never come across this icon in all my time on the internet.
Yes! I thought item #2 said they got rid of it?
I wonder if the fix is browser-dependent? Maybe it works on Netscape?
I appreciate the fixes so far, but I’m disappointed that your list of upcoming fixes doesn’t include restoring the old My Conversations/All Conversations page. That was a better way of tracking discussions than the current All Discussions page, since it let you focus specifically on the threads you were participating in (while having a sidebar listing of new posts), and it only showed the most recent comment in each discussion instead of every single one, so it was more compact and less redundant. My Conversations was my default bookmark for the site, the best way for experiencing it my opinion. I’d like it back, or something reasonably close to it.
Is it just me, or the fact I’m currently viewing on iPad that is making this entry box for comments incredibly small (like about 1/3 of the comment column width, which is itself only about 2/3 of the page width)? And all the format options have become a jumbled string saying bilink/b-quoteUulol/licodespoiler?
i would love a ‘always pause background’ feature, if i’m honest. It really ratchets up my browser memory usage and CPU usage.
That stupid footer animation has to go. I always have to scroll to the bottom, click stop, then scroll up again to start reading.
Interesting: I don’t see that. I wonder why?
I don’t see the footer animation either, and I figured out it was because my browser has a plug-in that disables video autoplay. I have to remember to deactivate it on streaming-video sites so that I don’t have to start everything manually, but on other sites it spares me from distracting animations and videos (though not always).
RSS actually worked for me since launch, but I only subscribe to all articles
Really excited to see the Archive page come back, but can you please just…get rid of all the annoying graphics? And maybe shrink the proportion of thumbnails to text? I’ve tried multiple times to come back to the site to read articles, and it’s just too unpleasant to wade through this site because of all the visual noise.
For example, on this article alone, the “REACTOR” image takes up my ENTIRE screen! Nobody is clicking on an article because of the pictures. They want the text.
And without the My Conversations it’s really hard to keep track of conversations/threads and that was the main draw to the site.
If I could make only one comment, this would be it. I used to stop at Tor.com several times a day; now it’s once, maybe twice a day, sometimes not at all — all because it’s just gotten too painful to visit with all the visual rubbish being flung at me.
If you absolutely must do graphics on the homepage — and I suppose you just must, because, gosh, what else is the World Wide Web for? — take a look at how Ars Technica do it. I actually don’t mind visiting that site, because it treats its readers as intelligent people, not mindless recepticles for whatever visual stimuli can be thrown at them.
And now you can also take a look at how URLs are handled in your comments text, since that’s clearly broken in my comment above. Clicking on Ars Technica takes me to the site, but the text is not highlighted in any way and the line of text breaks at that point and continues on the next line.
(Safari 17.3.1 (19617.2.4.11.12, macOS 14.3.1 (23D60))
Ditto. (Safari 17.3.1 here as well, MacOS 12.7.3)
That’s been a really wonky issue since the switchover. Edited to add: I get the line break too and furthermore “take a look” is underlined even though the actual hyperlink on the words “Ars Technica” is not until my cursor’s in proximity and the empty space gets underlined as well.
I still get the incorrect wrapping in the comments using the Pale Moon browser on Debian Linux. I just checked and other browsers work fine.
You already have RSS feeds, but they’re kind of janky, with the various sharing icons being *massively* zoomed in.
If I click on one of James Davis Nicoll’s footnotes in his recent article (I assume this is true for other articles as well, but Nicoll’s footnotes are half the fun of his articles, and the ones I most care about), it’s not at all clear how to get back to where I left off. In the old viewer, the footnote would appear at the bottom of the screen and then disappear if I clicked the superscript a second time; the new one bounces me to the end of the article with no obvious way of returning to what I was reading (click the number in the footnote does nothing).
Does backspacing work?
James, no backspacing does not work (for me at least, mac, ancient Safari 15.6.1, gosh I should buy a new computer). I had noticed this issue when the new site originally rolled out, but I was caught by the “it doesn’t look like you commented even though you really did problem”, which is now, I hope, fixed.
However, the back button on my browser does, pretty much. Hadn’t thought to do that, but makes sense.
Clicking the number in the footnote to go back would be okay, but I kinda liked the way they worked on the old site, it was cute, though wierd. There are other ways footnotes could work which would also be fine with me. Having to click the back button when I’m down at the bottom isn’t great, rather interrupts the flow of reading the article.
I keep considering writing a browser plugin to try and fix this stuff, but run into the problem that I’ve never written one before.
I am glad to see text wrapping fixed, but I’m disappointed that the default size of comments is still so tiny.
Yes, the microtext in the comments are near-impossible to read. The previous website had a very clear and easy-to-read font.
Yes! Fix the tiny font or we’re all going to START YELLING!
Let me test something…
IS THIS MORE LEGIBLE?
Yes… but what’s making it legible isn’t that it’s bold and uppercase,
it’s that it’s only a few characters wide and that you’ve figured out
how to add more space between the lines.
i find it hard to believe that this new site design appears to take no
account of the most basic user interface principles.