Removing the scrollbar from the post editor one of the worst "improvements" yet
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I like WordPress, too – as @susanbourne says. But if it takes more time to put an article on my blog as it takes for several articles on my job as a journalist I wonder if I have to blog further just for fun.
I’m wandering a bit around. http://medium.com/ seems to be nice and simple. Keep it plain.
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@susanbourne: Yet, all some people had to offer is focus on how angry people are. Well, hell yes I’m angry. Until this “improvement” was forced down my throat, using WP.com was a generally OK experience. It had its problems (such as not always taking the most recent changes, etc), but it worked, more or less, and didn’t get in the way.
This “improvement”, which is supposed to help us “focus on editing” gets in the way. I often have to write very long posts, analysing recent events, describing possible consequences and outcomes, etc. This is out of the question now. Even Blogger looks like a more viable alternative now – and to think I believed I upgraded from it by switching to WP.com!
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@monaeberhardt,
As I scroll down, the left-hand side menu goes all the way up and disappears.
The “left-hand side menu”?
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Yes. The dark grey pane on the left, which has options like “Home”, “Store”, “Posts”, “Media”, “Links”, “Pages” etc. You can’t miss it.
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On mine it does. On both Firefox 31 and Chrome 36.0.1985.125. And yes, I’ve cleared my cache. Thrice today. Twice yesterday.
Still, it’s the same. Everything moves up, getting well-hidden from view when I scroll down. The only device on which it doesn’t happen is my tablet, but I’d be a complete idiot to believe it’d be viable to compose 4,000-long articles (like I often have to do) on a 7″ tablet, even with an external keyboard, when I could do this work on a real computer, with a properly-sized display and a real, tactile keyboard.
This “improvement” improved something that was of little importance and impact; WP.com has a perfectly good app, which needs just a little tweaking. But no, they somehow had to give us this.
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I said “admin panel” meaning “admin sidebar menu.” Not sure what it’s called.
Sorry to hear about this unusual issue that you’ve been encountering. Has anyone else reported movement of the admin sidebar menu?
Calling the latest model of a product an “improvement” is pretty much standard business practice. Soap, cars, shoes, breakfast cereal, are always marketed as improvements over the previous models. We shouldn’t take that designation so seriously. It’s just the latest model, and it not only has a number of bugs, but results in some effects (more time spent scrolling for long posters) directly opposite to what was projected.
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Then again, when one maintains that a change is “extremely helpful and time-saving” a week after a flood of comments arrives saying that it is unhelpful and time-wasting….
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Retract my last comment. The descriptive phrase, “extremely helpful and time-saving,” cited above specifically referred only to the pinning of the post editor toolbar.
One small — but extremely helpful and time-saving — update we’ve introduced is a fixed toolbar to the Post Editor.
Quote from “New Editing and Media Updates Are Here,” by Konstantin Kovshenin, Jul 29, 2014 @ 3:42 pm
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>…after a flood of comments arrives saying that it is unhelpful and
> time-wasting….of course, over six hundred people liked the announcement. :-)
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@ roseglace,
Yes, but I retracted the statement because it refers only to the “fixed toolbar,” which not too many have found troublesome. That modification could have been made without touching the editor scrollbar and resizing tool.
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Every one on here with the scroll bar gone and my template not right keeps asking if you have a desk top or lap top .i called Micro soft they said it did not matter that the problem of my template looking different is because of a change done by WordPress [they did not say wp just —i dont remember] in there programing software and other things involving them running the main site
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Restating what Susanbourne said – and I’ve talked to several others in my own writing community about this, and WordPress should know that the people complaining here are but a small subset of people with issues. I know some are scratching their heads and don’t necessarily know how to get to the support area here.
When the dashboard was redone and all the useful data was moved out of sight or attached to other sections, I said that things had reached the point where I was no longer able to heartily recommend WordPress – that I always had to do it with a qualifier. “WordPress is pretty good, BUT they occasionally do these updates to things that make the experience worse.” – This was after the infinite scroll that was added to the site while I was away, which a lot of my readers were complaining about by the time I was back, something I had to spend some time undoing in the menu (but I could undo it, which is great!)
Now things are at the point where I’m not able to recommend WordPress to people, and I have a lot of fans who’ve started their own works, inspired by my own. Now I’m telling anyone who asks (and some who don’t) “Don’t go with WordPress, they muck things up, and the only reason I’m still with them is because I’m used to them, and that’s a reality that’s changing with every unasked-for update.”
I write with a very steady routine – 1k words per 2 hours, and since the change was made, I can very easily note the impact on my output. Instead of 1k words per 2 hours, it’s 900. Past two weeks, I’ll frequently have 1800 words written by 4pm instead of 2k words. I’m having to start earlier and put more time in because I know the writing process is more bogged down.
I can look at this and say, very simply, this one minor inconvenience is causing me a fairly strict 10% drop in productivity. My own concern is very minor here, but it keeps getting glossed over – pg up and pg down don’t work with the new setup. That’s all I care about, but I spent 12+ hours per workday writing, and not being able to easily move up to check something or make an edit is a massive hassle. Every time I hit PgUp and the screen jerks around, I hate WordPress just a little. I don’t want to have that kind of relationship with WordPress, and I don’t want to have to, when my fans ask me if they should use WordPress, tell them “No.”
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You’ve put the issue in its proper context. It’s not about whether specific people dislike something, it’s about the negative effect on efficiency that we are all experiencing.
WP has a lot of good stuff going for it, but it’s been made somewhat inefficient with this change. The original was better than the new improved. If Coke could go back to the original formula, so can WP.
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> …it refers only to the “fixed toolbar,”….
the video in the announcement makes it quite clear that there is more to the change. in particular it illustrates the enlarged editing box, removed scroll bar, etc. of course, we have no idea how many of those 600+ ‘likes’ took that into account.
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Yes @wildbow… One of the things that first attracted me to WP was the feeling of collaboration and cooperation among/between users and developers. That sense of workable relationship seems to be slipping away, one improvement after another. Why is it I do wonder, even as it confounds us, that WP has so few words to offer in response to all the many sentences and sentiments we users have shared about the lack of ease and time-consuming difficulties with WP’s latest editing changes — which include the disappearing scrollbar, as well as other unwelcome ‘improvements.’ Roll back the changes to the way they were when editing was workable and enjoyable. The longer WP keeps itself out of the conversation, the sooner many of us will be leaving WP. Is that the goal of the new improvements? One has to begin to wonder — especially in the light of the lack of responses and responsiveness from WP itself about this particular issue. WP, are you listening and do you hear us? Please respect bloggers enough to care and comment on our shared concerns. And, of course, bring back our scroll bar now!
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@ roseglace,
But I cherry-picked a quote from the Kovshenin piece referring specifically only to one element, one modification, and applied it to results due to modifications of different elements. I’m not saying that there aren’t questionable claims in “New Editing and Media Updates.”
Take the following quote from the piece:
Composing new posts — and editing old ones — has just become a lot easier with a fixed toolbar. You no longer need to scroll up and down the Post Editor to make changes, which makes longform writing, in particular, especially smoother.
Yes, the fixed toolbar would reduce the amount of scrolling necessary to edit a long post, but (as we’ve mentioned several times previously in the thread) on 22 July, when the time-saving fixed toolbar was introduced, another time-wasting modification was also introduced: the removal of the editor scrollbar (as well as the resizer). For many, the net effect appears to have been increased scrolling time during ordinary post editing.
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Therefore, the statement,
You no longer need to scroll up and down the Post Editor to make changes, which makes longform writing, in particular, especially smoother.
which might have been true had the fixed toolbar been the only change, is no longer true.
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> The longer WP keeps itself out of the conversation, the sooner
> many of us will be leaving WP.wordpress is in the converstation. late in the afternoon of july 29th, i submitted a comment on the Official Update on this topic (“New Editing and Media Updates Are Here”). i don’t claim that the comment was particularly insightful, but it did ask why the complaints on these changes have not been answered or addressed.
that comment, more than two days later, is still ‘awaiting moderation.’
that tells me that wordpress is not going to even acknowledge the existence of complaints which suggests that they’re almost certainly never going to roll these changes back. so if you’re threatening to leave, you may as well start packing your bags.
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