Hello, and welcome to GLA5
Firstly, this is the official feedback post! If you have some kind of feedback to give on the design, then please leave a comment on this post. If you have a bug to report, then please file it in our issue tracker instead. Doing so is a much better way of getting it fixed than messaging me directly.
So, yeah, here it is. Truth is, I always wanted to do a big rebranding. As I was mocking up GLA3, Digg had that godawlful redesign, so I decided to shelve some of the crazier ideas and just go with what was safe. Same with GLA4, but that time Kotaku was the tragedy. Although nobody really misses Kotaku, do they?
Anyway, here it is, in all its glory! If you don’t like how it looks, then too bad, because I posted something very similar to this design on the blog about a month ago and nobody complained. There are a few new features, such as the asynchronous theme switcher, doddskipedia section, tips bar (replaces the info bar), aforementioned issue tracker, new polling system, non-fluid, media-query based stream area, pirate bay proxy, better social media integration, and gigantic improvements to blogging, commenting and editing site content, due to the new blog system. The biggest of all, however, is probably the switch from Livestream to Twitch. Tell me what you think about twitch! I’m going to be trailing it for the next week or so, if it really doesn’t suit us then we will be switching back to livestream. But I really hope it does.
ALL of our current streamers should have received an email with a stream key that’ll let you broadcast to our Twitch channel. Make sure you check the email inbox that’s currently connected to your Livestream account. With the WordPress account you also have, you should also be able to author news posts, Doddskipedia entries and add a bio for yourself to the ‘about’ page, which I would recommend.
Try out some of the new features! Switch the theme! Resize the window and see what happens! Go nuts, really. If you’re really mad you can try connecting to our chat with an IRC client.
Finally, I’d like to thank Hexler and IronCladLou many many times. You can thank Hexler for the awesome illustrations that adorn the various pages. He seems to be a perfectionist in the same way Valve are. Mostly in a good way! You can thank IronCladLou for the site not looking like garbage, he was the person who convinced me to move away from my original (terrible) mockups, contributed a lot to the current design (particularly in the typography department) and gave us the lovely teacup logo that I now worship. You can find them both credited in the footer, and in humans.txt.
Oh, and don’t miss our podcast recording! This Sunday, the 9th of September, 4PM UK time, 11AM eastern US time, 8AM western US time, 5 in most of Europe (according to wolfram alpha).
Love, Cats