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You may have noticed something different.
Yes, we’re finally dragging Random Curiosity kicking and screaming into the mobile age. I know, I know, we’re about five years late to the party, but that’s the trouble with running a site with 13,000 published posts, and yes, that’s the correct number of zeroes. There’s lots to make sure will still work when you make a major update.
Fortunately, the tech wizard we recruited last year has worked his magic, and the new site is live! Pictor is currently stamping out bugs and fixing anything what needs fixing, and will continue to do so until everything’s working even better than before. In the meantime we’ve got a much more modern site with a real mobile interface and a suite of backend ehancements that will make our lives easier. Three cheers for Pictor, here here!
*cheers x3*
If you catch any bugs or issues, please report them in this post. Note that “I don’t like how this works” is not a bug! Change is change, some features are different intentionally, you know the drill. However, there may be some missing features, either because they broke in the update or we haven’t implemented them yet, and you are free to mention those. Just please check the comments below first to see if we’ve already addressed the issue.
Special thank you goes, of course, to our tech wizard Pictor! Thank you so much for all your hard work. You rock!
I don’t like how this works.
It was sooo hard not to mark this as spam. I still could. Still could… *grumble grumble*
A quick update, the google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) use the http protocol to access the site when the site use now the https (I have to manualy add the https protocol to the address)
This bring some problems with posts that still use the old http protocol to upload the images (doesn’t load properly)
I don’t know if this is something that escape off of your hand people, but its happens with a mayor update for a website
(Sorry for the engrish!!)
Not sure if their provider allows it but easiest way to deal with it is a forced http to https rewrite rule which will fix any references to http:// on the site for randomc stuff.
Love the ui
I will say that I think this is a nice change. It’ll take everyone a while to get used to it but from a reader’s perspective, it looks very clean and polished. Well done RC.
AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! It’s all different!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
😉
Very very smooth on the mobile.
You guys have come a long way since the Omni days.
Noice.
Not a bug but from an aesthetic point of view if possible you should probably darken/thicken the bubbles around comments, they’re so faint that in articles with lots of comments everything just kind of blends together.
Made the thickness around the comment bubbles a little thicker to help with visibility.
Also perhaps if there’s any way to further delineate replies to comments beyond the indentation, like how the previous layout had the boxes within boxes. Looking through old posts with longer and complex comment chains again everything just sort of merges together and you can’t always tell where one chain ends and the other begins.
Ok, so as far as missing features go, this one is minor, but before, in the recent comments side bar, we could see the first 10 words or so that were written in recent comments, besides having the name of the commenter and where those were posted. Those first words are now missing.
The first few words in the recent comments bar are now missing.
Ok sorry, but I just posted 2 comments already that are waiting moderation for some reason, even though I didn’t post any external links in them, so I had to make sure. But whilst doing so, I keep having to check the box below to save my info in case I want to comment again. That’s gonna have to be worked.
Update looks great; Love the crowns on the avatars.
I’ll be honest and say I’m not exactly thrilled because I’m not very fond of modern website design trends catering to phone people but it could have been much worse I suppose. Feels rather empty and blindingly bright though.
The most important thing though is that at least Louise is still here. It’s such a beautiful image. I was worried she would eventually go the way of the Dodo in an inevitable redesign.
I’m with you, much too bright and bare. I’d shift down the main panels to the value the boxes and side panels are at and use some sort of slightly darker, textured fill image for the panels, personally. Modern “clean” design is boring and soulless but if you feel that’s what you have to go with you could at least make it not sear my retinas.
I’m not a fan of how, if you click on an image link in a review it now pops it up into a new tab rather than just bringing it up in an overlay. I thought it was nice how that worked before.
Lightboxes should be working again
Agree.
Looks nice…
No, really I mean it.
…however…
It’ hard to tell where things are; who’s doing what with software.
Is it the browser (Desktop Firefox 56.0.2) that’s doing something,
is it the version of JS running, or is it the backend doing something?
So the page renders fine, but there’s very little contrast on the page.
IoWs, there’s a very light block for the poster, #EEEEEE. It looks a
tad better on Windows Firefox 70.0.1. I wonder if Pictor can add a
dark(ish) mode for non-mobile browsers?
So, wait… Is the poster’s name _under_ their comment? It’s hard to tell…
Access said it best — Feels rather empty and blindingly bright though.
Summary:
1. More contrast;
2. The “overlay” images worked well, the new tab really annoys; and
3. Love to have the preview button back.
Thanks for taking time to leave your feedback!
Lightboxes should be back up and running + playing around with adding a splash of color to break up some of the white.
Preview button?
Yes. RC used to have a “comment preview” button. Got “lost”
after that crash a while back. It was a nice thing if your
comment included tags, so you could ensure that you didn’t
mistype anything and have it show all crazy (e.g., if you forgot
to include a closing italic </i> tag).
What ever you guys did, it’s working faster compared to before so I’m loving this new layout.
Wow honestly after 6 years of lurking on this website, its refreshing to see it updated 🙂 Great work Pictor & the RC team! Keep it up.
Is the popular series tab keeping that list updated automatically now so that the most popular series only get there now? And if so, what would be the measure then that is used for defining which ones are popular enough for that? Amount of views? Comments? Both?
Same with the comments, will those be auto-updated as well or do we still need to refresh if we want to check if there are more recent comments?
Maybe some themes or a dark mode as well? Not sure how that would look, but as others have said, this is a bit too brightly white.
Another question i was wondering was why the choice was made to keep infinite scrolling away from the update. Instead of the pages we currently have, it would allow us to scroll down until we reached the very first page again all those years ago. If it was so that people could switch to different pages easier, putting that on top might have worked as well, but depending on how everything is set up, that might be more of an hazzle then a good thing now that i think about it. Still curious about the choice of not adding in infinite scrolling though.
If i ask too many questions, just tell me to shut up after giving me the answers ^_^”
interesting rework, but the site is way too bright and there is not nearly enough contrast between the text and the background.
I second this. The text needs to be bolder.
Too much unused space, this is layout is too mobile focused, i have about 50% screenspace left on 1080p, this is just silly, https://i.imgur.com/A2QNWua.jpg
We’re finalizing some bigger changes to address the narrowness on desktop.
The current narrow sizing is to make sure things don’t look wonky until then :’)
Agreed. Too much blank space on desktop screens.
If you think it looks bad on an HD monitor, you should see what it looks like on UWHD. Let’s hope that can be mitigated soon as per Takaii’s comment. But really it’s the vertical appearance as well as the horizontal that’s especially annoying on UWHD because there’s so much wasted white space now.
The name appearing under the comment rather than above is especially weird, although I suppose you could argue that putting it this way round makes you less prejudiced because you see what was written first rather than who wrote it.
Another small annoyance is the spindly font and especially the way punctuation appears. The comma and period are now both insignificant little specks ,.,.,.,.,
Oh, and my Gravatar looks too cropped now, don’t think it was quite like that before.
There is quite a lot of old content not working. Just look at “Best Anime of 2018”.
Then I would like you to add the tags again, since I always used them to look for new Anime. ie “Last Impression” of all Anime, instead of looking though every Anime separately.
I really hope that you can add that again.
But I guess you don´t care much about the old content.
The Design ist too narrow – too mobile focused. It´s really stupid to read text like that and the pictures are unneccessarily small. I can see that conversion to Phone is with that easier, but it looks stupid on 1080p.
The color is too bright, or at least the contrast is too low.
The background color of some headline text goes over the content section (Vinland Saga 21).
Additionally I would like to recommend to use one big picture in the Overview for Anime and not six. You could use an Gallery if you want to show more.
Regarding tags we’re working on that as well as other bugs. Search functionality is something we definitely don’t want gone as part of this change, especially considering how often we link back to older content!
Also while too early to comment on further changes and when to expect them, I wouldn’t expect the design to stay the way it is. We’re asking for feedback so we can start tuning and better defining the layout, especially in terms in graphics, colours, and utilized space. There’s a lot we still want to do, but want to make sure it’s going in the right direction.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm…………
I honestly thought I went to the wrong site. I’ve been following RC since Omni and Divine were around so this needs some getting used to.
The site seems “less busy” without a doubt.
It’s been a long time since I checked this site. I love the new layout!
Looks good on mobile, looks horrible on desktop. On desktop, there is too much empty space and the sidebar takes up more space relative to the actual content.. The format I guess is good for short blog posts, but for posts like season previews (which I go to a lot) the format leaves a lot to be desired.
Shiny!
I realized it’s not too big of a change after zooming out a notch or two (90-80%). Brings the new site to about the same scale as the previous layout. The only feedback I’d give is to add a bit more color. Having the tags and titles of posts in grey causes them to blend in with the post above it when just scrolling through
Congratz on this new Design
Oh this new design looks super clear. I like it a lot!
Looks better on mobile, but worse on desktop. Seasonal preview tables have become much much less readable, in particular. I think it’s a combination of larger font size, changing from sans serif to serif, and removing borders between cells. As per Arche’s comment, would you consider slightly decreasing font size and whitespace size, on the desktop?
Tables have been cleaned up a bit. Should be a lot easier on the eyes.
randomc.net cannot be find???
yesterday works well!!!
Watashi no me ga! me ga!
I would make the boxes around the comments/replies a little bit darker as they are now they’re too light/thin.
Great work! I see it’s not any harder to comment either, which is nice.
test
Coolness! So far I can use it fine. I think it would be good if the Reply field were put at the top of the section so i wouldn’t have to scroll down past 50 replies.
I wasn’t sure about the text boxes appearing above the person’s name in the comments, but I got used to that already.
not sure this matters much, but the RSS feed is reduced to 10 posts.
A bit of shade would be good.
Now I don’t have to keep this site permanently zoomed in!
I’ll admit, at first, I was kind of off put by the new layout. With the old one, it was easy on the eyes for me when reading posts and comments (on both mobile and desktop). With this new layout, it feels a bit harder for me to move around and find stuff, but hopefully, I’ll get used to it with time.
Welcome to the new look of RandomC 🙂
Best feature (I don’t know if it was this easy before): it really made my day to be able to go directly to the last page, pay hommage to the first post of Omni and to the start of the blog and find that almost all posts still have their pictures!
Is there a randomc chat channel where everyone hangs out at?
The Discord channel. Here’s an invite link.
https://discord.gg/cbwAC6H
Must say I’m surprised. You guys were like a decade late in getting rid of Adobe Flash on video embeds for your season previews, so I was only expecting a mobile optimized site sometime in 2025.
I don’t like the new look…
Some of the series like hi score girl , fate/ grand order ,fire force and other series from December
15 owards, the pictures are not showing ,please fix this thank you.
Still hi score girl and fate grand order pictures are not showing , please fix this ,thank you.
I must be one of the losers who hates change. The new look is very modern and that’s good but, I like the old site better.
thanks i hate it
I really appreciate your efforts, but personally i really don’t like the new look. The old one looked nice, felt nice, it had so much life in it while this new one is just a big white nothingness. Feels empty. It’s just doesn’t fell right. It’s not the Randomc i love. Please, put back the old one if possible. Thank you.
This is excellent on mobile. Well done guys.
The updated design looks good. I agree that this was a long time coming.
I overall like the new site.
Not sure if it is actually possible to fix but when you open a picture and it pops out, clicking so the picture closes then trying to scroll will often scroll you back to the picture you clicked on.
The new chat doesn’t differentiate enough making it hard to tell when there are replies to comments.
This is more an ascetics complaint but the new website works far better in a contrast version (like dark mode) than in normal mode where everything kind of just blends into each other. Some more shading and contrast would be nice.
Overall however Good Job, i like the new website quite a bit.
The third column of preview images and the sidebar overlap.
The font change helped, and the older posts (like season previews) look better after the formatting changes (like with tables). Looks much better on desktop now than the initial launch.
OMG I’m so happy with this. I often read blog post when I am commuting, but I always skip RC as it was very difficult to read on mobile. Now I can comfortably read it, I’m so grateful for this change.
Love the new UI!
And it’s super fast and smooth!
Oh wow, it’s so bright and clean. Nice work Pictor!
Been watching the site since Omni was writing posts for Bleach and Gundam 00. Love the work you all put into the site every week.
I cant think of a better chronicle of modern anime, and the new site is a great way to bring in the new year with an eye toward 20 years of Random Curiosity!
I only view the site on a desktop. As with others, I’m not a fan of the grey on grey scheme. A bit of contrast would be helpful. Stronger grouping of the comment post and poster would also be appreciated along with some colour. I was surprised to find that the font was at a standard weight as it appears to be very light but that seems to be a property of the font. It strikes me as a curious choice for a text font although it’s attractive enough. Maybe it’s my eyes but I find it a challenge to see (with certainty) my punctuation as I type this as the contrast is even lower within the comment text area (especially when the cursor flashes alongside the just-typed character (or if a speck of dust alights at that place on the screen).
It might sound weird considering the surfeit of white (grey) space but I find the way that the left/right arrows reach out into the text to be irksome. This irritation is compounded when the ‘previous’ article’s name unfurls into the present article if you accidentally hover over the arrow (or even move slowly over it). I’d prefer them to remain (or at least the left arrow) entirely inside the margin.
Not sure how this is intended to work but if you pick a show category page and then open one of the episodes, the left/right arrows don’t send you to the previous/next episode of that show but rather, to the previous/next post chronologically from all shows. It would be great if it stayed within the ‘category’ when changing articles.
Overall, the site feels nicer but I wouldn’t mind some adjustments around contrast and legibility. Thanks.
The new format will take some getting used to, but I’ll do a test on my smartphone if it’s actually readable in mobile form.
And let me guess, RC being down for the past few days was because of last-minute adjustments/debugging? (Could have used a heads-up on your Twitter.)
Also, I’m guessing screenshot thumbnails no longer show up in comment posts?
I for one am dang excited for this new look! Congratulations on the upgrade and thank you for all your hard work going into this and maintaining one of my favorite anime sites of all time!