New Website Feedback
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In ~3 hours I Refuse to Be Your Enemy! Parts 1 & 2 are coming out and, while this is clearly obvious in the old site, the new calendar only show Part 1 coming out.
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@jpwong Thank you for the answer and pointing me to the discussion.
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Some radio buttons in the series tab don't render quite aligned on my end, at a glance "Has Pysical Releases" and "Complete & On Hiatus". "Followed Titles Only" also ends very close to the icon. I'm using Edge 89.0.774.54.
I also think that, for publication status, it might make more sense to have checkboxes for Ongoing/Complete/On Hiatus to select/deselect, rather than the current setup. As far as the ongoing filter request goes, I've seen it was requested as early as page 1 by Khaos, but I haven't seen an official reply to that in the first 2-3 pages (might have happened later on in the thread or I could have just missed it, it's kinda difficult to search for, sorry in advance if it was already addressed).
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Please add back the future volumes as it was. It was one of the main reasons I would use the beta version of the site. Maybe have a toggle option at least?
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Would it be possible to update the new RSS feeds to say when a part is a volume end, and not just that a new part is available? As someone who prefers to read the volumes once all the chapters are out, and relies on RSS feeds for information on when stuff is posted, having to flip between the RSS reader and the site just to get this information is an annoyance, and is something that can easily be forgotten to do.
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I just found the RSS feed under User. I approve of this. (Works well with my RSS reader).
Is it going to also list the releases for the ebook?
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@redmasq said in New Website Feedback:
I just found the RSS feed under User. I approve of this. (Works well with my RSS reader).
I agree, and have migrated to it, and appreciate getting a list of only those items I have followed.
I have noted, however, a significant delay. The normal RSS feed had items in my reader within 1-2 minutes of their actual release time. The user-specific RSS seems to be between 30 and 45 minutes behind.
A programmer is just a complex method of turning caffeine into source code.
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@mystyk More than likely the website is using a direct table query while the feed is likely being generated by a cron job (or other scheduler) to control load. It probably has to build a row per login user. If done serially, it probably will take a while. I am uncertain of their architecture, but processor and I/O are the biggest setbacks for making it parallelizing it, assuming their DB (if not just caching in a file system) support row or page locks instead of table locks for the write. I'd throw together some better jargon of my assumptions, but I only had 2 cups of coffee today.
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@redmasq As a full-stack engineer, I feel your base assumption is likely spot-on, and that was essentially my conclusion as well. It likely does perform a straight read for the "everything" query, but not for user ones, due to the number of users. In the end, the benefit of reducing unwanted items in my feed outweighs extreme punctuality with the releases, especially when the ones I really want will have me waiting on the app for the moment they release anyway.
A programmer is just a complex method of turning caffeine into source code.
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Some other unexpected behavior on mobile (safari iOS 14):
If you go to the series list page, click on a series, then click the back button (part of the webpage, not the browser), it brings you back to the list of the series as you would expect. However if you first click the buy button on a volume, then click x to close that, clicking back takes you to the buy screen again instead. -
@mystyk said in New Website Feedback:
As a full-stack engineer,
Your signature gave it away; that's why I was lazy with my reply instead of making it "suitable for end-users and management" (given running on empty for caffeine).
In the end, the benefit of reducing unwanted items in my feed outweighs extreme punctuality with the releases, especially when the ones I really want will have me waiting on the app for the moment they release anyway.
I feel the same. Besides, it is usually in the evening after work and any side projects when I follow up on reading material, as such, punctuality is a moot point, but less scrolling and tapping/clicking (read:convenience) is beneficial.
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@redmasq @mystyk All RSS feeds are cached for 5 minutes (just simple memcached of the bytes since you seem to be curious), I may consider reducing the caching time of the user-specific ones. If you are sure they are 30-45m behind you can send us an email and I can troubleshoot that.
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Not sure if it's been previously suggested, but in the user library it'd be nice to be able to quickly jump to the series webpage to be able to see/buy new volumes. Maybe even list all volumes and simply denote which are owned and which are not as they are in the series pages, and allow quick purchasing of unowned volumes.
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I can‘t log in on the Website with my IPad. After entering Userdata and clicking on the log in, i See the Animation with the circle of dots, but nothing Happens. I think it is an Redirect Problem, behause, when i jump to Forum and back to title Page i am logged in.
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A couple little updates went up today:
- The text for the Series filters has been updated to be more concise. Some series are not filtering correctly, so we're investigating that.
- The Series search bar no longer searches description text.
- The text in the How It Works and FAQ pages has been updated to clarify some things:
- Premium credits can now be redeemed through the website normally even without an active membership.
- When you redeem a credit for a premium ebook, that gives you access to the prepub parts for that book even when they are expired and regardless of your membership status. That means non-active subscribers can use saved credits to preorder a book and keep up with prepub parts! Can't discuss it on the forums without being a member though~
- Crimson Text added as default font choice for reader, default font size is now 110%.
Other major issues that were fixed this week:
- Google SSO issues fixed
- Subscriber part access denied issues fixed
Whoever said nothing's impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
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@chocolatkey I am not for certain in my case. The RSS reader on my mobile devices might be experiencing delays due to its own sync settings + notifications delays for the mobile OS (iOS and iPadOS in this case). I don't use one on my PC since I just keep the tab for the Calendar open. I can probably setup to monitor it (don't mind for short term if needed), but it won't make the translations release any faster ;-)
Also, I was actually curious on the setup.
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Welp use a text to speech program to read prepubs because of bad eye sight. It works fine on older site reader but not at all on new one. One I use can even read from kindle online reader and just about anything else but not j novels. Not sure what I'll do once old site is shut down. I'm guessing there wont be much hope of this kind of issue being addressed.
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@heimdal7 could you let us know which TTS program you use? Also, please try switching to vertical reading mode, that tends to work a lot better due to the simple layout.
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The front page still needs some work so that it would have more useful information on it. A widget showing upcoming and recently released pre-pub parts like the old site had would be nice. If you could limit it to only followed series, even better.
@myskaros said in New Website Feedback:
Premium credits can now be redeemed through the website normally even without an active membership.
This is such a nice update! Would it also be possible for non-members (people who have just registered an account but are not currently paying monthly membership fee) to also buy credits?
I think this would make more people buy the books directly from you given the bonus content in some books and being able to read the books with the app of your choice. This suggestion is something I make assuming that you'll get a bigger cut of a book sold directly by you than a book sold by Amazon or Nook for instance and you'd actually want to drive direct sales up AND expected drop on sales lists on other sites would not decrease visiblity so much that it would be a net negative. If I am wrong about those things, well, then that would change a lot of what follows.
Even making the non-members pay an extra dollar or two per credit might be worth it just to make it so that you do not need the monthly subscription to buy books in their best form and make it possible to buy DRM free books without a membership. (Also a higher price for non-members might even work as an encouragement to subscribe when you are able to "price anchor" the non-member price a few dollars higher.) I know some people are very much against subscription services and needing a subscription to buy books makes it a little bit harder to recommend this site as a place to buy ebooks. Also some people really, really want to buy DRM free products, and sometimes these two groups overlap.
I'm certain there's a lot of stuff here I am not able to even think about since I do not know your numbers and other stuff going on behind the scenes and I believe that you have thought about this matter a lot too. However, now that there seems to be no technological limit to allow non-members to redeem tokens, it would be awesome of you to at least reconsider this.
Btw, being able to go back and read old pre-pubs is an awesome improvement! Thank you for new features! It's nice when you can check something quick on the go without needing to download the whole book on a new device. I was a little sceptical when the new site released and looked good but feature-wise it looked like it was a slight step back from the old one and it seemed like it was just full of half-implemented features and everything was not taken out of many of them. It is nice to see that when someone says that they will continue development after release, for once it actually means that! This specific feature (being able to read older pre-pubs if you own the book) might or might not have been there from the release, but I only learned about it a little while ago. At least the feedback-driven improvement of the reader speak for itself.
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@heimdal7 I used text to speech on the new website on my ipone in the chrome app and it worked just fine.
