Please give me at least a chance to get a plain pdf (or html) that I can read (and click into) without content bumping forth and back and my computer grinding to a halt.
telnet www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
Trying 128.16.6.8...
Connected to haig.cs.ucl.ac.uk.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /staff/M.Handley/ HTTP/1,0
HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
MIME-Version: 1.0
Server: CERN/3.0
...
I still subscribe, since the papers are interesting, but the website needs some love.
Also, they might have restrictions about distribution of papers. Youtube also doesn't have a download link next to every video.
Using chromium it's a tiny little quicker, but still annoying. They could easily stop the content bumping and the darkening "please subscribe" overlays.
Why does clicking anywhere on the document, or highlighting any text open up a "write a new comment" sidebar? Do they really think there are going to be more users writing comments on a paper than there will be copy-pasting a few sentences from it?
It feels like the primary purpose of the site is for users who want to comment on papers, and not users who just want to read papers. For the latter group, it's a really poor experience.
I'll acknowledge there is not an overload of ads being displayed with the paper, which is cool. Also acknowledge that there certainly might be restrictions for distributing papers (a separate, possibly inflammatory topic)...but have you tried doing something as simple as printing the paper? On Chrome (windows machine) it prints out so disjointed as to diminish one's interest in reading the paper (offline of course). I just want to print this out and read it on the train ride home. I guess the intent of the site is ideal, but execution is less so.
"Thanks, for me this was mostly another illustration how to make a website that doesn't." - sounds pretty harsh to me.
I was unable to read the paper because an unclickable modal kept popping up asking me to subscribe.
And not the gp, but I'm not "helping". In fact, I have no idea what I'm supposed to take away from you having asked that question.
So, yeah, it was an unusually, negative experience on mobile.
It is really that hard to just serve PDF instead of stupid javascript filled browsers.
Well, the entire point of the site is a collaboratively annotated journal article. You may not think that's interesting, or that it's feasibly implementable with current tools, but I think the folks do a pretty good job with their stated goal. So I think this is something to be left up to the HN voting.