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New Format for Reader/Wordpress Website

  1. leannewhatever
    Member

    I was enjoying the new reader, but I am finding it really confusing. It is hard to work out where one finishes and the next starts. I hadn't realised, but I do now that they were only showing one image and no text. I will have to watch out how my posts are displayed, as a visual artist my blog is all about the visual.

    I do sometimes wonder if WordPress has got too big and the guy who started it has let it go to his hear. The reality is most people won't complain because they will let others do it for them, it happens everywhere. People will sit back and hope that things change. WordPress need to be careful, look what happened to instagram when an unhappy change was made.

    I have stuck with wordpress for the community, I enjoy that, but I will admit I have started looking elsewhere for other blog platforms. One that gives me more control.

    As to WordPress, they make so much money from us. They allow advertising on our blogs, there are the upgrades, which don't really do anything much anyway. They have so much control over what you can do to your blog, then they can screw us over, and we just have to put up with it.

  2. annacull
    Member

    I'll add my voice to the complaints about recent changes to the Reader, for what it's worth. The new format provides less information and doesn't accurately represent what's being posted. Mind you, I might spend a bit less time looking at other people's blogs now and a bit more time working. Is that what you want, WordPress? Is it?

    I also miss being able to report and/or block blogs from the Reader — that was a great feature while it lasted.

    And I like the idea of having viewing options on the Reader, such as being able to choose whether you see the images or not. For what it's worth.

  3. seedbud
    Member

    The new reader is horrible!!! Please return to the old, useful style where one could:
    Actually see a full image and not an odd cropping.
    See a few lines of text.
    See the word count of posts text.
    See the number of likes and comments.
    Report spam or block a blog from one's reader.
    And where the title of the post appeared at the top - not below the image.

    And another troublesome issue that developed before the "enhancements" and persists is the reader not loading or loading only a few blogs and looping them. Awful.

    Oh wordpress, you've been so wonderful. What happened?

  4. rakmilphotography
    Member

    On IOS Blogs I Follow has the old format, while all other topics show no media whatsoever. Odd.

  5. carrieslager
    Member

    Okay, I would like to add my complaints as well. Why is it on the stats page that the bar at the top is blue but on other WordPress sites, it's black? And why, oh why, did they take out the feature that drops down and lets you see all the blogs you are an author on? Now I have to go to the dashboard itself to find my handy black bar whereas before I could just drop the menu down, click and guest post! Or I have to go to the my blogs tab and do the same thing. Why can't they just keep the task bar like it was?

    The reader is hideous now. Why is all the important stuff on the right side of the screen now and why is it when you click on some titles it directs you to only that blog on the reader? Then you have to make a completely unnecessary click to get to the post you wanted to go to in the first place. The pictures are either too big or nonexistent and sometimes the titles of posts don't even show up. Don't even get me started on the font either.

    Seriously WordPress, what's going on?

  6. starsthatlight
    Member

    I'm not that happy with the changes WordPress has made. The navigation is a little weird and uncomfortable. But I'm sure in time I'll get use to that. Though the photos in the reader are way too large now. Most pictures I can't see all at once. I have to do the whole scroll up and down quickly thing to trick myself into thinking I saw every part at once. And I know it's not been changed that long, but it seems like it's making it too easy to just look at one post and scroll on. It's lowering the blogger interaction. And perhaps the way site views and visitors were before they were just being tallied oddly and maybe now is the more accurate way. But it seems more like people aren't checking out the full blog. Causing views to go down, even though the same number of people seem to be liking things, they don't seem to be looking around more. It really feels more like a Facebook interface of scroll and like move on. Which is not good for bloggers, we want you to stick around and see everything we have to offer. Not just the tip of one piece. It really seems less blogger friendly right now

  7. kitchenmudge
    Member

    I posted in a new thread before being pointed to this one.

    I can live with some of the recent changes, but my main complaint is the absence of the grey admin bar on some pages. That's my way of going to dashboard. If I'm in stats, freshly pressed, or settings, I have to go somewhere else before I can get into dashboard.

    Whose idea was this?

  8. lemonygregghead
    Member

    I am very unhappy with the new format of the Reader. It's inefficient in design and brings no improvements (as far as I can see). A few of my main complaints: as it is now set up, it makes it harder to navigate and discourages me from actually visiting the blogs I follow. The interface is counterintuitive. I can't see what's happening on my own blog, as I could before. I also can't access the dashboard from the reader, either. Please consider returning to the previous format. It was working just fine before. Redesign just for the sake of redesign is really not the way to go here.

  9. ancientlibrarian
    Member

    The new Reader!!!!!!!!!!!!! I haven't been able to load Reader since around October 2012. I logged onto Firefox simply to open Reader, and as of December 2012, Firefox could no longer open Reader, and started kicking me out.

    I even went to the local library (assuming something was wrong with my computer), and the library's computer system had a problem loading Reader, as well! Although, Reader finally loaded on the library's computer, it was slow, and a mess!

    What gives?

  10. belladonichaze
    Member

    Fix it or I am outta here!

  11. schoolpsychscholar
    Member

    Why can't we access our dashboard from the new blog main page? When I go to wordpress.com, logged in, the first tab is a Reader tab. So...the main reason we are all paying a subscription fee to WP is because we want to read other blogs?! Come on. Also, I can't get to my own dashboard from that page (used to be able to hover over my name). Now I have to go through two steps just to create a new post. And, no, I don't count that fat, oversized cartoon pencil as a genuine route to starting a post. It doesn't give you access to the full dashboard. Please don't try to be Tumblr. We count on WP being the anti-Tumblr. The other weird thing is that when I try to write a new post, there is a huge border of white space around my text. It used to just fill out to the edges of the text box as you wrote. I tried it on two different browsers with the same result. It's disorienting.

  12. shiftingphases
    Member

    Holy smoke, who knew that such tiny design problems could cause such a huge amount of cumulative irritation in such a short period of time??

    The new layout is unnecessarily cumbersome:

    - no one-click access to the dashboard
    - the "new post" page forces me to choose a template when I don't care to use them
    - the "kitchen sink" toolbar is gone (in the default "new post" editor) so if I choose at "text" type post and once I'm logged in, I can insert a photo but not a video
    - "wordpress.com" redirects to the infuriating start page, so there isn't even a way to navigate from my blog to the forums to complain about how annoying it is not to be able to navigate from my blog to the forum!

    I had to leave WordPress and go to Google just to find WordPress's forums. Seriously, folks, from a company whose visual and user-interface design has always been top-notch, that's embarrassing.

    It's not terrible -- I use worse software -- it's just that it's such a dramatic decrease in quality. If I wanted to be protected from my own administrative options, coerced into using inflexible templates, all for the sake of being pacified by giant buttons with safety-scissor-rounded edges that look like Duplo blocks, I'd use Apple products.

    Most distressingly, I don't see any response from WordPress staff. Rolling out a new layout can be expected to cause little glitches, even if the new layout is wonderful... I would expect the staff to be keeping an eye out for a thread such as this and at the very least acknowledging it. Which is making me second-guess my judgement about not just the design but also the service -- another thing that in my experience has always been worth bragging about.

    Like others who have commented, I am a paying user -- for my personal blog as well as several organizational blogs. I run free "sign up for WordPress, it's easy and great" workshops, and consider myself a cheerleader and promoter. I hope I get to continue feeling confident that that's a good idea.

  13. booksnobbery
    Member

    @shiftingphases

    Most distressingly, I don't see any response from WordPress staff. Rolling out a new layout can be expected to cause little glitches, even if the new layout is wonderful... I would expect the staff to be keeping an eye out for a thread such as this and at the very least acknowledging it.

    They did this on purpose, sadly. It seems likely that they were expecting feedback, but at this point, it's already a done deal, so no matter how many of us complain...

    Contained in those commits are countless improvements to the experience for WP.com, but I’m just as proud of the things we removed and streamlined: <b>the WP.com homepage has been drastically simplified, and a completely revamped reader is launching this week.</b>

    source

    (emphasis mine, of course)

    Sadly, I find the new reader unusable. Since I'm not willing to manually transfer EVERY SINGLE BLOG I follow over to a third party reader, I'll be missing out on a lot of the former WordPress.com interaction I previously enjoyed.

    I won't use that reader, it gives me a headache and I just can't.

  14. katwilson19
    Member

    Arrgg... why? Where are the images, why are they all cropped small, for those of us who are mostly photo orientated bloggers and readers this new format sucks. Why can't we see what the other photos are in the post? I have no desire to browse other blogs now, it is more work than it should be. Bring back the photos!

  15. kitchenmudge
    Member

    I happen to be logged in, type wordpress.com in the address bar, and it puts me in THE READER, of all things? (something I rarely use) There's no obvious way to go to dashboard, much contortion to find a link to wordpress support.

    The navigation on this is just plain nuts.

  16. shiftingphases
    Member

    Perhaps the reader and blogging platform could be separate (related) products, so that people who use one or the other are not forced to contend with both. When I log into Gmail, it doesn't force me to click through my RSS reader first. The same could apply here -- have a login process that clearly allows you to choose one or the other, and once logged in allows you to switch.

    It's amazing how irritating those few extra clicks are, when you know they're unnecessary that you're going to have to repeat them every. single. time.

  17. sleepinghorse
    Member

    Agre with ALL of the issues above. I never complain about WordPress changes but felt I had to add my voice to this one. Loved the old reader format. Intensely dislike the new one. Please change it back.
    And yes, I too had to go to Google to find the forum!

  18. themagicrobot
    Member

    I too was initially confused about the lack of functionality on the new blue header until I realised you just click on "Stats" and then click on the little "w" on the right and you're taken straight to your dashboard.
    Scroll to the bottom and click on "Forums". No Google required.....

  19. rakmilphotography
    Member

    This thread was started to discuss the changes to reader. Lots of other issues have been raised all with one thing in common, its more complicated to do things. I would like to hear from photographers or other media types concerned about the clipping of thier pictures and the haphazard approach to their presentation in reader.

  20. sebastiaanswinkels
    Member

    I've been using wordpress for self hosted blogs/sites for years and last year i decided to get a free blog on here and i liked the additional reader that i could just bump a few topics into to get interesting articles to read.

    Lately this reader is starting to "upset" me. I have 2 topics in general that i search for, Coffee and Espresso. Espresso generally resulted in a 80/20 ratio of spam and actual posts. I used to be able to just click "Report as Spam and Block" those blogs altogether but apparently that feature has been removed. Although the amount of spam in the reader was growing every day i didn't mind it as long as i could insta-block those (ab)users.

    Are there other ways of getting content from wordpress.com blogs by topic? Another website or service? Or even an application?

    I know i'm not a paying member, but i do feel that there are probably a lot of paying members on here that feel the exact same way.

  21. dorothymcdonall
    Member

    I hope someone at WordPress sees the light and addresses these concerns, or I shall have to think of another venue for my blogs. ... Why is it that when something isn't broke someone feels compelled to "fix" it? ... I don't know if I have the patience to figure yet another wholesale WordPress system change if they're going to change it again in the future. I just got used to the old one ... Frustrating ...

  22. thecourseofourseasons
    Member

    Please change this back to the previous incarnation - It is a confusing and unnecessary change - does not help the use or function - in fact hinders it. It is unpleasant to use and I will consider changing and moving my blog.

  23. irvent
    Member

    First, change the Freshly Pressed to the old format. The current format makes it no different from any other topic under Explore Topics. The "specialness" is gone.

    Second, when skimming through a topic, the photos are too big, the title font is too big and the title comes after the picture. If there is no picture, then that causes even more confusion and slows down skimming. One thing that could help is to make the background darker so one post can be differentiated from the following post. Having a title show up first would be nice too.

    Third, finding the dashboard is now a game.
    Last, do WP people even consider what bloggers think before making changes or just react? Do they care?

  24. thedixieflatline666
    Member

    For those concerned about huge pictures and fonts in the reader.

    For firefox users only (sorry!), I have a workaround using an addon, which turns this into this. Unlike firefox's built-in zoom, which gets applied right across wordpress, this is specific to the reader.

    If anyone's interested, you can email me via my About page. If I get a lot a queries, I'll make a post on it and post the link here.

  25. thedixieflatline666
    Member

    Oops. Those links!

    It turns this into this.

  26. barbradonachy
    Member

    Again, we remain unsettled/perplexed that with the new format, there is no indication whether the post contains multiple photos or just one photo; lots of text, a little text, or no text. In any other website we can think of, readers/viewers have an idea of what is behind the click: a story, just a photo, a story and a photo, etc. It used to be this way on the reader. We simply do not have time to randomly click on the reader page with no idea as to what - if any - additional content will come up. Plus, how come SOME photos that include stories show the beginning of the story on the reader, and OTHERS that also have a photo and a story show only the story?

  27. katwilson19
    Member

    Where do we block spam in reader now?

  28. synapticcohesion
    Member

    I think there should be an option where users can choose either the old or the new format. My two cents.

  29. furzeinahaze
    Member

    WordPress have ruined blogging for me. I just deleted my blog and I am leaving WP for good. This new update is the worst ever, and as it's always a case with WordPress updates of 'like it or leave' I do not like it, and so therefore I have quite willingly left.

  30. tammydotts
    Member

    Gotta agree with the other posters here. Catching up on blogs I follow, topics in my Reader, or Freshly Pressed is frustrating. Text and pics are too big. It's hard to tell where one post ends and the next begins. Sometimes there's a photo and a blurb, sometimes just a blurb, sometimes just a title, sometimes just a photo. Reading is impossible. If one of the blogs I follow changed to a format like this, I'd quickly stop following them.

    Please change back, or give us options to set how we want to view Reader and FP.

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