“It’s Not OK To Be White” – Sankaku Complex Renewal

Change has finally come to Sankaku Complex’s decade-old design, sweeping away a tangled morass of code and browser wrangling hacks in favour of something so elegantly simple even a smartphone user could be expected to comprehend it – but change doesn’t always come easy, nor find itself welcome at first, as so many have been at such pains to point out.

A number of interface enhancements and feature additions were already planned to follow the redesign, but naturally as Sankaku Complex’s guiding principle was always satiating the mob in the most tasteful manner possible, the brutally kind feedback received provided more than enough impetus to make some rapid additional course corrections.

Most notable of these of course is a return to the colour scheme of yore, but with some further development time a user-selectable light and dark theme selector should ensure all possible tastes and levels of retinal sensitivity are accommodated, just as they already are on the suite of Sankaku apps.

It will also be made clearer that the new look front page accommodates all of the features of the old pages (most notably that popular and recent post listings reside on their own indexes now, linked from the front page – but evidently not clearly enough).

The main technical difficulty reported by users has been trouble logging on – hopefully some further server-side fixes will obviate these troubles, but in the mean time, all account-related issues reported have so far been fixed by clearing site cookies and browser cache, and logging in again (this should apply only to issues relating to the www.* subdomain).

Those wondering about the state of half of the site’s forums also need not fret – a major renewal of these is also underway, with the forums to return in the near future in a revitalised and unified state, instead of continuing with the unnecessary confusion and complexity of several different account systems and a variety overlapping functionality.

As it is intended for all parts of the site to share the same logon system, so the return of the forums will coincide with these upgrades.

So far, torch-wielding users have helpfully listed most aspects of the new design which could be considered buggy, subpar or unclear, but any and all comments and suggestions are quite welcome as ever. Some may even be acted upon.

The near future should see several announcements of Sankaku offerings, including the open beta for the next generation web app intended to eventually supplant Sankaku Channel, several immensely useful updates to the site itself, as well as a final solution to the advertising question.