One negative change that you made is the way the comments are displayed. Now the user pic is at the bottom of the comment instead of the top, which is disorientating. You need to look down, then back up again, occasionally having to scroll if it's a long comment.

Typically, I want to identify the speaker before I read a comment and the user pic is my primary method of doing that because it's faster than reading the username, especially if I'm skimming over a long list of comments. (Here I'm referring to the Faves' Comments list, which displays the username at the start of the comment.)

Switching the order of the user info and comment content should be easy to do and I think it would really be an improvement.

I wish my mouse could jump the rollover dropdowns, or at least be able to gnaw a hole thru the middle.

I hope you guys are making a lot of money on the ads in the middle of the profile, because I'm going to adblock the crap out of this site now.

Composing emails in Firefox 2.0.0.3 has become extremely slow. There is a noticeable delay after each letter is typed before it is displayed. That is probably a consequence of how the counter is updating. That problem did not previously exist. This problem doesn't seem to exist in any version of Internet Explorer. I have not tested on other versions of Firefox.

1. Yeah. Remove the ad from the middle of the profiles. Or at least use a static ad so it doesn't look like a personal video. That's misleading as hell. 2. Give people at least the choice of a few color schemes. Stick to the same layout if you may (although the dropdown does stay static and annoys the hell out of me when I wanna click on the "x,xxx Online" link), but purple and blue isn't that good a combo. Give us a few color options at least. 3. In the journals' New Posts page, PLEASE limit the entries to a shortish number of characters. We can click to read the rest... right now, it's particularly bad when it's a long entry, esp. since the breakdown into paragraphs doesn't apply. 4. The thumbnail adjustment feature still works like shit. I deleted one of my pics because I hated the way the thumbnail looked and never could adjust it properly. Please make this feature more user-friendly.

Make the site a little wider, to much blue space on the sides. And will help with the scrolling problem. Also bring back titles to the stranger's journals, how am I supposed to know if I am interested in a topic?

Mostly I like it. I do agree with Julia though -- I don't like that the titles aren't displayed on the journals. A journal just appeared on my Friends' Journals page which made absolutely no sense without the title. I'm easily confused, but I don't think that was just me...

We're changing the journals right now to better-present information.

I just wrote about this in my journal. :)

*shrug* I'm not leaving, but only because it's free. The site's kind of ugly now. I'm calling it "new coke-aycupid".

Please, please, please get rid of the blue text on blue background, my eyeballs are hurting

I agree with ALL the above!! But yes. I love OkC and although I don't mind change I am finding it harder to navigate. Glad to see the wording "faves'" has gone though!

Bring back black text in comments, and put the thumbnails back at the top.

Maybe users wouldn't be so vitriolic if we had any sense that the site owners give a crap about what we want. In about three years, I have yet to see any evidence of that.

dgc20e, do you understand how condescending it is to say to someone, "You know all these things you're telling us you don't like? You're wrong. You really do like them, you just don't know it." Trust me. I know I don't like the blue text, I know I don't like the photos below the comments, I know I don't like a number of other things many people have specified. If you want to win points with people for responsiveness, don't start out by patting them on the head.

That's true. It's easier to ask what changes the users would like to see ahead of time than have to deal with complaints about what we hate afterward. Just sayin'

Oh, I would really like to see the menu at the top offer the choice of favorites' posts and favorites' comments again. It may seem picky, but I have limited time here and going from a journal in one step is better than two steps. Thanks for listening

Meanwhile you keep screwing with the way the site looks and not addressing user requests for functions. When, for example, are we going to be able to see which page we're on in a journal? Users have been asking for that since the first day journals had pages, and still nothing.

You need to bring back a flag the profile function. How am I supposed to flag camwhores, scam artists and child molesters?

Dgc, you already know how I feel about colours, and I wrote again about the need for a few selectable CSS sheets in Melanarchy's journal, and about the possiblity of user overriding of this in his, and Chris's.

Other than that, and missing friends as a separate category, I like the actual layout change, and am not experiencing any decrease in page loading speed, in Unix and SuSE Linux on my main system. I've yet to see what has changed with the IM app, since I rarely use that, and I have no idea if this will work in Mozilla 1.2 on my old Mac in Mac OS classic :)

I agree with IM about the comments. I want to view comments faster. Also, make the light blue box around comments a bit darker or surround it by a border. I've read the comments and thought one person made it when another did because the light blue box nearly blends in with the white background. Just my two cents.

I know how hard it can be to keep up morale when a flood of comments comes in. I disagree with lm who suggests you could ask user what they want in advance. Often users will make suggestions that would be a massive amount of work and they probably would like even if they had it if you ask them to design for you.

On the other hand, I know that feel-good comments were not useful in getting the bugs out, so I put a brief list of low hanging fruit in melanarchy's journal which I am reposting here:

Close format tags and the end of each comment. If you forget to close a bold/italic tag, it carries down to the next comment and so on to mangle the rest of the page.

Add post titles to the journal browsing page: It would fit nicely in place of "View this post" for posts and "this post" for comments.

Display which page of comments is being viewed: This could be as easy as adding the string Page 4 as the first and last line of the comment page; you don't need to be fancy by mucking with the chooser.

Place author above comment text (not below): That way we can just read from top to bottom. Otherwise the eye pattern is to flick down to who, up to what, farther down to who, back up to what. Very jarring.

Lose the blue boxes behind each comment and replace with a thin double horizontal bar between comments much like the thin single bar between author and comment. This would simultaneously stop me from going blind from poor contrast and save a huge amount of vertical real estate.

Losing the blue boxes will wreck the white border around the thumbnails. Instead of changing the boarder color, double the picture size and wrap the comment around the picture as per the new-user spotlight on the home page.

Alternate fix to the blue-on-blue that will allow you to keep things colorful: Place the author details in a blue box and leave the comment text in black on white just below the author. The blue box will provide both borders (from comment text and from the other comment, provide color, and no extra real estate is used. You can then reduce the margins since color boundaries are effective that way.

Sigh. Make the "probably would not like.

Most stuff is just irritating, but for god's sake, bring back the tab for friend's comments (or whatever you are calling it now). I was in a panic until I got a direct link for that page. But a lot of people who use the journals comment-stalk, and unless you want a drop in journal use, then you really need to SORT IT OUT.

I'll support the value of the direct button to friends comments. I hit that page more often than any other on the site. It is the feature that sets OKC journals above the competitors from the technical side. The only reason I didn't list it was that I have a keyboard hot key for the page and don't use the menus anymore.

...but as someone who's been using the new site for weeks now...

So why are there still so many design faults?

Why DO you keep redesigning? Is there some corporate image or goal you're striving for? Wouldn't you be better off at OkC using your clearly meagre skills to sort out all the known issues that people have been reporting ever since I've been here (a couple of years now)?

I'm not an engineer and in many cases am not responsible for the things that people want fixed or changed. My meager skill set is focused mainly on maintaining and altering the several thousand files that make up the site's front-end.

If people who can't code at all, and don't understand CSS, are willing to wait, myself and a few others that can code are working on modifications to put the journalCommentInfo above journalCommentText, where most people have said they want it. This will depend on your using Firefox or possibly Mozilla and either installing extensions like Stylish, or directly editing userContent.css.

As for the blue text on blue background, that has already been fixed and explained, both here :

http://www.okcupid.com/journal?tuid=8209294779479156655#10339546724335573551

and here :

http://www.okcupid.com/journal?tuid=17659092069595557416#9455481503815366037

If programming is too difficult for most people to learn it themselves, please try and be more patient and compassionate with those who do it everyday.

The site is buggy. The site has ALWAYS been buggy. The more features that are introduced, the more failings in the coding and basic design become apparent. Why not get stuff working before "improving" it? Who makes up stuff like "Faves'"? Why not do what everyone else does - get a big sheet of paper and write down what you're trying to achieve, how you want things to work and how you want things to look THEN start building it? If you've been testing the site for weeks, how come so much has been changed in the past 24 hours? Were all these issues not apparent? Why not?

Well, your aggression's not really compelling me to want to answer your questions, so: sorry you're so angry, and that you're unhappy with the site. I'd offer you a refund, but since we're free anyway ... *shrug*

Wow, that's some shitty customer service. Granted that JDBri can be a bit abrasive and his approach probably isn't the best. Granted that OKC is free, except for those of us who donate, but we do provide the content and the userbase that enable you to sell adspace. As such, we are customers and a reasonably valuable resource and I would think you would want to maintain that resource as much as possible.

That said, my only real complaint is the fact that it now takes two steps to get to friends' - or faves' - comments, which is the most-used feature for many of us. There are other things that I don't like, but I can learn to live with those, even if I may not donate again.

I'm not a customer service representative. I make journal posts like this because I value feedback from our users -- I'm not required to make these posts, nor answer your questions, nor do any other kind of customer support. Anything I do, I do because I see value in it. I'm not sure I should need to explain why getting the live site up and then making changes/fixes to it is valuable. It should be obvious that hundreds of thousands of people are going to find many things that three people (one of whom was just hired last week) working on something will not. If we'd written everything down on paper and then just done it without getting any feedback, we'd have a bunch of stuff that Chris Coyne and I think is cool, and would assuredly be missing things that our users need and want. Yes, the site has bugs and usability issues. So do amazon.com, google, and eBay. It's the nature of the web. We're working on bringing you the best product we can, for free, with a limited staff. Being told how incompetent I am repeatedly by someone who clearly doesn't even understand what I do is not thrilling for me.

I can definitely understand that. I think most of us realize that your job isn't easy and we do appreciate what you folks do, but being told what amounts to "you're not obligated to give us money, so fuck off" doesn't give much incentive to stick around and continue to supply the userbase that brings money in through ads.

That said, I wasn't really trying to flame you, I'm just trying to explain why we get pissy when y'all make those kind of statements, even when you're really directing them towards someone who may deserve it.

Thanks for the efforts man. :)

The site is buggy. The site has ALWAYS been buggy. The more features that are introduced, the more failings in the coding and basic design become apparent. Why not get stuff working before "improving" it? Who makes up stuff like "Faves'"? Why not do what everyone else does - get a big sheet of paper and write down what you're trying to achieve, how you want things to work and how you want things to look THEN start building it? If you've been testing the site for weeks, how come so much has been changed in the past 24 hours? Were all these issues not apparent? Why not?

This seems more like the sort of conversation you ought to be having with your parents, not employees at an internet dating website.

I meant yours in particular, JD, because you are a wasteland.

I agree with bonefish21, you people are way out of line with all the bitching and personal attacks.

The only thing such such behavior will likely result in is a very slim likelihood that any OKC employees will even bother to solicit comments in their personal journal, and you will all have to satisfy yourselves with emailing a "comments" address and never knowing if anyone even read what you wrote, or cared.

Nice job, indeed.

dgc20e: Some of us do actually appreciate what you folks at OKC are doing, especially considering we are not paying for it. I have my own wishlist, which I have passed on to OKC, but that does not in my view give me the right to flame the holy crap out of you people.

I also understand that you (like me) are a techie, not a customer-service person with little technical knowledge who is paid to present a perennially happy face to customers who abuse them all day long. Please hang in there, take a break, try not to let it get to you.

Thanks again.

Picture kink report:

Before the change pictures had to be 400x400 or get resized and distorted. Now some of my pictures automatically enlarged pretty big. Don't know why.

Also they say that if you don't show your face as a thumbnail now that they will delete them if they are flagged, so I went to re-thumbnail a pic it didn't show that option.

Not expecting a reply, just reporting. :)

Being told how incompetent I am repeatedly by someone who clearly doesn't even understand what I do is not thrilling for me.

You journal so you get comments. Are you an employee or a user when you post?

You patronise us (as other people have commented) and decide to be a spokesperson for the site - *you* **chose** this role for yourself. That's what you do and that's what's being commented on.

JDBri: Please do your part and learn to be civil. The alternative of viciously attacking the poster is likely to have the opposite effect than what you presumably intended.

Remember that "dgc20e" is not here to make nice with people, he is a site administrator. Like many people who enjoy what they do (and are not PR types), he's probably inclined to get a little defensive when people attack his work, especially if they do so without any knowledge of what goes into what he does, and especially when they make unfair vitriolic negative sweeping generalizations. Please consider how you'd feel if someone walked up to your desk at work and told you that everything you spent time doing every day was pathetic.

Now play nice, and maybe if we're lucky, and engage constructively with dgc20e, he will give us some feedback from time-to-time on the perspective from his side of things - and some of us might even learn something.

Thank you for making journals have different pages for faster loading. Perhaps a limit on 5 journal blogs a day would be good so annoying users like jenct06066with nothing to say don't hog the journal pages.

P.S. I bleeping love the dead to me feature. It's awesome. Thanks. (Also takes care of the Jen tards ;) )