My suggestion: find a simpler tool to display your slideshow.
Otherwise: a pretty decent collection of horrors.
I'll also note I'm that guy who generally avoids shopping online if at all possible. I'll do a lot of online research, but prefer patronizing local stores if possible, and paying cash. Why? Because:
- You know what you're getting when you buy it.
- When the deal is done the deal is done. No late-hit fees or follow-on solicitations.
- Generally a much easier returns policy, should that be necessary.
Yes, for some items, there's less choice (though you can special order a great deal of stuff), and there are some things I will purchase online (air travel on the rare occasions I feel it utterly necessary to humiliate myself before airport security).
In the case of darkpatterns.org, I had to:
- Load the page.
- Allow the domain.
- Reload the page.
- Allow slideshare.net.
- Reload the page.
- Click on the Flash link (yes, Flashblock is also in service here).
- Check for more JS. Yep. Try a few.
- Rinse, wash, repeat of reload, check, click Flash, check, reload ...
Honestly, usually it's not worth my trouble. I fairly frequently encounter pages which fail to function with _all_ JS enabled (possibly due to XSS usage, I haven't troubleshot them, really not a productive use of my time in general). Given that plain Jane HTML is fine for presenting textual / graphical content this is pretty much an anti-pattern.
JS resources claimed by Darkpatterns:
www.google-analytics.com flash.quantserve.com b.scorecardresearch.com slideshare-audio.s3.amazonaws.com darkpatterns.org s3.amazonaws.com www.slideshare.net cdn.slidesharecdn.com static.slidesharecdn.com
And it's not useful to be informed that your website won't work if a critical component is turned off. It just isn't.
I'd even go so far as to say that people who disable JavaScript should be ignored entirely.
It can be quite useful for someone to make a suggestion that can make the website have larger appeal. It just can be. I count my suggestion for a syllabus as one.
But as a stronger example, aljazeera.com recently started redirecting ips from the US to the subdomain america.aljazeera.com. I couldn't get around it without a proxy. I wrote them an email suggesting they make the old site ("english") an option from the front page (I pointed to CNN.com as an example). They wrote me back saying they changed it and, when I went there, they even had a pop-up that allowed me to have the english site as my default. They had deliberately put in the functionality but didn't realize that some of us wanted their European coverage, not their America coverage.
In this case maybe the site will offer alternative formats. Maybe they hadn't thought of it.
I also have sites that ignore non-javascript enabled browsers- but they are web-apps and are explicit about the need for js. If I had a normal site with a widget that broke for certain people I very well might take such a comment into serious consideration. It is more helpful, as I said earlier, if such criticism also suggests something that might work well. Otherwise it just sounds like bitching.
On http://darkpatterns.org/library/faraway_bill/
Next is listed first, followed by Previous.
On the "previous page": http://darkpatterns.org/library/disguised_ads/
It is listed as such Previous followed by Next. So when I got to the Disguied Ads page, I clicked the last link on the page expecting it to take me to the next page, instead it took me back to the previous page!
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-insi...
which is a nice introduction to Dark Patterns.
And apparently the darkpatterns.org site has been posted to HN previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347543
The URLs lexically match exactly, so I'm not sure why dupe detection failed here.
Dark UX: The Elements of The Video Gambling Experience
http://uxmag.com/articles/dark-ux-the-elements-of-the-video-...
>Behind the scenes, however, they engage in all kinds of “optimizations” that encourage gamblers to spend and play more without stopping or burning out.
>How do I know this? I have something to confess.
darkpatterns.org is a great resource for people in organizations needing a reference about what NOT to do.
I would be great to expand it to include dark patterns in software such as the Ask toolbar trick in the Java Oracle installer.
Wish I had the time to contribute to the project!