Burning Gates

I never imagined that version 5 would be a slimming of version 4. After all, what version 4 became was just a subset of what I wanted it to be. But I'm glad I stopped myself short in version 4's production, and I'll explain why in a moment.

In version 5, the main feature, aside from the returned open Island access, is the home page. Everything that happens on the site is now in your face. The link to The Island is front and center, with artwork showcased from The Island right behind it. There is more detailed forum activity and news briefs. The latest active gallery works are shown up-front rather than being buried deeper in the site. There is a lot more content from the oekaki displayed. The deviantART group is represented, along with a random selection of works from it.

For the tech savvy, there are now RSS feeds so you can stay on top of site activity. Right now, there are feeds for new topics in the forum, new Island active gallery additions, and activity in the deviantART group. I plan to add a more detailed activity feed for the forum, and create feeds that also keep track of the oekaki.

I replaced the forum software with another product, primarily for RSS but I was also getting tired of phpBB's issues. I reinstalled and upgraded the oekaki software as well. The oekaki I used on version 4 was heavily modified for a slightly different look, so it became impossible to upgrade. I won't have that problem with the oekaki or forum now; both are completely vanilla.

The main feature lost from version 4 is the Gallery. Unfortunately, that's the part I spent the most time developing in version 4. I made a lot of modifications to the gallery software to integrate it with the forum, added artwork thumbnails to forum profiles, rewrote the tagging and categorization systems, etc. I figured since the site previously revolved around The Island that a natural addition would be an organized gallery of Island artwork that users could comment on, rate, etc.

Nope. My site statistics tracker showed that it was a mostly ignored feature. An amazingly small amount of people were interested in commenting on artwork, or even viewing the artwork for the first time. Most of the artwork in the gallery had been viewed less than 12 times total in the two years that version 4 was online. So in place of that, version 5 has the randomly chosen showcase image behind the big Island link on the homepage, and the deviantART group.

Version 4 had also done a lot to unintentionally cripple The Island. It was closed behind a members-only system to protect people's artwork from random taggers and clearers, but what it mostly did was drive down our visitation numbers. The Island is now returned to the wild. Anyone can come in and draw, change their name, etc.

Hopefully these changes are more inline with what our visitors want. After some recent conversations I've had and some critical thinking about the site, I believe I've made it a lot closer to what it should be versus what I want it to be.