Dear readers, on January 23rd we became 1.) Reactor and 2.) A new website, and in that time, we’ve been working on fixes, features, and the kinds of unexpected heckstorms that tend to occur to newly launched websites (especially ones with 15+ years’ worth of articles and fiction).
We want to keep you updated on the progress we’ve made on fixes so far. We’ve been monitoring the bug reports you’ve been sending in via our contact form, as well as comments you’ve left on articles here. We’ve been working with other folks, as well, who are scanning and testing for bugs even as you read this. We’re not done with the fixes (not by a long shot), but we are actively listening to your feedback, and we want to thank you for being diligent and patient as we make improvements.
Some updates on what we’ve tackled so far:
- Un-froze the All Discussions page.
- Stopped the “accept/reject cookies” pop-up banner showing up incessantly, no matter what you clicked
- Upped the number of comments that load into an article at first scroll. (This is why you’re getting those three dancing dots once you start scrolling. We’re going to test this again and may cut the number of loading comments back a bit.)
- Switched comment threads to auto-expand because otherwise it doesn’t look like any comments are in response to each other.
- STOPPED THE COMMENT TEXT FROM WRA
PPING LIKE THIS. (As you can see, squashing this bug felt very, very good.) - The glorious MALAZAN REREAD OF THE FALLEN index page is now back! We have to manually update these index pages, but The Wheel of Time Reread, the various Star Trek rewatches, The Stormlight Archive, Jo Walton’s classic columns, and various other VERY BIG fantasy rereads are next.
- Corrected various pagination and link errors.
- Addressed various issues with the Contact and Newsletter pages.
- Also, various inconsistencies with Bookmarking.
- Speaking of Bookmarks, all of your Favorites/Bookmarks from Tor.com are now back in your user account!
- And speaking of things that are back from the old Tor.com site: Comments from articles in October 2023 and onwards have been restored! (Some comment bubbles may still be showing the numeral 0. Still working on that bug, but the comments themselves are actually there.)
- We’re still cleaning up a few stragglers, but most of the articles affected by broken “Read More” links should also be fully restored. (If you’re wondering why other fixes took so long, that bug is why.)
What We’re Tackling Next:
- Ennui
- RSS feeds.
- Bringing the Archive page back.
- Working on the site Search’s accuracy more. Like, a lot more.
- Fixing that weird video player.
- Some reclassification of articles so they show up in the appropriate spots. (“Books” is missing a few things, for example. We know why. It just takes a little time to set right.)
- Lots of clean-up of small things, like images, bad links, incorrect names, dead icons, automated emails, and such.
- Lots and lots and lots of other small and mind-numbing fixes that are important but not meant to be super apparent.
That’s the short version of it all. If this is your first time seeing that Tor.com has become Reactor, we answer a lot of the basics here. If circumstances permit, we’ll update again after the next wave of improvements. Thank you for sticking with us!
