Bugs and Suggestions

24-Jun-15 3:34

In the search results there is a thumbnail from the article, it's not showing up for me at the moment.

Could be a loading issue since the site does seem a bit slower than usual for me at the moment.

Tom

Re: search thumbnails

Chris Maunder24-Jun-15 8:12

24-Jun-15 8:12

Just updating the cache so some data was inconsistent. All up to date now.

cheers
Chris Maunder

Re: search thumbnails

Tom Deketelaere24-Jun-15 8:15

Lots of ads on the article pages

24-Jun-15 8:15

looks good

Speed is back to normal as well
Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

Tom

Nicholas Marty24-Jun-15 1:49

Nicholas Marty

24-Jun-15 1:49

I haven't had lot of time to read some articles lately but I noticed that there is a lot of noise caused by ads at the end of an article.

There is:
a skyscraper ad on the right (which stays in place)
a rectangle ad besides the license info and the share buttons (right above the author info)
a banner below the author info

And in addition to that there are 4 rows of "you may also be interested in..." before you get to the discussion board

I like to support codeproject by disabling my adblocker but I feel that there are a few too many of them Smile | :)

If you don't know what I mean:
Tell me that this[^] doesn't look cluttered...

Chris Maunder24-Jun-15 3:41

24-Jun-15 3:41

It's always a balance and we try really, really hard to not make the ads obnoxious.

When you first view an article you'll see two ads. Just two. Then as you scroll down you'll certainly come across the box ad and finally the bottom leaderboard. The tower ad is in the fixed side column so you can definitely get a situation where you'll see 3 ads.

The "Also read" are to try and show articles and research papers that are relevant and of interest. We want to encourage readers to explore some of the thousands of brilliant articles written by our authors and there's only so much room on a page.

I'm always happy to play around with placement: I could move the social sharing buttons, or move the "also read" to the very bottom (not super useful then) or move the box ad halfway up an article (really tricky since we don't control article layout).

We're a free site and we need ads, but I never want to have the noise outweigh the reading experience.

cheers
Chris Maunder

Tom Deketelaere24-Jun-15 8:22

24-Jun-15 8:22

Small, possible improvement to the also read "box":
Can you make the thumbnails a bit smaller, personally I don't need them but I can see that they might add something for people and for me they do more harm than good (especially if there is an thumbnail that can't be displayed, that seems to bug me more than it should Smile | :)

)
Even on my 24" screen (1920x1200 resolution) that box takes up half the screen, and combined with the "about the author" box and the add in between almost the whole screen, so to get to the comments I have to scroll an entire screen, for new users they might not find the comments section at all like this.

Tom

Chris Maunder24-Jun-15 9:44

24-Jun-15 9:44

Try now.

cheers
Chris Maunder

Tom Deketelaere24-Jun-15 9:52

24-Jun-15 9:52

Hey you just removed a row of them Poke tongue | ;-P

It's better tho Smile | :)

Still quite a few thumbnails not displaying but I guess that's a caching issue.
just in case it's not:
this[^]
has no thumbnails in the first column.

Tom

Chris Maunder24-Jun-15 10:09

24-Jun-15 10:09

I shrunk the thumbnails 20% as well.

The missing icons are cache inconsistencies (we changed the data we're expecting so the cache is sending us back bad data - they should be good in a couple of minutes).

cheers
Chris Maunder

Nicholas Marty24-Jun-15 20:59

Nicholas Marty

24-Jun-15 20:59

Chris Maunder wrote:
We're a free site and we need ads,

Yeah, I understand that. And when I usually use a site regularly and the ads aren't affecting my experience much (e.g. by punching me in the facing with a flashy animation) then I disable AdBlock on it to support the site.

Looks already quite a bit better with only 3 rows of the "also read" and the smaller thumbnails. Smile | :)

You could maybe move the ad above "also read" to above (or even below?) the discussion board. I don't know much about ad placement too much (and how the revenue based on the placement is, and I could imagine a banner on the top might be worth more than one on the bottom). You're the marketing guy (no offense meant Laugh | :laugh:

), so you could enlighten me here Wink | ;-)

Chris Maunder25-Jun-15 4:08

25-Jun-15 4:08

So as the Marketing guy what I really need to do is have the bottom banner attached to your cursor. As you move it around, the banner follows. Obviously I'd make it so the banner move to the left or right depending on where you were on the screen so as to ensure it wasn't blocking anything important (ie. other banners).

In all seriousness it's not so much the placement as the context. Ads should be placed where they will

1. Get immediate attention (eg 'above the fold', or 'top of page' placements), or
2. Eventually get attention (next to something down the page that you will most certainly pause to read), or
3. Possibly get attention, but only show if you get there (eg bottom of the page, but only show them if you scroll down enough)

with a caveat on 3 being

3a. possibly get attention by not being drowned out by something else

With an overall guideline being

4. Not interrupt the overall reading experience of the thing the readers have come for: the main content.

Item #4 is what I see broken all the time. In fact it's getting stupid: you go to a site to read and within 5 seconds there's a popup demanding you sign up for their newsletter.

With regards to our banners, having it at the very, very bottom fits with 3, but could possibly be affected by 3a: it would be lost. The trick is not losing it without violating 4.

cheers
Chris Maunder

Nicholas Marty25-Jun-15 20:42

Nicholas Marty

25-Jun-15 20:42

Chris Maunder wrote:
So as the Marketing guy what I really need to do is have the bottom banner attached to your cursor. As you move it around, the banner follows. Obviously I'd make it so the banner move to the left or right depending on where you were on the screen so as to ensure it wasn't blocking anything important (ie. other banners).

It's not like the marketing people didn't try, didn't they? Laugh | :laugh:

Chris Maunder wrote:
With regards to our banners, having it at the very, very bottom fits with 3, but could possibly be affected by 3a: it would be lost. The trick is not losing it without violating 4.

At least for you it's all about placing as many ads on a page as you can without affecting the intended user experience. This is way better than to just punch a user with as many ads as you can before he leaves and never returns. Smile | :)

I regularly encounter those sites with these newsletter popus as well (usually by following links from the daily news). But those definitely aren't sites that I keep visiting after that. The hassle simply isn't worth the chance of finding valuable or interesting content.

Some news pages used to suggest some other article with a small box on the bottom right. The content then rotated through different articles there. Found this kinda nice, but I don't really see it anymore. I supposed, that didn't really catch on.

Is it by design?

Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan23-Jun-15 3:48

Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan

23-Jun-15 3:48

On mobile browsers, profile picture or total reputation points (the right panel) of the profile, is not available. Even if we scroll to the right.

Is it by design? Or something is missing?

My suggestion would be to provide the total reputation count and profile picture, as on desktop.

Thank you.

The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~

TeX math in article

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter22-Jun-15 23:17

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter

22-Jun-15 23:17

I'm working on this article: http://www.codeproject.com/script/Articles/ArticleVersion.aspx?waid=173281&aid=1001468[^]
There are some formulas I decided to present them using Tex math so added the Tex code inside a div with class="math" as suggested...It worked well yesterday, but when today I went to continue I realized that the class part wiped clean somehow...
It seems that somewhere the HTML clean-up done its job too good...
Please check it...

Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.

Re: TeX math in article

Chris Maunder23-Jun-15 2:05

Non sense at code-project

23-Jun-15 2:05

All fixed, but it'll be a couple of hours before I deploy the fix (want to bundle it with another deploy).

Turns out we were applying MathJax to current articles, but not composing (or previous) versions. Simple fix.

cheers
Chris Maunder

Re: TeX math in article

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter23-Jun-15 2:08

Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter

23-Jun-15 2:08

Good work! Thank you! Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.

rihdus22-Jun-15 23:06

rihdus

22-Jun-15 23:06

I did email verification several times. But still it shows the error:

Is your email address OK? You are signed up for our newsletters but your email address is either unconfirmed, or has not been reconfirmed in a long time. Please click here to have a confirmation email sent so we can confirm your email address and start sending you newsletters again. Alternatively, you can update your subscriptions.

Any systematic work reflects its significance for a long time. So let's discuss the best...

Re: Non sense at code-project

Chris Maunder23-Jun-15 2:07

Re: Non sense at code-project

23-Jun-15 2:07

I've sent you a new confirmation email. Can you please click the link, and if you still see this error, forward me the email to chris at codeproject.com

cheers
Chris Maunder

rihdus24-Jun-15 1:30

rihdus

24-Jun-15 1:30

Thanks Chris. It works now. Just one more Qn.. If this mail confirmation is one time or periodic?

Any systematic work reflects its significance for a long time. So let's discuss the best...

Re: Non sense at code-project

Chris Maunder24-Jun-15 8:11