Spooktacular Aftermath
Thank you everyone who participated in our Halloween Spooktaclar! Judging is in progress but winners likely won’t be announced until late this month. Judging for the Best of October begins Friday and those winners will be announced on November 14th.
In the meantime, it would be great if you could check out and score as many Spooktacular entries as possible. The art category in particular could use more scoring activity, as entries with low vote counts tend to dominate the top spots and we’re weighing a lot of contenders.
Site Updates
I mentioned previously that we’ve been updating internal pages that are still using old code and layouts. Today we rolled out an update to our front page promo box manager and introduced some new features.
For example we can now run a desktop-only promo and a mobile promo at the same time. We can also now cycle multiple promos, rather than have a hard start and stop for each one.
At this moment if you’re on desktop, every minute the promo will cycle between School Night Seance, Vicky the Shotgun Witch and NGTV Halloween 2025. If you’re on mobile, you’ll see it cycle between just Vicky and NGTV. We’ve considered making the box work as a carousel that shuffles between promos in real-time but there’s a bunch of research that says that is actually less effective.
We’re down to just two remaining internal tools that need to be updated (the emote art manager is a scary one), at which point our ongoing code cleanup can proceed without breaking old stuff.
Lots of other internal changes have been happening in addition to these updates and once we turn a few more corners we’ll be moving ahead with adding age verification in more territories that now require it by law. These include the EU, Australia, Brazil and a bunch of US states. As much as we can, we’re hoping to follow what we did for the UK Online Safety Act since that has gone about as smoothly as something like this can go.
Site Events
Larrynachos is organizing Tankmas 2025 and KingCrowned is organizing Sketch Collab 2025, two big community projects that could use some top talent!
A lot of events have been added to the Calendar this past month so be sure to have a look.
Other Stuff
There were a handful of scam accounts sending people PMs last night. We will not reach out to you from random unknown accounts and you should be careful about any links sent to you by strangers. If you ever receive a weird message, clicking the flag button is the best course of action; it logs the message in our internal system for review and it helps us know the offending message is authentic vs a screenshot that could be doctored.
