I am grateful but very frustrated.

Listen, staff of GameSpot, let me start out by saying that I both appreciate the work you guys do and I understand that only a very select few of you (that this message will not reach) have any direct control in fixing the problems of the website. With that out of the way:

I just saw the new website feature that links several news articles together on a single page. It's very disappointing to know that despite all the problems that need to get fixed from the comment notification links being broken, to the upvote system not working, the the "token" issue plaguing mobile users, to the videos not working... that despite all those critical problem and more I didn't list, the developers are more focused on adding features before the website is even stable. It's disheartening.

For a very long time I've been very critical of what I perceive as a large increase in clickbait headlines and articles. I understand that on the business side this website needs to increase clicks & traffic. But it's scary to me that when I clicked on one article and scrolled down, my address bar changed webpage to a different news article. If I hold the back button on the browser, I see a string of web page articles I never clicked on. Articles I didn't want to click on.

It seems like a very underhanded way of increasing traffic and ad revenue.

I do not want to give those articles any undeserved clicks. But if I scroll just a few clicks into the unexpanded comment section I takes me to a new page. This was more important to the people in charge than fixing the very frustrating issues that make navigating this website a chore.

@digitaldame, I'm at the end of my rope. All I need is some reassurance. Some way of knowing the people in charge are committed to a better user experience. That all the valid complaints & concerns from across the site aren't falling onto deaf ears. More often than not, those complaints are met with defensive responses from the staff and very rarely is there any acknowledgement of their shortcomings. But without at least some acknowledgement, how can we be assured anything will ever improve? Will it even improve?

A new article stacking feature is not an improvement. Not for users.

Thank you for your time,

elheber

We are very much focused on fixing the issues you mention about notification links and upvotes, and expect to have most resolved very soon. The new news experience you mention is something that's been in the works for some time and is actually increasingly common on many sites because it provides an easier way to read news (ESPN being the latest high-profile example.) We are committed to user experience, and you may notice that these new article pages also have less clutter and even fewer ads per page - we these are things we've been listening to you guys on, and the scrolling news page allows us to make some of these improvements. We realize that not everyone is used to that format yet, but it is becoming increasingly common on both mobile and desktop environments, and we will continue to hone those pages to make sure they perform well and in an intuitive manner.

Not the response I was hoping for, but I'll take what I can get.

As for the new scrolling article layout: It's akin to a large, empty, open living room with only a small 1-person couch at the center tightly sandwiched between two imposing shelves so that it somehow still feels cramped. Empty space on the left, empty space on the right, a narrow article in the middle, and heavy bars at the top and bottom that you can't escape from. You can't hide the bottom bar. Once you open the comments, you can't collapse it again for easier scrolling.

But no matter what, the most important thing to fix is the bugs. It's a biblical amount of bugs.

Screen real estate is the biggest problem for me. The site's becoming damn near unreadable. At least with the notifications I get an email and the notifications page. Not acceptable but at least it's available.

@pongley: @elheber: Thanks for your feedback! I've posted a bit more details in a different thread, but we will be making some adjustments based on what we've heard. Of particular note is that we will be removing the sticky bottom bar.

And as @wemmick mentioned above, we are committed to fixing the bugs you've pointed out, and should be taking care of them shortly.

Thanks!

I dont like the bar at bottom of pages now linking other articles, dont like that i have have to click show coments now on the article i picked either or the fact it just show another article directly under that article in the same page...I click an article I expect to see that article and it comments ONLY i dont want to see another article directly under it seeing i didnt click in that article in first place.

Fix the problems with the site before adding useless extras no one asked for

The main reason that I like this article identification change is because I can read multiple articles in succession as I scroll down the page and there is a list on the bottom of the page that identifies which article I am reading, currently. It is much more of a preferable user experience to reading articles without any sort of notification. Since there are sometimes advertisements on the left and right sides of the screen as well as there being the site menu at the top, that is the basis as to my guess about the choice of formatting.

Fun fact: I'm using a plugin (uBlock Origin) to manually hide the extra articles and the list at the bottom of the page. That's how much I dislike this new article design.

There's still two things I can't fix though:

1. I still have to click a button to load the comments.
2. As I scroll through an article, the URL name keeps changing even though I'm still reading the same article, which makes the browser stutter a bit since it's loading entire articles in the background.

Basically, when I middle-click an article on the front page, all I want to see is the article itself, like this: (image) (it still looks like it was designed for mobile, but whatever)

NOT this mess: (image)

Like @elheber said, I suspect you guys came up with this system because it gives you super easy clicks and ad revenue for articles that we didn't even want to click on, which is honestly pretty shady. If I didn't have this handy plugin to at least make things look right, I would just leave until the next site redesign (which will inevitably happen, considering how buggy this is).

This. I dont get the feeling this new system is to benefit the user, but to benefit gamespot at the expense of the user. And yes I believe espn is also benefiting at the expense of the user if they are doing the same thing. The only difference is espn doesnt have a large community that use their forums and comment on articles regularly to tell them the system is bad...

@elheber:Have you noticed the comments now load backwards? They do for me at least, just one more way they can force you to scroll far enough to load more ads.

It's a shame when good businesses get so bigheaded they think they're too big to fail, and the few of us who used to care for this place are expendable.

@Tiwill44: Is that plug-in friendly with Adblock Plus?

@wemmick: Just because ESPN did it, doesn't mean it was liked by their users. Their new layout is horrible and traded functionality for ad revenue and a twitter feed.

I think so, yeah. But I don't use ABP anymore, since uBlock is an ad blocker in the first place. Using the element picker to hide bad web design is just a bonus feature.

My largest concern was that developers seemed to be focused on the wrong things. Instead of the lead coming in and saying, "alright guys, we're putting a hold on the redesigns and focusing all our efforts on stamping out these critical issues first," the people in charge decided to not prioritize the user experience.

Because let's be honest, the new article format doesn't really improve the user experience. We don't want to click on every article and nobody wants their screen space taken up by more hovering menu bars. We want to see only the articles we want to read, we want a convenient "filter" option so that we can hide articles we don't want (like "entertainment" articles or platform-specific articles), and we want all the comment systems that make us feel like a community (upvoting, replying, etc.) to just work.

Personally, I wouldn't mind a continually loading stream of articles if there were filter options, and each article was unexpanded by default (so they were short and easy to scroll past) and when you expand it to see the rest of the article it loads the extra ads that come with it. I can't speak for everyone on this.

It seemed as if this latest change was being worked on at the expense of more critical issues because it would raise the bottom line, not for the user experience. I don't block ads. I understand that my eyes pay for the entire website and I am fine with paying with my eyes. But that means I want to vote with my eyes too.

This seems more like a CBS decision than a Gamespot decision

@aigis: If that's true, then it's the first site to adopt this. I checked onGamers, GiantBomb, ComicVine, and even CNET. I think it's GameSpot.

@elheber: Then gamespot should realize that not many people want this... I didn't think it did well enough last time to warrant them to bring it back... This format doesn't have the best intentions for the user imo

@aigis: I'm glad more people decided to complain about this new design. Seamless content is annoying enough, that use of pushState() is unforgivable... Never mess with a man's address bar! Each article is opened in a separate tab for a reason.

I'm also fairly sure Gamespot/CBS is going to be too stubborn to revert changes based on anything short of thousands of complaints, so here's Adblock Plus filters for anyone wanting to block the seamless content feature:

gamespot.com##div.js-seamless-content__list-body.pod-recirc__content

http://*.gamespot.com/js/compiled/seamlessContent.js*

@ECH71: Thanks for that, good to have a workaround until they hopefully remove it

Awesome, thanks very much.

@wemmick: It's really sad to see that Gamespot isn't taking people's concerns about the endless scrolling articles seriously. And what does ESPN have to do with Gamespot? Time to put YOUR COMMUNITY first, or you wont have one anymore.

@straightcur: We are taking the complaints seriously and are currently working on fixing many of the issues you guys have brought up. I brought up ESPN because there seemed to be some question about why we were doing something so crazy and new, so I was making the point that many sites besides us have moved this way because it actually makes it easier for people to browse news (once they're used to it, perhaps.)

That said, we're also working on some tweaks you guys hadn't mentioned to make the experience more usable as well, so please stay tuned and keep letting us know how we can improve it.

As for the "I want to click to open articles into a new tab" request someone else had above, you are still perfectly free to do that - each article will still open in a new tab just as it always did. Scrolling down through the articles is not the only way to browse.

How is a big wall of fragmented content easier than the compact list on the front page? I don't think anyone here is actually complaining about the browsing method anyway. The problem for me is that it makes the article I actually chose to look at more difficult to read.

@wemmick: It sounds like you are digging in your heels with the endless scrolling of articles. Can you please explain how this makes it easier for the readers? You are assuming the article people want to read next. Not to mention making browsing more difficult by slowing down your site's loading considerably and making finding what we actually want to read more difficult. This all just seems like new for the sake of being new. Some web designer likely trying to justify their job by fixing what wasn't broken in the first place. Have any of your customers asked for this new "feature"? Show me how it is easier and more user friendly and I might be convinced. Not impressed at all so far.

I makes it cluttered and makes viewing the comments harder. So it is hindering the way I have always viewed articles on pretty much every site.

Would this include a button to take out the infinite scroll and the bar and actually be able to look at the comments without have to load them separately?

I would like to know this also. The answer I'm expecting is "It allows the user to browse all the articles seamlessly", but this can only be a good thing if you want to read all the articles. Whats the point of a home page if all the articles are going to be infinitely scrolled? I thought the point was to read just the headlines to get an idea of what the headline was about and then click the ones that you want to know more about. The home page has no purpose anymore, and I know they are going to say "But the article you click will appear first", but now I'm loading all the articles across multiple tabs which makes no sense, I just want the one. This really seems like a decision to get more views on their articles and they are just dressing it up as "helping the user", but it really is a hindrance. Has any one person said they like the new system even?

@aigis: We did do extensive testing with the new layout and had a lot of good feedback on it. I agree it needs additional usability tweaks, and we're focusing on those now. I know some of you haven't used it much and feel it's jarring, but it's been in use for a large chunk of our visitors for a couple of months now and performed quite well.

As for your concern about it loading "all the articles" when you just want to read one, it doesn't actually do that - it loads the first two and then loads more only if you continue to scroll down.

@aigis: Also, to add onto @wemmick's comments, I mentioned this earlier in the thread but we are removing the fixed footer bar to free up space on the page, as well as make some other adjustments to the layout to improve usability.

@wemmick: I'd heard that this was the layout that unregistered visitors saw for a few months back.

How did you gather feedback from those visitors if unregistered visitors can't post? Traffic data or multiple choice surveys? I fear traffic data could be skewed a little since now the site automatically pushes an address change. Plus, visitors don't have the same concerns about the comment system as registered users.

I don't know. I mean, it just seems like the bar locked at the bottom taking up tons of space being bad is a no-brainer. The "good feedback" (however it was gathered) didn't flag it as a potential problem.

"You'll get used to it," doesn't mean it's better; after all, humans are amazingly adaptive creatures. None of us have been sold on why scrolling articles makes reading more user friendly when we don't actually want to read every article. Most especially when the narrow article space makes for extremely long pages. If we can't be sold on it, then it'll just be a matter of GameSpot waiting for users to get tired of complaining because I know it isn't going to be rolled back.

PS. This issue is important. But I do want to stress that it's eclipsed by the other usability problems happening right now. I'd rather have those fixed first.

@elheber: When we test things like this, we usually run them as an A/B test, so we can see behavior for people in the new design vs the old design and have it be "apples-to-apples." We did this, looking at quantitative metrics like bounce rate, time-on-site, pages/visit, visits/visitor, etc, and we also gathered qualitative feedback through surveys and usability tests. We then launched it for signed-out users first to gather more feedback and data. Only after that did we decide to move forward. That said, there are certainly some things that need to be improved still, and we are focused on addressing those areas now.

As @LarkAnderson mentioned, we will be removing the bottom bar soon.

Of course the metrics look better. This format artificially increases the number of views per page. Seems like a great way to defraud your advertisers and make more money.

Thanks for this. The whole post, but especially the filters. I didn't have the JS line, so that's why it was still trying to load new articles as I was scrolling, messing up with my address bar and tab name constantly.

Only minor annoyance left is how we gotta click on a button to open up the comment section, but I guess I can live with that.