The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Also, I'm assuming this transition means that the secret RSS feed for new podcast episodes for the Kickstarter backers is no longer valid?
Maybe it's a glitch, but the latest 4 episodes of DLC (all episodes after the DLC for "The Statute") seem to be missing from that link for me. And I just listened to them over the weekend via that link.
Raiden333 on
0
Monkey Ball WarriorA collection of mediocre hatsSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited February 2014
Here's a quick and dirty Sylish style to trim that padding down a bit. In Stylish, click "Write a new style", copy-paste this into the text field, set Applies To for URLs on this Domain: penny-arcade.com, and save.
I'm not posting this on userstyles because I'll be damned if I'm going to maintain it through the next several weeks where the site will likely be in flux. But there you go.
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
Been reading the comic/news posts almost every week without fail since the mid 2000's. I've seen the site undergo a lot of changes and overhauls through the years, but this is the first time my browsing experience has been negatively impacted.
It seems... really obvious that this new layout was designed for tablets. On any sort of widescreen monitor the UI elements are HUGE and I was shocked by the amount of scrolling I have to do to get to anything. Right now if I go to http://penny-arcade.com/news I can only see 5 lines of text before I need to start scrolling.
Also the news posts are now organized by time of posting, newest first. This means the comic button (which seems to only appear on Tycho posts that correspond to a specific comic) will very often be buried mid-way down the page which, again, necessitates a lot of scrolling on my part. It wouldn't be a problem if the "main" Tycho post for the current comic would remain at the top of the page. There is, of course, the comic tab on the site's header, but that now involves a drop down menu. I would much prefer the option of simply clicking an obvious and immediately visible button as I've been doing for more than a decade.
The comic page suffers from similar issues. The ad and comic title space are both so huge that upon loading the page I see less than 1/3 of the comic. Ideally the moment I arrive on the comic page I should be able to see the entirety (or at the very least the majority) of an average 3 panel comic.
Overall, while the new design is superficially more visually pleasing it comes at the cost of basic functionality. It's fine to try and shine the spotlight on other PA projects, but not at the cost of making the site a chore to navigate. Some posters above me have echoed similar concerns so I hope this isn't a finalized version. I hope this doesn't come off as too harsh, but this is my honest first impression.
+17
Monkey Ball WarriorA collection of mediocre hatsSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Sooo.... hmm. I don't have an aversion to change, but this is... something different.
I think you guys went a little overboard with your JQuery plugins and the size and spacing of everything is way off. Icons are too big, the text is too large for the space you gave it, the placement of that banner in the middle is just really bad, and everything seems to have 25+pixel padding around it for some reason. Given the amount of talent I've seen from PA, this is pretty below bar. Hope to see some tweaks in time.
Yeah I don't have that anywhere at all. Are you on Chrome? Firefox is telling me my stylish is updated, but I cannot find that menu to save my life.
Yes that is chrome. Sorry that's the browser I use, it seems there's a specific CSS rule for Firefox to accomplish the same thing. Or if you want to look at it the other way, that functionality is NOT supported in chrome so chrome has a GUI to accomplish the same thing.
If I had to guess I'd say you want to put the above code inside a block like this
I really miss the news button over each comic that would take you to the news for that comic's submission date. Sometimes I get a few weeks behind and it makes it easy to just back up to the last comic I recognize before clicking through each comic and clicking the news link for the corresponding blog post. The process seems much more tedious now.
I also am not a fan of the truncated news posts and lack of borders, but those are largely design-related and I don't expect much to change there. The site's been through several redesigns in the past, but this is the first that seems to remove functionality that was present previously.
There's WAY too much screen real estate devoted to other PA projects (which is interesting considering they've just scaled back their operation), though I'm glad to see Katie's page get a link, and the process for getting to the comics from the news page is way too clicky. I just dropped 30 bucks to remove the ads (though mostly just to support PA), but hardly noticed due to the distracting ad-like nature of the top links. The only change seems to be the blank space (super elegant solution btw) that just magnifies the appearance of wasted screen space.
man, has any successful website ever had a major redesign that actually increased usability?
specific issues:
-on the comic page, you can't even see the full comic without scrolling down.
-even the "news" page doesn't have tycho's main post about the most recent comic (the main reason to view that page) listed first. with the current reverse chronological thing, 90% of the time the first thing you'll see is another "guys we sell pins now" post.
Monkey Ball WarriorA collection of mediocre hatsSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Okay so with this, in the news posts the huge avatars are above the post text, so the entire width of the post area can be used by the actual content. Only tested in Chrome.
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.
I completely agree. I mean, the "hot" thing to do with site design these days is to make the site giant, "bubbly", and generally waste as much screen space as possible, but I had hoped that PA wouldn't go that way. Tycho's post front & center was a highlight for me as much as the comic itself.
Dropped by the Strip Search site to watch some Episodes and noticed that it looks a little broken. http://imgur.com/fvykN3c
As of last night (about 9pm MST) it was fine, but it now looks like that in FF 26, chrome 32.0.1700.107 m, and IE 11
Then I went by the main site and saw the redesign, but no contact link to report technical problems. So here I am, and there you go.
EDIT: Also, contact link on Strip Search site simply goes to the PA front page.
so I've got a question. Sorta related sorta not...the $10 PA gift card that is coming with the Club PA account....Can that gift card be used at the merch booth/stand at PAX or is it only for use on the webstore?
For anyone viewing PA from a phone, this is a great re-design. On a 1440p monitor, it's a mess of blue space, which no amount of messing with the zoom level solves. I think the target width was 1080 pixels, as moving the window to half of the screen (1280w for me) actually looks pretty nice.
Honestly, the only thing I'd suggest is to figure out a better way of posting the Gabe and Tycho Heads alongside the posts. They take up a lot of that valuable width which could be used to tighten the text up.
so I've got a question. Sorta related sorta not...the $10 PA gift card that is coming with the Club PA account....Can that gift card be used at the merch booth/stand at PAX or is it only for use on the webstore?
Someone asked this on Twitter and Jamie said the gift card is only for the online PA store, not the one at PAX.
so I've got a question. Sorta related sorta not...the $10 PA gift card that is coming with the Club PA account....Can that gift card be used at the merch booth/stand at PAX or is it only for use on the webstore?
Someone asked this on Twitter and Jamie said the gift card is only for the online PA store, not the one at PAX.
Damn. That's a real shame. Makes this 10 vs 30 decision much hard. Thanks for the info though
And that would be great if it was by day and you could flip backwards through time by day as you could in the past (ie seeing the day and the comic as one unit)
sadly you can no longer do this and instead is simply the last 4 posts no matter what
Also it would be great if this new site was responsive so that this current new fancy mobile site showed up for mobile and there was a nice desktop site for widescreen monitors...
Hardtarget on
+2
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Ohh. News section being a fixed scroll of newest content does kinda suck. Any way to keep each news post locked to it's respective comic?
Also I like the new splash, very snazzy! To be honest, I have the /comic page bookmarked, and rarely saw the frontpage anyway, so maybe I'm a little biased in liking the new design. :P
I'm having an issue trying to register for club pa. When I click sign up, it says log in. It won't let me log in with my email address. I was able to log in with my user name, though.
I'm just so used to logging in with my email address that I thought you had to register specifically with clubpa. I got this error when trying to register:
Anyways, just a heads up that you have to log into your pa account with only your user name. at least I was getting this issue.
I like the banner (it could take up a little less space, though /news addresses that), and the dropdown menus. The preview image for the PA comic is great! I also like the twitter links.
On my 13" laptop, which caps out at 1366x768, I cannot see any of the comic when I go to penny-arcade.com/comic without scrolling down, which is sub-optimal. Puts me in a weird position where I have a better experience on my phone than I do on my PC!
I signed up at the $30 tier. My only question is: I live in the U.K., am I going to have to lay some additional money down for shipping on the Club PA Pin?
Yay for the new ClubPA rss feed, yikes for the website (luckily the rss feed fixes that for me)... Don't like the big tile design, way too big even on a high-res monitor.
My only real problem with the new site, personally, is that you have to scroll down to see the strip because there's WAY too much wasted space due to how huge the UI is. I mean, I like the "look" of it, but I don't like that it makes it less efficient to browse around. The comic should be entirely visible in the page when you load it.
0
[H]olyGeekboyPAX dad and PC builderClevelandRegistered User, ClubPAregular
If you use your browser as a horizontal rectangle, squeeze it into a vertical rectangle, like a phone screen. Suddenly, it looks much better; too bad most of the other sites I use have a more horizontal layout (internal work sites and such). Also, text is Big McLargehuge on the desktop, but looks really great on a phone!
Honestly, I think that you guys are going to have to build separate desktop and mobile sites; I know, no one likes maintaining two versions of a site, but the one you have is fucking incredible on my phone, but terribad in firefox on my desktop.
*edit* Fun Time Top Nav Bonus Game! Hover your mouse over any item in the top nav. Move slowly over to the edge of the panel, then continue slowly moving over, "chasing" the edge until your chosen panel has taken over the entire nav bar!
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.
Neat, joining up for ClubPA also makes a forum account. Well, I came to complain about the header and truncated text, but this link will do. Hopefully Mike or Jerry mention this link and people are able to find their post to read about it, the new site puts too much emphasis on everything but the posts. I do like the new look overall, I Just disagree with some of the spacing decisions.
Posts
Maybe it's a glitch, but the latest 4 episodes of DLC (all episodes after the DLC for "The Statute") seem to be missing from that link for me. And I just listened to them over the weekend via that link.
@media only screen { #leaderboard { padding: 8px 0 !important; } #main { padding: 8px 0 0 0 !important; } .newsNav { margin-bottom: 8px !important; } .navTop { margin: 8px 0 0 0 !important; } }I'm not posting this on userstyles because I'll be damned if I'm going to maintain it through the next several weeks where the site will likely be in flux. But there you go.
It seems... really obvious that this new layout was designed for tablets. On any sort of widescreen monitor the UI elements are HUGE and I was shocked by the amount of scrolling I have to do to get to anything. Right now if I go to http://penny-arcade.com/news I can only see 5 lines of text before I need to start scrolling.
Also the news posts are now organized by time of posting, newest first. This means the comic button (which seems to only appear on Tycho posts that correspond to a specific comic) will very often be buried mid-way down the page which, again, necessitates a lot of scrolling on my part. It wouldn't be a problem if the "main" Tycho post for the current comic would remain at the top of the page. There is, of course, the comic tab on the site's header, but that now involves a drop down menu. I would much prefer the option of simply clicking an obvious and immediately visible button as I've been doing for more than a decade.
The comic page suffers from similar issues. The ad and comic title space are both so huge that upon loading the page I see less than 1/3 of the comic. Ideally the moment I arrive on the comic page I should be able to see the entirety (or at the very least the majority) of an average 3 panel comic.
Overall, while the new design is superficially more visually pleasing it comes at the cost of basic functionality. It's fine to try and shine the spotlight on other PA projects, but not at the cost of making the site a chore to navigate. Some posters above me have echoed similar concerns so I hope this isn't a finalized version. I hope this doesn't come off as too harsh, but this is my honest first impression.
I think you guys went a little overboard with your JQuery plugins and the size and spacing of everything is way off. Icons are too big, the text is too large for the space you gave it, the placement of that banner in the middle is just really bad, and everything seems to have 25+pixel padding around it for some reason. Given the amount of talent I've seen from PA, this is pretty below bar. Hope to see some tweaks in time.
27" monitor @ 2560x1440.
Yeah I don't have that anywhere at all. Are you on Chrome? Firefox is telling me my stylish is updated, but I cannot find that menu to save my life.
Yes that is chrome. Sorry that's the browser I use, it seems there's a specific CSS rule for Firefox to accomplish the same thing. Or if you want to look at it the other way, that functionality is NOT supported in chrome so chrome has a GUI to accomplish the same thing.
If I had to guess I'd say you want to put the above code inside a block like this
@-moz-document domain('penny-arcade.com') { @media only screen { ...blah blah blah... } }I also am not a fan of the truncated news posts and lack of borders, but those are largely design-related and I don't expect much to change there. The site's been through several redesigns in the past, but this is the first that seems to remove functionality that was present previously.
There's WAY too much screen real estate devoted to other PA projects (which is interesting considering they've just scaled back their operation), though I'm glad to see Katie's page get a link, and the process for getting to the comics from the news page is way too clicky. I just dropped 30 bucks to remove the ads (though mostly just to support PA), but hardly noticed due to the distracting ad-like nature of the top links. The only change seems to be the blank space (super elegant solution btw) that just magnifies the appearance of wasted screen space.
specific issues:
-on the comic page, you can't even see the full comic without scrolling down.
-even the "news" page doesn't have tycho's main post about the most recent comic (the main reason to view that page) listed first. with the current reverse chronological thing, 90% of the time the first thing you'll see is another "guys we sell pins now" post.
To clarify, spending more time on PA projects was exactly what the scaling back was for: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/12/06/changes
@media only screen { #leaderboard { padding: 8px 0 !important; } #main { padding: 8px 0 0 0 !important; } .newsNav { margin-bottom: 8px !important; } .navTop { margin: 8px 0 0 0 !important; } .post .postBody { width: 710px !important; } }Reindeer has always been the account that posts our content on the forums. He used to be called Dog though.
There's so much of that going around these days.
I completely agree. I mean, the "hot" thing to do with site design these days is to make the site giant, "bubbly", and generally waste as much screen space as possible, but I had hoped that PA wouldn't go that way. Tycho's post front & center was a highlight for me as much as the comic itself.
http://imgur.com/fvykN3c
As of last night (about 9pm MST) it was fine, but it now looks like that in FF 26, chrome 32.0.1700.107 m, and IE 11
Then I went by the main site and saw the redesign, but no contact link to report technical problems. So here I am, and there you go.
EDIT: Also, contact link on Strip Search site simply goes to the PA front page.
Steam - Miker525 | Xbox Live - Miker525| PSN - MikeRosenberg
Websites - Gamerations - MikeRosenberger.com
Pinny Pals - Miker525
Honestly, the only thing I'd suggest is to figure out a better way of posting the Gabe and Tycho Heads alongside the posts. They take up a lot of that valuable width which could be used to tighten the text up.
Someone asked this on Twitter and Jamie said the gift card is only for the online PA store, not the one at PAX.
Damn. That's a real shame. Makes this 10 vs 30 decision much hard. Thanks for the info though
Steam - Miker525 | Xbox Live - Miker525| PSN - MikeRosenberg
Websites - Gamerations - MikeRosenberger.com
Pinny Pals - Miker525
sadly you can no longer do this and instead is simply the last 4 posts no matter what
Also it would be great if this new site was responsive so that this current new fancy mobile site showed up for mobile and there was a nice desktop site for widescreen monitors...
Also I like the new splash, very snazzy! To be honest, I have the /comic page bookmarked, and rarely saw the frontpage anyway, so maybe I'm a little biased in liking the new design. :P
pffft animated corgi gifs as avatars are for losers
that's why
I'm just so used to logging in with my email address that I thought you had to register specifically with clubpa. I got this error when trying to register:
Anyways, just a heads up that you have to log into your pa account with only your user name. at least I was getting this issue.
keep up the good work.
On my 13" laptop, which caps out at 1366x768, I cannot see any of the comic when I go to penny-arcade.com/comic without scrolling down, which is sub-optimal. Puts me in a weird position where I have a better experience on my phone than I do on my PC!
Steam: TimIsOnSteam
Battle.net: TimIsOnBnet#1745
Switch: SW-7012-4788-7410
PSN: TimIsOnTheNet
Little iffy on the site redesign, though. Probably because I fear change.
I've had a look but cannot work out where to find the Club PA RSS feed that gives me full posts? Is it released yet? If not, when will I find out?
Thanks.
Less so on a phone screen, but still awful. Too much stuff that's far too large and too much of it is moving.
3DS: 1650-8480-6786
Switch: SW-0653-8208-4705
Gabe's newspost says "our online store" so that's pretty much a "no."
If you use your browser as a horizontal rectangle, squeeze it into a vertical rectangle, like a phone screen. Suddenly, it looks much better; too bad most of the other sites I use have a more horizontal layout (internal work sites and such). Also, text is Big McLargehuge on the desktop, but looks really great on a phone!
Honestly, I think that you guys are going to have to build separate desktop and mobile sites; I know, no one likes maintaining two versions of a site, but the one you have is fucking incredible on my phone, but terribad in firefox on my desktop.
*edit* Fun Time Top Nav Bonus Game! Hover your mouse over any item in the top nav. Move slowly over to the edge of the panel, then continue slowly moving over, "chasing" the edge until your chosen panel has taken over the entire nav bar!
Navigation Gamified!
Neat, joining up for ClubPA also makes a forum account. Well, I came to complain about the header and truncated text, but this link will do. Hopefully Mike or Jerry mention this link and people are able to find their post to read about it, the new site puts too much emphasis on everything but the posts. I do like the new look overall, I Just disagree with some of the spacing decisions.