Stuff website and that goofy animated purple "S"

Forums › Off topic › Stuff website and that goofy animated purple "S"

robjg63

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#303258 28-Jan-2023 12:23

What genius decided that in order to load the stuff website, I need to watch an animated "S" every time?

Especially as you can see it already has loaded content, then switches to that goofy purple animated "S" before switching back to the content.

Really annoys me.

While we are at it - can't they curate the content a bit better? - Some items sit on there for months on end.

IMHO they have about the most overloaded/cluttered home page of any media site I have ever visited.

Grumpy old man rant finished....

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

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#3028279 28-Jan-2023 13:25

Im not seeing anything like that at all. What device you looking at it on? I just get the content loading in a second or 2 as I would expect from any website.

Richard rich.ms

sir1963

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#3028287 28-Jan-2023 13:33

If its not on the first screen I rarely scroll down as it is either endless repeats of what was on the first screen, grossly out dated, or its the Junk (which celeb had a baby, beauty tips, things you MUST do garbage, etc).

k1w1k1d

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#3028295 28-Jan-2023 13:55

I also get the purple S. Edge on W10.

The other gripe I have is that there is often a photo or video in the middle of the article that doesn't actually relate to the article.

richms

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#3028297 28-Jan-2023 14:02

Not seeing it in firefox but perhaps its inbuilt blocking is dealing with it along with a lot of the other invasive ads on it.

Edit: Oh hell I just looked in chrome and that is terrible and so much BS on the page! Ugh.

Richard rich.ms

robjg63

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#3028305 28-Jan-2023 14:24

Happens every time on Windows/Chrome - The platform I usually look at Stuff on.

Tried Ad Block Plus extension as well (exemption for GZ of course). Blocks the other junk on Stuff - but not the purple S.

Doesn't seem to draw the big S on Android/Chrome - Can't say I had taken notice of this before to be honest.

Just tested Firefox on W10 and it still threw up the purple animated S, but when I tested a second time no S.

Firefox is now not displaying the S.....

MS Edge displayed it once (I dont normally use that browser), now wont display it again.

Just chrome consistently displaying it - very odd....

Will have a look at disabling some extensions in chrome (windows) - maybe it is supposed to display once in a while but not every time and an extension is mucking it up....

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

MurrayM

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#3028649 29-Jan-2023 09:03

I had the purple S when I first accessed Stuff this morning but now I'm not getting it (using Vivaldi on Linux). Just tried on Firefox and saw it load part of the page, then the purple S, then the page contents. Clearing the cache between attempts has me consistently getting the purple S.

RunningMan

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#3028656 29-Jan-2023 09:35

Welcome to webdesign 1990s. Flashing jumping animations for everything.

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k1w1k1d

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#3028667 29-Jan-2023 10:09

I have found that Edge stores a Stuff cookie the first time I load the site, so the purple S only appears once in a session. The cookie is deleted when I close Edge.

cddt

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#3028703 29-Jan-2023 12:23

It does not happen for me on Firefox (no cookies).

JimmyH

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#3028918 29-Jan-2023 15:57

They stuff website is abysmal and very annoying, and not just for the irritating purple S. They seem to want to deliberately go out of their way to grab visitors attention simply by irritating them. Flashing ads, brightcove player with automatically playing videos and suchlike.

In the past I have made it usable with a combination of:

cookie blocking
blocking the brightcove player in my hosts file
uBlock Origin, and
Ghostery.

Not that it matters much. The content is now so poor I rarely go there nowadays.

Eva888

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#3028921 29-Jan-2023 16:06

I think the colour is more lilac with a pinkish hue rather than purple. Charming colour if worn by a granny with blue rinse hair but hardly appropriate for a news website. More of a candles and home made soap website colour.

Bee

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#3028977 29-Jan-2023 17:07

Stuff is the biggest news outlet in NZ, that much is fact... They have always been about quantity not quality...
Only half the news and a whole lot of opinion pieces and click bait.

Someone needs to step up and provide us a quality news site, but that's been a problem for years...

Doing your best is much more important than being the best.

robjg63

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#3028987 29-Jan-2023 17:31

For what its worth - I found an extension in chrome that was making that annoying "S" (Superman?) appear absolutely every time I went to the stuff web page with chrome.

I have knobbled the extension for that site and I haven't seen it for a day - so progress. I must have been seeing more than other people....

Yes - Stuff goes for quantity over quality. NZherald is hugely worse IMHO. It seems to be 50% Newstalk ZB opinion pieces from all the over opinionated radio a*holes masquerading as 'News'.

TVNZ and RNZ seem somewhat more balanced in my view.

We have ourselves to blame I suppose.

Back in the day, people paid newspaper subscriptions (and even TV licences) which paid for actual reporters to write articles with some degree of independence.

Now they have to survive on click-bait and headline grabbing to get web views. We get what we pay for......

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself - A. H. Weiler

Handle9

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#3029073 29-Jan-2023 22:01

Bee:>Someone needs to step up and provide us a quality news site, but that's been a problem for years...

There’s a number of good quality news sites. Of course what people actually read isn’t what they say they read which is why clickbait remains.

quickymart

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#3029081 29-Jan-2023 22:48

Happened after their new! improved! upgrades to their website recently.

My experience must be unique then; using Firefox, first time loading I get the old, standard S:

But if I reload, it shows me the new purple animated thing:

(this is the one I think you don't like - for the record, I don't really like it either).

Frustratingly, with the second S the stories seem to be cached/out of date/from my last visit, so I need to reload the page again and then I get the up-to-date stories.

I really don't know what was wrong with their old site or why the hell some genius saw fit to change it - I found the old one quite functional and didn't have to sit through S's loading all the time. It just loaded, job done.

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