Thoughts on New Nugget Bridge vs. Old Nugget Bridge

Hello world,

there's mainly three differences between the two:
1) Only a select few were able to write before. Now, everyone can write freely.
2) The page used to have a better layout, and even moreso a better search.
3) The new text editor is making any writing/formatting attempts a chore, because it's just bad and broken.

I'm addressing them in reverse order, here goes nothing:

3) I haven't gotten many opinions on how people feel about this, but personally I am disgusted. The Wordpress system we had before was just perfect, since it most of the time did exactly what I wanted it to do! Now because of point 1, it's clear that we can't just give everyone free reign over HTML and stuff (unless we have means to limit the usable elements effectively and in a way that isn't uselessly hindering at the same time), but it has become most apparent in recent years that the best text editor for any kind of online content is simply a pure plain-text editor coupled with a few formatting commands. WYSIWYG just pointlessly eats resources on client side and sometimes / most of the time doesn't actually do what the user wanted to do. Prime example: just look at how glitched video embeds are (but to be fair...I found them to be troublesome with Wordpress HTML as well!). It only works for the absolute simplest things in the world, but as soon as someone wants to go beyond writing ordinary text with ordinary formatting...challenges arise. I think that we should encourage quality content over extremely simple content, so yeah, this editor needs serious work in order to be properly usable for anyone.

2) Articles were divided into fitting categories and the search gave you exactly what you wanted to find. Now you need to remember specific groups of words from the titles in order to have a chance at finding whatever you're looking for. In other words: good articles are very much there, they're just getting lost and not found again all the time!

1) This is the one clearly good change. The barriers in the old system may have ensured quality of content more, but since the system wasn't working perfectly, there was also quality content that unrightfully got left behind. Thus, it's just good that now everyone can post without barriers -- gets us to read stuff without an imperfect preselection, gets us to read it faster etc. And about people who aren't the best writers but would still like top-notch articles, they can still always get help from friends, you know. So, my biggest criticism related to this point has to be how the featuring feature is playing out. It seems rather arbitrary what is getting featured and what isn't, and I'm pretty sure that there has been content that has been left behind here, and thus was only seen for like a few hours in the list on the right. I want to suggest a place where people can request articles (can be their own, can be others, doesn't matter) to be featured, staff review the requests as they come in -- difference to the past: just review, not edit --, pass their judgement with a few notes in case of rejection, and that's it.

So much about the main points. 1 is mostly good and the problems with it can be fixed completely outside of the given technology. 2 and 3 are huge technical issues and I'm afraid there's not much that can be easily done about it. Just maybe one day, you know... Also, let's not forget about all the old articles that maybe weren't completely lost from the migration but got their formatting destroyed. That's something that could solve itself with the other points, but till then...yeah, it's been nice while it lasted, not like anyone could find them right now anyway. *cough* Oh, and the artworks. They went to hell as well, but not much reason to care about them while the other issues persist.


And about the issue of quality content becoming rarer these days, true or not... NB has problems and problems need to be fixed. All of these put new barriers in the way of creation of every kind of content. If we fix those (and maybe also increase exposure a bit, since that main page just isn't looking optically inviting anymore), it should be safe to assume that good people will have more motivation to do things up there again. And those who don't want to produce content to begin with...there's nothing we can do to convince those anyway. And that's pretty much it.