libcom.org version five has landed!

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

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?

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

Have tweaked permissions, so see if that worked

adri wrote: Yep it works

Great

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.

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.

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…

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.

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!

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

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 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 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.

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

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

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).

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 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

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 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 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

Steven. wrote:

nastyned wrote: can see the Quote button now? Let me know

yes

Mike Harman wrote: There's now:

https://libcom.org/search/tags

And also a working search box on https://libcom.org/tags

These are now both done and seem to be working well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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 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.

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!

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?

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 wrote: All layout, spacing looking very good here now.

wahey! Cheers for the feedback.

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.