The dated front page

[TxRad]

Okay, maybe a little history lesson is needed. This is what I have gleaned over the years from several sources.

Manu and some friends bubble gummed the place together so Laurel had a place to read smut. It grew bigger and stuff was added on here and there and then it was tied into something else. All of the people who helped put this mess together are no longer around or dead. Manu held it together with more bubble gum and duct tape until Google decided that to keep a top rateing the site had to be smart phone friendly.

This is when some things started to change. The problem is the spaghetti coding is a mess and no one knows what is what or which is where. He didn't want to tear the house down saving the data bases and rebuild from scratch, a massive job so he decided to build the new house around the existing one and is hoping the whole thing doesn't implode.

Maybe this will explain a FEW THINGS.

 

[Duleigh]

Google decided that to keep a top ratting the site had to be smart phone friendly.

That's pretty obvious, and the new pages are much nicer on a smart phone than the old app was. However some of the links that still exist...Dr. Bizzarro? Persian Kitty? They used to be interesting pages (Bizzarro rocked!) but they faded into porn obscurity over a decade ago and gave up the guise of original content with their passing.

 

[Initiate_me]

I like the old-school front page. But I do think they could make it a bit simpler and more obvious as to accessing stories from there.

 

[feather1892]

I love the nostalgia for the front page, but it’s a right old pain. It doesn’t work for mobile, and you have to scan all the text to see the one or two links that are still relevant.

Does this happen to anyone else - when you click on lit beta it sends you to a new years welcome message in the sci-fi stories page?!??

It also refers to the forum as the bulletin board, a term that is Neolithic in internet history.

 

[Comshaw]

Okay, maybe a little history lesson is needed. This is what I have gleaned over the years from several sources.

Manu and some friends bubble gummed the place together so Laurel had a place to read smut. It grew bigger and stuff was added on here and there and then it was tied into something else. All of the people who helped put this mess together are no longer around or dead. Manu held it together with more bubble gum and duct tape until Google decided that to keep a top rateing the site had to be smart phone friendly.

This is when some things started to change. The problem is the spaghetti coding is a mess and no one knows what is what or which is where. He didn't want to tear the house down saving the data bases and rebuild from scratch, a massive job so he decided to build the new house around the existing one and is hoping the whole thing doesn't implode.

Maybe this will explain a FEW THINGS.

Thanks. Interestingly, although I had no inside info, this is exactly how I thought it grew into what it is. I think it happens in a lot of things. Mechanical things I know it does. You build something for one purpose, it does it's job very well. Because of that it gets somewhat popular. One of the users asks you to add another function. You do. A third person asks you to add a different function. You do. Before you realize it you have a Frankenstein monster on your hands. You can't replace or remove Y without effecting X and X is tied to U and so on. On top of that the damn thing has become so popular you can barely keep up with the repairs, much less try to figure out how to modify it to make it less complicated. And all the time more people discover it.

So you keep patching the monster back together hoping for the best.

Comshaw

 

[Trionyx]

Non-computer geek here wondering if it wouldn’t make sense to build a completely new site from the ground up, migrate all the stories to it, beta test with a handful of computer savvy readers and once the OK is given, open the new site while shutting down the old. I’m sure this would be expensive but in the long run might save money and headaches.

 

[SimonDoom]

Non-computer geek here wondering if it wouldn’t make sense to build a completely new site from the ground up, migrate all the stories to it, beta test with a handful of computer savvy readers and once the OK is given, open the new site while shutting down the old. I’m sure this would be expensive but in the long run might save money and headaches.

I doubt they have the ability, with their current staffing, to do it, even if it made sense.

Also, there are the matters of continuity and brand loyalty to consider. Many users might get upset if everything changed overnight. The Site wouldn't want to lose a big chunk of readers/users during an abrupt transition. The old site design may look ancient, but it's familiar, and that counts for a lot.

 

[alohadave]

I doubt they have the ability, with their current staffing, to do it, even if it made sense.

Also, there are the matters of continuity and brand loyalty to consider. Many users might get upset if everything changed overnight. The Site wouldn't want to lose a big chunk of readers/users during an abrupt transition. The old site design may look ancient, but it's familiar, and that counts for a lot.

I'm on another site that recently changed their forum software (interestingly, to the same software as the forum here), and it's such a huge change, that I've pretty much stopped posting there. The content is the same, but the presentation is different enough that it throws me off.

 

[CyranoJ]

I don't mind the old-timey look, but it really should be a fairly simple process to remove embarrassingly broken links. Like, for example, the top "Top Sites" selection that goes to a "live cams" page that appears to be a ghost town, there's just nobody there. Or the link to the "Blurty" blogging site which AFAICT hasn't been operative in six years.