I've been considering writing a post like this for some time, and here it is. Lets not waste a bunch of time screwing around with a "friendly" intro when I'm going to say how crap a lot of things are.
Content/Sidebar
Why is this not consistent? There is a different amount of right-side padding on the post looking at the same area in the main
blog view and an
individual post. And here's the kicker: both are bad. The sidebar has too much margin either way, but at least in blog view the padding on the post isn't uneven as well.
Profile Color
This doesn't work at all. You can set it, and the value saves and is reloaded when viewing the profile page again, but changing it does nothing. It seems like this one died after reverting from the beta site, which doesn't make much sense. It's like it was rolled back, and then back some more, taking away not just the added functions of beta.destructoid, but some that were on regular old dtoid as well.
Broken Links
I don't think this tab has ever worked. It just goes to the "Gadzooks!" page because it's missing the "elephant" directory in the path. I know there was some other link or form submission that had similar results, but this isn't a hard fix. That it's sat broken for months is kind of ridiculous. I think there are one or two more things that are mispointed as well, but I haven't been able to find them again.
Toidlets
Toidlets are 2 things: Broken and worthless. The groups of the old beta.destructoid.com site had much more functionality and didn't require the one person that made the group to manage all the members. If I recall, it even said who owned it. When that was scrapped and toidlets were created, Red Veron created the
PS3 FNF toidlet and I didn't track that down and get added for a couple weeks.
In the end, that didn't matter anyway, because the list doesn't appear to be displayed in any particular order. I guess that's fine for just a collection, but it's junk for
anything else because it means that finding a specific post means scrolling past them one by one until you find it. Doubly worthless for FNF, which a chronological sort would be much more useful. I'm tagging them as PS3 FNF mostly as a formality at this point.
Neglect
The cblogs are generally like this. It seems like a few changes have been made and no one ever followed up on them. This should take a single viewing of any CBlog page to show that it isn't coded correctly. I get the impression that the attention was focused on the front page and no one even looked at the cblogs after modifying this.
BBCode
Why does all (or at least most) of
this not work in the cblogs? With this, the only thing stopping the forums from being better blogging tools than the actual blogs is the lack of a fixed width.
Youtube
This was removed a couple months ago now, I think. The rumor I heard was that "there is something better coming". Well that's slick, Destructoid. But why did you take away our ability to add youtube videos before that better thing was available? It doesn't make sense to me because if you just left it as is (or was), it would have been
less work. Someone had to go in and modify things to remove it.
Beta.Destructoid
The beta.destructoid site, also known as "newtoid" was just a better site in general. I didn't like that the entirity of the forums were removed, but having forum and blog logins crossover was good, and as a whole the layout was better. It had great functionality with groups and was the first facelift the Cblogs got in years.
It also had a WYSIWYG editor for the cblogs (CKEditor, I believe) and a multi-image uploader. Honestly, it was buggy for a while, but it seemed like it got taken down just as it was running smoothly. Things were fixed and then it was gone. We were told it would be coming back sometime in the future when the kinks were iron out, but we seem to have some gradients and rounded corners crap instead.
Seriously, lets take care of
repairs before we move on to improvements.
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Seriously, lets take care of repairs before we move on to improvements.
well said.
I'm... not sure how sarcastic that is. As a web developer, things like this really do get under my skin. I'm pretty OCD about my own creations, but this is different. They added the "your blogs" tab semi-recently and it has never worked. That's not "oh no, it's off a pixel", it's "did you ever click it?"
I've had my own share of janky alignment issues, but the cblog's spacing wasn't messed up before. At some point, changes were made and then it became bad. If it's using a wordpress-style include for posts list and individual display, It should be the same either way because it's in the same template.
@Lenigod
I know this is missing some things, but I can't remember all of them, and I didn't want to list any issue I couldn't reproduce in a couple browsers.
Here is what I feel like every time I find something broken
I think it's due in part to me working in a similar field, that not only do I find 'broken' things easier, but many times I realize it is the result of rushed or un-tested code.
Anyway, a lot of good suggestions here. Thanks!
Like mentioned before, the system we're on was untested and was made very quickly to keep up with the community growing, to some degree we're happy that we took the "do it" path, but we're kind of sad that we've had so many issues due to that.
Also, please bear in mind that we're all capable engineers with lots of experience (some of us wrote books about it, have open source projects, worked for bigger companies, etc). The issue here is that we've had years and years of legacy code which we're taking out of the new version of Elephant.
So be patient. You'll love the new improvements.
I'm trying to think of the right way to express this, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm not questioning the abilities of your or the other people that work on it, but the mentality with which it is applied. Since it's what I do, I can only look at it through that lens of a developer. Dtoid seems to go through phases; a hot, new idea comes up, is plugged, gets mostly implemented, and is then just sort of dropped, never to be mentioned again.
The youtube thing is a perfect example of what I'm trying to say. I have a google doc of videos I wanted to add to posts that hasn't been edited for 45 days, which means it's been at least that long since I gave up looking for fun videos for FNF posts and it was created well before that. So video support was pulled out, and I wouldn't have done that until the new thing was ready. Similarly, between beta.destructoid going away and the potential future fixing of any of the things listed here, Flixist was created. I was getting "Assertion Failed: Bad TK" when I tried to embed a video, but an entire new site was set up. That's not what I would do, so when I see it with developer-vision, I end up in wtfrudointown.
This comment is going on too long, I think. In a nutshell (ah, help, I'm trapped), it's not that I mind the "do it" path, it's that from the outside the path seems things don' get fully done. If the new software is going to fix things, great, but don't backtrack on it. Put it in place and do it until it works.