Gifting Supporter
‘Tis the season of giving! We just pushed a few updates to our Supporter upgrade. When you visit a user page, if the user doesn’t have a Supporter logo next to their name you will now see a gift icon in its place - click this to gift them Supporter status!
@BrandyBuizel already tried it with @SouljaBoy:
Gifting has always been an option but traditionally required manual name entry on the Supporter purchase form, vs a convenient link that encourages gifting.
We’ve also introduced a checkbox that lets you control whether your gift is anonymous. Gifting was previously anonymous; now you can make your gift known and see your name on the Wall of Honor.
You can edit the private / public status of your gifts via your Supporter history page, which we plan to tidy up a bit.
If you aren’t familiar with our Supporter upgrade, it’s $3 per month or $25 for the year with the option to pay more if you’d like to give additional support. Supporters browse NG ad-free with a variety of perks.
Long-term we’d like for NG to be entirely funded by supporters, with enough surplus to establish a new rev-share system that isn’t based on ads (think of it as Spotify or Netflix for indie web content but free for people who can’t pay). We’re making gradual progress towards this goal each year and your support is greatly appreciated!
On the topic of funding, we’ll likely be running a video ad campaign for the last few weeks of 2019 to help cover some expenses from the year. We plan for the ads to only show for unregistered users and no more than 2-3 ads per day.
Collabinator
Last week we updated The Collabinator, introducing new categories for those seeking paid work and those looking to hire, in addition to the existing category for people who just want to make stuff with other talented individuals.
We added tags with tag search and copied the existing “Open for Commissions” blog posts into the “Open for Paid Work” category. We’ll be adding ratings filters and have a big list of improvements we hope to make in this space, while also promoting it more around the site.
Newgrounds OC Animation Competition
What started as a writing competition, followed by an art and voice acting competition, has now moved on to the final segment: the Animation Competition! Utilizing the script, character designs and voice demos, create a trailer or teaser for what an actual episode might look like!
Ruffle - In Browser Flash Emulation
If you missed it, Ruffle now has a sponsor page on GitHub! Ruffle is a project created by @Mike to create an open-source Flash emulator. We’ll soon be using Ruffle on NG to emulate Flash in-browser for most of the existing animation and some of the games. The goal for Ruffle is to support every SWF (Flash file) but it will need a lot of time, effort and ongoing support from Flash enthusiasts!
