The beta.rust-lang.org PR debacle

[gilrain]

At this point, a fully closed process and simply unveiling a new design would have been preferable, yes. This instead feels like “we’ll do it closed, but pretend it was open for appearance”. I’m sure that wasn’t the intent, but asking for feedback on a big change, then categorically rejecting all substantial feedback, is going to upset the people whose time and effort were solicited.

[vitalyd]

There’s not a belief, we are sure of that. The old page was already a liability for 2 years. It was hard to maintain, at many places factually wrong and we have frequently noticed that people couldn’t place the language.

This sounds like a content issue, not a visual design one.

I do a lot of booth service for Rust (as in: I stand at conferences taking questions of people for a whole day) and “I checked the website and found none of what you tell me” was very usual. The most common question was “Yeah, it’s a programming language, alright, but what is it used for?”. That was an extreme problem for embedded folks, because at no place, embedded workloads were covered.

Same - sounds like content.

We have been carrying that page around for ages, with no clear strategy. The old page was so useless that we usually didn’t even point people to it.

It’s a landing page, it’s not supposed to be extremely useful - it’s meant to be (I think) a portal with curated links for further reading, support/discussion channels, and so on. It’s not a manual so it’ll never satisfy every conceivable visitor.

The planning around the page has started at Rust all-hands 2018, with feedback from all represented working groups and people that want to publish on it. That should be taken into account. If you argue for not showing aspects like network programming and embedded upfront like the current page was, you are also asking all those working groups to take a step back to have their work presented.

Again, content.

I think most of the negative feedback on the beta is around its visual aspects, such as the chosen color palette. Was there really no way to improve the content but leave the basic visual cues and styles as they were?

And I’ll reiterate my belief that the landing page is not holding back adoption - I say this as someone evangelizing Rust to my org, and fielding many questions about Rust in the process from people of varying background. People that visit the Rust site, don’t find answers to their questions and then proceed to ignore Rust because of that, wouldn’t adopt Rust anyway because the path to adoption requires a lot more effort than they’re clearly willing to expend.

I’d love to discuss ideas for improving adoption, perhaps a separate thread, if folks are interested in doing that.

[kornel]

I don’t agree, otherwise we’d have everyone all over the place with design

The Rust-the-language manages to include community in the design just fine:

1. Ideas are floated and discussed (in the open),
2. best pieces are collected together and polished in RFCs,
3. and then the team makes executive decision to ensure the final design is sound and coherent.

There’s nothing wrong with the third step per-se. However, the redesign of the website seems to have skipped steps 1 and 2 entirely, which left the community out of the process.

[skade]

Okay, I’m out. I gave you a pretty extensive response and you cherry-pick one of the sentences that suits you while not addressing that I feel you misrepresented the contribution guidelines. I’m okay with you feeling angry and respect your work, but this is not a basis on which I want to interact with you.

[kornel]

Sorry, I did not cherry-pick one part to erase rest of your post. I just didn’t want to repeat @vitalyd’s response and engage in tit-for-tat argument.

I do appreciate work made on the site. The content changes are overall very positive.

[mjw]

Rust-the-language also has the sensible release train model, so that features can be published when they’re ready and not before.

I suspect the underlying cause of the troubles with this update is the decision to both make a big-bang change of the whole site, and do it with a fixed deadline.

Either of those decisions would be reasonable on their own; it’s the combination that’s gone wrong.

[Aloso]

The new website is now online on www.rust-lang.org. I’m glad that some of the issues have been resolved – for instance, the text size has been improved. However, there are still major problems:

• The code samples are lacking text contrast and syntax highlighting. Nobody wants to read code without syntax highlighting.
• The website is not available in other languages, unlike the old website.
• I can’t find the link “See who’s using Rust” anywhere.
• Google Search still finds old links that now lead to a 404 error. It wouldn’t be too hard to redirect old links to the new, valid links.
• The link “Looking for the previous website?” is dead ATM. fixed

Also blog.rust-lang.org got a visual overhaul, also with some issues:

• Blog posts don’t have the word “Blog” in the header, so they are indistinguishable from the main website.
• Blog posts are also lacking syntax highlighting.
• Most links in the footer are dead.
• The headline font in blog posts is way too bold (800 instead of 400).
• The design of the blog is a few pull requests behind the main page (e.g. font size and social icons in the footer)

Why couldn’t the release wait until some of these issues are resolved and the website is properly tested?

[mmmmib]

I really like the compromise/improvement they made on the slogan

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

It’s got both the “empowerment” thing and includes two technical selling points, without the somewhat vague term “systems programming” and also without using terms that may not be understandable/relevant to everyone (e.g. “data races”).

[steveklabnik]

Please file issues, some of these have already been filed.

Why? Well, everyone has been burning the candle at both ends to ship the edition, for months. Some small stuff will be than less than ideal at first. We’ll work through them. The blog also suffered from the same maintenance issues as the website. There’s some stuff to be fixed, but it’s already in a better overall place.

[gurry]

Appreciate you guys for incorporating some of the feedback in the version that’s gone live. The new slogan is not a great copy per se, but is a definite improvement over the previous (beta) one. Overall a step in the right direction. Kudos to whoever worked to make this possible .

Now when are we getting the code samples back?

[realcr]

The lack of source code on the front page is… concerning. A simple generic example that demonstrates many of Rust’s more interesting syntax futures goes a long way in enticing a deeper look into the language.

I highly agree with this. The first thing I want to see when I’m checking out a new language is some code, but I couldn’t find code anywhere on the page. Even after clicking on the largest “Get Started” button I didn’t see any code. I had to scroll 3 pages down to find “A small Rust application”. I think that this, or some other piece of code, should have been on the front page.

It feels to me as if the people designed the new Rust page try to target audience which is not developers.

I also miss the highlighted Safety and Fearless concurrency that were on the old page (Maybe I remember incorrectly?). These are stuff to write home about, to show off to your friends.

Just my 2/cents.

EDIT: I just looked at the old website again.
I still remember the first time I learned about Rust and entered this page. The page says:
" Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety."

I remember how excited I was when reading this in the toilet on my mobile phone.

Prevents segfaults? I used to be an assembly developer. I had segfauls all my life up until that point. I had to know how one can prevent them. guarantees thread safety? I thought that this was impossible up until then. I didn’t know at the time what “zero cost abstractions” meant for Rust, but I knew immediately what this should mean. This means that I could have nice code abstractions that still run fast.

Those were the things most important for me, but I can’t find any of them on the new page, or they are mentioned in very small letters. From my point of view these are the things that will make developers want to use Rust.

[chriskrycho]

FWIW, the specific phrase “eliminate segfaults” isn’t on the page, but “memory-safety and thread-safety” are: they’re in one of the first blocks on the page, in larger text than they were on the old website.

[jeramyRR]

Has anyone noticed that the new beta site doesn’t really say “Programming Language” anywhere?

[stevensonmt]

I do want to applaud the team for their responsiveness to issues and PRs. I may still have issues with lots of the design choices, but the effort and diligence they have exhibited is commendable.

[xd009642]

There’s support for using MicroPython on ESP8266. As much as I don’t like it there are a number of people using python for their IoT projects on a low cost micro

[Veedrac]

• An alternative design has been put up at issue 468 . It has been closed with the point that the overall idea of the design was fixed.

To give some context here, I wouldn’t have posted this issue if it wasn’t clear to me that there is an accessibility issue here, not just a stylistic one. People have used terms like “uncomfortable”, “difficult” and even “nauseous”. I know it’s easy to dismiss claims like this when one doesn’t suffer the same thing themselves, but if people are asking for an alternative version for autistic people it seems clear to me that the current website is simply not working for some fraction of the userbase. To me this goes beyond bikeshedding, YMMV.

On the other hand, a lot of the reaction I’ve seen has made me uncomfortable. I don’t think it’s appropriate to aggressively advertise opinions here, or try to argue points that the authors don’t want to argue about. Generally speaking, if you don’t have opinions that haven’t been seen before, you are applying pressure rather than giving advice, and I don’t really feel that’s fair.

[mmmmib]

Someone opened a thread about this yesterday on the subreddit (they were unaware of this one). The thread became rather big, and i thought maybe some of you may be interested in reading it, so here’s the link:

r/rust - Concerning the new website design

[Benjamin-L]

accessibility issue here, not just a stylistic one

This to me just seems really inconsistent, since the new website is trying to go for a theme of empowerment and inclusion, yet choosing to ignore feedback indicating the new website fails to support or include categories of people.

As a side note, I feel very similarly about the push to move everything from IRC to Discord, a platform with fairly serious known accessibility problems. However, I’m not sure it’s really appropriate to discuss that on this thread.

Aside from that, the thing that bothers me most is that the response to most serious negative feedback (on Github as well as everywhere else) is “we already have discussed this please stop talking”. I may just not be looking hard enough, but I have yet to see any real discussion that involves anybody who is involved in maintaining the new website that dosen’t get shut down immediately with “we already discussed this”.

It seems a little frustrating to me that any form of larger scale feedback or requests for change get shut down instantly, but any request for a pointer to previous discussion gets ignored. I would be pretty satisfied with an answer like “we already discussed this but it wasn’t public and we aren’t going to make it public”, but instead there is never a direct response.

And again, while subjective design feedback is important and should be considered, I think accessibility feedback is on an entirely different level and the fact that the website maintainers seem to be grouping these together as not being worthy of their time and effort to consider or respond to feels very insulting.

[BurntSushi]

Moderator note: I’d like to encourage everyone to reflect on what their commentary adds to this discussion. Please try to remain constructive. Unstructured commentary that only serves to encourage off topic discussion will be removed. If you have questions about our moderation, please email the Rust moderators at rust-mods@rust-lang.org.

[mbrubeck]