Linked by Adam S on Mon 2nd Apr 2007 21:53 UTC
After several modifications, feature tweaks, and revisions, please feel free to beta test our revision of OSNews.com version 4. Recently introduced to the site? Amongst many other things: Themes! Read on for a more complete changelog!
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RE: It's not a religion
by Thom_Holwerda on Tue 3rd Apr 2007 17:29
in reply to "It's not a religion"
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:
2005-06-30
I have enjoyed visiting OSNews for quite a while. It has even become my first stop for tech news. As long as the content of the site doesn't change, I can learn to use the new version of the site. I'm not going to get religious about how the site looks.
I have to say that I like a lot of the changes. I don't necessarily like all of them, but I think the net effect is positive.
I don't like the new logo. I don't think the old logo was perfect, but I prefer it to the new one.
Another thing, since themes are now easier to create, it would be nice for more themes to be available to everyone (not just subscribers). Perhaps when new themes are introduced, they could be made available to everyone, and some of the most popular ones would then be tagged for subscribers only. I personally like to use a theme different from the default (even if it's only a different color scheme) to make it easier to recognize when I am logged in.
I think the approach to adding incentives for people to subscribe is a good one (don't make the site worse for everyone; make it better for subscribers). There didn't seem to be many reasons for subscribing before. If subscriptions allow OSNews to provide a better experience for everyone, I'm all for it. I might even subscribe myself.
Regarding moderation and abuse (it doesn't seem to have changed yet, but I know it has been considered), I think the current system works better than it did in the past. I also agree with comments that have been made that OSNews doesn't need to recreate a mod system in use by another site (like /.). I do think that it might be beneficial for some people other than site owners (probably subscribers) to be able to mark comments as abusive/offensive or substantive. Perhaps it could be done in a way that three or more subscribers would need to mark a comment as abusive/substantive in order to have any effect on the comment. Such comments could then receive a visual cue to mark them appropriately. I know that some posts really don't need to be read while others deserve higher than a score of +5.
The last gripe that I would mention is that the "Post Comment" link should add fields to the bottom of a page (to be able to refer to other content) instead of opening a new page.