At 5/27/09 10:05 AM, PsychoGoldfish wrote: Keep in mnd, Newgrounds is not some big site backed by venture capitol. We are all about branching features to the audio community, but with limited resources, most of our time is spent on maintainance and revenue generation with the long term goal of being able to do more in way of sponsorships, and bringing in new talent to the team that can help with features relating to multi-author audio (amongst other awesome ideas on the super long 'to-do' list we have).

How about asking what features people actually want before launching them? A redesign was not needed, and just by a gross guess, I say that about half the comments about it is negative. People are citing good reasons to NOT have this design.

Besides, aren't you supposed to be working on that chat? Ghee, why is it taking so long? Is DNF going to come out before the chat?

Ask people for opinions, they got plenty to share. Making half the userbase unhappy is a bad move.
Go ahead, try and blame that much on people not being used to the new stuff. Because change is bad.

I ask, why do people not complain about old stuff? Because they no longer care about it. It's old news, and it's not something they think about.
Yes, all the complains are going to come in when it's still new. It's because no one cares when it's old!

This situation feels like Nintendo all over again, "let's make our loyal people upset by focusing on the causual masses! Screw the repeat visitors! What, the repeat visitors have opinions? Bah, who cares?". Yeah, real good business practice.

Or for the people with short attention spans:
I don't like this redesign project one bit. It was unexpected and done without any feedback, resulting in a lot of people being upset.

And as the finishing words:
Change is not bad. Unexpected change is.

It's great, but please put the "user, co-author, views, upload date, filesize"-box higher up, next to the flash maybe. People should be able to see stuff like that.

It's awesome! thanks phcogoldfish, that other guy, and bob!

At 5/27/09 11:27 AM, mranarchy wrote: However the pop-up doesn't work for me (It did before so could it be my blocker?...Or maybe its the fact I'm on a mac)

If you're using Safari 4.0 (beta), it could be that. I can't get it to work, and I think Glaiel Gamer pointed out that he couldn't get it to work either, and we're both using Safari.

When I use Firefox on a Mac, the pop-up works just fine.

I believe someone pointed out earlier on that Safari may not work for pop-ups because it automatically axes them without notification. This doesn't explain why I could use the pop-up function before though.

I'm not satisfied.

Good Points:
I can vote easily whilst still playing.

Bad Points:
You can't instantly see all the information, which is useful.
The voting buttons look out of place and alone

At 5/27/09 11:34 AM, SuperAppendixMan wrote: I found a use for the widescreen layout!
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/49 7142

LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO that is PERFECT

At 5/27/09 11:36 AM, henke37 wrote: I say that about half the comments about it is negative.

Oh sure. And how many people do you think have logged on today and HAVEN'T commented?
There have been 500 posts in this thread. Let's say thats 250 negative comments. That's in the last 15 hours.
Newgrounds gets half a million unique hits a day.

250 is a DROP IN THE OCEAN.

SWEET!

I like the new layout, but it could potentially be more dangerous if the ActionScript makes pop-ups. One thing I'm not sure of is what do the small icons above the flash mean?

I honestly doesn't like it, at all. It's too much of a clusterfuck now.
But, why change it all? The old design wasn't broken.

I'm still waiting for a fucntion so I can sort reviews by their length.. hint hint!

At 5/27/09 11:34 AM, SuperAppendixMan wrote: I found a use for the widescreen layout!
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/49 7142

HAHA how the hell did you do that?

At 5/27/09 11:48 AM, BananaBreadMuffin wrote: There have been 500 posts in this thread. Let's say thats 250 negative comments. That's in the last 15 hours.
Newgrounds gets half a million unique hits a day.

250 is a DROP IN THE OCEAN.

250/500 of people who dislike the new look is a high proportion in this case. It's a good sample of the half million visitors, hence why administrators are taking note of the complaints and looking to improve upon them.

At 5/27/09 11:34 AM, SuperAppendixMan wrote: I found a use for the widescreen layout!
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/49 7142

Hahaha, fived it!

For anyone with a graphic design background like myself, the new layout just makes you cringe. And I saw someone mention how NG didn't really consult the user base before the change at all, alienating its publics much like Nintendo did with its most loyal customers with the Wii and the type of software being developed there. In public relations, we call this a lack of environmental scanning, where there is an expectancy gap formed that produces issues for organizations that threaten their legitimacy. That formation of a legitimacy gap, with a lack of any sort of actional legitimation thus far from Newgrounds (defending policies or actions successfully), coupled with the security issues some have mentioned this new layout opens people up to, is just all a big smack in the face to NG's most loyal users from my viewpoint. I wonder if NG actually has anyone consulting them on their strategic communication strategies at all or if they are just winging this whole thing (like they seem to have winged the layout).

Well, I'm sure it'll all be driven by the money sources and not by the people who have just came here for years to enjoy what all of the artists are doing for them as media consumers. It's a slippery slope, though, alienate enough people and the hits go down and the advertisers go away.

Does anyone know of any sort of good rival site to NG or have any of the artists out there considered an upstart with a simple, clean layout to launch and blow NG out of the water? It would be interesting to see some competition methinks, and there are plenty of talented artists on here who could pull it off. Consider it another collab.

At 5/27/09 12:12 PM, Gorgorothx wrote:

At 5/27/09 11:34 AM, SuperAppendixMan wrote: I found a use for the widescreen layout!
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/49 7142

HAHA how the hell did you do that?

stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
function update(e:Event){
if(stage.stageWidth <= 500 && pen.currentFrame != 1) pen.play();
if(stage.stageWidth > 500 && pen.currentFrame == 1) pen.play();

scaleX = stage.stageWidth / 500;
scaleY = stage.stageHeight / 300;
x = (stage.stageWidth - 500) / -2;
y = (stage.stageHeight - 300) / -2;
}
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, update, false, 0, true)

At 5/27/09 12:13 PM, Chumbawamba wrote: 250/500 of people who dislike the new look is a high proportion in this case. It's a good sample of the half million visitors, hence why administrators are taking note of the complaints and looking to improve upon them.

But it's not. Of course it's important to pay attention to the masses, and judging by pyschogoldfish's most recent post they are, but we're not a sample of their visitors.

They created this to give the flash to us more directly, so that passing trade wouldn't go straight through without stopping, but would see the flash quickly and easily. For people who've been on Newgrounds enough to create an account, this isn't a problem. But there's no-one who hasn't already created an account, who clearly likes NG a reasonable amount, who's posted in this thread.

It's not an accurate sample of the 500k. It's a useful sample when paying attention to what to change etc but it's not a random 1/1000th.

This Wide Layout kicks ass

At 5/27/09 12:16 PM, Jdisasoldier wrote: For anyone with a graphic design background like myself, the new layout just makes you cringe.

Has it ever occured to you that the "wide layout" is a works in progress? Of course not, someone who has such a swollen inferiority complex as you wouldn't even have contemplated that.

Eventually, each of the elements of the page will fill the width of the inner part of the page. It is not possible to do that without going all out on that for every section of the site, which we did with the redesign and it very nearly burned us all out.

And I saw someone mention how NG didn't really consult the user base before the change at all.

We base what we work on from solid facts - trends we see in statistics, something the userbase is not privvy to (though they tend to speculate upon it regularly enough, taking heresy for fact).

Well, I'm sure it'll all be driven by the money sources and not by the people who have just came here for years to enjoy what all of the artists are doing for them as media consumers.

You have completely misunderstood the point of all of this. Most people who come to this site come to watch flash, or listen to music. The fanbase does not equal the majority of people who come here on a daily basis, who watch the content, but couldn't give a monkeys about who created it, stats, etc. They get to the site, watch the content, then leave. Simple as that. If they have to get to the page, click something to get the content going, etc, this hinders what they were here to do in the first place.

THE most important thing about each of the content pages is that it delivers the content to the audience. And what we've done here makes that far more efficient than it was before. This actually will benefit authors more, too, because anyone who's patient enough to sit through submissions will also be likely to find out more about who created it. There is no evidence against changes we've made in the past to suggest otherwise.

the new layout is much better than the old one. I like the change. BUt...I miss the old one too. for example: when you saw a movie the old layout set a verry cool mod with the background shadow, and the movie in the center. now that mood is lost. mabye if you include an option to set that black shadow curtain behind the flash window again like the old times....that would be really cool IMO

Its pretty cool, I think i liked the other layout better though.

Today I like the new layout. I found out some good points and way to make my work nicer. Still think the autoplay is not a good idea at all though.

Soo ... the change in having the flash on the main page is a fairly new thing?

DOES NOT WANT.

I'm sure I'll get used to it but ... I've been using Newgrounds for years now, so I'm too comfortable with the old way of doing things ...

I'll keep this short and sweet: I hated the new format! I like to be able to open the window to a flash without having to actually downloading the flash, as I might just want to read the reviews for a flash, for example, or vote again for a movie I like.

Anyway of making this optional, via the account options? Please?

Amazing I only just noticed today NG is getting alot more like youtube Everyday (But with games!)

...there's gonna be a new redesign...

A new redesign? OMG!!! Caant wait :)

I'm curious how you justified always using bandwidth to view/play the flash. Shouldn't you hope they wouldn't and design around that? Even if statistically 1 of 10000 don't load the flash, you're still saving yourself just a bit. And a bit over thousands of page loads over thousands of days, well.... If users are anything like me, they would have a much higher chance of not loading the flash.

I like the idea of having a wideout resolution for the Newgrounds flash videos mainly due to the fact i have a widescreen laptop so it helps out plus i also like how you can up the size of the resolution and you can dim the lights of everything else and make it look like theater style,i know it's just a working progress but it's a good start. =)

I actually liked the old way of embedding the flash a lot, but I am not against a new layout. However, this layout does have its problems, a bit too many of them if you ask me.

First off, the current layout just does not work at 600x800 and looks really crammed in 1024x768. I don't see what can be done about this without completely redoing the design again and that's probably not considered. Maybe it's possible to steal a few pixels here and there and add to the sides, it would probably make it feel better at 1024x768. Being able to choose a different layout (not necessarily the old one) might resolve this problem all together, but I would not want such an option for my site, I guess, so I can't advise you to do that.

Then there's widescreen. It has been mentioned a hundred times in this thread, but I think it is important enough to mention again: Authors should have the option to disable widescreen for their flashes.

Next I want to talk about autoloading and a closely related concept: the close button.
I think that a lot of thought went into the decision to make flashes load automatically, as you don't strike me as the kind of people to make such a decision hastily. However, autoloading everywhere and all the time is not the right solution I think. This has been mentioned a lot of times, but what I consider the biggest problem with it, has only been said properly a very limited number of times. I can't "save" flashes for later now. Say I am looking for a tower defense game and see a number of promising flashes, now I can no longer open all of them in tabs and try them out one by one. The disappearance of the close button looks like it was just an oversight to me.
I'll come with a proposal for solving this in a moment, but first I will keep on "whining" for a little longer.

Someone put it quite nicely earlier in this thread (sorry, I don't feel like going through it all again to find out who it was): The author deserves more than just a footnote. I don't think putting the flash info below the flash was a correct choice. Putting the author comments and reviews all the way down is not something I would have done either, but the flash info is obviously in the wrong place, I think.

The back button does not function correctly. When dimming a flash, one needs to press back once extra in order to go back one page from where he or she started. I'll get technical on this one right away.
Seeing that the ads are in iframes, they disappear and the url of the main page does not change, I blame the changing of the ads. I haven't looked into it, but I suppose you are changing the src attribute of the iframe, which causes it to be a new entry in the history of your browser. Even if this is not the case, you are modifying something of the iframe that causes it to be a new history entry. One could instead access the content of the iframe directly and change it using innerHTML (or the W3C html-changing functions) and not leave a history entry.

The last thing I want to complain about is pop-up blockers blocking the "play in pop-up" button. While I was looking for the reason of the last problem (it would need a reason, usually you'll have to do difficult things to do the exact opposite), I found that the three buttons at the top where actually a flash file. Now I know that this is a flash portal, but there are correct and incorrect uses of flash. Most things other than what could be submitted to the portal are incorrect use of flash (barring some exceptions such as using flash to play a sound). Besides, I don't see any reason at all to make these buttons a flash file. And as it happens, once these buttons are done in html rather than flash, it's a piece of cake to make a pop-up blocker not consider it something that needs to be blocked.

So, that's enough complaining. Before I continue to my suggestion, I would like to highlight something another user said:
Adding the author's name to the title bar of a flash would be nice.

Alright, as to how I would do it. It sounds like swapping the suggestions and the flash info box would do a lot of good in terms of solving the author not getting due credit. However, I think I can do better than that and leave them as they are and solve a couple of problems at the same time.
Personally I think it would be best to collapse the area that is taken up by the flash and the suggestions to - say - a 100 pixel height area. This area would feature a very large play button and possibly some other nice stuff. This way all the things that were pushed down, aren't pushed down so much. When clicking the button the flash and the suggestions would fold into the page much like the write a review-box does now. A close button would remove the flash again, but probably it should leave the suggestions, as this would be the moment at which the suggestions would be most relevant. Possibly it would be good to move things around a bit so parts can move up even though the suggestions are staying in their place, but I am not sure whether I would go with that or with simply leaving the area where the flash was open.

What I have not addressed yet is the idea that outsiders will like the autoplay. Somewhere in the thread the option of using a GET variable for this (?autoplay=true). This sounds alright, but is not, as people will copy the url of a game they like when digging it and not add that variable. So I came up with the following: autoplay unless the HTTP_REFERER is newgrounds. This way incoming links will have the benefit of autoplay, while if you start out at newgrounds, you won't have flashes autoplaying.
With this system in place, I think it would still be good to implement an overriding GET variable, so links in weekly mails can be done such that autoplay is off.
One could argue whether the flash info and the suggestions should be swapped when autoplaying. In the end I think it would be best not to. These incoming users are the ones that the suggestions box is most important for, and I think that authors can stand not being in the spotlight in this case. However, it is easy to argue in favor of swapping them as well.

Well, that's my eight thousand words (or two cents) on the new view. I hope you can do something with my suggestions, and if not... too bad.

Very good!

But too Lag!

Woah that's strange.

Not what I'm used to I mean.

This thing is crap, at least give us the option of turning it back.

At 5/27/09 02:28 AM, ZekeySpaceyLizard wrote: tom: idea:
make it so we can EDIT the "other flash you might enjoy" thing

that way i can link people to flash my friends have made when they are watching something of mine

Seconded. That would be a very awesome idea. Kind of like the "tell your friends about this flash!" e-mail feature from the old layout, except better and smarter and sexier.