Welcome to your new and improved Anime-Planet V4 (beta).
We began this journey over a year ago and focused mostly on wireframes and design, wanting to make sure we rolled out something professional-looking, clean, and modern. After spending the past few months coding nonstop, we've launched a first revision of V4, and will quickly iterate on new features, visual upgrades and other aspects moving forward.
A lot has changed - here's a breakdown of what you can expect:
New design
We've designed Anime-Planet from the ground up, focusing on creating a better user experience than past versions of the site and a cleaner appearance. 100% new CSS (with a much smaller file size), the Pure framework, and (coming soon) color palette options. We know many of you have loved and appreciated the visual themes over the years - these have been a facet of the site since its creation in 2001, but are finally being laid to rest in favor of color options.
New seasonal charts
In V3, you could look up anime according to seasons, but the visual layout was pretty awful if I do say so myself:
In V4, we've changed the layout to a familiar seasonal chart format that many of you use from week to week elsewhere. You can now visually browse any season in our database (accessible via the 'browse and search' headings, or the main navigation 'current and upcoming' option), and (coming soon) mark status via hovering over the cover images.
If there's anything that you think external seasonal charts give you that you'd love to see here on our seasonal charts, please let us know :) our goal is that you'd get everything you need here on Anime-Planet! ^_^
Brand new 'watch online' experience
As with the season data, on V3, browsing videos on the site was a bit of a boring drag:
In V4, we've matched the 'watch online' experience with the season browse, letting you visually scan anime to watch on Anime-Planet with a variety of pretty helpful filters (such as your 'want to watch' list, popular titles, your favorite tags, etc).
Love or hate all teh tags!
In V3 we let you mark 3 favorite loved and hated genres. The rest of the tag database felt lonely, so we're now letting you love or hate any tag, including character tags. If you already had fav/hated genres set up in V3, we've migrated them to V4. Similar user functionality isn't set up yet, but we'll use these tags to give you a more accurate view of users you might like later on.
To mark loved or hated tags, use the new browse experience for anime or manga, or characters ("browse and search" in the main nav) and then click 'browse by tag'.
Responsive design (V1)
Rather than creating mobile-specific apps that will get out of date over time, we've decided to create a responsive site that will work in your phone, tablet or on the desktop. With our initial launch there's only some responsive functionality (mostly with the header, and also some of the in-site content) but will iterate on this quickly in the near future. There are certain known issues we're aware of, like crunched tables for the wide/big tables, too-big ads on mobile, etc.
Gorgeous new profiles
We've given the profiles a major upgrade, giving you the ability to add gorgeous header images and bigger avatars - with the ability to pan/zoom on submission to get the best possible shot. Background images are cropped to 1000x300 pixels.
Merged browse experiences
In V3, you had to hunt all over the place for different 'browse by [x]' experiences. Browse by studio was somewhere over there, browse by tag was elsewhere, browse all was yet somewhere else. We've combined these experiences for anime, manga and characters (separately) to give you easy access to different browse types all from the same page.
This includes a new advanced filter system and design.
Better review functionality
You've asked for awhile for 'site review' functionality in the community reviews. The site review team went MIA years ago, so we've removed those (will migrate them over to community reviews soon) and are focusing fully on your reviews. We've added the ability to 'vote' (helpful or funny) and love a community review - the top loved reviews will bubble up to the top in anime/manga entries. You can also sort all reviews on an anime or manga's page by certain criteria, like top loves, funniest, etc.
Anime and manga tooltips
We've added handy hover tooltips pretty much anywhere you see an anime or manga listed, to give you quick info about the series. Coming soon is the ability to mark status directly from these tooltips on pages like 'watch online' or seasonal charts.
Tag tooltips
Ever seen a character tag you didn't quite understand and weren't sure where to turn? We've added tooltips with descriptions of what they mean. Some have been inputted and we're steadily adding the rest - and coming soon, the same tooltips for anime/manga.
Anime to manga recommendations
We've launched one of the coolest features I've been waiting for, cross recommendations. You can now recommend an anime to a manga (or vice versa). So if there's been some you've been dying to suggest to people, now you can!
I found a bug!
We like squashing bugs! If you find something questionable, please post it in the bug forum to make sure it can be triaged quickly (as opposed to here in the announcement thread)
Thank you
Thanks to everyone for your patience during this time, especially the moderators who tirelessly continued keeping things running while I was in a black hole of development. The character mods, club leads, anime and manga updaters and others are a backbone of this community and do a great job.
Also thanks to the group of beta testers who helped squash tons of bugs over the past few weeks, and to our small development team (xesxen, kace, kweeket, x52495 [and me, ofc!]) for working through many days and nights to get this done.
Support the site
We've created a new 'support the site' page with tips on how you can help show your love for A-P, from how to donate towards server costs to clubs you can join to help the community and more.
What's next?
We had to cut some functionality to get this release out the door, but have many plans on ways to improve the site moving forward.
We began this journey over a year ago and focused mostly on wireframes and design, wanting to make sure we rolled out something professional-looking, clean, and modern. After spending the past few months coding nonstop, we've launched a first revision of V4, and will quickly iterate on new features, visual upgrades and other aspects moving forward.
A lot has changed - here's a breakdown of what you can expect:
New design
We've designed Anime-Planet from the ground up, focusing on creating a better user experience than past versions of the site and a cleaner appearance. 100% new CSS (with a much smaller file size), the Pure framework, and (coming soon) color palette options. We know many of you have loved and appreciated the visual themes over the years - these have been a facet of the site since its creation in 2001, but are finally being laid to rest in favor of color options.
New seasonal charts
In V3, you could look up anime according to seasons, but the visual layout was pretty awful if I do say so myself:
In V4, we've changed the layout to a familiar seasonal chart format that many of you use from week to week elsewhere. You can now visually browse any season in our database (accessible via the 'browse and search' headings, or the main navigation 'current and upcoming' option), and (coming soon) mark status via hovering over the cover images.
If there's anything that you think external seasonal charts give you that you'd love to see here on our seasonal charts, please let us know :) our goal is that you'd get everything you need here on Anime-Planet! ^_^
Brand new 'watch online' experience
As with the season data, on V3, browsing videos on the site was a bit of a boring drag:
In V4, we've matched the 'watch online' experience with the season browse, letting you visually scan anime to watch on Anime-Planet with a variety of pretty helpful filters (such as your 'want to watch' list, popular titles, your favorite tags, etc).
Love or hate all teh tags!
In V3 we let you mark 3 favorite loved and hated genres. The rest of the tag database felt lonely, so we're now letting you love or hate any tag, including character tags. If you already had fav/hated genres set up in V3, we've migrated them to V4. Similar user functionality isn't set up yet, but we'll use these tags to give you a more accurate view of users you might like later on.
To mark loved or hated tags, use the new browse experience for anime or manga, or characters ("browse and search" in the main nav) and then click 'browse by tag'.
Responsive design (V1)
Rather than creating mobile-specific apps that will get out of date over time, we've decided to create a responsive site that will work in your phone, tablet or on the desktop. With our initial launch there's only some responsive functionality (mostly with the header, and also some of the in-site content) but will iterate on this quickly in the near future. There are certain known issues we're aware of, like crunched tables for the wide/big tables, too-big ads on mobile, etc.
Gorgeous new profiles
We've given the profiles a major upgrade, giving you the ability to add gorgeous header images and bigger avatars - with the ability to pan/zoom on submission to get the best possible shot. Background images are cropped to 1000x300 pixels.
Merged browse experiences
In V3, you had to hunt all over the place for different 'browse by [x]' experiences. Browse by studio was somewhere over there, browse by tag was elsewhere, browse all was yet somewhere else. We've combined these experiences for anime, manga and characters (separately) to give you easy access to different browse types all from the same page.
This includes a new advanced filter system and design.
Better review functionality
You've asked for awhile for 'site review' functionality in the community reviews. The site review team went MIA years ago, so we've removed those (will migrate them over to community reviews soon) and are focusing fully on your reviews. We've added the ability to 'vote' (helpful or funny) and love a community review - the top loved reviews will bubble up to the top in anime/manga entries. You can also sort all reviews on an anime or manga's page by certain criteria, like top loves, funniest, etc.
Anime and manga tooltips
We've added handy hover tooltips pretty much anywhere you see an anime or manga listed, to give you quick info about the series. Coming soon is the ability to mark status directly from these tooltips on pages like 'watch online' or seasonal charts.
Tag tooltips
Ever seen a character tag you didn't quite understand and weren't sure where to turn? We've added tooltips with descriptions of what they mean. Some have been inputted and we're steadily adding the rest - and coming soon, the same tooltips for anime/manga.
Anime to manga recommendations
We've launched one of the coolest features I've been waiting for, cross recommendations. You can now recommend an anime to a manga (or vice versa). So if there's been some you've been dying to suggest to people, now you can!
I found a bug!
We like squashing bugs! If you find something questionable, please post it in the bug forum to make sure it can be triaged quickly (as opposed to here in the announcement thread)
Thank you
Thanks to everyone for your patience during this time, especially the moderators who tirelessly continued keeping things running while I was in a black hole of development. The character mods, club leads, anime and manga updaters and others are a backbone of this community and do a great job.
Also thanks to the group of beta testers who helped squash tons of bugs over the past few weeks, and to our small development team (xesxen, kace, kweeket, x52495 [and me, ofc!]) for working through many days and nights to get this done.
Support the site
We've created a new 'support the site' page with tips on how you can help show your love for A-P, from how to donate towards server costs to clubs you can join to help the community and more.
What's next?
We had to cut some functionality to get this release out the door, but have many plans on ways to improve the site moving forward.
- A new flow for newly-activated users
- Facebook registration option
- Ability to mark status from hovering (watch online, season charts, etc)
- Character tooltips (associated anime/manga)
- Anime/manga tag descriptions for the tooltips
- Forum/site integration (finally)
- Ability to report reviews and a flagging system to hide too short/bad reviews
- Ability to +1 a rec (instead of having to write your own reason)
- Ability to love a rec reason (to bubble up better written ones to the top of the list)
- A good 'logged in' experience for your own profile
- Adding the 'similar users' feature back in (enhanced)
- JS minification to cut down on load times
- Recommendation algorithm based on your voting habits + user recs as a combination, to give you more personalized suggestions alongside the core user recs.
- Adding favorite tag info and other content back into the profile homepage (including the feed, once we change databases post launch)
- Overhauling the visual look of the signatures to match the new design
- Creating a better 'view single custom list' experience
- Adding an export list option
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