The LW 2.0 Open Beta is now live; this means you can create an account, start reading and posting, and tell us what you think.
Four points:
1) In case you're just tuning in, I took up the mantle of revitalizing LW through improving its codebase some time ago, and only made small amounts of progress until Oliver Habryka joined the project and put full-time engineering effort into it. He deserves the credit for the new design, and you can read about his strategic approach here.
2) If you want to use your current LW account on LW2.0, we didn't import the old passwords, and so you'll have to use the reset password functionality. If your LW account isn't tied to a current email, send a PM to habryka on lesswrong and he'll update the user account details on lesserwrong. He's also working on improving the site and sleeping and things like that, so don't expect an immediate response.
3) During the open beta there will be a green message in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. This is called Intercom, and is how you can tell us about issues with the site and ask other questions.
4) The open beta will end with a vote of users with over a thousand karma on whether we should switch the lesswrong.com URL to point to the new code and database. If this succeeds, all the activity from the open beta and the live site will be merged together. If the vote fails, we expect to archive LW until another team comes along to revive it. We currently don't have a date set, but this will be announced a week in advance.
:-(
I do not have the patience to read anything on that site. Or alternatively, my computer is too old and my screen too low res. But I am not sufficiently committed to LW to buy new hardware just to maybe be able to see it. Is there any possibility that the old site might remain up, maybe as some kind of accessibility thing for people who can't use the new one?
I can corroborate that the scrolling is painful on sufficiently old hardware (and two of the not-home not-work places I most like to hang out in these days have hardware that is sufficiently old).
Scrolling for example is painful near the bottom (in the comments) of the recent article on the Cambrian explosion on a Core 2 Duo running Windows Vista, in Chrome. In particular, it takes whole seconds for the text to appear. (Till then the view port is blank / white.)
But even when I'm using reasonably fast hardware, my reaction to any signs that the text on a we... (read more)