New Website Feedback
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Far out guys,
I've been using the new set up for 10 minutes and already I've seen a heap of handy little features that make the site so much easier to use! -
Frankly the new reader is completely unusable. It's an absolutely terrible reader compared to the original. The new site design is great but the reader is horrible.
- The font size is too small.
- The lines are all squashed together.
- It's not formatted like a printed page.
- And even all the text formatting is broken. For example italic text is no longer italicized.
Why was this even considered for launching at this point? It's not even done yet for beta testing, let alone production ready.
A few other issues:
- Opening the find bar on Firefox causes all the text to move around and mess up what's on screen. It shouldn't do that.
- If you're going to have a dark mode button you need to make the entire background black, not just the text of the page black, otherwise it's completely pointless.
- Going in and out of full screen in the browser or resizing the page can cause massive numbers of page changes. It should stay on the same page when going in and out of full screen or resizing the screen. The old player was smart and kept track of what percentage you were through the novel.
- Clicking the actual full screen button in the viewer doesn't actually full screen the the physical screen, it only fills the browser window.
- When in full screen you can't navigate to the last page of text, you have to go out of full screen to see the last page or sometimes last few pages. (The old reader had this issue as well sometimes, but this seems to be always rather than just sometimes.)
- There's no "go to the next chapter" button when you finish a chapter.
- If you press the right arrow key too long it doesn't go to the next page. You have to press and release it quickly or it does nothing. In the original player this would seek through the pages quickly which was nice for jumping back to a spot you were at.
- The dark mode button on the website doesn't affect the reader in any way. The reader should get changed by the dark mode of the website changing.
- Refreshing the page takes you back to the beginning of the part/chapter instead of keeping you at where you were before like the current reader.
Oh and one nice to have: Make the text selectable. I've many times wanted to select text and google the meaning of a word (I assume English as a second language people want to do this a lot more often) that I wasn't quite sure I got the meaning of fully. This wasn't possible on the original without diving into the page source. You can still do that to get the text out but now it's even harder because it's so obfuscated. (If you're trying to stop people ripping the site, this won't stop them, it's not that hard to programmatically pull out text out of an html page, it's just a bit harder now, but they'll do it within a few weeks after the old site goes away.)
Again the rest of the site is great, but the most important part, the online reader, is completely terrible. Please revert it. Just use the old player with the new site and everything will be perfect. The old player was basically perfect. (Only thing missing was darkmode which a browser addon covers perfectly.)
Honest question, did the upper management at J-Novel force this reader code out before it was done? In my career I've seen this type of software release usually caused by management pushing something out before it was actually done.
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Also, please go back to the original font, "Crimson Text", it's much easier to read than "Roboto" that's used now.
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I'll be using old.j-novel.club for all my purposes until we get the old reader back or there's massive improvements in the reader's current state.
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One question. I see this in the page source for the reader:
<!--I would not recommend using this content to build EPUBs-->
Was one of the design goals to obfuscate the page as much as possible or something which would explain the rather high complexity of the new reader compared to the old one?
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Suggestion: Keep future volume covers blurred even on mouse-hover.
Some series might have rather spoilery future cover pictures, so I think that mouse-hover should not unblur unreleased covers. The idea of the blurred cover pictures for upcoming volumes is a fantastic one but I would keep them blurred even on mouse-hover just like they are on no mouse-hover. If they never automatically unblurred, it would help no one get spoiled accidentally.
Example (beware of spoilers): https://j-novel.club/titles/ascendance-of-a-bookworm
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When I follow a series it does not appear for me on my library, saying I'm not following any series
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I like, that the new website is less dependent on Javascript. The calendar page is nice. Everything else is plain bad.
Old novel reader was imperfect, but bearable. The new reader is an abject failure. Just scrap it, please. Seriously, why would you transition from a version, that sometimes fails to count pages to the one, that always does?
New home page looks like a placeholder, rather than a finished product. A useless animation and 3 gigantic covers take 100% of above-the-fold space... what?
There are other minor issues, such as inability to login in without leaving current page (that didn't work reliably on that old website, but still) and single-page reader mode not looking... nevermind, just scrap the new reader, period.
In my opinion JNC should replace the current "Releases" section with new "Calendar" page and focus on polishing it'd design and usability. The rest of redesign is inferior to old version and not worth salvaging.
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The new site seems very good. I'll be using it a lot after I catch up with the stuff I gotta read this week.
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You can read some of the volumes that are labeled as expired. For example "The Great Cleric" volume 1 is labeled as expired on its page, but you can still read the whole volume if you go to the drop-down selection within the reader. So either the page displays incorrectly that it is expired or some of the volumes don't correctly expire.
Fushi no kami vol 2 does the same thing. It is listed as expired, but you can still read it. You can't read Volume 1, however.
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@AlexanderR said in New Website Feedback:
I like, that the new website is less dependent on Javascript.
lol
Ok, kidding aside, both the old and new site were built in javascript-based frameworks as single-page web applications. This is a popular way of designing sites now, as it provides for rich, responsive pages that only need to load additional data for the dynamic parts and generally work well on a wide assortment of devices and layouts. From what I can tell, the old one looks like Bootstrap.js, while the new one appears to be React.js. This, too, would be in line with the trends in popularity of these JS frameworks.
Old novel reader was imperfect, but bearable. The new reader is an abject failure.
Extensive custom javascript functionality, such as the web readers, frequently has conflicts when embedded into JS Frameworks, and ends up needing a lot of tinkering. I wouldn't be surprised if the old reader broke even worse when embedded into the new site than the new reader does. So for that, I'd say give it time.
(Source: I have been a Full-stack software engineer for 25+ years.)
I really like the calendar page. I further like the ability to restrict it to just followed items, and to save that as a preference.
I'd love a feature on the Users > Library page to let us know about updated epubs, not just new ones.
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Glad to see the new series pages are live, but I would appreciate an easier way to check for future volumes on the series I've bought. When I go to my library, I can see series I've purchased a few volumes of, but I can't click on the series title to look at the series page. My only option seems to be to download the original books. So if there's a series I bought some of that isn't currently releasing parts I can't figure out how to easily get there without being forced to run a search on series title, which is less than ideal.
In the same vein, I would like an option on the series search to filter by owned/followed titles.
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I really like the look and UI for the new site
I thought I was screwed cause I binge read prepub volumes I don't buy once via searching for the "final" tag on the old release calendar, and a quick search for "final" on the new January page shows up nothing so I started to panic!
(I'm still catching up, just finished Vol2 of that seed creation girl one)Looking closer, the last parts in the volume now have an "End" tag instead of "Final", so I just have to search for "End" instead now, phew!
Thought I'd note it here in case someone else runs into the same (non-)issue.
Side note: How does the new "follow" function on the title page of a series work exactly?
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Having used both now, I'll be going back to the old site. Just not sold on the new one. The other site was easier to navigate. Homee page is just plain confusing, so is the navigation. You don't know where your going or where you even are. That, coupled with the fact that you don't even know what you are looking at in the calendar make navigating the new site a nightmare. Especially for new members.
The only thing unchanged, the forums, is still good.
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I can't see any of the novels that I'm following from the user tab. The user tab shows that I have no novels followed.
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The new navigation in the reader which allows for jumping to any parts in the volume is really nice. It was very clumsy to do that with the old reader.
One request around the "follow" capability. Currently, there is no easy way to get a "List of series I'm following", which would be pretty handy to have. Could you add "Follow Status" filter on the TITLES page the same way as in CALENDAR?
Also, while I do have series I'm following, when I enter USER page, it currently says;
You do not own any books nor are you following any series.
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I like it overall. One thing I'd like for the library is the ability to see unpurchased volumes for series I've already purchased a volume in. Bookwalker has something like that and I like it a lot.
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Suggestion: Make a filter in the calendar to only show final chapters for prepubs.
Personally, I don't like reading the new book until the full thing is out, and I can read it all at once. If you could filter out to find the final section, that would make it really easy to see when the next volumes are completed.
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My first impression with the new site was not great. After digging around a bit I’m happy with the new features but still find the front page jarring. Since I mainly read through the beta app I don’t use the website to read, though I did hit the 404 problem other iOS users were having at first but seems to have been corrected. I mainly pop in to see what’s coming up and if anything new is being released.
My experience is mainly coming from using on an iPhone X, but have looked at it on my iPad and PC.
It took me a while to figure out what bothered me about the front page. At first it was the loss of the upcoming release schedule. I like the new calendar but still would be nice to see what’s coming up for that day right away.
That wasn’t all though. The problem I believe is how the site handles the mobile view. The whole page is one solid block. While the headers are there, they don’t do much to highlight the next section. On top of that everything feels too large. Covers take up almost half of the viewable area. Text runs completely edge to edge even on an iPad. There’s no negative space at all on the mobile view. I shrank the view on both devices to 75% and found it all much more visually pleasing.
The last little thing is the catch-ups. I like seeing the covers and being able to jump to the series by clicking on them but miss the fun article description that went along with it.
One technical issue I hit was a 404 error when using Google to log in on my PC, Win 10 Firefox. It still logged me in though.
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Forgot one last thing. I haven’t tested in other browsers but in iOS Safari tapping the top of the screen doesn’t return to the top of the page.
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I would be nice to see on the main page today's part releases rather than having to go to the calendar to do so.
