The RPS Feedback Thread

[ColOfNature]

They're particularly off-putting on a mobile, they take up a huge chunk of screen space to no particular benefit.

[CMaster]

They make sense in print media, where you might otherwise skip over the page if there wasn't a quote that grabbed your attention like that.

It makes much, much less sense for a web format like RPS, where we've already clicked "Read the rest of this entry".

[LowKey]

They're particularly off-putting on a mobile, they take up a huge chunk of screen space to no particular benefit.

Second this.

[somini]

Are there any reasons as to why you decided to use them? Not that you're obliged to share them with us, I just think that it might be interesting to now.

Someone has been skimming over the wordpress plugins, I guess.
If only the pull quotes were all like the EVE article...

[L_No]

What I realised when reading the articles with those 'pull quotes' is that it makes me more likely to just skim through the article instead of reading it carefully, would be interesting to know if other people had the same experience as I.

I know what you mean, a pull quote somehow distracts me from the main body of text, as if my eyes are pulled towards the pull quote while reading or something (hope that makes sense). I'd rather not have them in the articles please.

[pepper]

I cannot post in threads anymore on the main page:

Access has been blocked.

You are trying to beat the system.

Protected by: AVH First Defense Against Spam

Started since yesterday. Tried posting the following message in the flare path:

I agree with you on the locomotive, I just looked through all the early locomotives wikipedia lists and this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Witch

Comes in closest by the way the boiler/wheels look.

Wild geuss on the engine, a Merlin?

EDIT: it appears its blocking on IP, should I start using proxy's for RPS?

[Lambchops]

Can't say I'm loving the pull quotes either. As others have pointed out I'm already interested in reading the article so they are somewhat redundant and just a bit of a distraction.

[Gnarl]

I just thought I chime in on the pull quote dislike, for the same reasons as others.

[LTK]

They're called pull quotes, and have been used in standard editorial formats for many years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote

Well, given that they are widely used in editorial formats, we know what they are; it would be nice to know why they are here. Are you taking our feedback into consideration, or are the pull quotes here to stay regardless?

[Fumarole]

They're particularly off-putting on a mobile, they take up a huge chunk of screen space to no particular benefit.

I third this.

It is just about enough to discourage me from reading the articles at all.

[Vander]

Yeah, same here, i don't see the advantage of putting pull quotes in your texts,and its distracting.

And it look bad.

[waltc]

I was about to start a thread in that direction until I discovered that although I had joined the forum I could not start new threads...pretty much a first in my experience. However, even that strange policy is not wholly outside the realm of logic, so I suppose I can post what I had intended here...(I just revisited my spam bucket--see below--to discover yet more automated correspondence from RPS--Jim, to be precise--explaining the ten-post, anti-spam measure. As I suspected: logical.)

This site stands out for me because of the quality of its writing! Not only the writing by the RPS editorial staff, but also, I'm glad to say, the writing of many (if not all) of the people who post here. I like the wit and I enjoy the turn of phrase, especially since these commodities are so difficult to find in the Internet at large. RPS is refreshing, frankly. This way I can read and not write so much, or write a lot, as the case may be...;) You may find me hovering around the technical threads to give whatever meager advice I may, but in other places, too!

Signing into the forums was not quite as easy as it should be, though, because Google kept routing my initial password email from RPS into my spam bucket, with the proviso that "We find that most of the mail emanating from horace.positive-dedicated.net is spam," or something like that. When it finally dawned on me to peek into my spam bucket I was able to actually sign into RPS properly. The native Google spam filter is odd as for instance it had shunted two items from Newegg as spam while not even burping on the 99% of Newegg posts it posts directly to my inbox. However, I note the filter was probably right in that case as it wanted me to respond to "e.newegg.com" instead of "newegg.com." If there's any of my mail that should not be shunted to spam it is RPS mail! I have changed my rule for RPS, so we shall see what will happen. (That e.newegg.com thing just might be the first phishing email I've ever seen directed at one of my addresses!)

Anyway, just wanted to say that I am very appreciative of the site and thought it very much worth the small trouble of signing in. RPS is now in my list of daily visitation links! Thanks again!

[Barberetti]

I, too, am not really feeling the pull quotes.

They are distracting from the main body of the article, and if I'm already reading the article in question (as I am, they only appear under the Read More jump), I'm going to be reading them words anyway. Making them big and red (which makes me think they are hyperlinks) isn't really adding much.

This. Putting pull-quotes in the main body of the article is completely redundant, and only serves to annoy the people who are already going to be reading the whole thing anyway, as happened with me while reading the Witcher article today. If they're here to stay, then I hope someone creates a script to remove them as soon as possible.

Pull-quotes are for other, lesser, formats.

[mizzu]

I don't have anything against pull quotes per se, but the narrow RPS article layout doesn't work with them at all. My favorite piece of journalism, the swiss magazine "Das Magazin", does them very well (at least in their paper version, in the digital one that uses a layout similar to RPS, you can't find them):
example 1 (pull quote is on top, but it's not actually a quote from an interviewee (though sometimes it is), it's just a sentence from the article, so there are no "")

example 2 (again, just a sentence out of the article, but embedded into the text in a nice way)

In both of those two examples the pull quote doesn't actually say something extremely relevant, it either gives off the mood of the article or is a funny/interesting/weird anecdote that is designed to make you read the whole thing. It makes sense on its own, but most of the time it won't tell you anything substantial.

[Velko]

Hey, the back-button problem is back (no pun intended, honestly). Once again, I have to click back twice to get back from an article.

It's been fixed at least twice during the last six months or so?

[LTK]

In the comment thread for the Space Hulk interview, Sparkasaurusmex says to block http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/##.simplePullQuote to get rid of the pull quotes. I don't know how or if that works in Chrome, but if I right-click on a pullquote on the page then my AdBlock plugin gives me an option to block them nonetheless. That was easy. Might be a good solution for others as well.

[Vercinger]

Please remove the mid-article quote boxes. They make the articles harder to read.

[guitarxe]

Wow, looks like they've changed the pullquotes. They now cannot be blocked with adblock. WTF RPS??

[LTK]

Wow, looks like they've changed the pullquotes. They now cannot be blocked with adblock. WTF RPS??

They're still gone for me. What browser/adblock are you using?

[Mana_Garmr]

I put this

.simplePullQuote
{
    height: 0px;
    width: 0px;
    visibility: hidden;
}

in a style using the Stylish add-on for Firefox and it got rid of them. I assume there's a similar option for style-sheet alteration for Chrome too.