A New Top Bar for Stack Exchange | Hacker News Reader

A New Top Bar for Stack Exchange

blog.stackoverflow.com

33 pointscodegeek23 comments

One benefit they bring up is the site switcher, which is much nicer than the old drop down they had. I have a question for people who participate on multiple sites: do you need a separate account on each site? All I can recall is that it was indeed the case in the past, but there was mumblings about them making the system better for multiple site accounts. After a quick search, questions like this [0] make me think it still isn't the case that there is a universal account.

The real reason I ask is because I was bummed when they removed the ability to filter by top questions per week or per month [1]. The justification given in the response is fair enough, but I have never understood why, as a comment there points out, they also removed the ability to manually filter by ?tab=(active|hot|week|month). The cynic in my thinks this was mainly to drive people to signup for the weekly emails. The problem I have with that is I just want to hit some sites once a month and see the top questions, some once a week, etc. For example, I have no need to read the physics or mathematics communities very often, but would love to read the top questions once a month.

So, it seems like the option is still there when you are signed in, but I have never wanted to sign up an account for each site. Is my understanding of their accounts system wrong?

[0] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/195849/how-can-i-ful...

[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/180850/hot-and-week-...

I don't know if this answers your question, but for me, I login to each site using my Google account, and the top bar shows me notifications across the network of sites. So, the authentication is on a per-site basis, but the account itself seems to be seen as a single account.

I haven't looked into it extensively, but my understanding of the account system matches yours. However, you can emulate the week/month tabs using the search bar, for instance:

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&q=is%3...

Thanks for the tip! This emulates exactly what I wanted.

I admit to just throwing my hands up and, as a result, visiting the various stackexchange sites less often. Certainly my loss, and not theirs. I should have looked into what the advanced searching options were. I stupidly didn't think of that. I did find out a way to get all the newsletters without signing up for them, but it wasn't an ideal solution for me as they were only questions by week, not by month.

Time to write a script that throws out these search links for me. Thanks again!

Stack overflow PM here.

The hot/active/week/month tabs were only removed for anonymous users. If you're logged in at all, you will still see them. I think my meta-post covers the reasons behind this (mostly simplification for drive-by users).

Also, we have put a lot of effort into simplifying our accounts management over the last year. We're about halfway there, but at the moment we aggregate site accounts under a global account. You'll have to take an affirmative action to "join" another site, but it's not the whole registration process - no separate username/email/password.

Bottom line is registration requires an email and password, and that gets you the key to all of our sites. You just have to "use" the key on the site when you interact the first time.

Also, I'll add that you could just go here: http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot

Thanks for the reply. I think I covered some of those points in my post, but thanks for clarifying.

I get the justification for removing the tabs. I admitted in my post that the justification for the removal was fair enough. I, along with the other people commenting in the meta post, just don't like that the behaviour is also unavailable manually with e.g. ?tab=(active|hot|week|month).

As for having to login once but join every site, it's just a pain I was unwilling to go through for the behaviour I wanted. As I admitted, this is my loss and not any loss to stackexchange.

Well, it is a loss for us, but unfortunately it's just not technically feasible to have a global seamless login experience yet. We're working in that direction.

The reason I keep mentioning it as not being a loss to stackexchange is because in the justification you say

> users who browse but never vote or post just aren't really that valuable, relatively speaking – except to encourage cross site discovery which we intend to incentivize in other ways.

and for the behaviour I desire I fit exactly the mould of a user who isn't looking to vote or post. Okay, I might vote on the excellent responses, but on the sites that I just want ?tab=week or ?tab=month behaviour from, I don't want to ask questions.

I... hated it.

I don't get it exactly what problem this new bar is solving.

A let down is that will be out of place in some layouts. StackExchange got beautiful layouts, like unix.stackexchange.com or cooking.stackexchange.com. A big black bar up there will break the perfectness of those.

I think it's awesome.

You have a personalized and prioritized view into the other stackexchanges you care about.

You can see reputation gains across all the stackexchange sites instead of the one that you are currently on.

Of course, I'll agree that the stackexchanges themselves should have input into how it's rendered on their own page, so as to prevent clashing.

Yeah, I hated it as well. The black really destroys the whole page, maybe another color wouldn't disturb me that much.

A Bigger, Blacker Bar

Subtle reference to Cards Against Humanity. ;-)

I find it too black.

It's like, how much more black could this be?

as black as the black, black hearts of the mods.

It could be #000000. It's only #212121.

Personally, I don't like the amount of contrast between the near black and grey text.

The text has a 67% L, the background a 13% L, and the difference is only 54%.... obviously only about half the contrast available. http://contrastrebellion.com/

20 shades of black.

Thank God! They no longer whip the search box across the screen the moment I enter a character. That was one of worst UX design choices I've seen. I know they were just making room for a longer search string, but to yank it like that gave me whiplash.

Have a problem?, just visit this site: http://stackexchange.com/sites#

Stack Exchange is becoming the guide to everything.

The new bar is so imposing compared to the rest of the interface.

The logo is pixelated on my Retina Macbook. It's a new bar and it's not even retina. Can you fix it please? :)

Fixing...

And yet it still requires a call to google's servers in order to function. That's kind of disappointing.

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