JRoller: Continuing a fine tradition of sucking
JRoller is one of those impressive applications where the version number consistently marches in the opposite direction to usability and functionality.
The new version is rolled out, and it is astoundingly bad. I don’t know who the current set of geniuses behind it are, but kudos to you guys, you really seem to know how to fuck up a good thing.
Where does one start? Why on earth were the font sizes changed? Why must titles on the front page be so massive? Is Rick Ross going blind in his old age, and forcing his need for font magnification onto everyone?
Speaking of the front page…What on earth has happened here? What sort of sick drug induced haze would make this seem like a good idea? If there’s ever proof that developers can’t design a functional UI then this has to be it. Previously, you could view all recent entries without scrolling. Now, you just see 3 if you’re lucky. Previously, you weren’t forced to read nazi shite or foreign gibberish, you just saw the title and author and quickly averted your eyes. Now you’re regaled with this wanky content whether you like it or not.
Now this might be a surprise to some, but most JRoller blogs are, on the whole, terminally dull and tedious. Most people have next to nothing useful to impart. Why oh why do we need brief blurbs for every entry?
Next up, we lose the useful and professional blog name in the hot blogs list, to be replaced by usernames. Who the fuck cares that this is the ‘fate’ blog? The author is irrelevant, what matters is the content and blog name.
The tabbed UI look is also astoundingly braindamaged. Most people are read-only users, so seeing a single tab with ‘main’ is a complete waste of space.
The search functionality is still amusingly useless. Returning any number of duplicate hits, and managing to be the only search functionality on any website in 2004 without paging support.
The edit weblog pages are equally pathetic and depressing. Fields are laid out in a haphazard manner, their positions seemingly decided by a random number generator. Where previously you could see how many comments a particular entry had right on the main edit page, now you have to manually count them in the edit entry page. The spastic calendar date picker does not work on Safari (it pops up, but never goes away).
Not only that, but we’re also presented with a list of nonsensical options for formatting. ‘Email scrambler’ and ‘bookmark linker’ might seem like obvious intuitive names as alternative formatting options to ‘textile formatter’, but to us dummies, it’s utter gibberish. An html link for each option to some sort of help or guide to the differences wouldn’t be considered too rude, you fuckwits.
The edit user page brings its own brand of humour, by insisting that I am in fact Albanian, and live in Eirunepe (in the US, apparently).
May 31st, 2004 at 1:01 am
First post?
May 31st, 2004 at 3:59 am
Maybe it was, who the fuck cares?
May 31st, 2004 at 4:09 am
> The search functionality is still amusingly
> useless. Returning any number of duplicate
> hits, and managing to be the only search
> functionality on any website in 2004 without
> paging support.
+ + + +
1. Learn Italian.
2. Search for some shit in Italian-ecommerce sites.
3. Get back buying stuff from other Euro countries as usual.
May 31st, 2004 at 5:50 am
Did they use Mozilla to test this crap? Half of the stuff on the front page is written over the top of the stupid zig-zag border so you can’t read it. Maybe that’s why they needed larger fonts. It didn’t work anyway. And what happened to the boxes for these comments? It looks like one big comment (or one big pile of shite). All we need is Ciara and that other tosser to post a couple of their tedious monologues and nobody will bother trying to figure out where one comment ends and another begins.
Remember! People who write web sites are underpaid, stupid children. They are not real programmers. They are the VB kiddies of today. They have no idea. Don’t make them feel any more worthless than they already feel. I mean, just because they’re fucking wankers there’s no need to insult them.
May 31st, 2004 at 6:25 am
Does JRoller really detect IP now?
May 31st, 2004 at 7:10 am
What if I specify email address (like Davide), will JRoller show the IP address?
I’m sorry for my bad English. I’m from… uhh… Nigeria (but my mom is a Chinese… haiya). Our country exports world class drug-trafficers.
May 31st, 2004 at 10:31 am
In addition to your other issues, it appears that some change in the RSS feed is causing all stories to appear as new every time my (Radio Userland) aggregator polls for them. (I’ve deleted ‘TSS: First keynote’ at least 4 times now.)
May 31st, 2004 at 4:40 pm
Am i the only one who can’t view the blogs in IE? Opera is working just fine.
May 31st, 2004 at 5:48 pm
[Trackback] Testing 1 2 3
May 31st, 2004 at 7:23 pm
> Am i the only one who can’t view the
> blogs in IE? Opera is working just fine.
What sort of a dum question is that, if it works in Opera then bloody use Opera. If it doesn’t work in IE then don’t use it, it’s crap anyway.
May 31st, 2004 at 7:26 pm
Testing the email address…
May 31st, 2004 at 10:40 pm
Zander is a retarded asshole. Maybe he made the change.
http://javadesktop.org/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=10577&tstart=0
May 31st, 2004 at 11:33 pm
What in the hell is wrong with the format of the comments? It is virtually impossible to read using Safari.
June 1st, 2004 at 1:04 am
I’m using (a legal copy of) Windows 95, with default IE. I can’t properly see this comment page. What should I do?
June 1st, 2004 at 1:07 am
I am using Pirate Copy of Longhorn and I can’t browse the web at all. What should I do?
Excuse please my poor English. I am from Iraq, where we want our old Dictator back.
June 1st, 2004 at 3:49 am
The homepage is a complete mess in Mozilla Firefox.
Get back the old UI.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it and if you do – deliver something better as good as the old one
June 1st, 2004 at 5:07 am
>What sort of a dum question is that, if it works >in Opera then bloody use Opera. If it doesn’t >work in IE then don’t use it, it’s crap anyway.
What sort of dumb answer is that.. the question was related to the update of jroller, it worked fine before im just pointing out that they seriously made something wrong if some blogs isent shown in IE. Just because your replying to the billeblog dosen’t mean you have to act retarded, and if you do please do it in a fun and not agressive way!
June 1st, 2004 at 5:36 am
Seriously, Hani, why don’t you switch to Blogger? Or… install movable type on your Linux server, and transmit your stream of biles from there.
You can’t install Linux? Oh, yea, right… you’re still using dial-up.
June 1st, 2004 at 8:22 am
> and if you do please do it in a fun and not agressive way!
Sorry you’re right I missed off the smiley!
Apologies!
-John-
June 1st, 2004 at 8:54 am
Glad for the effort you put in to fucking with the status line. Jroller :: Comment :: is very helpful.
Pl33z x-cuse my english, I’m Amurican, and we’d like regime change here too. ASAP.
June 1st, 2004 at 8:59 am
Blimey! What a fuck happend here? Now I need to switch to 1600×1200 to fucking see the whole front page !
June 1st, 2004 at 4:13 pm
At least the hit counters aren’t off by an order of magnitude anymore.
June 1st, 2004 at 4:49 pm
How is it that Chiara’s blog is in the Hot list when it hasn’t been updated since JANUARY!
June 1st, 2004 at 5:42 pm
wow, comments are in fact unreadable in IE now. The font size is crazy big and paragraphs are not in the skillset of the UI designers.
But now the UI seems to bypass the laughable uptime in terms of “sucking factor”.
I am using MoveableType and its so much better than this crap.
June 1st, 2004 at 7:45 pm
Not to mention the search box is under the “Hot Blogs” section, which in most cases will be completely offscreen for most users and force them to scroll just to do a search.
June 2nd, 2004 at 2:36 pm
perhaps they should change the name to corn holer?
June 3rd, 2004 at 4:19 am
Amazingly Rude JRoller Bloggers
First, I would like to thank Dave Johnson, a leading Javalobby volunteer and author of the Roller Weblogger, for all of his hard work and commitment to making JRoller.com a valuable service. Dave deployed a new build of Roller on the JRoller.com site this weekend and was promptly handed a merciless mountain of insult and criticism from the so-called “community of bloggers” there. I could not believe how caustic and rude some of these losers were! Dave’s good nature is such that he saw through the nastiness to the underlying suggestions that might actually help improve the system, but I wouldn’t blame him for saying sayonara to the whole project. It’s clue time, friends and bloggers. If you have a problem with something at JRoller.com you can always consider an email to jrteam@javalobby.org. When volunteers are spending their personal time to provide something free for you, the least you can do is be polite, discreet and (shudder to think) helpful and encouraging about the improvements you’d like to have. Having a blog is not a license to be a total pig.
June 3rd, 2004 at 11:13 am
yes yes, but when will it be fixed?
June 3rd, 2004 at 8:18 pm
Ross, how would you like to suck my c0ck?
June 4th, 2004 at 4:50 am
Why not just turn the blogs off, so furious bedroom wankers like Hani can go and meet some real people instead?
Or maybe ….. even…..have sex …….. WITH GIRLS!!!!
Sorry. Too ridiculous. Excuse me.
June 4th, 2004 at 2:18 pm
IP addresses on comments…but not all of them…I wonder…
June 4th, 2004 at 2:19 pm
Perhaps if I give it an email address…
June 4th, 2004 at 9:00 pm
Last call for alcohol, last call for freedom of speech. The rigid facist corporate gods now own every fraction of your pathetic soul!
June 5th, 2004 at 1:02 pm
So now you’re displaying IP’s why don’t you just write the big fat corporations a tool so they can tell which of their employees are posting here (from home as well)? Might as well crush the little people now that you’ve knocked them down.
June 23rd, 2004 at 3:22 pm
Why not switch to another blog engine. I’m using BlogEasy and it works great.