After more than 15 years with basically the same layout, the Realclimate website – while still functional – has become increasing anachronistic both in appearance and ‘under the hood’. In order to take advantage of more up to date web-site designs and new features that have been developed since the early 2000s (!), we need to upgrade the site, and while we are at it, update the theme and design, while maintaining an aesthetic link to the original.
With this post, we can reveal the new layout.
The differences are not related to content but to appearance – all of the material is still here – but the new layout is much fresher and includes much better support for people reading the site on their phones or iPads. We are using larger typefaces, cleaner menus and a more content-focused presentation for posts.
All of this is intended to improve the reader/commenter experience, but it’s inevitable that we have missed some aspects and/or some of the design features may be suboptimal for some. We will endeavor to fix any issues or problems that you find. So please comment below if you like it or hate it, if you find anything that’s broken or if you have any specific requests for tweaks. We’ll try and iterate over the next few days to get it right.
Thanks!
Reading #NotAllModels, I immediately find that the blockquote starting “A.4.4” is hard to read… and it’s not just that the text is typcal IPCC-speak, Ohno they have changed the color of the text.
Folks, anything, ANYthing that makes complicated text even a little harder to read will lose you some customers. My eyes are old and I genuinely found the blockquote harder to read than the main text. Please please black on white! Hope somebody is checking these comments…
I just tried to reread the “If you doubt that the AMOC has weakened, read this” piece from some years ago, and it was frustrating.
I do really urge a “jump to most recent comment” option. As others have mentioned, having to scroll through many responses and review all the old comments gets tiresome.
Not to mention being a good reminder of who was prominently taking up bandwidth with bogus comments.
It made me realize why I quit reading comment threads a while back. Bad for my blood pressure. As others have mentioned, the old Usenet “Killfile” tool was invaluable.
Strong (but humble) opinion here: If the numbering requires the name/icon and date to take up more space, I’d get rid of it. In fact, I think the numbering is old school and encourages the endless boring arguments most of us would like to see absorbed into the nesting system. I think it better for people to learn to copy the link at the date stamp and use that for reference if they need to continue outside the nesting. However, I see that the bullet vs. number system does remove the indent, which compresses the text somewhat.
I also agree that the typeface should be pure black, and would encourage slightly less line spacing. I remember having this discussion with Tobis on the old P3, and realize that most news outlets use the same spacing, but still think it is slightly too generous. I am looking at the tightness of my comment draft and believe there is a happier medium, though I prefer this look to the “formal” result.
The Bore Hole and the Crank Shaft seem to have lost all content – have they been discontinued? And has the historical content of them been deleted? I love reading them.
The content is still there but the system seems to have changed or is buggy. When the borehole page appears but with no comments showing, click on the word borehole and the comments then appear.
Hack for comment link issue
For me, when I click on a recent comment, it goes to the correct address briefly but then jumps to the end of the comments. But the correct address for the comment is still in the address bar, so you can get to the intended comment by clicking on the address bar and hitting “enter”.
This is in Firefox; the problem so far does not happen in Chrome.
I’d like to suggest to the moderators that, since you have all that empty space in the sidebar, you enlarge the list of recent comments for those of us who might not check in as frequently.
I find it impossible to follow any discussions, but that’s a mixed blessing since so much of the discussion is just a lot of bickering and useless back and forth. I think we really need the killfile function to hush/hide comments and commenters.
The redesign looks great.
One issue: The “Mission” and “Archives” tabs (but not the rest) default to French for me. I got the same results on two different computers and four different browsers (Brave, Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
Looks like you’ve already fixed this, thanks!
Today there doesn’t seem to be any comments preview box. This is very frustrating. This is with windows 10 and google.
I am seeing the same thing. And a reply I submitted yesterday seems to have disappeared into the ether. After submitting, no “your comment is awaiting moderation” preview, either.
Linux and firefox (and linux and SeaMonkey).
At least for that one, I see the comment with the “awaiting moderation” tag after I submitted it.
Still a persistent problem. I have tried three times to add a comment under the “hockey stick” thread, and each time there is no preview, no “awaiting moderation” message after submitting, and no comment every appearing.
Still no preview here.
Has anybody used the search options to find an old post using a keyword or a quote?
The old search one was getting increasingly ineffective – digging up too many tangentially related threads, but the new one does not seem to find anything ….
[Response: Trying to track this down. A number of things have stopped working for uncertain reasons… – gavin]
We now seem to have tiny little faint coloured text on a coloured background. And huge spaces between things. This is terrible and even worse than before. Its really hard on the eyes.
I hate being critical like this, because the science content of this website is so good.
Oh that’s strange. When I posted my comment above about small text, the refreshed page jumped to the normal text size. Other pages have small text as well, but zooming out helps. But we shouldn’t have to do that.
[Response: trying to reduce the spacing… – gavin]
I have also noticed the smaller font on my desktop. It improves the amount of information on my screen, but there is still a lot of space wasted by the display of a “picture” (just a white head on a grey background for most people) and the name and link to the comment. For short comments (like the ones I see now above this one), that header is taking up half the screen space. I”d vote for dumping the “pictures” if you can.
…and I echo nigelj’s comment on the poor contrast. The modern OS design of eliminating any contrast so things look artistic and blend together is slowly making things unusable. The edit box is not bad – darker grey on white background – but the normal text on my screen is dark grey on a bluey-light-grey background that really lacks contrast.
Preview is still not being displayed.
A few updates. We have fixed the search function, but we are still puzzled by why the comment preview no longer works. As mentioned above, we are still looking for a plugin to replace the old functions we had for comment numbering. We are trying to condense the (excessive) white space in the comment threads. Patience while we sort this out is appreciated! – gavin
It seems comment threads are limited in number? After a certain number one simply cannot respond any further. I first thought it was censoring by the admins, but have seen it in numerous threads including those with no obvious reason to cut it off. It’s creating confusion and chaos as threads get nipped and jump here and there. If it is possible to de-limit the number of responses in a thread, it would help a lot.
I’m not visiting this site every day, but it seems the text size has shrunk some time in the last couple of days, since the initial redesign launch.
At the moment it’s way too small for my +50 years old eyes on a 1920×1080 monitor (scale 100%) with Firefox (110% zoom).
I made a screen shot of this comment field, with terminal and text editor windows for comparison, see.
Please see http://www.dropbox.com/s/uexv3eipb0l8mxh/rc-fonts.png?dl=0
This is going quite well; thanks.
The sub-threading is a big improvement and the visuals are fine now. (More nests would be great if possible.)
Not sure how the numbering would help all that much. Rather, now that we have the sub-threading, it would be most useful to see that someone has replied to my comments, and expanding the list of recent comments so we don’t miss them.
Much better would be to keep a list of comments a user has read for the last month. Add a “Show New” button and nested, linear, whatever; it all works.
Clicking on Sidebar Links
Perhaps others already found this out, but in case not:
When you click on a “recent comments” link in the sidebar, it takes you briefly to the message then pops up to the header. IF you click the link a second time, it takes you to the message.
This is clearly an issue of the coding for links being a bit squirrely, most likely in the “target” or in the “If… then” part of the code…. or something like that.
Yes, this is a problem I have on all devices. On desktop, there’s a workaround: the URL stays in the search bar, and entering it a second time takes me to the comment. Slightly annoying, but doable.
Sadly, that doesn’t work on my tablet; there the only option is random scrolling. Not really workable.
That works thanks, but I noticed the reply button had become vastaa, which is apparently finnish for reply! And other words look like they are in finnish. Remember the old system sometimes had words like kirjoitti which is also finnish. Its totally weird.
where do I find the “sidebar links?” I am not spotting that.
I don’t see “recent comments” in the sidebar. Any help to find that?
Scroll down… down… down… ALL the way down! :-/
ok, thanks. I think of that as the footer, not a sidebar. I was hoping I was actually not seeing a sidebar like the one on the previous website. This redesign is a bit of a mess imo. The old site was not great, but it was ok. This is a step backwards so far.
Cheers
Mike
If your zoom is too large, the recent comments will appear at the bottom of the screen, not in th sidebar.
I don’t get it’ just scroll down the sidebar again and hit the link. On any device it should be a given number of clicks on the scrolling bar. It’s three on my laptop.
Click the link.
Click three times on side scrollbar.
Click the link.
Or, if you watch where it goes the first time and you can see it’s the last comment, either click low in the side scrollbar till you get there or use your mouse to drag it down to the bottom.
Should have been under Kevin’s reply. Weird.
Thanks, Ray, that worked. If I zoom out to tiny text size, the side panel comes back. At the side where I would expect to find a side panel!
I don’t think the kill file add-on works, but I saw someone mention kill file… so ??
Cheers
Mike
I think the redesign is terrible, however it greatly simplifies my killfile program. Small mercies i suppose.
sidd
Hi – Really like the new “start here” page. Great as a refresher for those of us who are not scientists and a good resource for referring people to. However, contrary to the statement that “We are using larger typefaces,,” the typeface as it shows up on my desktop is tiny, very thin, and light-colored (pale gray rather than black). Almost unreadable for my aging eyes and attempts to increase the size per Chrome instructions produced almost no results. Am I the only one having this problem?
Just checked, and no, using the “zoom in” function under the View tab in my browser (Firefox) worked just fine. (It doesn’t affect size other tabs, which is great if not particularly surprising.) Not sure why your experience is different (and sorry it is).
Also, per Ray’s comment on this, it put the sidebar where it belongs rather than at the foot of the page. Thanks, Ray!
I do miss the automatic ‘preview’ function, though. It has saved many an error on my part in the past, and saved y’all from reading some seriously mangled sentences–or, perhaps, *trying* to read same! Fair warning…
“It doesn’t affect size other tabs…”
See what I mean about mangled sentences? :-(
If there’s no more preview, “edit” capability would be nice, even if only during pre-moderation.
Hr. Schmidt Dr.R.Climate
I see you are back to original size and the typings has become black rather than blue on pale blue background.
You see, the optical clearness of eye- lenses gets more and more opaque as years go by, and I reallize that you have now given up that conspiracy against the elderlies in order to better have younger people in here.
So far so good, but as it was, I could see more of the text. We are old readers and aquainted to see a whole newspaper all at a time, not just a tiny glimpse of it in a window..
It`s trained mentality, like being able to hear a whole machine or a whole orchestra or seeing a whole landscape and a whole situation all in once, , and not just smaller and framed, labeled details.
I feel inhibited and discriminated in my trained and conventional way of thinking..
Think of all the ways of sight and looking, There are 12 of them at least, presumably at the same time, and our tiny brains is supposed to keep all that together in proper orientation, understanding, and performance.
Else we will not be well present and incarnated- involved in the universe and in the whole situation.
I would personally rather like to have it like it was, more compressed with more infrormation and more participants displayed visually at the same time.
Layout and display really makes a lot of the style and the message, like the whole Newspaper in hand rather than the short messages and telegrams..
This thread has not been very active recently. I notice that one well-deserved commenter has had a couple of comments redirected to the Crank Shaft, but if you follow the link, the comments are not there. This one, for example, currently listed in the “Recent Comments” sidebar.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/03/the-crank-shaft/#comment-795629
Following that link puts you on a page with 31 entries, covering 21 March 2019 to 28 June 2021. Nothing from the individual in question, though.
The “Filed under the Crank Shaft” link at the top of that page points here:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/the-crank-shaft/
…which has no comments at all.
Not that I’m in a hurry to read more weapons-grade crankery from that individual, but I though you might want to know.
P.S. The Bore Hole (no longer easy to find – that may be by design!) is also empty:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/the-bore-hole/
For some reason the links go to the Bore Hole/Crank Shaft categories, rather than the posts. Click on the titles to see the post and the comments.
I am not following.
In the above comment, the first link was obtained from the Recent Comments sidebar, where the name is just text and “The Crank Shaft” has a link. Leads to the old 2019/03 version, which does not run past 28 June 2021.
I’ve tried several other possibilities. I either end up with the old version (31 old comments), or the second link in my post above (no comments).
In the old version (2019/03) the breadcrumbs at the top (“You are here: home/The Crank Shaft”) point to the new version. So does the link behind “Filed Under The Crank Shaft”).
On the new page (empty of comments), the breadcrumbs do not include a Crank Shaft link – only Home provides a link under “You are here: Home/Archives for The Crank Shaft”) And there is a link behind the main title “The Crank Shaft” (above “11 Mar 201 by Group”), that leads to the old (2019/03) version, and a link behind “Filed under The Crank Shaft” that stays on the new page.
If I go to the Archives link under the header image, and scroll down to the Crank Shaft link on that page, I still get the new, but comment-less, page.
Just tried it in another browser – same result. (Firefox, SeaMonkey, both on linux.)
And just tried it in Edge on a WinBlows machine. Same behaviour.
So, only old comments, regardless of where I try.
Yes, that’s my experience as well (Firefox on OS).
There is still a problem with the posts dropping into the Crank Shaft (& potentially also the Bore Hole which has yet to receive any custom since the RC Redesign).
We have had two such posts into the Crank Shaft since Redesign.
Both appeared on the sidebar listing the dozen most-recent posts. And their presence in the Crank Shaft is shown by the number of posts incrementing up to 32.
But there remain only 30 comments showing in the Crank Shaft, not 32.
Good catch, MAR. That explains my confusion when I said “31” above. A little later, I saw “32”, but I saw no new comments in the old Crank Shaft listing:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/03/the-crank-shaft/
I didn’t think to actually count them.
I have no idea how moderators move stuff from a regular thread into the Bore Hole or Crank Shaft, but it looks like the code behind it may be doing something like this:
Moves the comment into the area for the new Crank Shaft (entry in a database?), but does not update the new Crank Shaft’s counter. The new Crank Shaft page still thinks there are no comments there, based on its counter, and does not search for comments to display.
In the old Crank Shaft page, the code gets the now-updated old counter, says there are now 31 or 32 comments, but when it searches for them, it still only finds the original 30 to display.
Maybe as simple as finding the place where the counters are updated and specifying the correct one?
this is very odd. I’ve cleared the cache, but while the database has 32 comments, the page only shows 30. No clue what’s happening….
A bit more investigation reveals that if a comment is a reply to another comment, then the move to the crank shaft fails. I’ve uploaded a newer plugin for this and it now seems to work.
Glad to hear it. They are now located in the old Crank Shaft location, which now has 35 in total (based on the number at the top):
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2019/03/the-crank-shaft/
The new Crank shaft is still empty, but we’ll have to see what happens when the Usual Suspects post again.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/the-crank-shaft/
I’m not sure whether to hope that we get a chance to see this working properly, or to hope that the Usual Suspects will clue in and realize they are cranks. The first is a reasonable hope. The second is a faint hope.
…and today we see new comments in both The Crank Shaft and The Bore Hole. (Both well-deserved, it would seem).
Request
Could the display of “recent comments” be expanded beyond 12? Or, if you don’t want to take up the space on the front page, allow access to the list by a click?
I’ve figured out how to bookmark sub-threads when I make a comment, so I can see if I get a reply.
But I am missing other new comments from people I would like to read, when they don’t show up in that recent comments display… because of people I have no interest in reading filling it up.
Thanks.
How do you get notifications from a bookmark? Info would be appreciated.
There is no notification…you click on it, it takes you to your comment, and you see if there is a response.
The trick is to remember to bookmark the thing to which you are replying, because your comment may not show up in the “recent” list, and then you have to go back and search for it.
It works for me because I don’t comment very much.
The absence of pre-views for comments coupled with what appears to be aberrant HTML interpretations (in two comments of mine today it had problems with the first instance of [a href=”…] it encountered) does make comments which are more than simple text a bit of a challenge.