[Warning: Rant] [Suggestions are below]
As a long time lurker on Newgrounds, I'd like to say the the Collections page makes no fucking sense.
First of all, what is the point of having Collections? I mean, series are a way of honoring artists who take time to develop characters or at least focus on one theme. The collections though, are all over the fucking place.
Some group together flash that all have to do with one event. I guess that makes sense, someone might want to see how Newgrounders responded to certain events. Documenting history is cool.
Some of the collections group together flashes that parody one subject, like a TV series or stereotype. Now these collections sometimes make sense when there are a lot of parodies, I mean, the Matrix collection has a bunch of quality content. In order to fill up space on each collection page, there is unavoidably crap lining the bottom. Unfortunately, some collections like Emo don't have any quality flash, leaving us with a shit sandwich.
Some collections are just really vague, like sticks or politics. You can't really expect to lump together every flash where the artist couldn't be bothered to draw the body of their characters. Every good stick figure flash should also qualify for another page, like funny cartoons or ultraviolence or something. Also, you can't really expect to lump together every flash that talks about politics either. You are going to end up lumping together anti-Bush flash with campaign 2008 flash with Barack Obama presidency flash. Hell, you might as well have a pixelated collection, putting together every shitty animator who can use pixel tools.
Sub-collections just make the whole thing more confusing. The main three offenders are holidays, Newgrounds, and the king of subcollections: video game parodies. I mean, it is bad enough that pages like Valentines Day are hidden in hard to find subcategories. This shit gets ridiculous when you consider that some of these subcollections have subcollections within them. That's right, there is enough content in collections like Christmas, Clock Crew, or Halloween to force them to be divided into even smaller categories, but they still don't get their own link on the collections page while Mikey does.
For video game parodies, the situation is just fucking ridiculous. I mean, Newgrounds has had a lot of video game parodies. In fact, the Street Fighter Collab is currently the second top scoring flash on this site. However, if you want to see all these parodies, you have to dig through the pile of shit that is the collections page to find the one link that leads to the video games parodies page. Then, you are greeted with over 30 subcollections, each with more content than that lame ass Napster collection. And then, if you scroll down past all those pages, you find even more flash. And then, if you are very patient, you find high quality shit like Nin10do!, or Decline of Video Gaming, three quarters of the way down the page. Seriously, some of the parodies put above these on the very same page are so bad, that they have been blammed. There is no possible way any new user could possibly wade through that much crap to find those gems.
Coincidentally, Castle Crashers is not a subcollection, even though it is most definitely a video game.
And then there are those subcollections that are scattered about the site, such as the Lemon Demon music videos collection which is hidden on the second page of the music videos page. I have no idea how many of those hidden collections there are and I can't think of any way of finding those collections that doesn't involve wasting a fucking lot of time.
Then there are the obvious collections that have not been made, like the collection for the swine flu, the shapes animations, or the Tankie nominees. It seems that the only collection pages that have been added recently are subcollections. That probably means that even the guys who are supposed to updating the collections page have no idea what the fuck is supposed to be there either.
[Rant end]
So here is my suggestion to help fix the collections page. First, find some way of marking links so you know you are clicking on a collection/series and not an individual flash. That way, collections can be on pages mixed in with portal submission without making them too hard too find.
Second, move all the good subcollections from their hidden location to the collection page. I mean, ideally the NG collabs page should get more coverage than Stephen Hawking, and we definitely have more quality cartoons in the Mario collection than the scat collection.
Next, move all the dead collections, like Animutations or Wazzup, to only be in the portal history page. The only people who could give a shit about them are probably also interested in the portal's history anyway.
Then, move all the parody collections to the parody toons page. Since the collections are now marked differently than normal flashes, people might actually be able to find the parodies they want. I mean seriously, Mario and Laura Croft are right on top of the parodies page while the video game parodies are hidden away.
Finally, the only thing left on the collections page will be the vague shit, like Anime or Experimental, the whimsical, like old folk or ghetto, and the few pages that actually deserve to be collections, like Flash Tutorials, Clock Crew, or Christmas. The collection page will still be mediocre, but it would be less of a train wreck than it is now.
