To my dearest @TomFulp
I've been trying out the new Movie Portal over the past couple days, and if I may be so bold...
I have some notes.
First and foremost, after using the new Portal for a while, I'm happy to say that my initial trepidations have been thoroughly and undisputedly cancelled out. I thought for sure I was going to dislike the layout just as I did back when the very same change was made to the Art Portal, which I dislike to this day because of how easy it is to click out of the page and lose your spot on the endlessly scrolling list, a flaw that I always thought could be solved simply by having all submissions open in a new tab by default.
Fortunately, the Movie Portal has solved this issue almost completely and in a far more extravagant way than I would've thought of thanks to the new player's in-page viewing option which allows you to watch every movie in a non-stop playlist which, I've gotta say, is pretty freaking great! It's been a while since I've watched as many cartoons on here as I have in the past two days and I think this will do a lot of good in holding audience attention!
Of course, just like anything else in its relative infancy, there are aspects that can be improved, such as the biggest problem that I saw from the very beginning.
With a non-stop automatic playlist like this, it's easy to go through a number of cartoons and forget to check out the artist's page, as I did a few times before remembering to go back and favorite them afterward.
I think the in-page audio player has a near perfect system where you can favorite a track as it is playing, a feature which is more or less a necessity to carry over to the movie player. With that in mind, I think both players are in dire need of some way to follow the artists right within the page.
Another thing that came to mind was how the new setup might make it easier to overlook the voting aspect, but then I realized this probably wouldn't be as important considering the fact that most playlists wouldn't include under judgement movies anyway. So I considered the idea of a middle ground where monthly voting becomes more emphasized, maybe set up a new system where it's rewarded with XP? Or maybe even a new version of monthly voting where instead of a top-ten list users just rate all the submissions they watched like they probably should've done in the first place.
I don't know how difficult this would all be to set up as my programming knowledge peaks at <a href="newgrounds.com">Linking something</a> but I just figured I'd share some ideas and observations instead of just being the dick who says "Ugh, the new layout sucks, why can't everything just stay exactly like it was back when I first joined the site?" because that's not a productive mindset for anyone.
So that's pretty much it, in-player favorite/follow buttons and maybe some kind of voting shortcut, more emphasized monthly voting, and art/game links opening in a new tab by default until the point they get their own in-page player since that seems to be the direction Newgrounds is going in.
