libcom.org version five has landed!

A man in a libcom t-shirt wearing a hard hat and carrying wrench nearly as big as he is

Learn more about the upgrade and what it means.

Submitted by libcom on March 20, 2022

Hello everyone and thank you for bearing with us during these last few days while the upgrade has taken place.

We have been working on this upgrade behind the scenes since at least 2018, and so are very happy to be able to share the new version of the site with you.

A number of major completely broken parts of the site which we were unable to fix are now fixed. There have also been a number of major improvements.

Key improvements are:
– responsive design, adapting to your device, particularly smartphones
– reinstating a Search function for the site
– fixing new user registrations and other account issues, in addition users will be able to post moderated content as soon as they register instead of having to request permission
– increasing speed, with pages loading 4 times faster
– increasing security with better encryption, HTTPS, and eliminating insecure communication channels
– fixing various issues with tag navigation and pages
– massively simplifying the website structure, which was overly complex and unweildy in previous versions.

With the site structure, instead of a mixture of news, history and library articles which had arbitrary distinctions which overlapped (e.g. news articles become history once they are old), we now just have one type of content: articles. And you can browse these articles more simply, by viewing most recent articles, by using the search function, or by browsing by tag. Tags include author and group names, countries, industrial sectors, topics and more.

The forum index has been removed, but you can still post and follow discussions.

Please note that libcom.org v.5 is a pretty basic functional version of the site, which we have launched as early as possible, because it is still a vast improvement on the old site. However, we have a number of improvements planned over the coming weeks and months. So we will be gradually rolling these out once we have time and keeping users updated.

We would really like to thank everyone who donated to our gofundme which enabled us to undertake these major upgrade works, thank you so much! And we would also like to thank all of our current regular donors, mostly on patreon, who help us keep the site online. And special thanks to a few regular users who helped us bug test and make improvements to the new version of the site!

Please let us know your thoughts on the new site in the comments below. In particular, let us know if you spot anything broken. And feel free to make any suggestions/requests which we can take on board and consider.

In solidarity,
libcom.org

Comments

Fozzie

2 years ago

Submitted by Fozzie on March 21, 2022

Thanks to the libcom crew for getting this sorted. It must have been hundreds of hours of work.

I'm sure the new site will take a bit of getting used to for some, but I'm glad it's now on a stable platform and things like the search function are back.

adri

2 years ago

Submitted by adri on March 21, 2022

Yeah what Fozzie said. I definitely like the simplified design. We could maybe give thought to replacing the Tory/Democrat-blue (kidding!) with a dark theme of sorts, which is always better on the eyes. Of course as mentioned this is just a basic functional version. Everything's working fine for me though. Thanks again to the libcom people for providing this excellent forum/resource over the years.

adri

2 years ago

Submitted by adri on March 21, 2022

Another suggestion would be to include an edit feature for comments, edit: thanks!

adri

2 years ago

Submitted by adri on March 21, 2022

Hmm, the "recent content" and "recent discussion" pages seem to not be updating properly. I'm also noticing the timestamps on comments are not in real-time, but seem to be delayed a bit?

sherbu-kteer

2 years ago

Submitted by sherbu-kteer on March 21, 2022

Wait so did the forums get deleted in their entirety, or are they just no longer accessible through the normal index?

Fozzie

2 years ago

Submitted by Fozzie on March 21, 2022

Sherbu-kteer - looks like all the forum content is now under "discussions": https://libcom.org/recent/discussions but there are no "forums", "sub forums" etc.

Fozzie

2 years ago

Submitted by Fozzie on March 21, 2022

Adri - I've found a few comments that were flagged as spam on the old site that were not spam, so have been getting them approved.

Steven.

2 years ago

Submitted by Steven. on March 21, 2022

The Forum structure has been deleted, but discussions are still there. You can just navigate them through recent content, discussions. At the moment the order of the discussions is a bit messed up but this should be fine moving forwards from now at least.
adri, all users should be able to edit your own comments. There should be an edit button right below the comment.

adri

2 years ago

Submitted by adri on March 21, 2022

Here's a screenshot of the timestamps acting up (or not updating in real-time it seems),

https://i.ibb.co/fqxfHWG/Screenshot-2022-03-21-09-28-45.png

Fozzie

Adri - I've found a few comments that were flagged as spam on the old site that were not spam, so have been getting them approved.

Ah that might explain some of it

Thunderbird

2 years ago

Submitted by Thunderbird on March 21, 2022

Hello, is it possible to edit the articles in this version? I don't see where's such option...

IkeIke356

2 years ago

Submitted by IkeIke356 on March 21, 2022

Hello, and thanks for the update! :)

I think that you guys might wanna look at footnotes and article editing in this version. It doesn't seem to be working for me.

Thank you in advance.

Submitted by Steven. on March 22, 2022

IkeIke356 wrote: Hello, and thanks for the update! :)

I think that you guys might wanna look at footnotes and article editing in this version. It doesn't seem to be working for me.

Thank you in advance.

What's the issue you are having with footnotes and editing? If you give us a bit more info we can sort this out

Submitted by Steven. on March 22, 2022

Thunderbird wrote: Hello, is it possible to edit the articles in this version? I don't see where's such option...

It is, depending on user permissions. Did you have permission to edit articles beforehand?

Thunderbird

2 years ago

Submitted by Thunderbird on March 22, 2022

I don't know exactly. Earlier had an opportinity to edit it even after publication (with moderator's confirmation) and it was alright

adri

2 years ago

Submitted by adri on March 22, 2022

Could I have permission to edit articles (had it before)? Thanks

adri

2 years ago

Submitted by adri on March 22, 2022

Yep it works

Juan Conatz

2 years ago

Submitted by Juan Conatz on March 22, 2022

Good to see that you were able to finally make some changes. I'm assuming there are still some planned changes to the look? It's pretty bare bones on my end. A lot of white, some blue and some black text.

Submitted by Steven. on March 22, 2022

Juan Conatz wrote: Good to see that you were able to finally make some changes. I'm assuming there are still some planned changes to the look? It's pretty bare bones on my end. A lot of white, some blue and some black text.

Yeah, the aesthetics will get sorted out later. The priority was getting a functional website, where users can register, log in, and contribute, browse and search content effectively.

syndicalist

2 years ago

Submitted by syndicalist on March 22, 2022

Very different. Not being a techie or anything. I wish Libcom comrades success with the new stuff and all.

Malcy

2 years ago

Submitted by Malcy on March 23, 2022

libcom has been an incredible resource for many years and I am happy to become a regular financial contributor. As a librarian though I did appreciate and use the indexes. Are they all gone? Is there still the ability to browse through the lists of authors?

Mike Harman

2 years ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on March 23, 2022

@Malcy we're re-doing how we store the author metadata, long term it'll be an improvement, short term it's not.

Previously it was its own field 'Authors, people and groups' which included both articles by and about people. This means you'd get fairly random articles tagged with 'Karl Marx' or Kropotkin' because it mentioned them.

The new site has a dedicated 'Author' field which will allow us to build lists of content only by authors rather than about them.

However because we don't have equivalent accurate data in the old version, it's essentially empty now, so a few thousand articles will need to be updated before there's a useful author listing again.

You can however see a listing of all tags and search them at https://libcom.org/tags

Steven.

2 years ago

Submitted by Steven. on March 23, 2022

Yeah, there have been changes, but it's worth stressing that the old indexes didn't work most of the time. For example with most indexes you could never progress to page 2 of the index or later. And the Sectors index has been completely broken for several years.
The old Authors, people and groups tag has been incorporated into our general tags. And as Mike says, you can browse that by the tag index. If you are looking for a particular person, just type a bit of the name into the tag search box.

Fellow Worker …

2 years ago

Submitted by Fellow Worker … on March 24, 2022

Hey friends/comrades.

Congrats congrats congrats on reaching this milestone! (I do web development and I know that migrating a site to a new platform or iteration is hard work.)

Feedback I am hearing from Facebook threads et. al: the most important thing that's missing is article pagination. If it's there, people (including me) are missing it. I inquired a little deeper, and people seem to remember "roughly when" Libcom articles are published and find articles by "paging back," and they're a tad lost without these controls.

Perhaps if front page pagination was restored and maybe even a "date dropdown" was available somewhere (like the kind that appears in a typical Wordpress / Blogger sidebar) they would have an easier time. They find the tag cloud/list less useful, but I know tagging is important.

They are very pleased to have a working search function.

For me, I think the new iteration is a bit jarring because there are no familiar elements. No Libcom logo, colour palette, etc. - things that made up the libcom 'identity' (even if that was pretty rudimentary and not consciously developed).

If these were back, I think people might be more able to "settle in" to the new version of the site. It doesn't mean you need to replicate the look of the old site. But anarchists are creative and yeah, my guess is that visitors like a site to be more so. I do know that these things are HARD to line up with a launch tho, so if these are just "on their way in the near future" that's terrific.

Again, super congratulations to all my fellow workers who have worked hard on this.

Submitted by Steven. on March 24, 2022

Fellow Worker, thanks for the kind words. A few responses below:

Feedback I am hearing from Facebook threads et. al: the most important thing that's missing is article pagination. If it's there, people (including me) are missing it. I inquired a little deeper, and people seem to remember "roughly when" Libcom articles are published and find articles by "paging back," and they're a tad lost without these controls.

Firstly it's worth mentioning that we used to have index pagination, but 90% of the time it didn't work!
Now there are no pages as such, but there is a button at the bottom of each index which says "Older posts" which loads more posts, and so functions like pagination.
Personally I think it is superior to pagination, because the problem with pagination is it means you get hyperlinks from other websites to pages on libcom – and as more articles get posted, the page numbers change, so the hyperlinks and Google search results become useless.
Also, this seems to be how most websites work nowadays. I'm not aware of any decent ones which use numbered pagination.
But we are open to feedback on this, if anyone is aware of any decent websites which use pagination effectively.

For me, I think the new iteration is a bit jarring because there are no familiar elements. No Libcom logo, colour palette, etc. - things that made up the libcom 'identity' (even if that was pretty rudimentary and not consciously developed).

It was consciously developed at the time – basically we copied the BBC website!
And when we introduced it, almost all site users hated it and complained about it relentlessly for a few months. But we thought that people would probably eventually stop complaining, and in fact probably complain if we changed it again!
TBH we never actually made a libcom logo, all we did was write the word "libcom.org" in the corner of the site. We did plan to do a logo, but at the time none of the group could agree on one, so we just put in the text as a holding thing. Which ended up staying there for 10 years! So this time we have just done the same, put the name of the site in text. We may have another crack at designing a logo, however.
With the colours, as I said people were very unhappy with our last colour palette when we introduced it. I think we do generally feel that a commie website using a red theme is a bit cheesy. But that said, when we launched the upgrade we just started using the default colours of the CMS theme. Since then we have begun tweaking and changing certain colours (e.g bringing back black headlines).
Our plan is to have a proper consideration and overhaul of the look of the site. However, there are changes forthcoming to the theme, so we basically need to wait for these to happen, then we can begin working on the overall look.

If these were back, I think people might be more able to "settle in" to the new version of the site. It doesn't mean you need to replicate the look of the old site. But anarchists are creative and yeah, my guess is that visitors like a site to be more so. I do know that these things are HARD to line up with a launch tho, so if these are just "on their way in the near future" that's terrific.

Completely appreciate your view. However, it has been our experience that every time we have improved the site, most people complain about it for ages, then they get used to it. Then they complain if we change it again! Honestly, a lot of anarchists just don't like change.
But as we said in the above post, we decided to launch with a basic theme in order to fix all of the massively broken parts of the site which have been broken for years, not to mention the security issues which existed with it. And as we've said we are going to continue to work on improving the appearance.
While a few local people on social media have been complaining, our traffic has actually massively increased since the redesign. Which may be partly or entirely due to the old site being so broken that we weren't able to properly record traffic…

Again, super congratulations to all my fellow workers who have worked hard on this.

Thanks, we do appreciate your kind words, and your general point here. However, even if we had done something that would have been technically possible at the time, like change the colour blue in the current theme to the dark red of the old theme, all the same people still would have complained just the same.
So our preference is just to let people complain, and behind the scenes just keep working on making things better as and when we can, as a very small group of unpaid volunteers working in our spare time on top of earning a living, having families, personal lives etc.

Steven.

2 years ago

Submitted by Steven. on March 24, 2022

Just a quick summary of additional changes we have made since the launch:
– Slimmed down and improved appearance of article authors/contributors and social sharing modules
– Improved appearance and browseability of articles in indexes, changing colours and adding intros.
– Simplified and cleaned up the appearance of articles for mobile users
– Fixed huge numbers of broken search engine links to libcom articles and pages
– improved styling of quote in comments for better clarity in discussions
– tidied up hundreds of redundant and duplicate tags
– improved formatting of footnotes for better comprehension and readability
– improved recent content tracker for articles and discussions
– Fixed numerous bugs

adri

2 years ago

Submitted by adri on March 24, 2022

We don't care about having a functional website that you've spent the last 4 years of your lives working on—it's blue!!

We may have another crack at designing a logo, however.

With respect to a logo for the library of communism, I would suggest doing something with the error-message penguin, or maybe just appropriating the Penguin Classics logo

may_valences

2 years ago

Submitted by may_valences on March 24, 2022

In this new format is their any way to select the poster of an article and view their previous postings?

For example i found the translations by the poster Alias Recluse very interesting and they came from many scources i did not know of previously. I tried typing their name in the search bar and it did not bring up all his previous postings. presumably because he was not listed as an author or translator.

The foums (Discussions now) do not appear in search results?

Submitted by Steven. on March 24, 2022

adri wrote: We don't care about having a functional website that you've spent the last 4 years of your lives working on—it's blue!!

haha, right?!

We may have another crack at designing a logo, however.

With respect to a logo for the library of communism, I would suggest doing something with the error-message penguin, or maybe just appropriating the Penguin Classics logo
you know, that's not a half bad idea…

Submitted by Steven. on March 24, 2022

may_valences wrote: In this new format is their any way to select the poster of an article and view their previous postings?

This is something we are looking at re-introducing.

The foums (Discussions now) do not appear in search results?

good spot. We will look into this.

jef costello

2 years ago

Submitted by jef costello on March 25, 2022

It is nice to see a lot more of the site working.

I preferred the old style, but I don't think that this is actually a problem, but I would vote for red given the chance.

There are a couple of things I think could be improved. I'm using latest firefox version, so I assume I am seeing things as they are supposed to be.

Just having the name at the top of the post, without any kind of line or colour change makes it hard to follow discussions.
Same thing for quotes. a different coloured background, or even making the bar more visible would help too.

I liked the buttons for bbcode if they can come back that would be great. The little list of code and tags at the bottom of the comment box is helpful.

It would be nice to see the name of the original poster for the "discussions" tab.

It is nice to see the tags working better.

Articles without images leave a big blank space. I couldn't think of a good automatic placeholder for articles without pictures though. I did wonder about putting in the introductory paragraph as that is a separate field, but converting text to an image is probably difficult and would probably look awful.

I am a bit disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go through my messages, but some of them have been there for 15 years, so I have had the time to do it.

Mike Harman

2 years ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on March 25, 2022

I liked the buttons for bbcode if they can come back that would be great. The little list of code and tags at the bottom of the comment box is helpful.

We need to phase out bbcode altogether because it's getting to the point where it's almost unsupported as a format. However the plan for doing that is to add a wysiwyg instead - hopefully in the next few weeks.

I am a bit disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go through my messages, but some of them have been there for 15 years, so I have had the time to do it.

You've still a couple of weeks to do that - the old site is at http://old.libcom.org

Articles without images leave a big blank space. I couldn't think of a good automatic placeholder for articles without pictures though. I did wonder about putting in the introductory paragraph as that is a separate field, but converting text to an image is probably difficult and would probably look awful.

We added introductory text to all the article listings as well as images, so this evens things out a bit. However, there are lots of very old articles with no introductory text either.

Mike Harman

2 years ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on March 25, 2022

Just having the name at the top of the post, without any kind of line or colour change makes it hard to follow discussions.
Same thing for quotes. a different coloured background, or even making the bar more visible would help too.

Yeah we left a lot of cosmetic things until after the switch, because the whole switch itself was years overdue. A bit more separation between comments, and between blockquotes and normal text is very doable.

Red Marriott

2 years ago

Submitted by Red Marriott on March 25, 2022

The paragraph spacing on comments here isn't very reader-friendly for me on Chrome; big 3 line gaps each side of quotes (and the same for paras on some posters' comments above). Background also too white and/or text too grey.

IkeIke356

2 years ago

Submitted by IkeIke356 on March 27, 2022

https://imgur.com/a/ikAq7Na

Idk how to tag users, but, Steven. here's the issue I mentioned. "Edit" options only appear for things I've submitted myself.

Submitted by Steven. on March 28, 2022

IkeIke356 wrote: https://imgur.com/a/ikAq7Na

Idk how to tag users, but, Steven. here's the issue I mentioned. "Edit" options only appear for things I've submitted myself.

You can't tag users in comments. This is something we will look at introducing in the quite distant future.
But okay, that's right. That is just like the old site, with your user permissions, which are "regular user" you can only edit your own content.
If you would like to help us more generally with the site, in terms of tidying up other content and fixing problems, then please let us know and we can up your permissions to give you this power!

IkeIke356

2 years ago

Submitted by IkeIke356 on March 28, 2022

Steven.

If you would like to help us more generally with the site, in terms of tidying up other content and fixing problems, then please let us know and we can up your permissions to give you this power!

If it is not too much trouble, I'd love to have that power and assist in tidying up the site.

pi

2 years ago

Submitted by pi on March 28, 2022

I've never requested posting rights nor had any before but on your intro guides page I see an "add child page" link (next to print friendly link) which leads to a page for adding content. I guess that's not intended.

https://libcom.org/article/libcom-introductory-guide

Submitted by Steven. on March 28, 2022

pi wrote: I've never requested posting rights nor had any before but on your intro guides page I see an "add child page" link (next to print friendly link) which leads to a page for adding content. I guess that's not intended.

https://libcom.org/article/libcom-introductory-guide

hey no worries that is deliberate! every user we know isn't a spammer should see that

Submitted by Steven. on March 28, 2022

IkeIke356 wrote: Steven.

If you would like to help us more generally with the site, in terms of tidying up other content and fixing problems, then please let us know and we can up your permissions to give you this power!

If it is not too much trouble, I'd love to have that power and assist in tidying up the site.

done, thanks!

Ivysyn

1 year 12 months ago

Submitted by Ivysyn on March 29, 2022

so what's the deal with my personal profile? specifically it seems like you can't view your own inventory of uploads to the site anymore, is there a way I can do that still, or is that gone?

Submitted by Steven. on March 29, 2022

Ivysyn wrote: so what's the deal with my personal profile? specifically it seems like you can't view your own inventory of uploads to the site anymore, is there a way I can do that still, or is that gone?

That is gone at the moment but the plan is to bring it back when we can

Agent of the I…

1 year 12 months ago

Submitted by Agent of the I… on March 31, 2022

So what's happening to the forums and old threads? Are they gone forever?

Submitted by Steven. on March 31, 2022

Agent of the International wrote: So what's happening to the forums and old threads? Are they gone forever?

No, like we have mentioned elsewhere, the forum structure is gone, but not many people used that anyway. They have been replaced by Discussions, which you can browse in Recent content in the Discussions tab.
Search doesn't currently index Discussions, but we will be introducing that a bit later on.

Yosef

1 year 12 months ago

Submitted by Yosef on April 1, 2022

Looks great! I work in web development and I'm very willing to help out if needed.

Cooked

1 year 12 months ago

Submitted by Cooked on April 2, 2022

The content pages look very good indeed which makes sense now that the forum is such a secondary thing. Thanks to the theme I guess but it still makes reading much better. I wouldn't listen to much to people who want a more space efficient layout and typography. Believe me they are always around but it just wrecks the pages. Whoever did the original theme did some thinking. Fiddling with margins and spacing tends to ruin the design imho.

Just a recent one https://libcom.org/article/factory-peace-stuart-christie looks really great upon opening. Better when not logged as the edit etc links are a bit squashed up against the heading but it looks decent anyway.

The home page and other landing pages do feel a bit to generic. Like you've landed on someones generic blog. It's probably worth it for pages such as reading lists etc as it makes for easier maintenance. Making the homepage feel a bit more like a place is probably worth it.

Nice to see that the upgrade finally happened!

adri

1 year 12 months ago

Submitted by adri on April 2, 2022

Pagination for the discussions/articles would be nice, because scrolling all the way to the bottom of a super long thread is no fun (of course you can just click to where you want to scroll to but that doesn't really feel natural). Might also want to consider rotating the bird 90 degrees so it's more obvious what all the social-media things are

AnythingForProximity

1 year 12 months ago

Submitted by AnythingForProximity on April 3, 2022

Congratulations on the site update. I was wondering if it's still possible to contribute an article specifically to the "Other languages" section of the site? If I remember correctly, this used to be one of the options available when submitting new content, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore (not on my end, at least).

Spikymike

1 year 12 months ago

Submitted by Spikymike on April 3, 2022

Its always been difficult to encourage different groups within our broad spectrum of anarchist/libertarian/left/council communists to discuss with each other in an open way, open to the rest of us, on any particular important current theme (such as the Russia/Ukraine war now) rather than just use libcom to broadcast their particular 'one off' texts but I fear the new layout has perhaps made it even harder. Not sure there is anyway to correct that without having separate sub-threads. Much good material is wasted if it doesn't produce some intelligent debate.

Submitted by Steven. on April 6, 2022

Cooked wrote: The content pages look very good indeed which makes sense now that the forum is such a secondary thing. Thanks to the theme I guess but it still makes reading much better. I wouldn't listen to much to people who want a more space efficient layout and typography. Believe me they are always around but it just wrecks the pages. Whoever did the original theme did some thinking. Fiddling with margins and spacing tends to ruin the design imho.

Just a recent one https://libcom.org/article/factory-peace-stuart-christie looks really great upon opening. Better when not logged as the edit etc links are a bit squashed up against the heading but it looks decent anyway.

The home page and other landing pages do feel a bit to generic. Like you've landed on someones generic blog. It's probably worth it for pages such as reading lists etc as it makes for easier maintenance. Making the homepage feel a bit more like a place is probably worth it.

Nice to see that the upgrade finally happened!

Thanks for the kind words!
As we've said, we have launched a basic functional version of the site. Customising of the theme, and aesthetic details will be sorted out later. We just have some practical stuff to do beforehand, like sorting out all the different input formats the site used, getting rid of BB code and implementing a What You See Is What You Get text editor

Submitted by Steven. on April 6, 2022

adri wrote: Pagination for the discussions/articles would be nice, because scrolling all the way to the bottom of a super long thread is no fun (of course you can just click to where you want to scroll to but that doesn't really feel natural). Might also want to consider rotating the bird 90 degrees so it's more obvious what all the social-media things are

The way comments are themed at the moment will change in a little bit.
Rotating those logos 90° is also on the to-do list

Submitted by Steven. on April 6, 2022

AnythingForProximity wrote: Congratulations on the site update. I was wondering if it's still possible to contribute an article specifically to the "Other languages" section of the site? If I remember correctly, this used to be one of the options available when submitting new content, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore (not on my end, at least).

Yes it is. We are working on a better way of classifying multilingual content on the site in the medium to long-term. But in the short-term, you can post anything and just tag it with the language you are posting it in (in the language of that language, if you see what I mean, so for French you would tag français).

Submitted by Steven. on April 6, 2022

Spikymike wrote: Its always been difficult to encourage different groups within our broad spectrum of anarchist/libertarian/left/council communists to discuss with each other in an open way, open to the rest of us, on any particular important current theme (such as the Russia/Ukraine war now) rather than just use libcom to broadcast their particular 'one off' texts but I fear the new layout has perhaps made it even harder. Not sure there is anyway to correct that without having separate sub-threads. Much good material is wasted if it doesn't produce some intelligent debate.

Hey Mike, I'm not really sure how the new layout makes it harder to have discussion?
It's true that we have got rid of the forum structure, however hardly anyone actually used the forum structure. The vast majority of site users used the tracker, which we have basically reproduced exactly the same: https://libcom.org/recent/discussions
For many years we have noticed that discussion here has been declining, because people have instead chosen to have discussions on social media, principally Twitter and Facebook.
So for most of the site's existence we were getting 40,000-100,000 comments per year. In 2013 this started to fall, and by 2020, this had fallen to 3900 comments in the year. In 2021, it was only just over 2000 comments.
Many of our individual forums hadn't had any comments at all in 1-5 years, so it did just not make sense to keep them. And in general we felt that forums don't create the best environment for productive discussion, because of the attitude people have towards them. Comments on articles are often more useful and constructive, so we wanted to promote discussions under articles to at least the same extent as straight up Discussions, rather than on the old site which prioritised forum discussions over discussions below articles.
Not sure what you mean by "separate sub- threads", maybe you could elaborate further?
In terms of your final point, I do agree with the sentiment, but I think that we needed to acknowledge that this debate for the most part was not taking place on libcom itself.

nastyned

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by nastyned on April 6, 2022

There used to be something along the lines of 'new documents' and 'new forum posts'. I'm finding having both mixed in together annoying.

Mind you I stopped posting regularly years ago after one of the moderators was a dick but I have started occasionally posting again recently.

Submitted by Steven. on April 6, 2022

nastyned wrote: There used to be something along the lines of 'new documents' and 'new forum posts'. I'm finding having both mixed in together annoying.

The old tracker mixed both together, like this one, and so hasn't changed.
The new feature we have introduced is showing just recent articles, without discussions: https://libcom.org/recent

Submitted by Steven. on April 6, 2022

nastyned wrote: Go to last post seems to be gone too.

Go to last post was something that seemed possibly useful in the old forums, where discussions would take place over several pages. But now a discussion all fits on one page. So if you want to see the last post you can just scroll to the bottom of the page, or press End. As before, there is also a New link which takes you to your latest unread comment.

nastyned

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by nastyned on April 7, 2022

Can't work out how to quote either!

But: Steven. said The old tracker mixed both together, like this one, and so hasn't changed.
The new feature we have introduced is showing just recent articles, without discussions: https://libcom.org/recent

Is there a show forum posts only? Not as interested in new articles.

Submitted by Steven. on April 7, 2022

nastyned wrote: Can't work out how to quote either!

It has been installed but looks like some users can't see it yet. We will try to fix that right away

But: Steven. said The old tracker mixed both together, like this one, and so hasn't changed.
The new feature we have introduced is showing just recent articles, without discussions: https://libcom.org/recent

Is there a show forum posts only? Not as interested in new articles.

There is not. Because hardly any discussions were taking place, and many discussions which were were low quality and unproductive.

nastyned

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by nastyned on April 7, 2022

hardly any discussions were taking place, and any discussions which were were low quality and unproductive.

Hang your heads in shame Libcom forum posters!

Submitted by Steven. on April 7, 2022

nastyned wrote: hardly any discussions were taking place, and any discussions which were were low quality and unproductive.

Hang your heads in shame Libcom forum posters!

That was a typo, was supposed to read: "many".
By the way, have tweaked something so hopefully you can see the Quote button now? Let me know

Spikymike

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Spikymike on April 7, 2022

Haven't managed to see how the search function for Tags works Nothing happens if I just put eg 'Russia-Ukraine war', in the search box in the tags section? Is there another listing to the Tags section? Edit: Sorry I think I didn't realise there was only one Search box for everything rather than a separate one for tags - is that right?

Mike Harman

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on April 8, 2022

@Spikymike

Nothing happens if I just put eg 'Russia-Ukraine war', in the search box in the tags section? Is there another listing to the Tags section?

We just recently broke this when we added the top tags vs. all tags pages :(

Will work on a fix.

WithDefiance

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by WithDefiance on April 13, 2022

Great work on the website. Like many said I can understand that migrating such a website is a huge effort. Some feedback to help improve it (I'm not sure in what sense you are already 'done' so ignore when this is still on the to do), I think it would be good if you had some clearer headers on the front page.

There seem to be categories and articles and something more, but for me it is very difficult to see the difference between the articles and categories for instance. Somehow I still have quiet some difficulty navigating the website as it is now.

Submitted by Steven. on April 13, 2022

WithDefiance wrote: Great work on the website. Like many said I can understand that migrating such a website is a huge effort. Some feedback to help improve it (I'm not sure in what sense you are already 'done' so ignore when this is still on the to do), I think it would be good if you had some clearer headers on the front page.

There seem to be categories and articles and something more, but for me it is very difficult to see the difference between the articles and categories for instance. Somehow I still have quiet some difficulty navigating the website as it is now.

Thanks for the feedback! This is actually in the works and will be done at some point, hopefully relatively soon.

Mike Harman

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on April 14, 2022

New collections section, still in progress but mostly working.

At some point we'll add an 'Authors' tab on there too, but we completely redid how authors (as in the person that wrote the content, not the person that posted it) are stored between the old and new version of the site, so a lot of content to edit first.

Submitted by An Affirming Flame on April 16, 2022

Steven. wrote:
There is not. Because hardly any discussions were taking place, and many discussions which were were low quality and unproductive.

Not feedback per se, but I just wanted to comment that, as someone who never uses social media, this trend Steven mentions has been sad.

I mainly lurked, but I've been checking forum posts on libcom daily for probably 12 years now. The forums used to be a fun, funny and informative resource, filled with interesting people. Its dwindling state over the past few years has left me feeling cut off from other anarchists and communists. The site redesign just kind of feels like the final nail in the coffin. I completely understand why you made the change.

I still refuse to look at Facebook or Twitter though, haha.

tigersiskillers

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by tigersiskillers on April 16, 2022

Other than clearly setting libertarian communism back decades, I like the redesign.

One suggestion/question though re the death of the forums: could discussions (i.e. not comments on articles) have their own separate tags, even if it's just 'theory', 'announcements', 'news/current events'? So those people who want to could still check the tags (or filter for them under recent discussions if that would be possible). I agree that the forums were pretty much dead, but it was still useful to read those discussions/questions that did come up.

Submitted by tigersiskillers on April 16, 2022

adri wrote: The discussions/forum didn't go anywhere; the forum-layout just became more simplified (most people just used the "recent posts" page anyway). See here https://libcom.org/recent/discussions.

I get that, but the recent discussion list includes comments on articles, as well as listing new articles without comments, so it's more cluttered with stuff than the old recent posts view was. Might be useful to be able to filter that somehow.

Submitted by Steven. on April 17, 2022

tigersiskillers wrote:

adri wrote: The discussions/forum didn't go anywhere; the forum-layout just became more simplified (most people just used the "recent posts" page anyway). See here https://libcom.org/recent/discussions.

I get that, but the recent discussion list includes comments on articles, as well as listing new articles without comments, so it's more cluttered with stuff than the old recent posts view was. Might be useful to be able to filter that somehow.

The tracker on the old site included new and updated content, as well as content with new comments, so it was actually more cluttered than this one!
But we can certainly look at having a tab just for people to navigate to latest items which have new comments. However, we can't use tags for these, because then they will get mixed up with articles, and the only way to navigate them would essentially be recreating forums, which were already effectively defunct.

Submitted by Steven. on April 17, 2022

An Affirming Flame wrote:

Steven. wrote:
There is not. Because hardly any discussions were taking place, and many discussions which were were low quality and unproductive.

Not feedback per se, but I just wanted to comment that, as someone who never uses social media, this trend Steven mentions has been sad.

I mainly lurked, but I've been checking forum posts on libcom daily for probably 12 years now. The forums used to be a fun, funny and informative resource, filled with interesting people. Its dwindling state over the past few years has left me feeling cut off from other anarchists and communists. The site redesign just kind of feels like the final nail in the coffin. I completely understand why you made the change.

I still refuse to look at Facebook or Twitter though, haha.

We agree that this trend makes us sad. But unfortunately it seems irreversible. People can keep posting new discussions, and keep track of updated discussions. We basically just got rid of a way of navigating them which hardly anybody used, to focus on the tracker, which is what nearly all site users used in any case.

Steven.

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on April 19, 2022

By the way, probably worth mentioning that increasing the speed of the site was a big aim, which has been successful. Pages on the new site load about 4 times faster than on the old site.

darren p

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by darren p on April 19, 2022

Has the site search function broke again, or is it just a passing problem, or just something only affecting me?

(If it is broken it could be due to excessively long comments stalling the re-indexing - That was a problem I had with a Drupal 6 site once)

Fozzie

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on April 19, 2022

Hey darren p - yep the search seems broken for me today too.

Spikymike

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Spikymike on April 19, 2022

So is it that the TAGS box only comes up under COLLECTIONS which then seems to make searching possible as before?

Fozzie

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on April 19, 2022

Search is working ok for me now?

Spikymike - there are now two different seach boxes I think - a general content one and a tags one.

Submitted by Steven. on April 19, 2022

Yeah, search is working okay for me as well. Let's keep an eye on it, but hopefully just a momentary blip.

Spikymike wrote: So is it that the TAGS box only comes up under COLLECTIONS which then seems to make searching possible as before?

Yes, in Collections you can search tags. If you go to the general search page by searching something, you can also go to the tags tab and search them there

darren p

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by darren p on April 19, 2022

Article search still doesn't return results for me. Been testing with the term "Karl Marx". Tag search does return a result though.

Fozzie

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on April 19, 2022

Hmm ok yes it's stopped working for me again now too.

R Totale

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by R Totale on April 19, 2022

Has anyone mentioned the thing with child/parent pages? I appreciate it's quite nice having all the other child pages in a book listed at the bottom of each page, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to navigate to the top page - so for instance from Irish Anarchist Review Issue 3, I can navigate to any of the other issues that have been added, but not to the main Irish Anarchist Review page, if you see what I mean? Unless I'm missing something.

Submitted by Steven. on April 20, 2022

R Totale wrote: Has anyone mentioned the thing with child/parent pages? I appreciate it's quite nice having all the other child pages in a book listed at the bottom of each page, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to navigate to the top page - so for instance from Irish Anarchist Review Issue 3, I can navigate to any of the other issues that have been added, but not to the main Irish Anarchist Review page, if you see what I mean? Unless I'm missing something.

This is a known bug. We are working on a fix.
We will also look into the broken search.

Mike Harman

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on April 20, 2022

The search issue is hard to reproduce, but we've made some changes that should hopefully make it more reliable.

darren p

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by darren p on April 20, 2022

Search seems to be working for me now. Thanks.

adri

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by adri on April 20, 2022

Showing the author's name (like who submitted it) next to whatever article/discussion in the recent content list would also be nice.

Submitted by Steven. on April 20, 2022

adri wrote: Showing the author's name (like who submitted it) next to whatever article/discussion in the recent content list would also be nice.

The problem with that is that it then wouldn't fit on mobile. Maybe we can look at displaying it for people using desktop, and hiding it on mobile. We will discuss.

Submitted by Steven. on April 22, 2022

Steven. wrote:

adri wrote: Showing the author's name (like who submitted it) next to whatever article/discussion in the recent content list would also be nice.

The problem with that is that it then wouldn't fit on mobile. Maybe we can look at displaying it for people using desktop, and hiding it on mobile. We will discuss.

Just to update you that this has been done. Cheers for the feedback!

adri

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by adri on April 24, 2022

Steven. wrote: Just to update you that this has been done. Cheers for the feedback!

Looks good, thanks

altemark

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by altemark on May 2, 2022

I have a really hard time both navigating and feeling like I'm sharing readable material using the new interface.

Submitted by Steven. on May 2, 2022

altemark wrote: I have a really hard time both navigating and feeling like I'm sharing readable material using the new interface.

Can you explain a bit more about what you mean?
As far as we can tell before, it was almost impossible to navigate the site, seeing as content was split between so many different sections with no consistency in how they were used, and no logic for which article was in which section, and there was no search function.
And in terms of readability, the site before was extreme difficult to read for about half of our users because it didn't work on mobile devices.
Pages also loaded about 4 times slower before.
But we are happy to look at any issues. Could you maybe give us an example of an article or content which you don't think is readable, but you think was before?
And in terms of navigating, could you maybe say what you think was easy before but isn't now?
(Also worth bearing in mind that this upgrade is still in progress. So the overall look of the site will still change at some point, and there will be an overhaul of the front page in particular.)

Red Marriott

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Red Marriott on May 2, 2022

I still don't get the point of the large paragraph spacing on quotes, is that for readability on mobiles? Cos it reduces readability on my PC.

Submitted by Steven. on May 2, 2022

Red Marriott wrote: I still don't get the point of the large paragraph spacing on quotes, is that for readability on mobiles? Cos it reduces readability on my PC.

That's a default setting. We will look into tweaking it.

Steven.

1 year 11 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on May 3, 2022

Red, we have narrowed the gap between paragraphs. Do you think this is preferable? Or do you think it should be narrower still?
Personally, I think on mobile it looks good now. On desktop they still look a bit big, but I think making them narrower might be worse on mobile…

Red Marriott

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Red Marriott on May 4, 2022

Steven. wrote: Red, we have narrowed the gap between paragraphs. Do you think this is preferable? Or do you think it should be narrower still?
Personally, I think on mobile it looks good now. On desktop they still look a bit big, but I think making them narrower might be worse on mobile…

The gaps around earlier quotes are still just as big on this page - or is the reduction not retrospective to earlier posts?

Red Marriott

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Red Marriott on May 4, 2022

... and the gap above between my quote of you and my comment under it is still very large, 3 lines or more. Maybe you misunderstood that I was referring to quotes here?

Submitted by Steven. on May 4, 2022

Red Marriott wrote: ... and the gap above between my quote of you and my comment under it is still very large, 3 lines or more. Maybe you misunderstood that I was referring to quotes here?

Sorry, we thought you were talking about paragraph breaks (i.e. breaks between different paragraphs in articles), so that is what we changed.
Now we will look at narrowing the gap above/below quotes!

Red Marriott

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Red Marriott on May 4, 2022

Whatever you did, the spacing is fine now, thanks - except the font size of quotes is twice that of the rest of the post. Which seems unnecessary and top-heavy, especially as quotes are italicised.

Spikymike

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Spikymike on May 4, 2022

From too many poorly used categories and sub headings in the old version of the site to none at all is a bit of a mess. Is there no way to filter all these random postings that include old library texts and uncategorised sources?
A way of using the search function for tags is I suppose all that is left?

Spikymike

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Spikymike on May 4, 2022

Also there is no automatic link on the front page to Facebook or Twitter for libcom as previously?

Mike Harman

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on May 4, 2022

From too many poorly used categories and sub headings in the old version of the site to none at all is a bit of a mess. Is there no way to filter all these random postings that include old library texts and uncategorised sources?
A way of using the search function for tags is I suppose all that is left?

Do you mean the front page? Or something else? Have you seen https://libcom.org/collections

There's a link to twitter/fb etc to every page of the site from the left side of the site on desktop, bottom of the page on mobile.

@Red Marriott: massive font size was a bug introduced by fixing the spacing, will unbug it.

Submitted by Fozzie on May 4, 2022

Spikymike wrote: From too many poorly used categories and sub headings in the old version of the site to none at all.

Mike do you mean the old forums and sub-forums here? With things like Feedback; Events and Oceania that were under used?

Submitted by Steven. on May 4, 2022

Spikymike wrote: From too many poorly used categories and sub headings in the old version of the site to none at all is a bit of a mess. Is there no way to filter all these random postings that include old library texts and uncategorised sources?
A way of using the search function for tags is I suppose all that is left?

Not really sure exactly what you mean here. In the old version of the site, you could navigate by news, blogs, history, library, organise, forums and tags. And you wouldn't know what section an article would be in necessarily unless you knew already.
Now you can navigate by search or tags. Coming soon you will also be able to navigate by author, and you will be able to search old discussions.
In terms of filtering random postings, could you give us a specific example? What sort of thing are you looking for? And how would you look for something before which you think would be preferable/easier?

Red Marriott

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Red Marriott on May 5, 2022

All layout, spacing looking very good here now.

Spikymike

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Spikymike on May 5, 2022

Steven. Thanks for your response. The new search categories will be helpful plus when it comes automatic links to other sites that are referenced. Apologies about the twitter etc links - I wasn't looking properly. Mind I'm not aware that there is any significantly more discussion on those sites than here.
Fozzie, I meant the sub-forums., but the big turn off is as it was before with all the posting of old texts (one by one) to the library clogging up any other more up-to-date news, theory or announcements as soon as we go to the latest front page or discussion listing. I value the efforts of you and others to retrieve older relevant journals and texts but the system for logging these is not the best and some others are not adding any reasons lately for their inclusion.

Fozzie

1 year 10 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on May 5, 2022

Thanks Mike, that makes sense. Like you I do value the discussions on here (and newer blog posts, contributions etc). And I do value the things that you contribute.

Realistically though there is not really much of a culture of discussion here now and hasn't been for a good few years. I don't personally think that there is much that can be done about that because online discussion these days generally happens via social media. And those discussions are generally terrible!

I think there would be merit in some kind of split between contributing archival material vs new discussion and new material (blog posts, news etc). But I honestly don't know if that is possible.

For my own sanity and that of others I do try and only add a couple of dusty old things a day :-)

Generally a good guide to whether something is beintg interacted with would be the number of comments after it, I guess (like on this thread or the "Ukraine: War or No War?" one).

Submitted by Steven. on May 8, 2022

Spikymike wrote: Steven. Thanks for your response. The new search categories will be helpful plus when it comes automatic links to other sites that are referenced. Apologies about the twitter etc links - I wasn't looking properly. Mind I'm not aware that there is any significantly more discussion on those sites than here.

No worries with the Twitter/Facebook links etc!
Not sure about Facebook as I don't use it personally. But at least 5 years ago or so, lots of people who used to post libcom would have lots of long discussions on Facebook, both in personal feeds, and in various FB groups. Don't know if that is still happening…
But on Twitter there is immense amounts of discussion every second of every day. Much of it is pretty terrible. And there is definitely an incentive in the medium just to make quick dunks, rather than have any decent actual discussion. But that's where we are…

Fozzie, I meant the sub-forums., but the big turn off is as it was before with all the posting of old texts (one by one) to the library clogging up any other more up-to-date news, theory or announcements as soon as we go to the latest front page or discussion listing. I value the efforts of you and others to retrieve older relevant journals and texts but the system for logging these is not the best and some others are not adding any reasons lately for their inclusion.

I understand your issue with our feeds for latest content. But as you say, these are unchanged from the old site. I know before you would have issues with stuff you would see as "clogging up" the feed. However the Recent feed is to show users all the latest content available on libcom. Our content is a mixture of new stuff, and archived old content. In the old version of the site we would try to separate this a bit, by having news and library. But then after a few years we ended up in a situation where a bunch of stuff in the "news" section was actually older than "old" texts in the library!
Most library texts do not contain stated reasons for their inclusion, and never have done. But the reason for their inclusion is because we want to be an online repository for basically every text ever which is of general interest to working class/anarchist/libcom/liberatory movements.
On the front page we do highlight particular recent texts and particular current archives, like related to the Russia-Ukraine war, and Covid-19. And when we rejig the front page we plan to make this more clear.
If you have any suggestions on how you think we could organise things better, we will happily consider them and think about what we can do. But any system which contains literally tens of thousands of texts gets difficult to manage. We could definitely do more if we had a team of paid editors systematically going through everything every day, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Steven.

1 year 8 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on July 26, 2022

FYI, as part of the ongoing upgrades, we have just launched a new front page which is more dynamic and hopefully highlights different ways of browsing out content and different sections of the site to check out

adri

1 year 6 months ago

Submitted by adri on September 12, 2022

I can't really consistently reproduce it, but I've noticed that sometimes when article/discussion pages load, the menu and homepage buttons don't work.

Steven.

1 year 6 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on September 12, 2022

That's interesting. Can you let us know what browser and device you are using?
And when you say don't work, do you mean they are visible, but if you click them nothing happens?

adri

1 year 6 months ago

Submitted by adri on September 12, 2022

Yes, they're visible but you can't click them (though the social things on the side still seem to work whenever this glitch occurs). I'm on a laptop with Firefox.

adri

1 year 6 months ago

Submitted by adri on September 12, 2022

The glitch occurred after posting the above comment for example (made a gif here if it helps to show what I mean).

Steven.

1 year 6 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on September 13, 2022

Thanks for the additional info. We will look into this.
If this glitch happens again, please let us know the scenarios where it happens.
Does it fix itself after a little while, or do you have to refresh the page?

Mike Harman

1 year 6 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on September 13, 2022

@adri if this happens again, would you be able to see if there's an error in the firefox console (should be somewhere in firefox development tools)? This looks to me like a JavaScript error.

adri

1 year 6 months ago

Submitted by adri on September 13, 2022

Steven wrote: If this glitch happens again, please let us know the scenarios where it happens.
Does it fix itself after a little while, or do you have to refresh the page?

It sometimes happens if I'm clicking through the pages of really long threads (or using the browser's forward and backward buttons to navigate through threads). Refreshing the pages seems to fix it though.

MH wrote: @adri if this happens again, would you be able to see if there's an error in the firefox console (should be somewhere in firefox development tools)? This looks to me like a JavaScript error.

Here's the contents of the Firefox console when the glitch occurred again. Sorry but I'm not really good with web stuff/debugging Javascript.