For the longest time now, responding to reviews has felt like too much of a detour. Artists have been required to access their account panel, visit their submissions panel, and choose to respond to reviews to particular submissions. The process also wasn't too self-explanatory, either; artists were required to click on the review summary line to respond.
This pet peeve has now been fixed! From now on, if an artist is logged in while reading reviews of his work (via the same page everyone else reads), he will have a link to "Respond" under each review. This means you can now respond to your reviews impulsively, rather than going through all the previous steps. We're hoping more artists will respond to their reviews, now that it is a more direct process.
Today also marks the first day that we are sending out private message notifications via email. Email notifications will be sent once per day, and only if you have received a new, unread PM in the last 24 hours. We are hoping this will result in more users checking their private messages. We still have bigger plans for the PM system that will make its usefullness more and more apparent, especially for artists who want to send notifications out to their fans.
Mike Houser (aka Matzerath) has made a new cartoon for National Lampoon! You can check it out here.
Also, I need to start posting links on the topic of Net Neutrality. Check out Savetheinternet.com to learn more about Net Neutrality and why sites like Newgrounds are at risk.
There are laws in place that provide equal access to all websites. Major ISPs have been lobbying Congress to change this, so they can charge a premium to individual websites for faster service. For example, Yahoo could pay Comcast a fee so that Comcast users would browse Yahoo faster than they can browse Google. Read up on the topic and contact your local representatives to let them know your feelings on the matter.
