A faster BBC News front page • Hacker News Board

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#131

Post by rntksi » Wed, Apr 26, 2017, 12:06 PM UTC

cnorthwood wrote: post #90

rntksi wrote: post #45

always love how you optimise the news front page. are you guys still running the Perl backend and "Html Put" :) @joseph_wynn ? a former BBC News CSD here.

Nope, the Perl backend went away a long time ago! (at the point of switching from news.bbc.co.uk -> www.bbc.co.uk/news). The site is dynamically generated at origin now.

There used to be this resident Perl-guru in an obscure area, back when we were sitting over in TVC (FM&T J area), who would debug stuffs for us when things were not working right. Can't remember his name though (Scott? Paul?). I wonder where he went...

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#132

Post by saghm » Wed, Apr 26, 2017, 8:29 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #103

deanCommie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't the breaking news banner. If aliens make contact with humanity, you better believe I want an intrusive popup. The problem is what the editorial board considers breaking news has been completely diluted and diminished both for the BBC and CNN

If the banner is always there, something has to be put into it, sadly.

That sounds like a compelling argument not to always have it there. If anything, it would be more noticeable if it only showed up sometimes as opposed to it always being present.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#133

Post by bbcbreaking » Sun, May 07, 2017, 11:22 AM UTC

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #50

bbcbreaking wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is at least an improvement. But can't the breaking news only appear if something breaks after I load the page, rather than on initial load? Even then... give me an option to set a cookie to never see it please.

I'll raise this with our product team. I think it's totally reasonable to expect the banner not to appear as soon as you load the page — if there's a breaking news story, it will already be on the page, right? So there's no need to also pop up a banner with the same story. But —this is a big "but"— I wouldn't expect this to happen soon. Changes take a long time at the BBC :)

Closing the breaking news now at least seems to be fixed (it no longer scrolls back to top). Thanks!