Good News Everybody!

Posted a long time ago by Oliver

As you've probably noticed, we've launched a complete redesign of nonoba.com. This is a redesign we've been working on for a long time, and we're very pleased to finally being able to show it to you all!

Before we get into the details, we want to point out that's it's a very big release, and even though we did a lot of testing, you still might encounter bugs. It's not a problem however, because if you just submit it in the feedback section, we'll get it fixed very fast.

So... What's new?

New design!

The biggest, and most visible, change is the new design. The previous design had evolved over a long period of time, and was beginning to show its age. Often, we'd have feature brainstorms where we would have to postpone features, because it just didn't fit with the old design and code-framework. It had also evolved one feature at a time, which meant that there wasn't any coherent vision -- it was just sort of bolted together.

With the new design, we took the time to really rethink all parts of Nonoba, getting rid of the biggest problems, and making sure everything fits together.
The redesign is also a preperation for all the features we want to do, but couldn't do with the old design.

Let's talk about the individual features:

PlayBar

The biggest new feature is the new PlayBar at the bottom of the page. It will keep track of the XP you gain while playing games and show you how much you need to gain a level, and it will also show you when you gain an achievement or a highscore in game. If you're logged in, it will also contain links to your home page, and you can place shortcuts to your absolute favorite games in it so that you can always reach them quickly. When you add a new game to your favorites, you get the option to place it in the PlayBar, and if you check out your list of favorite games, you can always add a game from there as well.

Games

The game pages has seen a lot of changes, most important is that we've now gathered all the information about a game on a single page, under tabs, so you can access all of it while playing the game. You can check out the highscore lists, or see which of your friends have got any achievements, or read about the developer of the game without having to go to a new page, and thereby lose your progress in your game.

Game Forums

Instead of simple comments, all games now have a forum. This should make it much easier to have a conversation about the game, without being interrupted by people shouting out how cool the game is in the middle of it.
For instance, you can start a thread suggesting feature improvements, or a thread with your walkthrough guide to the game. You can also start a thread asking for help on completing a hard puzzle. All these things weren't really possible with the old comments system.

We've also made it so that you can browse and post in the game's forum while playing the game - posting a comment won't reload the page anymore which we think is really cool!

The lastest updated threads from all games, are gathered on the forum frontpage, so it's easy to stay up to date with what happens in all games.

Chat

It turned out that a lot of users liked to chat, just as much as they liked to play games, which the old design didn't really facilitate. With the redesign, we're launching a brand new chat section, that's easy to find from the top bar.
In it, you'll find fullscreen chat, colorful backgrounds, and highlighting of your friends that are in the same room.

The chatroom you choose here, is the same chatroom you can access to the right of any game. Thus, if you want to always be in the Arcade room, just go to the chat section, change into the arcade room, and the next time you're playing a game, you can visit the Arcade room by just showing the chat section to the right of a game.
We've got a lot of features planned for this section for future updates!

Feeds

We've spiced up the news feeds quite a lot, it should look a lot more attractive now, you get a bit more information out of every news item, and most important of all - you can look at only items from a specific category instead of all of them at once, which should make it much easier to find the stories you are interested in.

From fans to Friend Requests

When it comes to the old system of fans and favorites, a lot of users were telling us they wanted to remove a certain fan, or didn't want people spamming their profile comments or mailbox about adding them as a friend.

We've changed the system now and removed fans and favorites. Instead, there's only friends, and to become friends with a user you have to send that person a friend request and then wait for it being approved. To send a request to another user, just visit that person's profile page and click the "Send friend request" button located under the profile picture.

When someone requests to be your friend, you will automatically get a notification in your newsfeed about it, so you won't miss any requests. You can also just check out the new friends page to see all requests that have been sent to you.

CSS

Unfortunately it wasn't possible to make the new design compatible with the old CSS that people had in their profiles. However, we didn't delete or modify the CSS that was already stored, so it's possible to go in and modify it to fit the new design, or even make some that's even better than before.

And more...

There are of course many more small changes, and we encourage you to explore the new site and find all the new cool things for yourself! :-)
In closing, we're very happy and proud to finally be able to show you and share the new Nonoba with you, and we hope you'll like it just as much as we do!

/Team Nonoba

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