Dilbert Goes Flash, Readers Revolt

spagiola writes "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."

Deleted

[Xenographic]

I have flashblock and noscript up. I tried temporarily allowing just a few things to let me view the site, but when that didn't work, I gave up and deleted Dilbert from my bookmarks.

It's funny, but it's not worth it. He also has an irrational love of Microsoft at times, such as when he thought that Bill Gates would make a good president.

Because, you know, it's not like the rest of the world minds having the USA push them around. And it's not like Bill is known for being good at that kind of business, or anything like that...

Suffice it to say, I didn't feel like it was worth the bother to continue reading it.

Can't leave well enough alone

[timeOday]

This seems to be universal among web designers. They just aren't happy unless they're redesigning something to make it more complicated and less likely to work.

My award for "sticking with what works" goes to craigslist.org.

Dilbert stopped being funny a decade ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who thinks Dilbert stopped being funny back in the 1990s? The last collection I enjoyed was Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy [amazon.com] . Since then, Adams has just been going over and over the same handful of gags. And even though corporate culture in America may have changed to some extent, the Dilbert office seems the same early '90s environment that inspired him to turn the strip towards a parody of office life.

Probably a Consultant

[Nom du Keyboard]

It was probably some outside consultant that convinced them of the perceived need to produce a "competitive" web-site in today's market, and only this garbage will do.

Don't these PHB clowns realize that it's content that draws people to a site, and excessive bandwidth, insecure plug-ins required, inane registration requirements, and slow downloads that drive them away again.

Scott Adam's personal e-mail address is well-known (remember to put 'Dilbert' in the subject line to slip past his spam filter). One can still complain to him directly.

Re:Deleted

[ColdWetDog]

I assume your using FF. Same problem for me. No matter what I disable (flashblock, Adblock plus, greasemonkey, Noscripts) I just get a comforting white page. It works in Safari but what a total throwback to 2000.

Not worth it....

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[CajunArson]

s/web designers/designers/g

Wisdom is knowing when to rip out the kludge, and knowing when it isn't really a kludge and to leave it the #$@# alone.

Re:Dilbert stopped being funny a decade ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that is when he stopped working in an actual office, isn't it? Should we be surprised that he doesn't have new office ideas to use?

Re:No Linux?

[lorenlal]

And try going to the next strip....
No previous or next button on any of the pages...

BRILLIANT!

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[noidentity]

It's funny, because in the past, experienced web designers could produce good sites. Now it's experienced designers who put out unusable crap, and those who just know basic HTML who make usable sites.

repeat old stuff for a new generation

[petes_PoV]

Since then, Adams has just been going over and over the same handful of gags

That's OK, it's just a genreational change.

Each generation is arrogant enough to ignore the collected wisdom of what's gone before, so it makes the same old mistakes. Hence Dilbert is just as popular with the new "breed" of readers as it was with the last lot. The reason is they get just as frustrated with the same bosses making the same mistakes as their forebears. No doubt in 100 years time, people will still be grousing about the incompetence of their superiors and Scott Adams, or his grandchildren, will still be making money out of it.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[MindStalker]

As a web programmer I'd say its that managers can't stop demanding new features. I spent half my time trying to talk people out of features my job would be so much easier if I just relented....

Come over to the dark side

[fermion]

Most person becomes that which they most rail against. More often than not, these people realize that those they railed against, for instance the PHB, were just doing things that they could not at that point understand. It has been interesting to see Scott Adams descend into the PHB. The PHB that is continuously coming up with new ways to make a profit, and has little concern with quality or application. Be it outsourcing to unqualified labour or redesigning a web site, the PHB is interested in earning, not customers or quality. This is why engineers have such trouble dealing with them. Engineers are taught that their job is to make the world better, and it is unethical to cut corners primarily to increase profits.

SO, this website redesign proves that Dilbert has become the PHB. A design not help the customers or users, but to help the bottom line. How does it hep. Well, for one, it put Dilbert on the front page of /. after I don't know how long. It is an marketing gimmick, nothing more. Dilbert is irrelevant, and when one is irrelevent, there is little else to do but employ gimmicks. OTOH, I am sure it will work. Admas will sell some of his collected blog entries, people will reminisce about the good old days, and many will complain simply because they cannot understand that a business must generate a good profit.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[mysqlrocks]

This seems to be universal among web designers. They just aren't happy unless they're redesigning something to make it more complicated and less likely to work.

Hey, don't lump all web designers together. At our studio our focus is on standards-based design - valid XHTML combined with CSS for design and unobtrusive JavaScript (via jQuery) for behavior. We avoid Flash at all costs, not because we can't use it, but because it's non-standard and almost everything people use Flash for can be done using XHTML + CSS + JavaScript if you know what you're doing. Many design shops use the tools in the Adobe (formerly Macromedia) suite because it's "easier." That's partly why there are so many crappy web sites - most web designers don't really know how to design for the web. They get tools handed to them that "ease" the transition from print design and now they think they're web designers.

Re:No Linux?

[mce]

I don't care whether the feature was there before: it should just work. And I actually even don't care that much about using flash (although flash does have a tendency to hang my browser, so static pages are still better). It's the "we don't support Linux" thing that really p*sses me off.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[linzeal]

Look at this site, the reply to this buttons replaced a perfectly useful reply text link. Now the pages are 10% longer than they used to be and take forever to scroll on small screens. Since the change I have been coming to Slashdot maybe 10% of the time I used to. Does anyone know how to get the old slashdot back?

uhhh hello...

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1990's called and said that it wanted Dilbert back.

Look, Dilbert blows. It's as cooked as The Far Side. Let it go. Just let it go.

Re:Ouch

[rossz]

It is fairly common for people who have no clue about how to design with standards complient html/css to use flash to make a wiz-bang menu that doesn't work with many browsers, takes longer to load, and is completely hostile to the sight impaired.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[Tablizer]

They just aren't happy unless they're redesigning something to make it more complicated and less likely to work.

New PHB managers always want to "make their mark" by making changes. I'll bet that's what is going on. The act of changing stuff is more important to them than the merit of it. It's like a wolf pissing on a log to mark its territory. We're seeing e-piss here.
       

Re:What a bunch of grumpy old cave trolls

[Javarrito]

Its not that we hate new technology. Its more that we hate when simple technology that is accepted as a standard is replaced by complex buggy technology that isn't as widely available yet performs the exact same function. With the exception of the animated strips, there is absolutely no need for Flash to be used on this site--all Flash does in this case is make the page load slower and increase the chances that the page will not render correctly (ie, if the client doesn't have Flash).

Now, that being said, the Dilbert Archive [unitedmedia.com] is, of yet, unchanged.

Re:Heh

[rlazarus]

And the Slashdotting will no doubt result in a similarly positive jump in pageviews. Complete success!

Re:Site designers live up to PHB's standards

[RAMMS+EIN]

``(It's not like I am still expecting it to work in Netscape 3!)''

On the other hand, why shouldn't it?

Re:No Linux?

[snl2587]

It's one thing to not support Linux, but to actively block it...that's absurd.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[thetoadwarrior]

Wrong.

It's usually the inexperienced or bad web designers that let their company's marketing people come up with all the ideas and implement them like a robot whether they are good or bad. Or they're an inexperienced freelancer who just learned how to use Flash so he blows his wad with Flash everywhere until he's bored with it.

It's the good designers who take business rules and use cases and their knowledge of what works on the web and comes up with something to suit everyone.

probably about linking and stuff

[nguy]

They may have switched to Flash to make it a little harder to link to their content and to copy the images.

Re:Can't leave well enough alone

[hey!]

Most people are quite aware that being able to tell a piece of music is snappy doesn't mean they can write a hit song. But somehow the distinction between experiencing excellence and producing it is lost on people when it comes to design.

Designing something is deceptively simple. Maybe it is simple, and that's what makes it hard. It's easy to do something bad, and hard to recognize something bad when it comes out of your self.

Re:non flash dilbert

[techno-vampire]

Who cares if it's in black and white or color? It's not in color in most of the dead-tree versions, so why care about it on the web?

Re:uhhh hello...

[Planesdragon]

The environment is changing, in much the same way it has for the past few million years. We're not doing it. The environment is.

Wow. So you're saying, in defiance to a wider margin than "a nuclear bomb is feasible" had, that throwing massive amounts of carbon and other pollutants into the sky is having NO effect?

I'm truly shocked by your scientific acumen.

The Climate Crisis is not that the environment is changing. It's that it's changing far, far too fast.

Site works in Linux

[chk89]

FYI, the whole site works on Linux, just use the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox and spoof yourself as IE7 on Windows. The animations portion works fine.

On a side note, this is what is extremely frustrating about this really, the fact that they didn't limit it to Windows and Mac because of technical reasons, they ARTIFICIALLY limited it. This is actually worse in my opinion.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Dilbert stopped being funny a decade ago

[amccaf1]

There's an funny blog I just saw a link to a few days ago called The Comics Curmudgeon (joshreads.com) where every day the author takes a few of the daily comic strips and complains about how lame the are (usually in a genuinely funny way).

I was curious to see what he thought of Dilbert and ran into this post concerning comic strips that have outlived their day (yes, Dilbert is one of them): http://joshreads.com/?p=924 [joshreads.com].

The best paragraph was describing For Better or Worse: "Trapped between a huge, dim, slavishly-devoted audience and a self-satisfied, ham-handed Stalinist author, this strip is creatively as dead as they come. Yet it will run on and on as a Frankenstein's monster stitched up from Mike's mewling brats and zombies from the Good Old Days, glued up with glop from that 'novel.'"

Re:uhhh hello...

[LingNoi]

Wow, he's actually right on that.. Global warming IS blown up out of all proportion.

Thanks for posting that, it really opened my eyes to all the BS.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Deleted

[CastrTroy]

It seems as though it does. I have flashblock. If I disable Javascript, the site looks fine. If I enable javascript, the site looks terrible until I click play on the 4 different flash objects. The first one that's clickable is the off to the right of the viewable area. So you have to scroll to play it.

One of those things is not like the others

[Nursie]

Global warming has a sound scientific basis.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:uhhh hello...

[Hucko]

Wether or not G.W. is the bane of human existence has no bearing on the sensibility of striving for minimal environmental impact and increase in efficiency and effectiveness of using energy.

Re:One of those things is not like the others

[SomeKDEUser]

No. Global warming is an attested fact. That humans contribute to it also.

There is debate on the exact amount attributable to humans, and that is all.

Sound science it is. Statistics are the basis of sound science, and if you think no fact can be construed from statistics, than pretty much all science is bunk.

Why is it experiments are repeated, do you think? for the fun of it? Why are papers littered with p-values and "statistically significant" and error bars and so on and so forth?

Hint: statistics are not a magical way of fudging data. On the contrary.