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I don't necessarily agree with the author's complaint, but I voted it up because I think dzone does have some usability issues. My main complaint is the incremental loading of links as you scroll down the front page. If you click into a link, you can't go back to where you were on the front page by clicking the back button; instead you have to start at the top of the page and scroll back to where you were. I'd rather see the Popular Links and New Links sections broken up into a series of pages that each load in a single HTTP request, as old-fashioned as that may seem.

It doesn't help that I get logged out soon after every visit. I don't want to keep logging in just to vote one story up or down, I'm a lazy loading type of programmer.

You probably have persistant cookies blocked, or you're not checking the "remember me" box.

Sadly but that's not the case :(
I've sent feedback about this issue a couple of times and checked cookies and "remember me" box - nothing helps.

Hi Qrilka. Can you send me your browser, platform, and cookie info for dzone.com to matt at dzone.com? We've been tracking down some new information on this in the last day or so.

I have this as well. Had it for months (maybe over a year?) - hate it. Main reason I don't vote.
Platform: Windows XP Pro, Windows Server 2003, Debian GNU/Linux.
Browser: Mozilla (latest) & Firefox (latest). I've been through a lot of browser versions by now.

I do have cookie, I do check "remember me". I don't even have to close the browser: after a few hours, it's gone. Same if I login through my "real" dzone account or openid account.

The "two click and go to article" is a really pain in the as***

whenever I get logged out, it takes a LONG time until I'm motivated enough to log in again just to vote/comment. If you could log in easily on the page you are seeing I guess that would be a lot better...

While we are bitching, if you are not logged in, and write a comment, it will prompt you to login, and then promptly discard your comment.

That is indeed quite irritating!

adding a comment happens with magic ajax; voting a comment up/down navigates the browser

^^ vote this comment up

This is still happening? We thought we had nailed this particular bug in the last 2 weeks. We'll double-check.

When submitting a story I get link is a duplicate when it is not so. It seems just by clicking on the url results in the link error.

Well I'm sure they do this to help pay for the site. You go to dzone.com and see adds if your the one or two people not using adblock then click through to the page you want to see. I would prefer to have a small add in my rss reader and click through directly to the site though if this were the case. If not then just fix the damn thing! ;) Also having additional links in the rss to vote up or down might increase peoples voting.
,

I agree it does have some usability issues. As xelipe has pointed out, it is very annoying to get automatically logged out,
that needs to get fixed soon

A good solution would be to show a list of recently viewed sites (with up/down buttons) on the "your account" page. This would also allow you to revisit recently viewed sites quickly, which everyone wants to do every once in a while.

Right now the order is somewhat backwards, since you'll only vote something up after reading it at which point you might have scrolled all the way down on dzone.

A dedicated recently viewed thing might be nice as well. Could be between "saved" and "shared". With an eye or looking glass icon.

While we're at it. There is another thing which really bugs me. There isn't an option to mark entries as spam. Currently my vote ratio is 55 up vs 182 down, which makes me look sorta evil. However, the vast majority (over 95% I would say) of those down votes were used to mark spam down. Pretty much all of those posts have been deleted already, but my vote ratio didn't change.

Annoyingly some of the spammers also vote down pretty much everything except their own posts.

So, what I would like to see is a way to mark spam as spam and all votes from banned users should be reverted as well (I'm not sure if the latter happens already). Additionally the changes to the users' vote counters should be undone if a post they voted for or against was deleted.

Hi Amphi. We used to have a bury mechanism and will likely bring that back in the near future. We recognize that some users vote down the spam and we appreciate that as it helps us identify it :)

My biggest pain is that DZone doesn't remember me and I have to login every time I want to submit/vote on something. Every single time. "Remember me" box doesn't help on this site.

Also, it'd be great if the page didn't reload when you up- or downvote a comment.

And changing my vote would be great too - like reddit does. If my opinion changes (or I clicked the wrong button) I'd like changing my vote.

Usability problems, heh. Let's see:
* Page loading time is huge (compare that to reddit.com, for example). I mean, I'm reluctant to even click on anything, because I'm not sure I'm ready to wait for 30+ seconds for something to show up.
* The above is twice as bad as it could be, just because of the already mentioned "click-twice-to-get-the-content" problem
* The original link URL cannot be seen in listings. Which means that when I click on something, I'm probably going to see the article I already seen via some other aggregation service (reddit, digg, whatever). [Visited links on reddit are colored as, well, visited links]
* Flash banner in the lower left column is often showing up over the navigation links in the left column. I.e., I can click "Tags" tab in the left column tabbar, but I can't click on "ruby" tag, because it's hidden under the banner. (using firefox on linux)
* Hovered pulldown ad buttons just above the navigation tabbar on the left. I.e., you want to click "Tags", but on your way to the button you occasionally hover over "dzone snippets".
* Comments are nowhere to be seen in the first screen of the article page. No information on how many comments are there, too. No shortcut link to the comments part of the page -- you have to reach for the scrollbar on the right. "comments" link doesn't point to the anchor of the comments block.

Well, enough for now, I think :)

dzone team, we aren't here to bash your work. We appreciate the site, and want to help make it better. As many commenters said we visit here many times a day, for me personally, I visit it many times a day is it is soley responsible for keeping me up to date in my career field.

Also, there is a dzone mailing list. Perhaps this conversation would be good to take there - http://groups.google.com/group/dzonegoogle

My concerns are:
* hover effect on the site images - worthless and annoying
* voting up and down comments is not ajaxified
* comments are too far down the page - get rid of the upcoming links. They are listed on the left of every page.

I appreciate the JIT page loading.

Good luck with all of this work.

matt I am using Firefox 2.0.0.9 and Windows XP Home, "remember me" is always checked.
I don't stay logged in for hours, it's more like minutes.
I stay logged in at home and in the office, and have noticed that sometimes I get redirected to
myid.net but only from the office. Works fine with treedolist.com. Need any more infos pm me