I'm very pleased to announce a massive site update that's about 6 months in the making, including a second server purchase and lots of blood, sweat and tears.
In addition to various bugfixes and little things, here's the main updates:
ALSO MAKE SURE YOU CLEAR YOUR TEMP INTERNET FILES AND DO A HARD REFRESH, as otherwise you may not have the latest javascript files and the recommendation popup won't work right
Site Activity Feed (Friend Feed)
You may remember the old 'friend' feed' - a list of status and rating updates from your friends. Earlier this year we purchased a second server to use exclusively with the new and improved 'site activity feed' - a way to track all activity on the site.
Not only can you see your friend feed again, it shows far more information including new reviews, recommendations, blog posts, and character comments. In the future, this will include even more information.
The feed starts from this point forward, and will include ALL activity you do. Date information is currently being stored with each activity update, but we do not display it. This is because I need to build a way for users to choose which timezone they are in, so the dates display accordingly. I figured it was better to not display dates weirdly than to display them and confuse people. Rest assured that soon, you'll be able to see a full list of everything you've done/marked, and which day you've done it on.
The activity feed can also be seen in entries themselves (such as an anime, a manga, a character page, etc). For example, you can look at the new Feed tab on an anime or manga page to see recent activity surrounding the entry. You can view a character entry to see recent activity for it, including new character comments and new loves and hates.
Also, in the anime and manga entries, you can look at the feed to see what the anime or manga has been recommended FOR. For example, let's say a user recommends Trigun for Cowboy Bebop. If you're on Trigun's page and looking at its Feed tab, you'll see that it was recommended for Cowboy Bebop. This gives you a way to see what certain anime and manga are being recommended FOR, to give you another way of finding new things to watch/read.
Right now the feed looks simplistic and like the old feed - we have a more pretty, big version of it that will show up in your profiles within a week from now.
Your profile will now show your friend feed on your profile homepage, and you can see the full friend feed, and your own personal feed, in the new Feed tab. When viewing someone else's profile, their homepage will show you their own feed. The profile homepages have been simplified as well, with some content such as newest recommendations and reviews being replaced by the activity feed. As always, you can click one of the top tabs to see a full list of recommendations, reviews, etc.
Recommendation Upgrades
Anime-Planet started off 10 years ago as a recommendation database, and we're working on moving back towards those roots. Step one is making recommendations a lot easier to make, throughout the site. Here's some of the big changes:
The code was rewritten for cross recommendations. While you can't make cross recommendations yet (for example, anime to manga), the entire system was rewritten to make that possible moving forward. Once we get some of the core pages redesigned, this will be possible.
There is no longer a 6 recommendation limit
The add recommendations page is much easier to use:
On the add recommendations page, there's no longer 6 boxes. Add a title and reason at the top, and click 'recommend both ways' if you want the reverse pair to be created for you. No more page reloads - you'll get the errors or success message instantly, and a table below shows you all of your existing recommendations. You can use the 'edit rec' button to see a popup that will let you quickly edit your recommendation.
note: right now there's a 'type' dropdown that you can't select at the top of the page. This is because in the future, you'll be able to choose a type due to cross recommendations. For now, you can't choose it.
A new popup has been added to add or edit recommendations SITE-WIDE
Have you ever been browsing the Recent Recommendations page, or the recommendations in an entry, and thought to yourself 'I agree with this'? The new 'I agree...' button you'll see throughout the site lets you quickly type in a reason and hit submit - no more need to go all the way to the 'add recommendations' page. If you've already made that recommendation pair, the popup will let you edit the recommendation just as easily (this is the same popup found in the add recommendations page).
Donation Badges
Anime-Planet isn't funded by some other huge company, and costs a lot to run - from having two dedicated servers to a small team of paid staff (I'm not one of the paid folks!) and various other site-related expenses, the site continues to run based entirely on advertising revenue, and donations from the community.
Since the beginning of 2008 I've saved every single 'donation received' email from Paypal, in hopes that someday I could associate them with the users who generously contributed to the site. I'm pleased to say we finally put up donation badges due to the new badge system. There are 5 types:
Bronze Supporter, Silver Supporter, Gold Supporter, Platinum Supporter, and a monthly set of badges.
Monthly badges (for example, the November 2011 Supporter badge, are awarded for making a donation during that month. There will be one badge per month, starting with this month. Due to the fee that Paypal gouges from you when a small donation is made (on a dollar donation, only a handful of cents gets to the site being donated to), the monthly badges are awarded based on a minimum $5 donation. If you donate less than $5, the amount will still add up to count towards the cumulative (Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum) badges.
Donations are inputted manually, so there will be a small delay between when you submit the donation, and when you get your badge. To help the process go smoother, please let me know your Anime-Planet name on the donation page! This way I know who to attribute the donation to.
While I tried my best to input all donations for the last 3 years, it's possible I may have missed one or two. There isn't a way right now for you to see all donations inputted to you, but if something seems really off, you can contact me and I can try to look through the Paypal logs for missing donations. There were a variety of email addresses that didn't match anything on the site, so I made a list (with partial names, for privacy). If you own one of these email addresses, reply to me privately with what the full email address is, and I can attach those donations to you:
What's Next?
If you are happy with any of the above features and functionality, please consider donating - it will count towards the badges! Now that the activity feed is done we'd like to get started on a twitter/facebook updater and other awesome features, and as always, your donations go a long way in helping make that happen. ^_^
Hope you enjoy the update - though we did thoroughly test everything, there may be issues across the site. A HUGE amount of code was updated, so if you encounter any errors, please post them in the Bugs subforum so we can get them fixed.
Thanks for your patience in getting the feed back up and better than ever, and enjoy!
~your faithful overlord
In addition to various bugfixes and little things, here's the main updates:
ALSO MAKE SURE YOU CLEAR YOUR TEMP INTERNET FILES AND DO A HARD REFRESH, as otherwise you may not have the latest javascript files and the recommendation popup won't work right
Site Activity Feed (Friend Feed)
You may remember the old 'friend' feed' - a list of status and rating updates from your friends. Earlier this year we purchased a second server to use exclusively with the new and improved 'site activity feed' - a way to track all activity on the site.
Not only can you see your friend feed again, it shows far more information including new reviews, recommendations, blog posts, and character comments. In the future, this will include even more information.
The feed starts from this point forward, and will include ALL activity you do. Date information is currently being stored with each activity update, but we do not display it. This is because I need to build a way for users to choose which timezone they are in, so the dates display accordingly. I figured it was better to not display dates weirdly than to display them and confuse people. Rest assured that soon, you'll be able to see a full list of everything you've done/marked, and which day you've done it on.
The activity feed can also be seen in entries themselves (such as an anime, a manga, a character page, etc). For example, you can look at the new Feed tab on an anime or manga page to see recent activity surrounding the entry. You can view a character entry to see recent activity for it, including new character comments and new loves and hates.
Also, in the anime and manga entries, you can look at the feed to see what the anime or manga has been recommended FOR. For example, let's say a user recommends Trigun for Cowboy Bebop. If you're on Trigun's page and looking at its Feed tab, you'll see that it was recommended for Cowboy Bebop. This gives you a way to see what certain anime and manga are being recommended FOR, to give you another way of finding new things to watch/read.
Right now the feed looks simplistic and like the old feed - we have a more pretty, big version of it that will show up in your profiles within a week from now.
Your profile will now show your friend feed on your profile homepage, and you can see the full friend feed, and your own personal feed, in the new Feed tab. When viewing someone else's profile, their homepage will show you their own feed. The profile homepages have been simplified as well, with some content such as newest recommendations and reviews being replaced by the activity feed. As always, you can click one of the top tabs to see a full list of recommendations, reviews, etc.
Recommendation Upgrades
Anime-Planet started off 10 years ago as a recommendation database, and we're working on moving back towards those roots. Step one is making recommendations a lot easier to make, throughout the site. Here's some of the big changes:
The code was rewritten for cross recommendations. While you can't make cross recommendations yet (for example, anime to manga), the entire system was rewritten to make that possible moving forward. Once we get some of the core pages redesigned, this will be possible.
There is no longer a 6 recommendation limit
The add recommendations page is much easier to use:
On the add recommendations page, there's no longer 6 boxes. Add a title and reason at the top, and click 'recommend both ways' if you want the reverse pair to be created for you. No more page reloads - you'll get the errors or success message instantly, and a table below shows you all of your existing recommendations. You can use the 'edit rec' button to see a popup that will let you quickly edit your recommendation.
note: right now there's a 'type' dropdown that you can't select at the top of the page. This is because in the future, you'll be able to choose a type due to cross recommendations. For now, you can't choose it.
A new popup has been added to add or edit recommendations SITE-WIDE
Have you ever been browsing the Recent Recommendations page, or the recommendations in an entry, and thought to yourself 'I agree with this'? The new 'I agree...' button you'll see throughout the site lets you quickly type in a reason and hit submit - no more need to go all the way to the 'add recommendations' page. If you've already made that recommendation pair, the popup will let you edit the recommendation just as easily (this is the same popup found in the add recommendations page).
Donation Badges
Anime-Planet isn't funded by some other huge company, and costs a lot to run - from having two dedicated servers to a small team of paid staff (I'm not one of the paid folks!) and various other site-related expenses, the site continues to run based entirely on advertising revenue, and donations from the community.
Since the beginning of 2008 I've saved every single 'donation received' email from Paypal, in hopes that someday I could associate them with the users who generously contributed to the site. I'm pleased to say we finally put up donation badges due to the new badge system. There are 5 types:
Bronze Supporter, Silver Supporter, Gold Supporter, Platinum Supporter, and a monthly set of badges.
Monthly badges (for example, the November 2011 Supporter badge, are awarded for making a donation during that month. There will be one badge per month, starting with this month. Due to the fee that Paypal gouges from you when a small donation is made (on a dollar donation, only a handful of cents gets to the site being donated to), the monthly badges are awarded based on a minimum $5 donation. If you donate less than $5, the amount will still add up to count towards the cumulative (Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum) badges.
Donations are inputted manually, so there will be a small delay between when you submit the donation, and when you get your badge. To help the process go smoother, please let me know your Anime-Planet name on the donation page! This way I know who to attribute the donation to.
While I tried my best to input all donations for the last 3 years, it's possible I may have missed one or two. There isn't a way right now for you to see all donations inputted to you, but if something seems really off, you can contact me and I can try to look through the Paypal logs for missing donations. There were a variety of email addresses that didn't match anything on the site, so I made a list (with partial names, for privacy). If you own one of these email addresses, reply to me privately with what the full email address is, and I can attach those donations to you:
essories
fiddes
jhants
antimoose
yanaruther
tk421ig88
towb
manuel@sadism
alexander.schmidt
kurtmiller07
Ryszardgon
ben.rumbles
jbracon
Ludovic_Lava
fornax1
imperialaspirin
hutsoncap
sinituulia.man
phill_rou
ghostgirl96
konekoale
k3rm1
hludwig74
wakowakowako
monikaxk
saunavaara
kisakata-legendofmir3
elindil
e_l_payn
AMN3SYS
ednashawg
stijnverdon
a_ghost_in_a
alexmacomb
justinscoggin
mr.chili
richardafa
cristian.vat
ted.osterman
sakura-petals
ethanJPrap
sword9z
aisen00
micoop8
juanaleon
arabidwolfattacks
aeisen
greatapepress
darthreva
crispie
aysun
pamj19
Kennethjones
jld0077
fiddes
jhants
antimoose
yanaruther
tk421ig88
towb
manuel@sadism
alexander.schmidt
kurtmiller07
Ryszardgon
ben.rumbles
jbracon
Ludovic_Lava
fornax1
imperialaspirin
hutsoncap
sinituulia.man
phill_rou
ghostgirl96
konekoale
k3rm1
hludwig74
wakowakowako
monikaxk
saunavaara
kisakata-legendofmir3
elindil
e_l_payn
AMN3SYS
ednashawg
stijnverdon
a_ghost_in_a
alexmacomb
justinscoggin
mr.chili
richardafa
cristian.vat
ted.osterman
sakura-petals
ethanJPrap
sword9z
aisen00
micoop8
juanaleon
arabidwolfattacks
aeisen
greatapepress
darthreva
crispie
aysun
pamj19
Kennethjones
jld0077
What's Next?
If you are happy with any of the above features and functionality, please consider donating - it will count towards the badges! Now that the activity feed is done we'd like to get started on a twitter/facebook updater and other awesome features, and as always, your donations go a long way in helping make that happen. ^_^
Hope you enjoy the update - though we did thoroughly test everything, there may be issues across the site. A HUGE amount of code was updated, so if you encounter any errors, please post them in the Bugs subforum so we can get them fixed.
Thanks for your patience in getting the feed back up and better than ever, and enjoy!
~your faithful overlord
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