A year and a half after first launching MP3Scene we are extremely proud to present version 2 of the site.
We had a tremendous first year, amassing an incredible archive of files, nfos, images and more, thanks to many contributors who have reached out to help our cause. When we first launched this site we were just a few friends scraping together files that we had collected over many years. We were forced to make certain compromises in order to launch, sacrificing features that we would have liked to include. Within a year we had expanded our circle of friends, including talented programmers. This enabled us to make a start on the new and improved version of MP3Scene, adding in features we wanted as well as those requested by the community.
Take a look around and you'll probably encounter many of the new features, but here is a summary of the main ones:
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Design - The essence of the original site has been retained, but tweaked in many places. We have a shiny new logo, have utilised space better in the right-hand column, split out the navigation, made the homepage more useful, among other things.
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Site-wide search - This was something we have wanted since launch, and gave us the most technical headaches. It's not perfect in its current form; we will be looking to improve the sorting of results and add pagination in the next few weeks.
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Unknown release dates - 0000-00-00, 1998-00-00, etc are now valid dates (previously we were forced to use 1998-01-01, due to a limitation in the system)
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Original nfo filenames - Many people requested this: previously we avoided duplicate filenames by hashing filenames, we now have a new solution that retains the exact filenames of nfos.
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Improved releases search - the last releases search box was far from perfect, the new search system is far more usable
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Group website mirrors - we have added mirrors of several old scene group websites to the links section
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Timeline - A new design and extra content
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Articles - The design of the articles section - which you are currently looking at - has been improved to better accommodate the content of the section. We've also added Disqus comments to each article.
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Contact - We can now accept attachments (up to 1mb), making it easier to send contributions
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Glossary - A new section that includes definitions of commonly-used terms
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SFVs/Nukes - SFVs on the previous site were few and far between, and didn't really fit with the goals of the site, so we made a collective decision to omit them from the new site. Nukes were also rarely used and although they will still appear on applicable release pages, they will no longer appear in the table view of releases, allowing us more space for release names.
We have also made a huge number of changes behind the scenes; in fact, we have completely replaced the old system with a new, custom system that better caters to our needs and reduces the amount of manual labour required to add new content.
Of course, there are still a few bugs here and there, and more will most likely surface over the coming weeks. We welcome any feedback/bug reporting, just leave us a comment below, or use the contact page to get in touch.
We hope you enjoy the new MP3Scene, and as always we welcome new contributions, see here for a detailed run-down of what we need.
-The MP3Scene staff