h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK, what is WITH the Guide entries being broken up into multiple pages with combo boxes to load each section? Today's entry on Pacific Salmon is an example. Chunking the entry this way increases the loading time, because you end up loading all the goo more than once. That, I'm sure, decreases readership; I get so aggravated that I almost never make it to the end of these newfangled fancy entries.

Please, please, PLEASE go back to putting entries all on one page. This looks suspiciously like an optimization for small-screen (i.e. WAP) devices. If so, you need to be detecting the browser and NOT showing it that way for non-WAP browsers. Most of the design around H2G2 is reasonable, but this particular piece of cuteness gets in the way of actually transmitting information.

Bad design! Go to your room!

Agreed - 1st time I encountered this format - yuk, ugg etc

-- I means to say, some of us have got access to *gasp* 1024x768 screens .....


Tigger

And others of us have to live with that 8th wonder of the modern world, the demon.net bottleneck.

Lil

One thing you can do to see the entirety of sectioned articles on one page is type section=all into the URL - for example: http://www.h2g2.com/A242489?section=all. It's still more work than just clicking on the article, but it might be a good temporary solution for you...

Kate

That's good.

But if I had something like a preferences box in the place where I edit my identity, I could indicate how I want my articles sliced.

And whether discussion links should disappear from my front page if I personally haven't contributed to the thread after a specifiable period of time.

And whether I would only like to see the latest n entries of a thread, or only entries since nn/nn/nnnn.

Lil

Aha! Thanks for that hint, Kate. A good stopgap indeed.

Lil's right, though. In the best of possible worlds, we'd be able to set our own preferences on some of these things. Try as they might, HTML designers just can't satisfy everyone.

I believe those sort of preferences are among some of plans for the site. (I'm not a big fan of the sectioning either.) I will share this, though, from my experience in database proramming: anything involving giving the user preference is inherently several times more difficult than doing it one way all the time. So you'll probably have to be patient while they work out some of these preference panels for us.

Yes, as a database professional myself I know what you're talking about.

In my ideal H2G2 world, they would make raw XML feeds for discussion threads and Guide Entries and let us develop XSL and client-side management utilities for them. Of course it's possible to do that now by parsing the HTML, but it's a good deal messier. I think if they made it possible for enterprising users to improve the overall user experience here they might be surprised how much it would contribute to a healthy community.

Then again, I'm not sure how central a healthy community is to the goals of the H2G2 owners, nor just what their developers are spending time on. Operating in an information vacuum, about all we can do is be the squeaky wheels and see whether it gets us some grease.

Hehe, this I know

We're working on the re-design of h2g2 at this very moment. User preferences will enable everyone to customise their h2g2 experience.

Of course we *do* listen to the community, ffmike - it's why we have a feedback forum, after all... And I keep good notes...

In response to 'I'm not sure how central a healthy community is to the goals of the H2G2 owners' - Remember ffmike, I came here from the Community. They welcomed me in. The Community is really important to everyone here, and I mean everyone; our CEO (who's a really, really nice guy, BTW) comes down to see me at *least* once a day and asks 'How's the Community?', 'What's going on?' 'How is everyone?' and has a chat and catches up with the gossip and enjoys reading new articles over my shoulder. They're cool.

We're working on the re-design of h2g2 at this very moment. User preferences will enable everyone to customise their h2g2 experience.

Of course we *do* listen to the community, ffmike - it's why we have a feedback forum, after all... And I keep good notes...

In response to 'I'm not sure how central a healthy community is to the goals of the H2G2 owners' - Remember ffmike, I came here from the Community. They welcomed me in. The Community is really important to everyone here, and I mean everyone; the CEO (who's a really, really nice guy, BTW) comes down to see me at *least* once a day and asks 'How's the Community?', 'What's going on?' 'How is everyone?' He chats and reads over my shoulder and laughs at the posts and the new Entries.

We're all fascinated by what goes on at h2g2, it's so interesting...

For the record:

* We are implementing a user preference to enable you to always read sectioned entries in one go. Patience...

* We will also add an option to the pull-down menu to display all the sections in one go, so you can override locally as well as globally.

* Check out the entry on Driving Etiquette, which is a prime example of when sectioning really does work. In long entries it makes it much easier to find what you're looking for.

* You can also categorise sections individually. But we haven't released the categorisation system yet, so there's not much point in me telling you that.

Happy now?

Happy now? Happier, anyhow. You should know by now that I'm a squeaky wheel, I think. I do appreciate vastly the amount of time you & Peta have put into replying to my concerns. I realize that things are very busy on your end, and I'm delighted you can take any time to keep us informed. I believe I've said this elsewhere, but for the record, I'm happy with H2G2 and if I point out flaws it's only because I think it could be an even better place than it already is.

Patience of course is in short supply for those of us living on internet time. But I'll try.

Categorisation sounds like a lovely idea, and a much-needed one. I trust you're considering that on a very large scale. The work that Mustapha has done in collecting all of the history-related entries in one spot is interesting in this regard, I think. And of course it would fit right in with a more data-oriented view of things...

You may have noticed that I've been working on some client-side utilities to make H2G2 users' experience more positive -- prime among these being an alternative display of the information from the front page & the "who's on now" list. I am trying to be *very* careful to do this in such a way as to not decrease page views on the actual site, and to not needlessly drive up traffic in any automated fashion. If you folks have any interest in either encouraging or discouraging this sort of thing, it might be good for someone to drop me a line email ([email protected]). I like this place and do *not* want to do anything that runs afoul of your own plans. If I can do anything that contributes though I'm happy to do so.

She felt it so strongly she had to say it twice.

And Mark, good to hear the sectioning is going to lead to a default "all" view on the articles. I've been considering adding the tag in in my editing stuff, but now I don't have to.

I must agree.

Showing all sections is now an option at the top of all sectioned entries. We'l hopefully add this as a user option soon, so if people loathe sections, they can turn them off forever.

Hope this helps.

It helps. Thanks.

Was just re-looking over Bizarre Australian Competitions ( http://www.h2g2.com/A240814 ) and didn't see the option.. Did I miss something?

'Nonnie

*blinkblink* Never mind. *wipes spectacles*