On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 16:15:49 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 07:07:23 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>>
>> Home page:
>>
>> This is a mess. There is way too much here. There is an attention budget and it is important to manage it well.
>>
> I think you're overstating it: it's a bit busy, but I think it can be fixed.
>

I work in growth, I've seen numbers.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 13:42:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/15/15 5:54 AM, tcak wrote:
>> The harder it is made for people to contribute the system for fixations,
>> the lesser changes are seen.
>
> I don't think we've had many contributions via the "Improve this page" button.
>

I don't know how representative it is, but once in a while, i forgot all of this is in DDoc, I notice something, what to do a quick patch, and end up being reminded this is in DDoc and I have no idea how to fix the thing, because suddenly, what looked like a quick fix end up being learning a new macro language.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 11:13:51 UTC, anonymous wrote:
> I agree, others don't. See discussion on <https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/1139> where I originally proposed this download button: <https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/9287500/10711239/4fb76968-7a75-11e5-8677-8a27eebdc952.png>.
>
> Now, I don't want to complain about people not liking the design. And I pulled the design changes back rather quickly, because the functionality was supposed to be the subject of the PR. A big, flashy download button has not exactly been rejected.

I get more and more irritated by how non factual the whole IT scene is. Why does it boils down to opinion ?

A good rule of thumb: if you can't notice and click on the button immediately while drunk, it is not big and obvious enough.

The proposed design is better that what we have now, but it is still clumsy. There are box into box, and way too much infos.

It is not opinion, it is what works. If one is of different opinion, there is an easy way to settle: do an A/B test and settle. I can tell you, on that one the result that would come out of this are fairly obvious.

On 15.12.2015 22:50, deadalnix wrote:
> I get more and more irritated by how non factual the whole IT scene is.
> Why does it boils down to opinion ?
>
> A good rule of thumb: if you can't notice and click on the button
> immediately while drunk, it is not big and obvious enough.
>
> The proposed design is better that what we have now, but it is still
> clumsy. There are box into box, and way too much infos.
>
> It is not opinion, it is what works. If one is of different opinion,
> there is an easy way to settle: do an A/B test and settle. I can tell
> you, on that one the result that would come out of this are fairly obvious.

What "works" means is still debatable. Is it a goal to get users to the download quickly, or are other things equally or more important?

Also, we don't really have the resources to do studies on these things, do we? So when you say that it's obviously this way and someone else says it's obviously that way, we're back to opinions.

Also, to reiterate, a more noticeable download button is not off the table. I pulled back all style changes in that PR to focus on the functionality first (which I kinda gave up on by now, too, because it turned out to be more difficult than I had hoped).

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 10:54:09 UTC, tcak wrote:
> It bothers me so much to report a bug on https://issues.dlang.org . The reason is that the password stops working for me. Firefox saves the username and password. I try to use it after 2 months, and whops, system says it isn't available.

Never had this happen to me. What browser and OS are you using, because issues.dlang.org runs on bugzilla, which is a very popular piece of software that is used all over the place.

> Another issue is contributing the website's design. I reported a problem on the forum that is about the title problem of web page. http://forum.dlang.org/thread/pymfyjuckxbvjolxlczg@forum.dlang.org Still the problem will be fixed.

I made a PR for that issue https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/1167

It has yet to be reviewed by someone with merge rights.

> Now I am asking, IF I was to make some changes for web site's look, and post a picture of them (CSS changes mostly), would it be okay to discuss it here, and apply them in short notice? If a change would take 1 week, that doesn't work. I am
> offering help here.

Sorry, but it's completely infeasible for anyone to propose a sweeping style change and expect it to go through quickly, especially sense I can guarantee that there are going to be issues with the first draft you make. If you were to make a PR, I'd expect it to be either accepted or rejected after maybe two months of deliberation, if you're lucky. This is the nature of volunteer work.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 13:42:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Yes, the css has grown long in the teeth. Just replacing it with something else is needed, even if it's not an actual improvement.

I have to disagree with you heavily on this point. Changing the look and feel of a site just for the sake of change is a lot of work for little gain. The issue with the site is not the CSS in the majority of cases but the content.

Also, you saying "even if it's not an actual improvement"  is a real head scratcher for me. We need a change even if it makes things worse?

> A related idea is to investigate the use of http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/ for the code samples. Takers?

This would be rather simple to implement, but custom fonts make pages load slower, on average 100-150ms. When the front page already takes 2secs+ to load entirely, I would want to do some optimizations first before this happens.

Some easy wins which could net a 500ms+ speedup:

* use gzip on everything
* minify and concatenate css files
* minify and concatenate js files
* use cache busting plus long cache times in HTTP headers

Unfortunately, all of these require the server admin (whoever that is) to do it and can't be done via PR.

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 22:45:30 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> * use gzip on everything
> * minify and concatenate css files
> * minify and concatenate js files
> * use cache busting plus long cache times in HTTP headers

I made bug reports for all of these

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15451
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15449
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15448

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 22:17:33 UTC, anonymous wrote:
> What "works" means is still debatable. Is it a goal to get users to the download quickly, or are other things equally or more important?
>

Download is the first step in your tunnel. If one can't get to the download step, one can't use D. And if one can't use D, one doesn't care about everything else on the website.

> Also, we don't really have the resources to do studies on these things, do we? So when you say that it's obviously this way and someone else says it's obviously that way, we're back to opinions.
>

Ignoring metrics is always more expensive. Also, I'm not stating opinion and preference here. Personally, I don't care about the download button, I already downloaded things. But that's a classic tunnel optimization.

> Also, to reiterate, a more noticeable download button is not off the table. I pulled back all style changes in that PR to focus on the functionality first (which I kinda gave up on by now, too, because it turned out to be more difficult than I had hoped).

On 12/15/2015 04:45 PM, deadalnix wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 13:42:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 12/15/15 5:54 AM, tcak wrote:
>>> The harder it is made for people to contribute the system for fixations,
>>> the lesser changes are seen.
>>
>> I don't think we've had many contributions via the "Improve this page"
>> button.
>>
>
> I don't know how representative it is, but once in a while, i forgot all
> of this is in DDoc, I notice something, what to do a quick patch, and
> end up being reminded this is in DDoc and I have no idea how to fix the
> thing, because suddenly, what looked like a quick fix end up being
> learning a new macro language.

It seems knowing ddoc is part of knowing D. -- Andrei

On 12/15/2015 05:45 PM, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 13:42:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Yes, the css has grown long in the teeth. Just replacing it with
>> something else is needed, even if it's not an actual improvement.
>
> I have to disagree with you heavily on this point. Changing the look and
> feel of a site just for the sake of change is a lot of work for little
> gain.

This is easy to refute because only one counter-example is needed. I made a bunch of non-improvement changes in early 2014. The success was tremendous. -- Andrei