Hello everyone, and welcome to the new and improved TouchArcade. Thanks to the backing of our Patreon backers we’ve had the resources to slowly work on completely rebuilding the site and forums from the ground up to bring us up to speed with all sorts of modern web technologies. Along with being under SSL, the whole site and forums are now responsive, meaning everything is intelligently build to lay itself out in an ideal manner regardless of what screen size you’re viewing the site on. You can play with this by resizing your browser window if you’re reading this on your desktop, or just load up the site on whatever mobile device you typically use to see how it automagically changes.
Up on the top of the site we’ve got a new feature block which we hope will help when it comes to driving traffic and generating interest to some of our long-form content which typically doesn’t perform as well as quick news stories, and under that is the familiar hot games and new games listings which were so popular on our old site. Keep scrolling and you’ll find stories like this one, along with all the other normal things we post on a daily basis.
Along with the front page redesign, we’ve also migrated away from our ancient version of vBulletin to a shiny new install of Xenforo, which much like the front page is totally responsive and works great across all screen sizes. We’ve spent the weekend migrating data to the new site, so everything should be there and all existing logins should seamlessly work. On the surface level, using Xenforo is very similar to VBulletin, so there shouldn’t be much of a learning curve to hop back in to our forum community.
Unfortunately, with this switchover, the TouchArcade app is officially dead. Barely anyone is using it anymore, and it just didn’t make a ton of sense to spend loads of time guaranteeing compatibility across the old and new site when we have no path forward in getting the app approved by Apple. If you’ve missed the millions of times we explained this, the app violated App Store policies and we were never able to update it without a drastic rework that would remove nearly all of its useful features.
Instead, we’ve devoted all of our resources to refining the web site and forums into the closest thing we can get to an app-like experience in the browser.
Our future roadmap for continued improvements to the site includes exploring the possibility of a notifier app to get push notifications from us. Given our tumultuous relationship with the Apple approval process, we’re likely going to do everything we can on our end to get the site as feature complete as possible before exploring that path, as it’s a more reliable way to spend our resources. Thankfully, there’s loads of free services out there that you can do this with right now, they just require a tiny bit more time setting up. Here’s a guide we published last year on easily using IFTTT for TouchArcade notifications.
This has been a pretty massive project, particularly when it comes to migrating a decade of content and user information. We’ve done a bunch of our own testing, along with a small group of beta testers to make sure everything on the site is operating properly… but it’s inevitable we don’t run into some bumps along the way with this migration to the new site. If you see anything that looks weird or doesn’t seem to be working right, there’s a bunch of ways you can reach us, just keep in mind this is a very 1.0 project right now and we are actively working on basically everything.:
- -For small things, feel free to leave a comment on this story or tweet at us @toucharcade
- -If you want to get more in detail, post in this thread on our forums.
- -If you’re not registered for our forums or want to send along some screenshots, send us an email at [email protected].
- -Additionally, if you’re having problems with user-specific stuff like not being able to log in or similar problems that require one-on-one support, please also email [email protected].
When submitting feedback and bug reports, the more information you can provide, the better. Be sure to include what browser you’re using, what operating system you’re on, what sort of browser plugins you might be using, and anything else that seems relevant. All of these things are super useful when it comes to squashing bugs that inevitably come out of a site re-launch.
Anyway, I hope everyone is enjoying their Memorial Day today, and once again we would like to thank our amazing Patreon backers that have made this whole redesign possible. Continued development of TouchArcade would not be possible without your support. If you’re not backing us on Patreon, that’s cool, but please thank the people that do for helping us stick around!
