Double XP Halloween Weekend
We are in the final days of our Halloween Spooktacular, with prizes for the best spooky animation, games, art and music. You have until the end of day Monday to submit your entry!
To celebrate Halloween Weekend and help get movie and game entries through judgment, we’re offering Double XP today until the end of day Tuesday. This means you’ll get XP for your first TEN votes per day, instead of your first FIVE like we normally do.
For the uninitiated, movies and games go through an initial judgment period that determines whether they remain on the site. You will see under judgment entries in purple on the Classic Portal page or via the dedicated Movie and Game judgment pages.
Scouting Update (Next Week?)
Starting as early as next week, Art and Audio scouting will become instant vs invite.
For anyone not familiar, the Art and Audio Portals default to showing entries by artists who have been scouted (approved) by their fellow artists. This is done to maintain a minimum quality threshold, since both Art and Audio can be easily flooded with low-effort / low-quality entries that make it hard for casual visitors to discover artists who are making a real effort.
Scouting has traditionally resulted in an invite being sent to the artist but this leads to various levels of confusion and lack of response, so we’re changing it to happen instantly. Scouted artists will also receive an introductory message that hopefully explains things better than before.
When you get scouted, you gain the ability to scout other people. This ability can be revoked, however, if you exercise poor judgment with who you scout. For example, sometimes someone will get scouted and the main Art Portal listing will suddenly be filled with rough sketches or sloppy MS Paint doodles, at which point that person will be de-scouted and the person who scouted them may lose their ability to scout other people.
After this update, if you have scouted people, you will now see those totals on your user page, in the infobox where we show totals for Trophies, Medals, Supporter, etc. Clicking the total will go to the list of people you’ve scouted.
It’s kinda confusing that NG has a judgment process for movies and games, with a scouting process for art and audio. The judgment system goes back to the launch of our automated publishing system in the year 2000. When we introduced the Audio Portal in 2003, to combat music piracy we had moderators officially approve each new artist. When we launched the Art Portal in 2009, we created the scouting system as a way to let the community vet each other. This system ultimately expanded to Audio, to remove the moderator bottleneck. Will scouting ever come to Movies and Games? It’s possible. Maybe scouted artists would skip the judgment phase but others would still risk having their entries voted off the site. It would make the judgment list more manageable while removing a bottleneck for vetted artists.
If NG history interests you, you may enjoy reading our history page.
Interstitials
We’ve been experimenting with interstitials; promo boxes that appear occasionally after you’ve browsed a number of pages. Unregistered users get a box encouraging them to sign up, while registered non-Supporters will get a less frequent Supporter promo. If you’ve been seeing them, have they been bothering you or are they not too bad? Is the Supporter promo feeling too frequent?
Various changes we’ve made this month have created an upward trend in new Supporters. If this continues, we’ll be gradually removing the last of the ads on A-rated pages (already did so with Art) and increasing the monthly prizes. I’m trying to manage my expectations at the moment but things are looking really good if we keep this up.
Other News
@MindChamber has announced Robot Day will be November 26th!
@Jaime-R has a new cartoon you can watch as part of Justin Roiland's "The Paloni Show! Halloween Special" on Hulu. If you don’t have Hulu, enjoy these classics:
@BrandyBuizel is organizing Tankmas ADVENTure 2022.
@itsreddqueen and @CommanderKuni are hosting an NG Cookbook Collab.
@Fro is the 11th strongest man under 200 lbs in the US.
Peter the Ant Day is December 26th!
@CatFat spent many years making a beautifully animated Destiny video, give it a look!
