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Giant Bomb News

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The New Giant Bomb Goes Live February 12

These things never go according to plan, but here's the general plan!

No Caption Provided

Good gracious, it's almost over. The engineering team here at CBSi plans to launch the 100% rebuild and redesign of Giant Bomb on February 12, 2013. That's Tuesday, one week from today. Despite an intimidating bug queue still in front of the team, Danny Chi (pictured), our lead engineer, gave me the nod to prep you guys that we're near the end. In my usual "bullet points are awesome" way, here are some things you should know.

  • On the night of Sunday, February 10, we will take a final snapshot from the live database. Any additions made from that point till the launch will likely not make it to the new site.
  • Also on February 10, I'll be pushing code to the live website that disables billing management and various login/password areas of the site so that users can't make changes that would cause them problems.
  • Subscription renewal during this dead period will not be processed. When the new site goes up, we will turn our nightly processing back on once we're stable on the new platform. There will be no interruption to your features during this time.
  • Because all of our RSS feeds were rebuilt, your readers / podcast managers will likely freak out initially, and then quickly return to a normal, regularly updating state.
  • 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.
  • Comic Vine's launch will follow a few weeks later. To keep members of both sites in sync, we'll be shutting down signup and password changes on that site till they're out.

If you haven't done so already, I highly suggest jumping over to the beta site at some point this week and trying the site out. We recently opened it up to all registered users (as long as you signed up before Thanksgiving of 2012). This also means that if you changed your password since Thanksgiving, you'll want to use your old password to check in on the beta. Everything will get updated once we do the final migration next week. However, if you are having trouble logging into the beta, please send and a Private Message (on this site) with the following information.

  1. Your Giant Bomb user name.
  2. Your email address.
  3. If you're a user from the old days do you have a central username that is different than your giant bomb username?
  4. Is there anything odd about your password (foreign characters, abnormally long...etc) that you think might be causing a problem?
  5. Are you using Facebook to login?

Thanks for your patience during the past year, as we've taken the time to set up the new site. There were a lot of ways this whole experience could have gone bad, both within the community and within our own team here. I'd like to think we did a pretty decent job of keeping you guys informed and a part of the process along the way, and we won't run into the "why did they change it" feedback that normally comes with site changes of this size. It's been a fun ride. Hopefully, it'll also be a smooth one, and I'll be drunk and celebrating with all the engineers next week! More likely we'll all be in a panic making fixes, but I'm gonna stick to that fantasy, as always.

Dave Snider on Google+

190 Comments

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fots

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Edited By fots

Almost time to party! And to revisit the bladerunner 'project' Dave.

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geirr

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Edited By geirr

I'm glad you guys are changing the video hosting service. I've been using Youtube whenever the option is available for far too long.

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probablytuna

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Edited By probablytuna

THIS IS IT

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YoThatLimp

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Edited By YoThatLimp

I hope they are changing the video player as well, GB has THE worst video player on the internet right now.

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NumptyX

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Edited By NumptyX

Think I'm going to miss the old site layout as the new site seems to take a few seconds more to load in firefox, but that could just be due to the site still being at beta.

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King9999

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Edited By King9999

Thanks for offering a white background!

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Majkiboy

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Edited By Majkiboy

I nead beats!

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TruthTellah

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Edited By TruthTellah

Excited for this! Though, the one thing that keeps souring my impressions of the new site is the subscriber medals. They have shifted from directly below a user image to slightly over them, and that just takes away from user images and over-emphasizes the medal. Something more akin to what we have now only slightly covers over the bottom edges of a user image, which are usually unnecessary anyway, but when you start cutting into 1/5 of an image with a medal, it actually makes user images look better for non-subscribers than subscribers.

Regardless, I'll be glad when this finally gets done and the real process of adjustment can begin.

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LegendaryChopChop

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Black background 4 life.

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Lashe

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Edited By Lashe

Blackground.

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dropabombonit

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Edited By dropabombonit

I'm liking the look of the new site so can't wait for this to go live

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kmg90

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Edited By kmg90

I've had no issues with video download speed... I'm totally stoaked for the site redesign to go live!

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HeyImPhoenix

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Edited By HeyImPhoenix

Excited!

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Lyfeforce

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Edited By Lyfeforce

<>

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TheManWithNoPlan

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Edited By TheManWithNoPlan

The Giant Bomb is about to be dropped.

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obinice

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Edited By obinice

@snide Brilliant news! You guys are awesome. I have just one question. I (and by proxy my family!) watch everything Giant Bomb produces on our XBMC media center. Will the Giant Bomb plugin be affected by any of this?

P.S As a side note, since the plugin redesign last year, the ability to list more than 100 videos in any particular section has disappeared. Basically, it makes it impossible to go back and watch stuff from even a few months ago, unless you know exactly what to search for! Major bummer :(

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Berserker6666

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Edited By Berserker6666

AWSM. The Real Giantbomb starts here.

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snide

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Edited By snide

@Zero_ said:

Hey dave what's going to happen to YouTube videos on the new site, still available for us?

Yep. Still available to subs through the site as usual.

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Alphazero

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Edited By Alphazero

@villainy said:

@Ravelle: As I understand it's not that the APIs are wonky, it's that they don't exist. Achievement tracking currently is the programmatic equivalent of hitting view source in your browser and picking out the relevant text. Scraping pages like that is the worst possible way of collecting data. The most innocuous looking change on the source site can completely break scraping scripts.

With a complete site rewrite I'm sure the engineering time is better spent squashing real bugs instead of maintaining achievement tracking. Hopefully the manufacturers will make actual achievement APIs to go along with their new consoles but I'm not holding my breath.

Sony, Microsoft, Valve, Apple and anyone else possibly reading this:

I play many games, mostly on 360. Giant Bomb's cross platform Achievement tracking system got me to play more games on other platforms because I suddenly had a way (that I cared out) that surfaced those achievements. I'm sure I'm not alone. Provide an API and you will have more of my money.

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scottygrayskull

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Edited By scottygrayskull

Membership goes up for renewal tomorrow, woo! I was going to ask what happens to those whose memberships come up on the 10th/11th, although it sounds like they'd just get processed the next day.

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thebipsnbeeps

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Edited By thebipsnbeeps

So excited oh my gosh keep makin all the ladies drop GB

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CJFoster

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Edited By CJFoster

Can't Wait

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Th3_James

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Edited By Th3_James

I want the blackest background possible

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striderno9

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Edited By striderno9

Exciting!

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marblecmoney

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Edited By marblecmoney

WOO! LET'S DO THIS THING!

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blacklab

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Edited By blacklab

Not a huge fan of the serif, but looks pretty good.

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fenixrisingxl21

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Edited By fenixrisingxl21

When the new podcast RSS feed goes up on the new site, will it continue to link to all Bombcasts released thus far (including the old Arrow Pointing Downs)?

Also, is there any chance you can increase the episode count in each of the subscriber-only feeds? They're currently locked at fifteen episodes. Any way to bump that up to thirty episodes, or are they hard-locked specifically to fifteen for a reason?

Any assistance or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

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obinice

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Edited By obinice
@Sweetz

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.

I could be wrong, but I thought one of the basic differences between progressive and streaming video transfer was that, while progressive can't skip ahead like streaming can, progressive will allow the whole media file to load up front, whereas streaming will stop at the end of a limited buffer, and only begin downloading again once you move forward through the video.

Which I guess would be useful for someone with less bandwidth that still wants to watch HD video :)
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jsmoke

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Edited By jsmoke

okay....hmmm i just barely started visiting this site again lol

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morrelloman

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Edited By morrelloman

What does this mean for the mobile site?

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MarvinPontiac

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Edited By MarvinPontiac

Excited for this in terms of responsiveness, functionality, content structure and the accessibility of that content. In terms of visual design, not looking forward to it that much. The new design has a lot of superfluous, overly-tweaked elements which work against the readability (for example "dig deeper" photos have a 1px border, a light border, darker outer border, then a drop shadow). Then there are some unnessesarily-skeuomorphed elements like the podcast controller which ruin the consistency. Why doesn't the video player look like a tv? Not that I'm complaining. As a designer and lover of restraint, this bums me out a bit. Just my two pennies – I'm not trying to derail or be negative for negativity's sake. I wish you guys the best of luck with the launch and I'm looking forward to its evolution.

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clapperdude

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Edited By clapperdude

Haven't had a chance to look too much, but I just want to say thanks for keeping pagination! So many sites are using never-ending scroll these days....its the absolute worst.

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LordAndrew

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Edited By LordAndrew

@morrelloman said:

What does this mean for the mobile site?

The mobile site as it exists now is a thing of the past. The site now uses responsive design. The same pages are served to desktop and mobile users, and which layout you see depends on the size of your display.

You can try it out right now, even if you're not using a mobile browser. Go to the beta and resize your browser window. When it gets small enough, the "mobile" version of the page will appear.

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linkster7

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Edited By linkster7
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.

HOLY SHIT YES! There are so many old videos I can't watch right now, so my random QL button is kinda broken.

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unsolvedparadox

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Edited By unsolvedparadox

I like what I've seen of the beta, excited to see it go live!

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fleshribbon

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Edited By fleshribbon

I guess I'm the only one around here (at least on the top of the comments) that isn't crazy about the new site layout. Reminds me too much of every other gaming news/review site.

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sfighter21

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Edited By sfighter21

@fleshribbon said:

I guess I'm the only one around here (at least on the top of the comments) that isn't crazy about the new site layout. Reminds me too much of every other gaming news/review site.

Yeah, I don't really like it either...

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KittyVonDoom

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Edited By KittyVonDoom

Is there an option to turn off comments on the new site? Or could somebody maybe make an extension for Chrome like the wonderful YouTube Options one (seriously the best extension next to AdBlock).

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Dimi3je

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Edited By Dimi3je

@blacklab said:

Not a huge fan of the serif, but looks pretty good.

This. Also the design generally feels cluttered. The new video player seems nice though.

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Freki

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Looks awesome guys! :)