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New site! Club PA! Hooray!

calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi WranglerSeattle, WARegistered User staff
PA Web and Design (Kiko, Kenneth, Erika, and Levin) have been working incredibly hard to create this snazzy new site and our Club PA offerings.

http://www.penny-arcade.com

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    LostNinjaLostNinja Registered User regular
    edited February 2014
    I guess this would be the place to ask. For club PA, is that a per month cost, or just $10+ gets you six months of it?

    LostNinja on
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    El_FunkoEl_Funko Perth, AustraliaRegistered User regular
    Love the look of the new site. Seems very Polygon-esque, but that might be to do with the CMS back-end being similar? Either way, it's proper pretty.
    LostNinja wrote: »
    I guess this would be the place to ask. For club PA, is that a per month cost, or just $10+ gets you six months of it?

    Yeah I took it to be a once-off payment for a six month period.

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    calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi Wrangler Seattle, WARegistered User staff
    @LostNinja - not per month! $10 or $30 for six months.

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    CenoCeno pizza time Registered User regular
    edited February 2014
    Will access to club PA stuff (like early podcasts) be a different site or is it all linked to your account on the main page?

    Ceno on
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    calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi Wrangler Seattle, WARegistered User staff
    @Ceno - All linked!

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    El_FunkoEl_Funko Perth, AustraliaRegistered User regular
    I have a very serious concern about this new site.

    Why isn't Jamie's corgi avatar an animated paddling GIF?

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    wilikasxwilikasx Idler Melbourne, AustraliaRegistered User new member
    I have a question about the PA Club benefits, the $30 tier has a unique Pinny-Arcade pin included that gets shipped to your home. How would I go about attaching my home address to my Club PA account?

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    CenoCeno pizza time Registered User regular
    One more question (sorry!)

    Do the subscriptions auto renew or will I get the option to manually renew/cancel?

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    StericaSterica Yes Registered User, Moderator mod
    wilikasx wrote: »
    I have a question about the PA Club benefits, the $30 tier has a unique Pinny-Arcade pin included that gets shipped to your home. How would I go about attaching my home address to my Club PA account?
    The front page says that your shipping information will be requested at a later date.

    YL9WnCY.png
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    calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi Wrangler Seattle, WARegistered User staff
    @El_Funko These are the questions of our age.

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    wilikasxwilikasx Idler Melbourne, AustraliaRegistered User new member
    Rorus Raz wrote: »
    wilikasx wrote: »
    I have a question about the PA Club benefits, the $30 tier has a unique Pinny-Arcade pin included that gets shipped to your home. How would I go about attaching my home address to my Club PA account?
    The front page says that your shipping information will be requested at a later date.

    Oh thank you very much, I didn't even see that.

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    calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi Wrangler Seattle, WARegistered User staff
    @Ceno - it's not autorenew for now

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    circuscircus Registered User new member
    The new site layout is extremely cumbersome. Accessing basic links takes significantly more screenspace/scrolling and steps of navigation (i.e. comic requires three clicks that include submenus?). Some streamlining would be great.

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    El_FunkoEl_Funko Perth, AustraliaRegistered User regular
    circus wrote: »
    (i.e. comic requires three clicks that include submenus?)

    Are you going through the menu at the top to get to the comic?

    Use the big feature carousel just under that. The PA comic has a big image on the left that takes you straight to dick joke central (now with 25% more dicks).

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    GaslightGaslight Registered User regular
    Good to see Camp Weedonwantcha getting highlighted.

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    Steel AngelSteel Angel Registered User regular
    Having to scroll down and click "read more" to get Tycho's post is kind of a pain. The wall of text is really one of the draws of Penny Arcade, not something to make harder to access IMO.

    Big Dookie wrote: »
    I found that tilting it doesn't work very well, and once I started jerking it, I got much better results.

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    3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
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    simpliciosimplicio Registered User new member
    Wow. I hate to be that guy that, when a site goes through a redesign is all like "jesus, this new design is terrible", but....jesus the new design is terrible.

    I'll try for some constructive criticism"

    The really thick bar across the top with the various images linking to PA comic, the trenches, etc. would be too much even if it weren't animated. But it is. Animated. Even if you don't mouse over it.

    Do you want to click a link to read Trenches. You are in luck my friend. There's a link at the top. And then two inches below that link, is the comic drag down menu with another link to Trenches. Two inches below that is a gigantic animated picture linking to the trenches. Then at the bottom there's a link to the trenches main page, which has both the latest Trenches comic and story. And an inch below that is a link to the latest Trenches comic (which just takes you to the same page as the one above it). And an inch below that is an inch to the latest Trenches story (which just takes you to the same page as the link above it). I'm just using Trenches as an example, almost everything in PA is way overlinked on the main page. I realize Tycho and Gabe want to drive traffic to their other projects, but at some point it just so noisy that people will just ignore all the links.

    Having to click through to read the news posts is annoying. I guess maybe this is to drive more ad revenue, but since the comic is already on a separate page from the newsposts, having to then click on each individual newsposts to read them seems to be a bit much.

    Having the text of the newsposts just sit on the same page without a box to separate it from the rest of the page makes it rather hard to read. Especially since, at least on my browser, the right side of the text comes within an inch or two of the ads running down the right side of the page.

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    NopeNope Frankfort, KYRegistered User regular
    Joined Club PA, good stuff, also YAY for a new PA The Series episode, hope you all tour around the new office some more (post-everybody being settled in)

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    calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi Wrangler Seattle, WARegistered User staff
    To everyone who would like to not see truncated newsposts: you totally can! You can also bypass the whole header if you like. Just bookmark http://penny-arcade.com/news. Very similar in function to the old site, full newsposts, still one click away from the comics.

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    zepherinzepherin Russian warship, go fuck yourself Registered User regular
    My eyes just crapped themselves with awesomeness.

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    El_FunkoEl_Funko Perth, AustraliaRegistered User regular
    edited February 2014
    Ahh cool, http://penny-arcade.com/news looks very nice for nostalgic folk.

    No fuss and/or muss.

    El_Funko on
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    Go! Shawn!Go! Shawn! New EnglandRegistered User regular
    Is there a way to subscribe to the PA Staff Podcast on iTunes so it can synch directly to our devices?

    At PAX East 2014: Cosplay Noire Project:
    http://www.goshawnphotography.com/cosplay

    Dark, gritty, character centric portraits.
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    El_FunkoEl_Funko Perth, AustraliaRegistered User regular
    If the PA Staff Podcast has an RSS feed, then you can manually add the RSS feed into the iOS Podcasts app.

    Giant Bomb's premium podcast RSS feed for subscribers works that way, I just have to enter my GB user/password into the app to check for updates.

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    VontreVontre Registered User regular
    Well obviously I haven't posted in these forums in a really, really long time. But I've been reading the comic and news posts every Mon/Wed/Fri since, I don't know, 2002? I'm just utterly bewildered by the redesign... everything keeps moving and why are there different buttons for Monday Wednesday and Friday and why is it so hard to get to the comic post and holy crap I can barely scroll the comic into view anymore. What the hell happened.

    And oh my god there's like 2 pages of footer, I can't even make sense of it.

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    Monkey Ball WarriorMonkey Ball Warrior A collection of mediocre hats Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited February 2014
    Overall it is very nice. Some minor nitpicks:

    It seems awfully tablet-y. Some of the UI elements and fonts are truly enormous on a real computer.
    It overemphasizes non-PA comics. Links are fine, but they have their own URL's so it seems weird to have them on-par with the actual PA comic.
    It is really long. In the widescreen era it seems odd to have content so vertically stacked.

    I'm not a UI expert, and this post is suffering from negative selection bias; I like all the things about the site that are not mentioned. So there's my two cents. :)

    Monkey Ball Warrior on
    "I resent the entire notion of a body as an ante and then raise you a generalized dissatisfaction with physicality itself" -- Tycho
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    NopeNope Frankfort, KYRegistered User regular
    El_Funko wrote: »
    If the PA Staff Podcast has an RSS feed, then you can manually add the RSS feed into the iOS Podcasts app.

    Giant Bomb's premium podcast RSS feed for subscribers works that way, I just have to enter my GB user/password into the app to check for updates.

    It has an RSS feed but it doesn't, the RSS feed just leads to the general PA podcast RSS feed. I asked on twitter if they were gonna have a separate one for the staff podcast, or just a clubpa podcast feed but I am guessing Jamie is crazy busy right now responding to everybody else as is :)

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    antheremantherem Registered User regular
    I can't find the post now, but I remember someone official-ish posting back in January that the PAR archives were going to come back when the new site design went up - did that get changed?

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    AegeriAegeri Tiny wee bacteriums Plateau of LengRegistered User regular
    PA Jamie wrote: »
    To everyone who would like to not see truncated newsposts: you totally can! You can also bypass the whole header if you like. Just bookmark http://penny-arcade.com/news. Very similar in function to the old site, full newsposts, still one click away from the comics.

    Okay that looks a major ton better to me and alleviates my complaints.

    Now will that Pin that's a part of the $30 tier be shipped to Australia?

    The Roleplayer's Guild: My blog for roleplaying games, advice and adventuring.
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    Monkey Ball WarriorMonkey Ball Warrior A collection of mediocre hats Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited February 2014
    I'll get even more constructive! Partially because I've been messing with CSS all day at work and I am still in that mode.

    Part of the reason it seems so tall is that there's huge amounts of vertical padding in #leaderboard (45px top+bottom = 90px), #main (55px top), and .navtop (38px top). Maybe there's a good reason for it? But it seems like a lot. Just trimming #leaderboard to 4px would get the whole comic on the screen on load for me. Granted my taskbar is on the side, so I have a little more vertical to work with than most.

    edit: This is what the page looks like with the aforementioned padding set to 8px. Much more reasonable I think. (warning: large 1920x1080 image) 8px padding

    Monkey Ball Warrior on
    "I resent the entire notion of a body as an ante and then raise you a generalized dissatisfaction with physicality itself" -- Tycho
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    XixXix Miami/LosAngeles/MoscowRegistered User regular
    Will this site ever have a responsive design? Browsing it on my phone sucks.

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    Steel AngelSteel Angel Registered User regular
    PA Jamie wrote: »
    To everyone who would like to not see truncated newsposts: you totally can! You can also bypass the whole header if you like. Just bookmark http://penny-arcade.com/news. Very similar in function to the old site, full newsposts, still one click away from the comics.

    That does help a bit.

    Another thing bugging me a bit is that there's a lot of empty space besides the text on my monitor. It feels like some of the text on the main page could be moved to the left and widened so the page doesn't do a weird hourglass thing.

    Big Dookie wrote: »
    I found that tilting it doesn't work very well, and once I started jerking it, I got much better results.

    Steam Profile
    3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
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    Raiden333Raiden333 Registered User regular
    Between this redesign and Club PA thing going up on the same day as the Dungeon Keeper comic, and this:
    Early Access to Comics
    Tycho and I usually make the comic the day before it goes live on the page. Sometimes even earlier! For example it’s Friday the 7th right now as I am writing this and I just finished the comic for Monday the 10th. You could be looking at it right now if you were a Club PA member!

    I honestly cannot figure out if this is some kind of meta-joke or not.

    There was a steam sig here. It's gone now.
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    RaakamRaakam Too many years... CanadalandRegistered User regular
    I'd be happy to give 10$ for the ability to switch back to the old format, with or without ads. I'll be honest and say I really dislike the re-design. There are too many things vying for my attention, moving bits, click-through to get where I want to get to, menus that pop down, etc. I'm sure it's just a minority that doesn't like it, so take it with a grain of salt, but it would be swell to have that part of the Club PA offerings.

    Please?


    My padherder
    they don't it be like it is but it do
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    HumbuggerHumbugger Registered User new member
    edited February 2014
    So am I alone in hating the design trends that Google started pushing a few years back, regardless of where they show up? Bulky, lineless, cluttered web designs are every where now, and it never looks good. If this redesign is, as someone above mentioned, for tablet users, why not give tablet users their own UI, and let me keep the layout of what was one of the few well-designed sites left on the internet?

    I liked the old design for the same reason I liked that Tycho never allowed comments on the news posts: it gave me exactly what I wanted when I came to the page, without any bullshit. The new design is rife with bullshit, regardless of what I'm looking at. I'm well aware of the other PA projects, yes. That's why they're in my RSS feed. I do not need a massive banner.

    Anyway, I expect there's no point in going on about it, as I don't believe that it's at all likely that there'll be any change from it. But I think it's at least worth saying that this redesign has made the site from something I genuinely enjoyed the look and layout of to something I am now forced to tolerate to get PA content.

    Humbugger on
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    Monkey Ball WarriorMonkey Ball Warrior A collection of mediocre hats Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    Humbugger wrote: »
    So am I alone in hating the design trends that Google started pushing a few years back, regardless of where they show up? Bulky, lineless, cluttered web designs are every where now, and it never looks good. If this redesign is, as someone above mentioned, for tablet users, why not give tablet users their own UI, and let me keep the layout of what was one of the few well-designed sites left on the internet?

    I liked the old design for the same reason I liked that Tycho never allowed comments on the news posts: it gave me exactly what I wanted when I came to the page, without any bullshit. The new design is rife with bullshit, regardless of what I'm looking at. I'm well aware of the other PA projects, yes. That's why they're in my RSS feed. I do not need a massive banner.

    Anyway, I expect there's no point in going on about it, as I don't believe that it's at all likely that there'll be any change from it. But I think it's at least worth saying that this redesign has made the site from something I genuinely enjoyed the look and layout of to something I am now forced to tolerate to get PA content.

    I wouldn't be quite so pessimistic. The guys running the forums and site are actually pretty responsive to us lowly users. This is the very first version of the new layout, I expect it will be tweaked a lot over the next few weeks. When the Vanilla forums first came out they were a mess, but now it's quite nice (as long as you are using Ye Olde Style, anyway). I expect that, even if the site never becomes exactly what you are looking for, it will get better over time... eventually to the point where there will be nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed by writing a Stylish style.

    "I resent the entire notion of a body as an ante and then raise you a generalized dissatisfaction with physicality itself" -- Tycho
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    GaslightGaslight Registered User regular
    edited February 2014
    It seems awfully tablet-y. Some of the UI elements and fonts are truly enormous on a real computer.

    I have to agree with this to some extent. On my 27" monitor I'd say it looks like space is being used rather inefficiently. It looks like I accidentally zoomed in on the page, everything is so big...but of course if I zoom out I just have smaller text and elements and even more wasted empty space.

    Gaslight on
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    calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi Wrangler Seattle, WARegistered User staff
    @antherem - PAR Archives are still in the works, we just weren't able to roll them into this launch.

    @Aegeri - Yup! Club PA pins will ship everywhere.

    @Raiden333 - That's Mike being a special snowflake.

    @Raakam , @Humbugger - try setting penny-arcade.com/news as your homepage. It's less flashy and a lot more like the original site.

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    NightslyrNightslyr Registered User regular
    So, is the hastily posting Reindeer forum bot a part of the revamp, or has Geth been drinking again?

    Also, on the front page of the new site, there's a dark blue bar that runs below the animated carousel. It's pretty tall, and pushes the beginning of the news post area below the fold, so to speak. Is it supposed to be that tall?

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    calamityjamiecalamityjamie Corgi Wrangler Seattle, WARegistered User staff
    @Nightslyr I'm gonna guess you have adblock in which case you can't see the ad nestled in there. But that's the reason for the dark blue area.

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    RaakamRaakam Too many years... CanadalandRegistered User regular
    Whatever you do, don't change the Child's Play page! I had actually gone through in Chrome and trimmed down the webpage and blocked off whatever portions were bothering me and change it more to my liking. Your suggestion to re-direct my bookmark to /news does make it easier. Thanks!

    My padherder
    they don't it be like it is but it do
This discussion has been closed.