Announcing Anime-Planet V3!

[sothis]

It's been a long, long ride, but I'm very pleased to announce the release of Anime-Planet version 3.

NOTE: PLEASE DO A CTRL+F5 HARD REFRESH WHEN FIRST VISITING V3 - you likely will have an old/cached version of the stylesheet and it will look bad

The path to v3

The idea of V3 began over a year and a half ago, and really ramped up around June of 2008. At that point, after 7 years of myself doing all coding, I hired a developer to work on the project. Things moved along until an unfortunate site hacking in August of 2008. At that point, we took the server down for a month, put up the bare bones of V3 with a lot of missing features (and poor design to boot), and chugged away on V3.

Months and months later with a variety of challenges in the way we’re proud to reveal V3 for the first time.


What’s New?

There are a TON of new features, some obvious, and some not so obvious.

• Blogs – you can now add blogs, complete with embedding video and audio. You can tag blogs with official entries (anime, manga, and site tags), as well as custom tags. The benefit to using site tagging is that then, you’ll see the blogs in the anime/manga/tag pages. However, don’t abuse this feature! Only tag when appropriate.
  
  
• Custom Lists – the other major feature of V3. To add a custom list, go to your profile and click the custom lists tab. If you previously had a top 5 anime, you now have an auto-generated custom list for ‘My Top Anime’. You can change this at any time (the title, and the entries in there). Custom lists can be either manga or anime, and you can only add things to a custom list that you have in your list already. Drag/drop is possible with the custom lists, as well as the advanced filter bar.
  
  
• Advanced Filters – This is a big, big new feature. It’s currently available on the anime/manga browse pages, as well as your personal lists. You can include/exclude tags, and filter by a ton of other stuff including your anime status, year range, episode range, studio, and more!
  
  
• General sorting/pagination – in addition to advanced filters, you’ll find way more instances of pagination and sorting throughout the site. Browsing has never been easier!
  
  
• Profiles – profiles now have tabs and you now have very easy access to all your info. You can browse your recommendations and filter by moderation status and editing status, amongst other things. Site reviewers have a reviews tab that you can browse through, and there are tons of other tabs as well. The profile homepage is now much more robust, and includes rating averages.
  
  
• Tags – tag pages (ie, horror or comedy) are now like profiles, with their own tabs.
  
  
• Average ratings – anime and manga now store an average rating. Avg ratings are weighted depending on the user. For example, users who only rate 5 on everything will have less of a ‘vote’ towards an avg rating than someone who has a more balanced set. Avg ratings were fully funded by the community!
  
  
• Relations – relations are also back, and also funded by the community. Right now the relations are very basic, and show up in a table (without a solid relation reason yet). Coming soon we’ll have a better relation view with suggested orders of viewing again.
  
  
• Review Ratings – you can now vote for what you thought of reviews, and also filter by those rating types (funny, cool, helpful) on the review home.
  
  
• Comments – reviews and blogs have comments, just like profiles! Profile comments are now paginated as well.
  
  
• User Browse – you can now browse users and get better info such as what’s in their anime/manga lists, number of recs, and more. Go to the users home and click browse by username to see more.
  
  
• Themes – themes are back! Only two are up at the moment but more are coming soon.
  
  
• Appearance – V3 is slick as ever with a much prettier, cleaner and functional design.
  
  
• Friends – are back! Add friends easily from various parts of the site, and browse them in your friends tab. As with the old site you can also see who has friended you.
  
  
• Recommendation filters – in the recs area of an entry, you can filter by a few options including ‘only friend recs’
  
  
• Anime/Manga list compare – in someone else’s anime or manga list you’ll now see a compare. You can easily see your lists side by side, and filter based on what you share or don’t share.

There’s likely more I’m forgetting – browse around and see for yourself!


Thanks and Appreciation

The following people deserve major attention and grateful profile comments, so if you like what you see and are looking forward to what’s coming next on Anime-Planet, please do these people a favor and drop them a profile comment thanking them for all the work they put into V3:

Kenaniah – the majority of all back end coding, and the server upgrade.

Me – the rest of the back end coding, all midpoint coding, content, zillions of hours of writing specs, and all free time for about a year dumped into V3

kace – all CSS and design – a HUGE amount of work, kace really slaved away at this as a favor to me and he deserves major, major credit.

System – aka Cerium, he wrote the blog bbcode system from scratch in a laborious fashion. Our blogs wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for him!

Zakiel and rockenroll4life – for inputting all of the relation pairings you’re currently seeing.

Behind the scenes we had a dedicated group of beta testers who worked on ridiculous deadlines to test V3. While there’s still some bugs left we didn’t have time to fix, the beta testers helped mitigate a lot of problems before the site was launched, thus saving you from various headaches. ^_^

Huge thanks to AnarchicQ, cassiesheepgirl, Cetonis, chii , Choko, Crimm, Drahken, Funkgun, gleipnir, Kari5, Ketsuron, Lanxdata, letsbuildafire, mjf314, Oehr, Omurqi, Pidjiken, rockenroll4life, ScarletEmerald, KiraRin, thepgo and Spunky.


Known Issues

While we tried to iron out all the bugs ahead of time, we needed to launch with a few problems still in place. These should be fixed within a few days so please be patient ^_^

-The view list page is pretty minimal atm

-There are various ‘coming soon’ sections due to timing, such as the tag home – these will be readded asap!

-The forum is majorly messed up – this will take awhile to figure out how to keep the styles in place for the rest of the site.

-The user similarity box on user home doesn’t fill up the bar right

In the meantime if you find additional bugs, please post them in the bug section of the forum.


What’s Next?

We have a lot of things planned for the future such as a more robust commenting system and manga to anime relations. We’re totally out of money to build new features so please, please consider donating to help pay back the huge bill owed for V3 launch (which I can’t fully pay for, I’m out of site money) and for future features. A big new secret feature will launch for 3.1!

We’re planning on releasing more iteratively every few months, so expect more frequent releases moving forward.


THANK YOU to everyone for your support. I’m totally burned out from this launch so any words of ‘wow, [x feature] is awesome!’ would be greatly appreciated XD
Tell your friends about AP!

[Zakiel]

It's all great.

As for relations, I estimate it should be all done eventually , only because it can get rather tedious, as does any mass data entry/organization.

The majority of relations are up, next up is finishing what remains and then ordering and how they are related. Possibly more, the exact details are still being worked out on some things.

[yipeskop]

Wow, V3 is amazing! Especially all the changes to the user profiles. Thanks a lot Sothis and all who were involved

[Lanxdata]

Woo! its like Christmas day ^_^

[Tez]

V3 was definitely worth waiting for.

I am really liking all these great new features.

[ZelozX]

I'm guessing that there will be a lot of changes to fix the confusing and frustrating layout that now encompasses most of the site.

[mellowgoldspike]

whoa this sucks
explain how this is better because it now takes about twice as long for pages to load and my
most used page/filter (currently watching) no longer works

[sothis]

Originally Posted by ZelozX

I'm guessing that there will be a lot of changes to fix the confusing and frustrating layout that now encompasses most of the site.

this isnt helpful - please give examples of how you think the layut is confusing and frustrating.

[sothis]

Originally Posted by mellowgoldspike

whoa this sucks
explain how this is better because it take about twice as long for pages to load and my most used page/filter (currently watching) no longer works

as mentioned above, that's a known issue and is being worked on (does anyone read these things before responding?)

load time-wise, most pages are screaming fast compared to what they used to be. profile homes take longer cause there's now way more stuff on them, and we need to gzip tinymce. otherwise, the new codebase has benchmarked way faster than the last version due to a few things.

[Hutson]

It brings tears to my eyes! At last I can have friends :) I really like the option to comment on reviews, that is going to change things dramatically. Great work indeed!