I think the mere fact of having unread comments highlighted in green more than makes up for the rest of the arguably worse changes (the old header is the only thing I regret (and frankly who cares, that’s textbook bikeshedding), the other small changes are probably improvements).
As a fellow programmer who has to deal with usability and fickle users (though I make games and not websites), I can guess how you feel—it is annoying how people tend to freak out over small details that are obviously small and easy-to-fix bugs (like the cache issue), and weight a lot of impressions together to form one big “good or bad” feeling instead of analyzing each aspect independently. And people also tend to think that some changes like polls are trivial to implement, etc.
That’s my favorite too. I’ve gotten into the habit of following discussions by using the Recent Comments page, since it has been so hard to follow what’s new with the threaded commenting system, and having new comments highlighted is going to make it much easier to follow the flow of the discussion in context.
There’s one issue that I noticed with that feature—viewing an individual comment gets counted as viewing the whole post. So when I click on a comment in Recent Comments, and then click “View the original post” to see the rest of the discussion, there aren’t any green outlines so I don’t have an easy way to tell which of the other comments are new. I wonder if it could be set up so that viewing an individual comment doesn’t count as viewing the post.
I think the mere fact of having unread comments highlighted in green more than makes up for the rest of the arguably worse changes (the old header is the only thing I regret (and frankly who cares, that’s textbook bikeshedding), the other small changes are probably improvements).
As a fellow programmer who has to deal with usability and fickle users (though I make games and not websites), I can guess how you feel—it is annoying how people tend to freak out over small details that are obviously small and easy-to-fix bugs (like the cache issue), and weight a lot of impressions together to form one big “good or bad” feeling instead of analyzing each aspect independently. And people also tend to think that some changes like polls are trivial to implement, etc.
So overall, keep on the good work!
That’s my favorite too. I’ve gotten into the habit of following discussions by using the Recent Comments page, since it has been so hard to follow what’s new with the threaded commenting system, and having new comments highlighted is going to make it much easier to follow the flow of the discussion in context.
There’s one issue that I noticed with that feature—viewing an individual comment gets counted as viewing the whole post. So when I click on a comment in Recent Comments, and then click “View the original post” to see the rest of the discussion, there aren’t any green outlines so I don’t have an easy way to tell which of the other comments are new. I wonder if it could be set up so that viewing an individual comment doesn’t count as viewing the post.