1) The tags in the tag browser were reordered for scannability, according to user comments from earlier beta
2) My bad, that shouldn't have been the case, but fixed now.
3) New possibilities add complexity. Right now we're dealing with three columns * two different textarea configurations * large/medium/small screens; the complexity and number of things you have to deal with goes up geometrically with each new possibility.
People have asked us before for the ability to put modules above the entry text, and we did carefully consider it, but ultimately we decided that would be too much added complexity on a page that was already very complex with a lot of choices that could be made
4a) Merging those let us get rid of two modules that basically we always want to be available, and reduced some of the feeling of overwhelming choice on the page.
4b) We did get rid of that, yes. We gathered statistics over a few months to see how people were using the page, and found that 0.001% of users used altlogin while logged in as another account. It's still possible to post while logged out, just not as account B while logged into account A.
The other problem with that existing option was that posting as one account when logged into another account wouldn't let you set any options for the post, like icons or tags, so people weren't using it because they wanted to set those things. We've talked a lot about how to connect up accounts so you can post or comment as one account while you're logged into another of your accounts and have access to all of those options, and it is something we do intend to do in the future, but there's a lot of design problems we haven't been able to solve well enough yet.
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2) My bad, that shouldn't have been the case, but fixed now.
3) New possibilities add complexity. Right now we're dealing with three columns * two different textarea configurations * large/medium/small screens; the complexity and number of things you have to deal with goes up geometrically with each new possibility.
People have asked us before for the ability to put modules above the entry text, and we did carefully consider it, but ultimately we decided that would be too much added complexity on a page that was already very complex with a lot of choices that could be made
4a) Merging those let us get rid of two modules that basically we always want to be available, and reduced some of the feeling of overwhelming choice on the page.
4b) We did get rid of that, yes. We gathered statistics over a few months to see how people were using the page, and found that 0.001% of users used altlogin while logged in as another account. It's still possible to post while logged out, just not as account B while logged into account A.
The other problem with that existing option was that posting as one account when logged into another account wouldn't let you set any options for the post, like icons or tags, so people weren't using it because they wanted to set those things. We've talked a lot about how to connect up accounts so you can post or comment as one account while you're logged into another of your accounts and have access to all of those options, and it is something we do intend to do in the future, but there's a lot of design problems we haven't been able to solve well enough yet.