(Kdt.)
If you’re looking at Consumerist right now and thinking “something’s not the same,” well… you’re right. We’ve been busy making some tweaks — some you’ll see and some you won’t — but it’s essentially the same Consumerist.com before it got prettied up for the society ball. The biggest change is that, because of the updates you will have to reset your password using the e-mail address you originally used to sign up with. Rest assured that this is not a security issue; it’s just necessitated by the switch to the new platform.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be asking for more feedback and suggestions on possible new features for the site, so stay tuned.
As always, donations — which go toward site maintenance and improvement — are not just appreciated, but are also 100% tax-deductible.
Once again, thank you all for being patient and for reading Consumerist!
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Pringles Multi-Grain Changes Packaging, Size, Grains Under New Owners
Woo
The profile page’s history *still* does not indicate if anyone replies/follows up to a comment
This was my most wanted feature. Disappointment. For good timely and active conversation people need to be informed when there has been a reply to their comment, also, when you click on your comment it should take you right to it with replies not just the story page, you shouldn’t have to look through 4 pages of comments to find yours. New replies should be highlighted upon first viewing them as well.
That would be a really helpful feature.
That, and an edit button.
Yes forgot about that and thought about it later but …no edit button
WordPress?
yes
Also apparently the HTML5 boilerplate, which is obvious if you highlight any text.
That pink does not match your site, Consumerist! HTML5 boilerplate 101 – change that color immediately.
I like the pink! I think I just might highlight all the comments before I read them.
Can’t login with my display name (like before), have to use username. Needed by new system?
Edit your profile, and Fill in the “Nickname” field, that will change your display name. It defaults to your username.
I have. I can POST with my correct display name, just can’t login with it. Annoying is all since I use the same name most places.
Mobile site appears to be broken, but overall looks good?
Looks ok I guess, but functionality-wise I’m getting errors left and right. Every comment I make resolves to a 502 – bad gateway (though the comment posts). Every other refresh of the homepage gives me a 503 error, “A temporary error has occurred. If the problem persists, please contact support@wpengine.com or check our status blog for updates.”
Between this and the lack of collapsed comments, I am very much not impressed with the downgrade to WordPress so far.
Me too – I came here to see if anyone else was getting these errors. I’m using Firefox v13.0.1. I hope we don’t have to use IE
Same problem.
Plus slow. 10s response time to clicking on a link, bad gateway errors,…
I don’t mind the non-collapsed comments though, saves me from hitting expand all for every article
I’m getting the error 40% of the time
Same here. Chrome v19.0.1084.56 and getting 503s left and right.
I wonder if the comments don’t stack in that awkward way anymore.
If you look at old articles they look like they stack the same, but don’t collapse.
Wonder if we get notifications for replies to our comments now.
Yeah, that is going to be annoying.
Any chance of an edit feature?
Nope :-/
I wanted to reply to Monkey but there is not Reply button on his comments. Does that mean we can only reply to comments 4 deep? I really really hope not.
And damn, no edit button.
I think the commenting limit has been removed.
Whoo hoo!
But how tight will the indention go before comments are unreadable?
The world may never know.
Side note: CUTEST LITTLE COMMENT BOX EVER.
Don’t know, let’s find out!
We can definitely go further than that! Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (testing word wrap at ridiculous nesting)
Yep, tried replying to DemosCat below and it wouldn’t let me. Sucks.
or it did before == it lets me now, hooray
Threads only 4 deep?
But what if I want to argue MORE!
McRib: yes, this is bound to get tedious.
Ooh, I see…that’s going to be a little annoying.
Replying to you because I noticed it was you who commented.
So the expand/collapse button is gone for sure – I thought for a minute it was my browser.
I’m HATING the fact that the separate conversations don’t collapse any more.
Looks different.
Wonder what the actual reason for the massive change was?
After 30+ years in IT, any change requiring across the board
password changes used to cause some of my colleagues to
be committed to the state institution afterward…..
Looks like they completely changed the CMS. It’s running on WordPress now.
A change requiring a password reset could be as simple as migrating to a new, more secure hashing algorithm. Once the new algorithm is being used, the old hash will be useless, and due to the nature of hashes, one can’t derive a hash for the new algorithm from the old hash.
Might not even be more secure.. a switch movable type to wordpress is also a switch from Perl to PHP. Perl’s crypt() function doesn’t salt the same way as php’s crypt() function, I don’t think, so it’s impossible for the CMS to know if passwords are correct or not.
(I once did a similar migration and got around it by writing a small script that took the password and hashed it, checked the hash against the stored value using perl. If it was correct, the script updated a toggle in SQL and called a php script to hash the PW using PHP crypt and update the stored value. The perl script was only called if the toggle wasn’t set. It was transparent for users and after 3 months I discontinued the hack and forced a reset for all non-updated passwords.)
Gotta love wordpress.
now if they could only get the comments to post newest first, and take less than 30 minutes to post a comment.
Completely disagree. The oldest comments usually have the greatest deal of discussion to them because they stay on the main page throughout the comment cycle. If you showed the newest, there would be fewer in-depth discussions because comments would be constantly bumped off the first page.
Granted if you have a novel comment after then first page its not likely to be seen, however you should be able to align your comment to one of the first 50 posts anyway.
it does look like they’ve fixed the comment order so that replies to a comment now stack from oldest at the top to newest at the bottom.
For example, I am posting after rmorin. Judging from other comments on this page, I will appear below rmorin.
finally off the old gawker media gimp system eh? Nice nice. Hopefully comments don’t take 60 seconds to post anymore.
They got off Gawker a while ago with their major redesign (the one that brought the look and feel it essentially has now). I think they were on Movable Type before though, and this is on WordPress.
That is correct.
Coincidentally, the commenting system is still god-awful slow.
I always assumed that was on purpose, to prevent people from spam-replying.
Things seem to work faster, so that’s good. I like that you kept almost the entire look and feel while switching to WordPress.
I’m a fan.
Much better system. Great job!
wow. been playing around with the new comments system, and it’s actually slower. Great job!
And still has no edit or delete buttons! Progress!
And we have 6 social networks/aggregation site buttons for each thread because you know, people love those buttons!
awaiting moderation
I always assumed that was intentional, to discourage using the comments for pseudo-realtime conversation.
The sign-in was a run-around (hit the same screen three times), and my username appears on the screen where my display name used to, but it’s still free, and I mostly only come here to see what other idiots are saying about the posts, so, in my book, it’s okay.
When I highlight text it’s pink. What’s the deal with that?
Oh yeah – weird!
To fight breast cancer.
It’s related to the CSS code for this site.
Comments are running pretty slow. Seems to be working all right otherwise though. I do like the change to not have to open all the replies to read them!
I wonder if we’ll have to F5 to get the comments to load after commenting.
Hah instead of just broken, now loading the mobile site brings you to the full site to a story from 2006. Oops!
I appreciate that there’s a mobile site, now, so that’s a plus.
Google Currents has been working great for me when I read the site on the go.
So we get an ‘edit’ button now? Probably not.
This is what I was wondering.
That’s coming in 2 major revisions from now.
Good times.
this might be a good upgrade – I can finally edit my profile again… Now, can I post?
D’oh. Apparently I had my account registered to a now-defunct email address – and now I get to audition to be a commenter! Woohoo!
I like WordPress. Great job!
WordPress. Hmmmm.
Nicely done.
Password reset successful. I wonder if display name works properly. I noticed there’s another field in the profile called Nickname.
And yes, my name is now properly displayed.
This is not my username!!! My username used to be snape and now its MauraAcastus???
Ok well my nickname is now snape but i’ll never remember that username..
*okay*
My wife laughs long and hard when I talk to myself.
But, I haven’t done that since yesterday.
Now you’ve done it today, moron.
You cain’t call ME a moron.
Just did.
Does submitting a comment not take a minute or 2 anymore?
hmm. still seems relatively slow.
Commenting is unusably buggy and …..sloooooowwwwww….
502
Funny, a total revamp and the one thing everyone wanted (an edit button) isn’t there.
The page seems more cluttered to me now, and I hate the white background…how about dulling that down some so we don’t get retinal burn.
The black headlines are significantly harder to read when just trying to scan the homepage.
Took 3 attempts to reset my password, and 2 attempts to correct my profile.
From some of the previous comments it seems this transition was not as smooth as Consumerist had hoped. Why do companies keep falling for the hype that a software upgrade and/or conversion is going to solve all of your problems. Always seems to exasperate old problems and create new ones.
Still too much sizzle (e.g.: social networking links) and not enough steak (e.g.: edit function).
My guess is that most of the impetus for a change comes from the back office and not the front. Usually, it’s that some version doesn’t work with the latest and greatest software or the servers are overtaxed. Customer issues aren’t at the forefront of the changes.
Nothing but problems so far. Pages aren’t loading, having to reload them more than once. Posted and now it says post is waiting for moderation? Really. Page errors, such as page not found, duplicate comments, blah. Yuck.
It’s taking almost as long to load a page as it used to take to post a comment.
It’s taking almost as long to load a page as it STILL takes to post a comment.
edit
Try logging out. For some reason, that made everything on this site move much faster. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to comment.
Nothing but problems so far. Pages aren’t loading, having to reload them more than once. Posted and now it says post is waiting for moderation? Really. Page errors, such as page not found, duplicate comments, blah. Yuck. 502 bad gateway? Comments now take two or three times to post if they post, this one didnt so I will keep at it until it does.
Took three attempts for the above post to post I got bad gateway every time. Then on the fourth attempt it says duplicate entry and that was how I learned that it successfully posted and it never confirmed a post just always gave bad gateway. MEH I hope they fix this broken thing. I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to get a post to stick. Whats with the “your comment is awaiting moderation.”
Took three attempts for the above post to post I got bad gateway every time. Then on the fourth attempt it says duplicate entry and that was how I learned that it successfully posted and it never confirmed a post just always gave bad gateway. MEH I hope they fix this broken thing. I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to get a post to stick. Whats with the “your comment is awaiting moderation.” What happened to my pict and user name MEH
Hmm, yeah, it does look pretty much the same
Okay, I no longer have an avatar or any editing features in my profile. I can’t even change my nickname. Lovely.
So if I log out and view my profile, then my avatar appears. If I look at my previous message in this thread, then my avatar appears. If I log in and view my profile, then my avatar is gone.
Yikes, can we lose the hot pink highlighting? It’s probably built into the theme (I use wordpress every day at work). Is there a way to make the comments collapsable?
RSS Feed had to be readded in Google Reader.
Scratch that. RSS is not updating. I have to manually remove and readd the rss feed to see new posts show up in Google Reader.
I’m having trouble w/ my feed as well. It looks like they changed the URL from /index.xml to /feed … I think. How to merge the posts I saved with the new URL (let alone purge the ones I deleted on the old URL)? Guess I’ll have to rename the old one “Consumerist – OLD” or something. Anybody else have ideas?
Getting “Bad Gateway” when I submit a comment. If I click Back then submit again, it says “duplicate post detected”.
Same for me.
Getting “502 – Bad Gateway” when I submit a comment. If I click Back then submit again, it says “duplicate post detected”.
Apparently even though it detects your duplicate post it has no problem at all allowing it…
I keep getting random “temporary error has occurred” messages.
Me too. About every other click.
Seems things are running slow.
–
10sec response time for page to load.
–
Submitting a comment takes 60secs and comes back with:
502 Bad Gateway
nginx/0.7.65
Going back one page and resubmitting again it says the comment already exists.
–
Clicking on any link randomly gives:
Error!
A temporary error has occurred. If the problem persists, please contact support@wpengine.com or check our status blog for updates.
Hope you guys are tweaking the system
I’m no longer able to receive Consumerist updates via my Google Reader. Anyone else having this problem?
I’m getting a heck of a lot of errors when loading pages, both when commenting and when just clicking a link for an article. Hopefully will be figured out soon.
I’m getting about a 75% failure rate for clicks. So one out of four times I try to read an article it actually works. I’d say the upgrade is a colossal downgrade in disguise.
I was also, but it seems to have cleared up.
But now, no way to preview a comment anymore before it posts?
It’s bad enough not having an edit button. At least by previewing a post you had a chance to fix any bugs in it, like any embedded HTML code that was previously allowed. Ugh.
What then was gained, really? So you don’t have to click ‘expand all’ anymore?
Every other mouse click or refresh results in an error, code 503. Very annoying. I’m using Firefox, latest release.
and when you comment you get 502 Bad Gateway nginx/0.7.65
I realize they are probably still working out some bugs, but talk about a massive step backwards. I would never expect these types of issues on a major website although being non-profit I can somewhat understand.
So far I’ve had to use my F5 key more often than I would during a hunt for the BOC on woot.com. I have noticed pictures with broken links, numerous 404 errors, 502 and 503 WordPress errors…. the list goes on.
All things considered… this is pretty horrible for the day after a release. If any for-profit website acted like this, (Walmart, Best Buy, NewEgg, Amazon etc) I’d probably be reading some outrage on this very site.
You’re having the same issues I am. And you’re right, if I went live with this type of “upgrade” I’d get shot.
It’s got that new car smell… or perhaps the smell of the mechanic who drove your old car around to the front of the shop after working on it.
“But please keep in mind that while we have millions of readers…”
It that truly millions of distinct hits, or the same math moms who hate JC Penny use?
Good thing wpengine has a 60 day money back guarantee. I would hate to see Consumerist have to do a chargeback.