Half a month

[mister yummy]

It's been half a month. I suppose I'll just have to steel myself and accept the fact that no, it's not an April Fools gag gone out of hand. My favorite website really is gon e forever. Oh sure, they'll say it's twice the site and twice the content. But really, we went from two great websites to one. In my book, that's half the website. Plus, the name's horrible and the layout sucks.

I hoped and hoped and hoped i'd come back to daizex.com and find that the merger had been an elaborate gag. My hope faded as the days passed. I've officially given up.

I'll still be around, but I won't be happy about it

</whiny bitch mode>

[SaiyaJedi]

It's been half a month. I suppose I'll just have to steel myself and accept the fact that no, it's not an April Fools gag gone out of hand. My favorite website really is gon e forever. Oh sure, they'll say it's twice the site and twice the content. But really, we went from two great websites to one. In my book, that's half the website. Plus, the name's horrible and the layout sucks.

I hoped and hoped and hoped i'd come back to daizex.com and find that the merger had been an elaborate gag. My hope faded as the days passed. I've officially given up.

I'll still be around, but I won't be happy about it

</whiny bitch mode>

We'd be happy to address any specific criticisms you have about the layout. Now that we're running on a modern back-end, we can actually make fairly major changes to the design (we'll leave it to Heath to decide what is "within reason"), rather than being married in a pre-Reformation sort of way to it like Daizenshuu EX was. We are planning on having a mobile (smartphone/tablet) version too, eventually. Just don't expect us to ever support IE6 or anything crazy like that.

That said, we're not undoing the merger or changing the name, which we thought long and hard about. Not only that, but while there is now only one site where there used to be two, once we're done adding content back, we'll actually have more than both sites combined. We do already, even, if you consider the massive news archive Mike rescued from oblivion. And the new song translations from me (plus the old songs where I went back and retranslated every single one).

The four of us are still here doing what we do... And I'm more involved with the site itself than I've been in years, despite being the father of a toddler who will turn two next month. You try staying current with that kind of responsibility.

And you are free to leave, of course, if the site displeases you. The fact that you haven't tells me that you just want something to complain about. Or maybe it doesn't bother you quite as much as you claim.

[jjgp1112]

Wait....so what you're saying is that even though the main site has the combined content of Kanzentai and Daizenshuu (which it does), because it's now all on just one site, it's only half of what it used to be? HUH? That's like saying Vegetto is only half of Goku/Vegeta or something.

[mister yummy]

Well, Vegito is half as many people as Goku and Vegita, at any rate.

Mostly I just wanted to complain. My biggest complain is that the site looks "too modern". I always liked the big navagation bar on the left. The drop down menu at the top takes a long time to load, and is gaudy looking. I'd just prefer the navagation bar on the left, like 95% of all Dragonball websites have had.

I REALLY don't like the idea of logging into the main site, and I hope that it's not automatic when I log into the forum. Logging into the site seems like pointless functionality to me. (I just checked, and it does indeed log you into the main site to log in here. Any way to avoid that?)

The twitter feed is annoying, mostly because I don't use twitter, and it's where I think the navagation should be.

The red and grey dates are also ugly. The blue ones looked better.

The old layout was simplicity and excellence. A website couldn't be designed better. This attempt has some good ends, I'm sure, but it failed to make the sites better, imo.

This is all minor stuff, mostly cosmetic. I'm sure I'll have more substantial complaints when I wander around a bit more.

Incidently, while I'd have never considered asking for IE6 compatibility, I don't see why that would be so hard. Sure, it's a terrible browser tha almost no one uses, but it's not so uggy that a good website won't run in it. In fact, the best websites run fine in the buggiest browsers. If I were going to ask for any weird compatibility, I'd ask for Netscape 4.08 support, so Win16 users can veiw the site, but that's so pointless and archaic, I won't even bother.

---

Honestly, this post was mostly tounge in cheek. I was astonished that it wasn't just an april fools joke. I'm sure it'll be an awesome website(already is, despite being not as good as the previous ). I just like to bitch and moan now and again

[VegettoEX]

I don't understand your concern about being logged into the site. You're a member of this forum, aren't you? The forum is a part of the website -- it's not a separate entity. Your site account is your forum account is your future wiki account. They are all the same thing. You don't have to use other parts of the site if you don't want, but it's all the same thing.

The old layout of Daizenshuu EX was deprecated bullshit developed in 2002 from crap thrown together in 2001 and duct-taped together over another decade into something that barely resembled a website. I have nostalgia for it as well (I mean, I'm the one who made the darn thing!), but let's not pretend it was well-programmed, passed any amount of usability or readability tests, allowed anyone to find any information they actually wanted, or optimized anything for search engines.

The red and grey dates are also ugly. The blue ones looked better.

Also confused over this. What red and grey dates? If you're talking about the colored lines that appear next to the dates in updates, they are all consistently color-coded depending on the type of update/category -- site content is green, news is red, and podcast episodes are blue (there's also a black one for "site meta" that's not really going to be used that often).

I gathered from the start that you were looking to whine for the sake of whining, so thanks for owning up to that. Like Julian noted, we're more than happy to entertain thoughts and suggestions from the audience, but please also know that this WAS a professional-scale project and everything you've mentioned is stuff that was thought about over the last year and was done for a specific purpose, both from a technological and usability standpoint. There's still more work to be done, of course.

(And no, on-going IE6 support has indeed been pulled from most major websites and online applications. If a site happens to work in IE6, it's no longer because someone's purposefully trying to support it, but a magical case of lulz that it still happens to work.)

[Nex Carnifex]

You probably just don't like change

[mister yummy]

Nex, that's definately the truth.

More accurately, I dislike certain kinds of change. Others I'm thrilled about. This is a negative change in my life, albiet only smally negative.

An example of a bad change: Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai merge into Kanzenshuu.

An example of a good change: A new website comes into existance called Kanzenshuu. Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai remain as well as seperate websites.

So, if a change involves loss, I don't like it. If it's pure gain, then it's ok.

--

For note, this applies to any area of my life. I still have clothes I got for school when I started 7th grade(I'm 28 now), but I've bought many new clothes as well. Even though the old ones are beat up and out of style, I can't bear to get rid of them. The positive change of keeping the old, and also getting the new, is how I handle that.

I think this is how people become hoarders... When I lived in a smaller house one might have though I was on my way there. Perhaps I am still, and I've only delayed it with more storage. Good thing I'm poor, or my house would be full already.

[Chuquita]

I'm fine with it being one site (I think it's kind of neat how I get to see my avatar on the main page if I'm logged in; and getting to comment on news articles using that forum account is nice.) and the forum itself looks pretty much the same.

It'd be worse for me if the forum was super-updated, since I often visit from my phone and I know coming here won't overload or freeze the phone up for me.

It wasn't too bad waiting those two weeks; I had minor, temporary withdraw, but it's not like any huge news that shook the fandom happened while the forums were gone (nothing animation or story-related anyway). That would've been something if it had though; can you imagine if Toei had announced a new series or a new live action movie or something while the forums were on break?

[Ashura]

I don't know if this helps your perspective at all, but something you should realize is that they've been talking about integrating the wiki into the site for quite a long time, and if they did, they probably would've made all these same exact changes anyway even if they didn't change the name from Daizenshuu or Kanzentai.

Even if the kerning on the new logo bugs the crap out of me (hi guys! Move that K + a together a little bit because it looks weird compared to all the other letters!), they've done nothing but improve the end user experience without the loss of any actual data... for pretty much free for you and me. You haven't actually lost anything here except a couple names.

If you're arguing on grounds of 'brand recognition,' I could see some kind of point there; With no sleight to Kanzentai, Daizenshuu EX is probably the more well known name of the two by virtue of being so old and holding the biggest forum. So I give the website crew props for not going the easy route in terms of naming the new site. It's going to take a while for people to recognize the name Kanzenshuu the way they do the others.

Even still, no matter what they decided to call it, it would still have become the same thing. You need to look at it more from the perspective of improvement rather than change.

[Zionist]

I think it's kind of neat how I get to see my avatar on the main page if I'm logged in

:O I just went to the main site for the first time since logging back into the forums since the integration. That is so cool

Yeah I got no complaints about the integration, besides the couple of weeks of withdrawals I went through. (I expect compensation....jk )

[Bussani]

An example of a bad change: Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai merge into Kanzenshuu.

An example of a good change: A new website comes into existance called Kanzenshuu. Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai remain as well as seperate websites.

So, if a change involves loss, I don't like it. If it's pure gain, then it's ok.

I can't say I understand the logic, but being slightly OCD and hating certain kinds of change myself, I suppose I shouldn't be judgmental. To me, though, the things that have been lost aren't really things at all. All the information will still be there, but in one convenient place; all the people who worked on the sites are still around, but are now working under one roof. To me it's a pure gain. Like Ashura said, all we "lost" were a couple of names, and that doesn't really feel like anything to me. A rose by any other name, you know? It's still Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai underneath it all.

[Hellspawn28]

I don't know about most of you guys but I like how the new site is. It makes it easier to read older news from 1998 up to now.