(WUWT readers, please excuse this distraction while I holler at WUWT’s hosting provider, wordpress.com. As Willis would say, “my blood is mightily angrified”.)
I have generally been supportive of most wordpress.com upgrades, for example the recent upgrade to allow the top editor bar to float with scrolling is a HUGE time saver.
Unfortunately, the new Beep Beep Boop “upgrade” is a crash-and-burn moment in user interface design.
Top 10 reasons the new WordPress Beep Boop Boob editor is a stunning failure.
1. It turns a process that used to take 1-2 seconds into something that takes several seconds, sometimes as long as 30 seconds. My timing this morning was 17 seconds to get the create a new post dialog. A second attempt took 32 seconds after I cleared the crash dialog (see below).
2. It is visually annoying. It makes me want to scream at the screen while it takes all those extra seconds to load, seen below.
The reason for the “beep beep boop” is that whoever programed it, realized it takes longer, and they needed something to let the end user know the program was doing something. Classic bloatware failure.
3. It makes wordpress.com seem juvenilized.
4. It is inconsistent with the rest of the wp.com user experience. For example, no “beep boop” appears when you try to create a new page.
5. It presents a smaller editor than we used to get, which isn’t fully representative of the CSS settings for width of your theme.
6. It was foisted on us with no warning. And this is the thing I hate the most, many of these “upgrades” just appear overnight. Microsoft learned this lesson of just foisting unwanted upgrades on end users without notice and allows you to opt-out. You should learn this lesson too. New is not always better.
7. It crashes:
8. The “Welcome to an easier way to create on WordPress.com! Missing the old editor? No worries, just switch to classic mode. “ feature doesn’t seem to “stick”.
9. It comes up in text editor mode, more work, more wait to switch to visual editor mode.
10. Whenever I accidentally stumble on it now, I realize my mistake and back out of it, and find the correct link to bring up the real editor. When users actively work to avoid using a new piece of software, because it wastes time, annoys them, and crashes, you know you have a MEGAFAIL on your hands.
Whoever came up with this idea, along with the person who approved implementing it deserves a virtual 2×4 upside the head to knock some sense into them.
For me, it may be the tipping point to abandon wordpress.com and go to a paid service where I at least can control my own user experience by choosing not to install inane upgrades.
UPDATE 8/27/14 :
WordPress seemed oblivious, but I and many others continued to bombard them with emails, posts, phone calls, and anything we could do to tell them how bad this change was.
Today, all of the sudden, things were back to normal, and this appeared above the editor page:
That “new and improved posting experience” aka the “beep boop” editor, is corp-speak for “we took this turkey out back and shot it in the head”.
Two thoughts:
1. Users win. Lesson to WordPress – trust your users.
2. Thank you WordPress for finally seeing the light
Absolutely, right in your assessment A W. Whoever thought of this peculiar distraction should be put back on sanitary engineering duties.
NikFromNYC says:
August 17, 2014 at 12:56 pm
Strongly note that the one demographic that should have already converted to climate alarm skepticism based on intelligent reason but hasn’t is the urban tech crowd, heads full of buzzwords and hipsterism.
People who write software are easily fooled. People who design hardware not so much.
skeohane says: “I just spent ten minutes logging into wordpress so a comment could be posted.”
I’ve had to do this for over a year. It’s a gigantic pain in the butt to compose a comment, fill in the blanks, then have it lost in the ether when WP says, in its best Ralph Nedry voice: “Uh, uh, uh! You can’t comment! You’re not logged in to that account!”
“It also changes my user name to a truncation of my email rather than my full name which I have always posted under.”
Aha. You’re laboring under the misconception that WP uses your user name to track your account. HAHAHAAHAH! They use your email account! Always have.
One thing: avoid at all cost having multiple WP blogs with the same email associated with more than one. Okay, two things: If you use, say, your “Dr. Snarkipuss” WP blog to comment here, never open WUWT before logging onto Dr. Snarkipuss. It’s sometimes advisable not to check the “Keep me logged in” box when you log into a WP blog.
Rumor has it that the beep boop poop window is being replaced with a sing-along feature in the next WP release.
Singalong? Wow, now THERE’S something I can relate to. Will it also record? I mean, you know, so we can cross-post to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr? Maybe Skype it too? Let’s make WordPress the premium Karaoke blogging platform! This is mind numbing while simultaneously giving me a migraine. Ignore the paradox. It’s just the dying spasms of brain cells in distress.
I feel your pain, most of my favorite software is 10 to 15 years old. Some of it was coded for the 2Gig HDD era. By which I mean it’s fast, reliable and it does everything I want and it’s easy to use. While all the new versions of the same programs I find almost unusable, their interface make me absolutely furious. I never stop cursing Microsoft. And every new version of operating system has been far more of a PITA than the last one. I despise new software and new phones. But more than anything else, touch screen interfaces are the quintessence of a crime against humanity.
Hi guys, I’m not a developer or any kind of IT specialist. I’m just a simple blogger. And this beep beep boop thing is driving me insane! I was so glad to find the possibility of reverting to the “classic” editor (for as long as it lasts).
Besides all the complaints above, with which I agree with every one, I also find it ridiculous and extremely annoying that when you publish a post, you are not taken back to your blog to see the actual post!
I tried to publish a post about a dozen times until I opened my blog homepage in another tab and realised it had indeed published. All I was getting was that stupid juvenile notice “your post has been updated. Well done!” or some such inane notice.
Whose bright idea was that to separate a blog editor from the blog itself, WordPress? The developer responsible ought to be fired forthwith.
In an effort to make this thread somewhat climate related, I would like to observe that the people who bring you Windows 8.1 and WordPress are highly trained, talented, engineering professionals. The people who bring you computer programs called “climate models” are hacks who don’t really know what they are doing. So if Windows 8.1 and WordPress are both in error in some aspects, just imagine how screwed up the models are!
By the way, you can make Windows 8.1 act a lot like Windows 7 without any needed addons and I have to use it at work. I much, much prefer a nice Linux box and am typing from an LXDE desktop right now on an old Vista class emachine cheap box. But what really makes my day is when I use my personal MacBook Pro from 2008 to work on. Dang desktop looks the same as it does on my 2004 machine G4 machine and both look just like any new 2014 OS X 10.9.4 box you could pick up today. (I did put 8 gigs of memory in the 2008 Intel box)
Moral? Change can be good, but change just to be changing is usually a mistake.
Hi Anthony, your hollering at wordpress.com is completely unjustified. You are the one who is doing the extremely foolish thing to run a website this big on wordpress.com. It should naturally be on wordpress.org hosted on your own (virtual) server where you have complete control of updates and plugins. Your hollering is like a 10 year old being annoyed that his legs are too long for the trike that’s intended for toddlers. Get off of wordpress.com and move to selfhosted wordpress asap. You will not have those issues then!
I had trouble logging in to WordPress before to comment, and again just now. “Capcha” is bad enough, but when your WordPress login fails, the screen now wiggles in a stupid, childish way. I tried to get a new password, only to find that it sent the email to an account that no longer exists. I finally was able to login using a user ID and change the contact email.
After it first appeared I went over to their feedback to ask about it. They’re reply (to others asking) as near as I can recall was they weren’t going to go back and you just needed to live with it.
Terrible, terrible, editor. Childish and narcissistic programming and programmer.
Oh, and to Hajo Smit, why would you ever have any kind of commercial relationship with this kind of company?
The Swedish branch of eBay, a.k.a. Tradera, did this sort of stunt a while ago. They closed the old well-functioning website and launched overnight without warning an untested website and the result was any but successful. They quickly realized to operate both in parallel and promised to keep the old one to the end of this year.
They have been less than receptive to most of the problems identified, such as of creating new auctions. Something that has become more time consuming now. When buying, all searches of any items are done initially with the non-functioning search option “relevant“. Have not seen any working search option like that anywhere yet and don’t expect to find it in the future either. (What’s “relevant” to one person, isn’t nessesarely relevant to any other, but they are not of required level of understanding, like on several other websites …)
By not listening to the buyers, then they commit the classic mistake in trading … If they don’t change their attitude, they will lose many of those who are active on the website today. The headquarters of eBay does not seem to care …
Dear Mr. Watts,
The key, obvious & recognized thing going on here is that mobile phones & social media are on a huge roll, and they’re cutting into the tradition desktop & website scene.
The REAL KEY, but somehow subtle & vaguely-sensed thing going on here is that females took to the new computerized telephone (and ‘simplistic’ ways of using them) in truly massive droves … after we all had spent 20 years chewing our lip & fretting about how in the heck we were going to create a sustainable, healthy Digital Era/Culture … with essentially no women. Because that’s exactly what we have in programming, computing and webcraft – way, way, way too few females.
Well, the answer to the sparsity of girls & women in computers is now, literally, in hand. Unfortunately (for you & me), the solution came with an equally-massive shift to the most-dreaded drawbacks of classic mindless exploitative Consumerism.
I’m with you, Anthony. The ‘dummied-down’ solution is a painful step backwards. And it’s not just WordPress. Oh, no. All digital stakeholders from Microsoft and Apple on down are heavily affected. (Apple of course just guzzles the Kool Aid.)
There is a serious near civil-war situation going on in Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth has alienated a lot of his traditional computer user-base & contributors (yeah, virtually all of them male), by turning his Linux UI into basically a phone, and not an impressive phone at that, imo. (That’s what Matt Mullenweg is doing with WordPress, too.)
I have dabbled with WordPress since very near its beginning, but never ‘on the dot-com side’; always self-hosted. Before that I experimented extensively with other CMS, and before that I wrote several meaningful sites by hand. I’ve kept WP on a localhost server environment for many years. I follow the scene.
Like the old song sez; “Nobody does it better [than WordPress] … tho sometimes I wish someone would”.
In the case of Anthony Watts and WUWT, going with WP Dot Com may be the grin-and-bear-it optimum (imperfect) solution. I’ve seen you lay your relevant WP (dot-com) argument-cards face-up on the table on previous occasions. Other significant community leaders & contributors continue to express appreciation to Anthony for his advice to use WordPress, and to let ‘the dot-com side’ handle the gory backend load.
Ultimately acting in our interests is the fact that Evolution stands still for no Man. Or Woman. Or Website Software. Or Consumer Industry. Darwin’s Dictum is no tender comfort … but it vexes those who would dumb us all down worse than it does us. “We” are the Variations that enable Selection to work.
Like with freedom, there is a price to computerized self-determination. There are different ways to meet the costs … but if in the end the cost of a successful WUWT is the acceptance of WordPress Dot Com foibles … that wouldn’t be the worst compromise I’ve seen this week. 😉
Thanks to Ted Clayton.
Well said sir.
Good news for Windows 8 haters, you’ll be able to try out Windows 9 next month or so :
http://winsupersite.com/windows/coming-soon-threshold-public-preview
I would cheer … but I think I’ll wait and see what they actually give us before I start the party.
It’s a licensing issue. I use ckEditor for a few of my sites too (the “classic” WP editor). It’s really easy to use, greatly functional, and has a great UI. WP doesn’t want to abide by their licensing rules.
I also occasionally build a site that requires WP, and I have to say for the amount of time WP has been out there for development it’s still painfully primitive, with an insanely steep learning curve for template development. If I make even the most simplistic changes to the UI I can’t switch between templates while retaining those changes. Although great for a simple blog, there are easily 10 major features that simply don’t exist that would make it useful to integrate into other sites.
And yeah, it sucks to install a few WP installations, then have WP own your name for every one of them, even the ones like WUWT where I’m just a guest. My WP account that I created to work on other sites should have NOTHING to do with WUWT.
Even for this comment, I had to ‘log in’ and I couldn’t remember my password since I haven’t had to enter it for months, then got put on “wait a few minutes to try again”. Sorry WP, but you suck.
CodeTech @August 17, 2014 at 3:02 pm,
Here’s the popular CKEditor plugin for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/plugins/ckeditor-for-wordpress/ … and here’s CKEditor’s subdomain for WordPress: http://wordpress.ckeditor.com/
Respectfully disagree. They charge nothing, and are available for help all the time. Ask for your money back if you don’t like it.
New is not always better. Flickr.com?
Anthony,
Can I suggest that if you go private, go with the same host as JoNova? The layout and comment usability of her blog is unparralleled in my experience. Maybe that can reduce the hosting cost for both of you.
Just a suggestion.
Grant says: “The problem with it is that it’s too much of a departure from win 7 but once you learn it …”
Any decent, well designed upgrade should not require the end-user to “learn it”. A new operating system, sure. But not an upgrade!
Same applies to any application upgrade. For example: Many years back, Apple blew it with their iLife upgrade which also “upgraded” iMovieHD where users had to re-learn app and get replacement SFx Add-ons.
Truthseeker @August 17, 2014 at 4:35 pm,
The JoNova site, http://joannenova.com.au/, is “Powered by WordPress”.
Beta Blocker says:
August 17, 2014 at 8:58 am
Pamela Gray says: August 17, 2014 at 8:23 am
You have described Windows f***ing 8. It was meant to work for mouse-less touch screens on tablet-like devices and computers. But most of us still buy a mouse and notebooks with mouse pads and buttons.
In addition to a Windows 7 box, I have three identical XP boxes all configured to the same hardware standard, one of which is always in continuous use. With any luck, at least one of them will remain functional until I breath my last breath.
Here is a question for the WUWT readership: Is one of the reasons why Chinese engineers are more productive than American engineers is that most of their desktop applications still rely on user-friendly Windows XP?
———————————————————————————————————————————-
I would not have W8 if Classic Shell had not been invented. The program allows you to configure your desktop as W7 or XP. There are still some annoying W8 functions, but liveable. Compatibility, however, sucks big time. W7 could handle just about anything, but W8 simply refuses to run some older programs, and am still waiting for several upgrades. I use a British version of W8; much less clutter and only have to make allowances for that added “U” the Brits favoUr.
Oh No! Another Wang VS-100 operator? What did you work on next? Dec/Digital?
tsk tsk That is sooo sad. 🙂 🙂
How about IBM 3270PCs? Got them lurking in the background too?
Wow. Wang. Digital. Blast from the past. Those were the first two systems I worked on. They were big … WordPress should think about that. Oh, and GTE. Remember them? Backbone of the Internet?
Just like ‘climate scientists’ ™ if they didn’t f#k with things they wouldn’t have a job.
Microsoft seems to work like a pendulum, 98 good, ME bad, XP good, Vista bad, W7 good, w8 bad
I hope everyday Anthony will dump WP and go to a Vbulletin Forum with a front page like this site http://www.overclockers.com/
There is so much information here that it deserves to be divided up and categorized like only vbulletin can do
I suppose all you lot must be writing your own blogs. But for the common or garden reader of WUWT, I see no change. Just as easy to post a comment today as it was yesterday. Mind you, I still use Windows XP and Outlook Express, even though every now and then I get idiotic messages telling me to upgrade as they are no longer supported. That is good, if they are no longer supported, then it is not worth while hackers writing worms and other nasties for them. Also recently silly messages warning me to update the drivers – whatever they may be!