While it's fine to dislike the things we've worked very tirelessly on for the past 9-ish months, but at the very least I think people should understand decisions we've made. Here are some complaint topics I've seen and why we did things this way:

Front Page is covered with art
This seemed appropriate to us, considering this is an art site. The front page is the primary entry-point to discovering great new art, and by enlarging the quantity of art seen on the home page we're making sure that once a person submits a new deviation it'll have exposure for a significantly longer period of time than on the previous channels-style home page. The old channels-style home page was nice to look at and was more stream-lined, but it severely cut down on the amount of time a new piece of artwork was noticeable. We felt we had a commitment to our artists to do what we can to show their work off as much as possible, and we felt this new home page was a great way to do it.

More Menu is Confusing
Actually it's not. You just have to customize it to fit your specific interests. We learned that not everybody is into the Chat, and maybe not everybody is into News, etc etc. With the More Menu everybody can decide what their primary nav should look like, thus making their dA experience more personal and enjoyable.

Userbar at the top of the page
We wanted the navigation and especially the search box to be directly connected to the primary content of the site, and the userbar was seriously in the way. So we moved it. We also feel it makes more sense at the very top, since the content within the userbar is tertiary to the rest of the content on any given page.

Colors are too bright
They're not too bright, they're just brighter. It's going to be quite a contrast from the colors of v5, yes, but you'll adjust to it soon enough and probably enjoy them. There is also a methodology to the color usage, but I won't go into all of that.

Message Center looks like gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, some mail app
We discussed the Message Center a lot and deduced that the messages most people get around here are, in effect, a lot like emails...which are also just messages. There is no difference between comments/replies and email, conceptually speaking. They're all just messages that you either respond to or ignore. We also wanted our Message Center to be familiar to everyone, which is why we took cues from email apps in an effort to make everything more intuitive.

Message Center can only show me a few items at a time
I've been seeing this comment a lot, and it's clear people haven't tried clicking on the left-hand menu at all. All messages are sorted based upon context, to make it easier to find the types of messages you want to respond to. Just click on a left-hand menu item to go to an appropriate section, or click on the "View More" button listed directly underneath any grouping of message types in the "All" area.

Secrets of the Message Center
We haven't built a full tutorial on the tricks we built into the MC, but here are some you might find useful:
- Folders: Create a new folder and drag anything into it. It's that basic.

- Shift-Clicking: Want to select more than one message? You can click on the exterior outline of one, hold Shift on your keyboard, then click on another one further down the line. It'll group them all together, making them easier to drag into a folder or elsewhere.

- Click-Drag: Click somewhere, and drag a selection box onto any messages to manipulate them similar to the shift-clicking I mentioned.

- Fast X-clicking: The (X) button on the top-right of every message is a fantastic thing most people haven't caught on to. A method $spyed likes to use to go through his devwatch is to focus on the top-left thumbnail and just leave his mouse hovered over the associated (X). He clicks through very quickly and can get through hundreds of deviations in just minutes flat.

- Remove all Messages: There is a button on the bottom-right of every grouping of message types. Click there and then click on the appropriate pop-up menu item.

Message Center drops changes
We're going to work on this, actually. You'll notice after you do something in MC, there is a little "saving" box in the top-right corner of the page. It's literally saving your changes. Let it finish before you close Message Center.

V5 was better
Actually it was worse. Ask any of the developers who worked on both V5 and V6, and they'll tell you V6 is built on a far more stable and lighter framework. New and old users have also found it easier to find new artwork, which was part of the point.
Also, there is no way we're presenting an option where people can use either v5 or v6. We've completely rebuilt the database, so v5 is gone and wouldn't even function properly on our new system anyway. Allowing such a thing would block the progress and evolution of this site. Please give v6 a week of frequent use before you decide it's garbage.

Front Page isn't customizable enough
Try digging into a section or category on the home page, and then go someplace else on the site. Go back to the home page and you'll find that it remembers where you were last. Some people prefer to only see certain types of art, which is why we did that. The old Channels area didn't do anything different than this, anyway. There are essentially two primary methods of sorting art: date submitted and popularity. Both the channels page and the new home page use these sorting methods, the only difference being the method by which they're displayed.

Being a Subscriber isn't worth it anymore
We admins have seen many instances of this opinion since v6 launched, and it's understandable. One of the biggest features of being a subscriber in v5 was a message center that included thumbnail previews. We decided to give that feature to everybody because it directly benefits the art. What I mean is, being able to see thumbnails means you'll be more likely to click on artwork or simply react to it in a way you otherwise wouldn't if the thumbs weren't there. Our modus-operandi for v6 is to give the community what they need (subscriber or not) to view artwork in the best way possible. That meant giving this particular feature to everybody. However, we have a huuuge list of new subscriber features we're planning, and I promise being a subscriber will be more enticing than ever before.

The site is slow
Yes, it's been a bit slow these last few days, but for a reason. Our system is importing and formatting billions (with a b) of messages into the v6 Message Center. That means things are running at full capacity. I don't know when it'll be done, but when it is there should be a speed boost.
You might also be assuming the site is running slowly on the home page, but in actuality the site simply loads more thumbnails than previously. With v5 you'd see an average of 20 thumbnails on the home page, whereas with v6 you're sure to see more than that.

What about (insert seemingly ignored page/feature here)?
Sleek, aka v6 was our #1 priority over the past 9 months. The reason is because it would provide a much more stable and functional base upon which we could implement new features and rebuild existing ones. Things like the Friends system, Groups, etc etc are going to be worked on harder than ever before, because deviantART as a company is more efficient and focused than ever before. We're also planning ahead better than ever before, too. The More menu is a great example of this future planning: it's a navigational structure with a sort of "app buffet" that we can put new apps into. In other words, we can build new things and toss them in there on the fly. Anyone tried using the Wallpaper app, for example?

I can only see 3 icons on my nav
This is something we're still sorting out. If you've got a 1024 screen resolution, your nav is only built to show 3 icons at once. We're considering other options to expand the amount you can see at any given time, but until we get it perfected please consider removing any elements from your nav that are repeated in the userbar drop-down menu (that arrow next to your username). There is intentional redundancy there so profile-specific options are always accessible.

Not enough contrast/color-blind people have issues
We've been aware of this for a little while, and we have some plans to adjust colors down the road slightly to help those without typical eyesight. We're still discussing exactly how to modify colors, though. We released v6 despite these issues simply because it's important to get the majority of our community using this new version successfully.

V6 doesn't work in my older version of IE
We did a lot of cross-browser testing to ensure v6 was accessible to everyone, but the reality is that IE is really poor when it comes to support for common web technologies. This is especially true with older versions of IE (6, and below). I've seen some people reporting that Message Center completely doesn't work, and this is likely because of our drag-and-drop technology (although I'm still conferring w/ our developers on this). One option is to built an alternate version of Message Center sans technologies IE doesn't support, but this isn't a very desirable option considering more and more of our users have switched over to more updated versions of IE or Firefox.

Nothing makes sense anymore
We did a bit of focus-group testing with non-members of the site as we were building this, and we also released it to our Beta Testers months before we released it publicly. Beta Testers were especially useful, as they made a commitment to using the new version for a considerable amount of time. The result was that they made a ton of suggestions, reported a ton of bugs, but overwhelmingly found everything easier to use. Ask any beta tester, and you'll likely find that they wouldn't dream of going back to v5. Also please consider that all of the people who built this new version used it. When things didn't make sense to us, we fixed it. That said, this is still a work in progress, so more changes and modifications are likely to come.

Notes doesn't look different. All you did was change the colors.
The notes system has always worked well, so we didn't feel it needed to be updated as crucially as the main Message Center did. This doesn't mean we've neglected it, though. In fact, we already have the design for it done. We simply wanted to update the Message Center first, since it's used far more frequently than notes are. Give us some time and we'll update notes.

One last thing to consider!
You probably aren't aware of this, but the implementation of v6 has actually cost us money. Despite what you may want to believe, this site has to make money in order to keep running. One of the ways we make money is through advertising, even though as a designer I loathe it because it invades otherwise beautiful layouts. Anyway, we've taken a hit on the amount of advertising that can run through this site because of the new Dynamic Browsing functionality on the home page. Long story short, we decided to make less money simply so our community could have a better browsing experience. I'm not going to get sentimental, here, but how many sites do you know that would willingly and knowingly reduce the money they make just so their members could more fully enjoy their site? Myspace just went through a redesign, and all the redesign did was maximize advertising space at the expense of its users. We could do that too, but we won't. We exist to support art, and anything that gets in the way of that has to die.

I'll keep working on this as I see different complaints, but as of right now this covers everything I've seen...in terms of logical complaints, at least.


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