Hey all. Since the acquisition of the site by CBS nearly a year ago the engineering team here has been working on a redesign and rebuild of Comic Vine. Most of the changes we're making are cosmetic and this is definitely more of a refresh than a rethink of what makes Comic Vine great. If you've been following my updates over on our sister-site Giant Bomb you may have a good idea of what's coming. If not, feel free to jump over to the beta web site, which logged in users (assuming they'd signed up before Thanksgiving) should be able to access. That site will launch fully next week and assuming all goes well, Comic Vine will get its relaunch sometime in the next month.
Here is a brief list of some of the features coming with the redesign.
- A new, responsive design where every page looks great on mobile or tablet devices.
- The ability to filter comics by who was in them, who created them and when they were made. (example: Give me all issues with Hulk, The Avengers and Spider-Man made in the 1970s).
- Full wiki histories and rollback.
- Better search (no more hunting through pagination for a specific issue number).
- Better moderation tools.
- Better API filtering and sorts.
- Better forum tracking with the ability for watched topics.
- Redesigned profiles with better activity streams.
- A completely redesigned way to handle image gallery management.
- Better wiki tools that allow you to create new pages as you edit existing ones.
Although I know sometimes change is hard, the feedback we've gotten on the designs from the Giant Bomb community has been extremely positive, and although I know each site has different needs, I'm hopeful the community here will have fun with it once we start showing it off. Expect a dedicated Comic Vine beta very soon.
To make the relaunch as smooth as possible we will however have to turn off some features on the live version of Comic Vine (the one you're reading this on!) during the next month so that we can keep the two sister sites, and their linked subscription services active and in-step. On Sunday February 10th the following changes will temporarily be made to Comic Vine till the new site launches. Expect this period to last no longer than a couple weeks.
- New signups will not be allowed.
- New premium memberships will not be sold.
- You will not be able to change or reset your password.
If you wish to do any of the following (I'm talking to you RPGers) in the next month before the new site launches you'll need to do so in the next couple days. Existing premium memberships will continue to run as normal, with no feature loss during this period. I know some of this seems a little drastic, but it's a necessary step to get Comic Vine on its new platform and have the redesign go well. Essentially, we're trying to make sure you'll still be able to log into the new site without issue once we relaunch.
Comic Vine is in a great place and we recently became the largest Comic Book site in the world. We take our job of collecting and organizing the data around Comic Books very seriously. This will continue with the new design as we fix a lot of the problems we just couldn't wrap our heads around when Ethan, Tony and I launched the in 2006. We'll have more to show off soon. Thank you for your patience as we transition over.
