New Website Feedback
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Only problem I really have with the new site that hasn’t been touched on so far is the lack of links to the forums. You used to be able to access links to the forums from the volume description pages, and you can’t do that anymore.
Also, is it intentional that all of the prepub parts for Rokujouma are no longer accessible? It used to be a special case where all prepub parts were accessible despite being past the expiration date for that particular series.
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No pictures corresponding to the LN or manga. Could we have those back please?
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Ok, now I've had a chance to test things out, I like the new site. It's certainty easier to use credits now, which use to be a bit of a kludgey process. The reader seems to work ok, though I think both the main app and the beta app work a bit better, to say nothing of some of the 3rd party apps people have tossed together. I do like that it shows what future volumes are out in Japan already... it's something I'm off curious about but going and looking can also open you up to risking spoilers. This is much better.
The only problem I came across in testing is that when I search for a title, I have to close my keyboard and reopen it and hit enter a time or three to get it to search. Hard to tell if that's because of a issue with it recognizing that I'm searching or with a long response time to generate the results. This on a Note 9 using Firefox, if you care.
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@chocolatkey Yup, novels are now loading! Calendar, library, and catchup all good. On my phone, and my laptop for good measure.
However, in checking that things in general were loading, I actually stumbled across a lone manga that didn't. Just to make sure it was specific updates and not entire swatches, I opened up every single novel and manga Part that's released in February thus far; and for those that were off, I checked up on its related chapters + the title pages. The following chapters (all manga) don't properly load on both my phone and my laptop:
- Marginal Operations manga, V8Ch1 - it gives 404 error
- Campfire Cooking manga, V4Ch1 - it says "PANIC: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference"
- YuriOta manga, V3Ch1 - 404 error
- YuriOta manga, V3Ch2 - 404 error
The Marginal Operation page seems like something is up, since neither V7 prepubs nor the V8Ch1 prepub are available for me to click. If I click on "Read Preview" for V7 it will take me to the manga and let me read all of V7 if I use the dropdown volume&chapter selector from the reader or click "back/next" - though V8 still doesn't show up anywhere.
The Campfire Cooking page is fine in regards to V3, as I can click/read all of V3 just fine. The V4 cover shows an error sign instead of the cover though, and its link gives the same "PANIC" response.
I couldn't find "YuriOta" when searching the site's titles (which is probably only an issue when I can't click on the release to find the full title lol), but Google tells me it's the "I Love Yuri and I Got Bodyswapped" novel/manga; the YuriOta page lets me go through V2 as normal, but V3 again isn't listed as being published right now, and there are no links to it for me to click.
For reference, my laptop specs are - OS: 64-bit Windows 10 (Version 2004, OS Build 19041.746); Web Browser: Google Chrome (Version 88.0.4324.150). I've tried to be thorough and explain all I've noticed, but if I missed something or you need me to clarify/recheck something, just let me know! ^^
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I can second that complaint about campfire cooking.
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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.
