Good Job Knighty! #02 · 4:22pm Dec 10th, 2012
Well, it'd appear the long-awaited site updates have done as much bad to the site as good. Call me miserable, old-fashioned or cynical, but the new front page is surprisingly reminiscent of ff.net's. Story cover images are now smaller than America's 'healthy eating initiative' budget, the front page is a massive block of grey and the featured box is now massively unfair to new writers. With the removal of the 'Popular Stories' sidebar, you're fucked unless you get featured within the first hour.
Secondly, a fair amount of people have lost chunks of their stories. That's from anywhere between 1,000 to 6,000, going off what I've seen. I'm fairly sure he could have waited a while longer, given people warning before conducting the site changes. Y'know, possibly a goddamn week and maybe a little warning that their chapters could potentially be deleted during his site changes. First I noticed of these changes was when I logged in to check a close friend's story. Suddenly: boom. Site changes. And another childish Knighty blog. Hang on, let me just grab a quote.
KNIGHTY WHAT DID YOU DO TO THE SITE?!? UR JUST AS BAD AS YOUTUBE
Ok, ok, chill. You've probably noticed the site is looking a bit different.
Really? Oh, I thought my monitor had become sentient and was trying to fix FiMFic itself. Damn. I guess I didn't need to go to my Skynet bunker after all. But yeah, I personally would have preferred a list of site changes as opposed to Knighty's YouTube 'joke'. Oh, you'll get around to them later? I was under the impression you'd been working on this for a few months. Would it have killed you to prepare a well thought-out blog before changing the site massively?
That said, there are a few positive changes I've noticed. The new group coding that allows for banners, perma-blocking, private groups, lockable and sticky-able threads is going to be welcome. I've also noticed the 'NSFW?' option at the bottom of this blog. That's certainly a step in the right direction. Lastly, even though the front page is a massive wall of depressing grey, I've found a rather nifty phoenix background for the site header. I like this. A lot.
I wasn't expecting the site changes to be applied this quickly; I was hoping for January-February. Still, I guess that the site has been changed now, so work could possibly begin on planning a 'new' reviewing group. I don't know. Maybe I'll give it a few weeks before I start getting involved with that. Then again, I don't want to be left behind when it does get formed. I've also published the first chapter of Brushy because I need something to cheer me up. Hopefully it'll get a positive response. Maybe it won't. Oh well, it'll be interesting to see what people think of it anyway.
And now a comment, just to see if there are any new thingamajigs or doohickeys I can play with.
594421
One thing to point out is that I did not receive a notification for this blog.
Also, individual comments can be deleted in groups as well.
594454 I'm not receiving notifications for a lot of things. I'm also fairly sure I lost a chapter of something somewhere, but I guess it's not important if I can't remember. Also, I'm playing with group tools as we speak. It's nice to have a dedicated group banner rather than using most of the front page.
I also noticed gifs can be used in group headers. I'm not sure if this is intentional or a mistake.
594459
I've played around with a lot of 'em too. It's pretty good, for the most part.
594464 Aye. It's also got a search-by-name function on the member list, which is much easier than trawling through hundreds of goddamn names trying to find the one you're after.
Any discussion about creating a private group yet?
594473
We're hoping to have it up and running by the weekend. Or, at least, I am.
594475 I've got an empty group I created by mistake a while back. I don't think Knighty's added a function for deleting irrelevant groups, so you can use that one if you want.
594480
We'll see what happens as bugs are ironed out. But that would work just fine.
Like Csquared08 already mentioned, you apparently don't get notifications about new blog posts anymore. I just noticed this post on my dashboard.
I think Knighty once said that the site is supposed to promote new stories... But when I look at the new front page, it doesn't seem too good; there is a huge feature box on top, and after that 10 new stories crammed on two columns, each story showing only a tiny cover image and the short description. And like you mentioned, "popular stories" section got removed, making it even harder for new stories to get any attention.
Well, there's hoping Knighty (or some other admin) will listen to all the feedback he's got in those comments in his announcement post...
At least group tools seem somewhat better now. For example, it is now possible to sticky and/or lock group threads.
These updates are like Skyrim.
Rushed, unfinished, and the bugs make everyone unhappy.
I hope it gets fixed soon.