@Sweetz said:

Kind of surprised they're taking it live this soon. Streaming videos don't work, looks like they just straight up removed the option (kind of a big deal on site where video content is the point and their progressive player doesn't allow skipping), and as of last Unprofessional Friday, the live chat still crashed if you breathed on it the wrong way.

I like the new site though, only thing I don't like design-wise is that reviews are now constrained to a fixed width column like news posts and can no longer resize take up the full width of the screen. IMO they're not as nice to read as a result.

Streaming barely works on the current site. It only works with the quality set to auto which almost never picks 720 for me (even though my internet is more then capable of watching 720 with no buffering) so it looks terrible usually.

And the beta site only has a small amount of their total resources devoted to it, which hopefully means the chat won't crash with the full site resources at it's back.

I'm going to miss my achievement data, but I'm excited to start using the new site, guys. Thanks for all your hard work!

This redesign process has been the best I've ever seen. Usually the userbase is heavily divided, but the response so far has been almost completely positive. Transparency definitely helps people get familiar with the updated site before it is pushed out for daily use.

I'm psyched the most about you guys changing your video hosting server. It's been rough for the last month, but oddly speedy the last couple days. Too little too late, suckers!

Good luck on the launch! I predict Dave will be happily drunk and panicking during launch week.

I've been enjoying the beta site. It'll be nice to see it with the regular, proper content showing up. I'm excited the see how the new video hosting is.

Raise the shields and transfer all remaining power to weapons.

Let's do this.

I'm gonna keep one blog window open for next week's blog and see what happens when I try to post it from the old site.

Awesome.

All that hard work will be shown to the world very soon, and its like a late Christmas for us users. I'm super excited, messing around with the beta site is cool and all but it just makes me think about how awesome the redesign will be with all the data migrated.

I'll be sad to see the current, lawless incarnation of the beta site disappear but it's exciting that such big changes to GB overall are so close.

@snide: Hey Dave, when I log into the beta site, it always changes my name to all lower case. So instead of LiquidPrince it appears as liquidprince. Is that a bug, or is that just a result of how the site was built, and if so can we change it so that we have the capitals back in our names?

@LiquidPrince: that's a bug which we have a fix for.

Dave, thanks for all the in-depth updates on your progress. Best in the biz.

Awesome, I really dig the way the new site looks.

ON MY BIRTHDAY!!

Cool, will this be followed by a new website/new subscription sale?

Huh? Huh?

@snide: Once the final snapshot is taken of the live site, will there be like a huge banner or something on wiki pages saying something like "Due to an impending site migration, any edits made to this page will not be permanent" in like big flashing yellow letters or something? It would really suck if someone didn't read this and then put a lot of effort into editing something and it was lost into the ether.

[grumplyoldman] I like the current site just fine. No need for any fancy updates or what have you!!! [/oldfart]

Will our PMs and such carry over to the new site as well? I'm assuming they will, right?

The thing keeping me from being totally bummed out about the new USA Today style site design that focuses on giant graphics and inefficient use of screen real-estate is the knowledge that continued improvements and tweaks will occur over the next year or so and hopefully many of my quibbles will be addressed.

@MattyFTM said:

@snide: Once the final snapshot is taken of the live site, will there be like a huge banner or something on wiki pages saying something like "Due to an impending site migration, any edits made to this page will not be permanent" in like big flashing yellow letters or something? It would really suck if someone didn't read this and then put a lot of effort into editing something and it was lost into the ether.

Yes.

Wait, Achievements are going away?? Why are Achievements going away? 90% of the reason I started using giantbomb was because of the great achievement aggregator that let me see everything at a glance.

This is horrible. Can anyone recommend an alternative? (Other than Raptr, Raptr is really cumbersome.)

And Quests! Oh man. This makes me so sad.

AHHH the white background ...my eyes...my eyes...they burn!!!!!!!!!!!

Looking forward to the new site going live and not having a database that's two or more weeks old.

NEW WEBSITE INVESTIGATION TEAM GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

@bledsoe9mm: there's a button at the top right of the page that will switch you to the dark version of the site

Will the chat finally work?

Can't wait for the new website to go live. The beta has looked awesome so far.

@Sweetz said:

Kind of surprised they're taking it live this soon. Streaming videos don't work, looks like they just straight up removed the option (kind of a big deal on site where video content is the point and their progressive player doesn't allow skipping), and as of last Unprofessional Friday, the live chat still crashed if you breathed on it the wrong way.

I like the new site though, only thing I don't like design-wise is that reviews are now constrained to a fixed width column like news posts and can no longer resize take up the full width of the screen. IMO they're not as nice to read as a result.

in the article, @snide said

Along with everything else, we are changing our video hosting provider. This should fix a lot of the slowness people have witnessed with our videos in the past six months. We'll be testing this on the beta site in a couple days.

so I don't think that will be a problem.

Yay, Feb 13 is my birthday and since I'm in Germany, this will be ready just in time for it. Oh silly giantbomb, you shouldn't have.

Congratulations, fellas! Will be nice to see all the months of hard work pay off. So happy for you guys.

@EarlessShrimp said:

Will our PMs and such carry over to the new site as well? I'm assuming they will, right?

Yes

I assume with the new video host this'll apply to downloading videos and not just streaming them? I need to update my Quick Look archive to 3500 from 1500 and would be nice to get good speeds while doing that.

I'm gunna miss this site :( especially the ability to edit the HTML of your post and embed stuff :(

Oh Sweet!!! Pump that new Patrick STRAIGHT INTO MAH VEINS YO!!!

@snide: New site is terrific Dave, the team's really done a great job rebuilding a much beloved site while keeping it feeling familiar and fresh. All the best for 2013!

RIP Quests :(

@MattyFTM said:

@snide: Once the final snapshot is taken of the live site, will there be like a huge banner or something on wiki pages saying something like "Due to an impending site migration, any edits made to this page will not be permanent" in like big flashing yellow letters or something? It would really suck if someone didn't read this and then put a lot of effort into editing something and it was lost into the ether.

+1.

On the night of February 10 is ambiguous when you guys have a world-wide audience; if you can publish the window when you guys start pushing the bits, that would be much appreciated.

Alternatively, you could just co-ordinate everything using Swatch Internet Time. I'm sure Jeff would be up for it. :)

Does anyone happen to know if, during the live shows, there is a way to move the chat below the video? I know you can stretch the video window further to the right but I would like the video to be the width of my browser window. I mainly want to be able to see the show and just glance at the chat from time to time.

@Sweetz said:

Kind of surprised they're taking it live this soon. Streaming videos don't work, looks like they just straight up removed the option (kind of a big deal on site where video content is the point and their progressive player doesn't allow skipping), and as of last Unprofessional Friday, the live chat still crashed if you breathed on it the wrong way.

I like the new site though, only thing I don't like design-wise is that reviews are now constrained to a fixed width column like news posts and can no longer resize take up the full width of the screen. IMO they're not as nice to read as a result.

One of the engineers working on the site said in the Giant Bomb thread on GAF that they took down streaming as a temporary measure because of some bugs. It should probably be up when the site goes live.

Yes! Super excited. Here's hoping everything goes smoothly.

Looking forward to this - loved playing about with the beta. I will miss those quests though.

Will there still be video games on the new site?

@Mijati said:

I assume with the new video host this'll apply to downloading videos and not just streaming them? I need to update my Quick Look archive to 3500 from 1500 and would be nice to get good speeds while doing that.

That would be a correct assumption.

In honour of the new site, I am going to rub mayonnaise all over my elbows and slide around like a fish.

Always wanted to do that. Perfect excuse!

Thanks, Dave! See you on the other side!

Very cool I can't wait.

Excited for this, the beta has been going great so far, can't wait to be able to use it full time.

GREAT!

I had problems running the site on my 256mb phone. Has this been addressed?