The more minimal things get, the more refined the remaining UI can get 
The autoplaying video was just a crappy brightcove embed that couldnât be turned off, but was needed for that particular post. Standard TV affiliate shitvideo.
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Iâm an ancient spirit of evil! Awesome, go me!
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We may be old spirits, stuck in the mud,or however youâd like to refer to usâŚbut have you done a/b testing? Do people actually prefer the new design, or do they begrudgingly use it because we, by default, accept what we get?
Itâs really easy to use page views as a metric (youâve beat us over the head with it it every time someone bitches about the new design), but as a quantitative metric it is absolutely worthless when new users/default users donât know there is an alternative to the gawker-esque layout that prioritizes days-old features over the hourly posts.
Put simply, if new visitors to BB knew they had a choice, what would they choose?
(Iâm not expecting anything more than a terse one-liner or a trite meme as a response, but it would sure be nice if you would earnestly address these criticisms for once).
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We like this design. It has also presented the results we intended and lets us publish more content we like. More people are reading boing boing than ever. We are commissioning pieces we want to read and we want to publish.
We will change the design when it suits us and our business needs to do so.
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Just plain curiosity, whatâs your bounce rate from the blog view vs the regular view? Alexa has you at 66% overall.
Please donât get me wrong, I enjoy the longer-forn content and the more diverse points of view since the re-do. Its made BB even more of an essential (multi-) daily read.
From a design aesthetic, the default layout is difficult to navigate and intuit, especially when one visits multiple times a day â the new posts from the people we care about are so condensed and the large features donât change as often. Donât give those non-feature posts such a short shrift! Thatâs why I still use the old view - I can know that I wonât miss content just because some algorythmic design says that I donât care about Xeniâs or Coryâs or your posts as much as the guest du-jour.
Bottom-line: we all appreciate the content, or we wouldnât keep coming back, buying the shwag, participating in the BBS, and clicking the sponsored/affiliate links.
Iâm not asking you to change, revert, redesign, or anything else about the site, just trying to provide some honest feedback.
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We have a very high bounce rate due to the large percentage of our traffic that comes from search. Alexa is not a source we look at but I am not surprised.
If we went back to being a pure blog full-time we would have to give up the longer features, they were lost in the speed of the blog river. Features need more time on the front door to get views that make paying for them worthwhile. We are getting more and more traffic from features. Blog-style content in the blog column continues to grow, faster than before the redesign but at a slower pace than Features.
We really like the features. We like having new voices in the mix. We also think they, and the frontpage that enables them, are critical to our continued success.
We keep the /page/1 format for folks who want it. You already have our empathy. It was intentional to leave it for you before you ever asked for it. Rob is making the changes people asked for to the blog format. He may have had some of them in mind on his own, I do not know.
I, personally, am always going to have less empathy for someone who openly tells me they donât want to support our main source of income and how we pay for all this content. It is a very, very hard business to run and we are very fortunate to be able to do it â ads are what support us. Youâll need to buy a lot of t-shirts to move that needle.
Nearly every day we discuss how lucky we are to be able to do what we do for a living. None of us came at this looking for money, every single member of the team landed here out of passion for Boing Boing and what it means to us. Almost every single one of us worked for free long before we were paid a dime.
We try very, very hard to ensure this site is something people enjoy and appreciate you reading it. I hope you continue.
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This also makes sense from a purely tactical point of view.
Anyone (well for some value of âanyoneâ) can slap together a link blog that says look at this picture, look at this gif, look at this banana ⌠but mixing in some thoughtful, in-depth content features is where sites distinguish themselves. Thatâs where the long game is won.
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A/B testing (which weâve done a fair bit of now) doesnât tell you what people prefer. It just tells you what they click.
The market for âcool things to look at on the webâ is saturated, and few people do anything begrudgingly on the web. Youâre an outlierâsomeone with unusually structured preferences, who commits to particular interfaces, and considers deeply their relationship with sites on that basis.
Bear in mind that commenters in general are already a small and unrepresentative constituency within the readership as a whole. We listen, but are more aware of that context than we used to be â an awareness that is growing among web publishers in general.
I guess itâs interesting to think about quantitive metrics in new/default usersâ abstract preferences for homepage formats that are still available to them anyway? But only so far. Weâre attached to the classic reverse-chron blog format, too, but not to it being what everyone else should prefer. More people come to the new layout than did to the old one, and more people return to it too, so our strong preference for a more zine-like presentation is continually reinforced by its performance. If anything, our greatest concern is that we need to try harder to live up to its promise.
Iâm sure this is a frustrating answer, because it implies we know more about our audience than it does. But this is ours understand or misunderstand 
Itâs not just about traffic, either. We know what new visitors to BB would choose, if they had the choice of telling usâŚand we wonât do it!
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Hamburger? Cheeseburger! No Coke, Pepsi.
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Used to eat at the Billy Goat in Chicago all the time.
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The dual/duelling content of the features and the blog works really well. And is among my favorite flavors of free ice cream.
If it pays to keep the lights on, all the better.
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srsly, no Mumm-Ra gif?
In other weirdness, Iâm missing icons on http://bbs.boingboing.net (see hopefully attached image for reference). Iâm not running any ad-blocking or script blockers on any of boingboing.net.
I think that I have whitelisted any other domains that could be required for this to work correctly too.
Please could you clarify which resources/assets are needed for this to be fixed?
You have https anywhere installed, and itâs buggy. It is causing problems for you on this site. Specifically in loading the font glyph.
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Nice catch. I hadnât checked with that extension turned off. Iâll look at a suitable exclusion later today.
Thanks again for the information.
Edit: rule in place and working.
I have had that experience in spades. https anywhere does not play nice with BB yet. If you find a good one that works could you please post it for the rest of us who might want to turn https anywhere back on but still have our beloved BB work properly.
Iâll do that but it turns out that I spoke too soon. The rule appeared to work but the effects didnât persist across browser sessions.
Currently I have to toggle HTTPS-E off & on at the start of each visit.
We are hopefully soon to have our HTTPS roll out debugged. We all want it online.
Sorry. It has taken us over a year!
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Yeppers, me too. I checked my AdBlock settings; I have AdBlock disabled on this site and I have it whitelisted. Issues Iâm seeing:
But still I canât click the hamburger! No menu pops up when I click the hamburger! (Hamburger, new term for me, gotta use it more).
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