Multi-Tag Search Update
People sometimes complain that our tag search doesn’t return items that only contain all of the tags listed. For example, if you search the Blue Knight and Green Knight tags, you get art that has just the Blue Knight and art that has just the Green Knight, vs only art that has both.
What they don’t know is we do have this functionality; you need to open Advanced search and click the “Exact Match” checkbox. It’s not very obvious.
Today we added a shortcut to make all that easier. If your tag search contains more than one tag, you’ll now see a toggle to “Require all tags” in the results.
Other News
Last week was the Too Many Games Meetup! Check out that post for pics and browse the TooManyGames2023 tag for individual blog posts about the event.
July 11th is the Christmas in July Collab Album deadline.
July 18 is the ”Loss” Art Collab entry deadline.
July 21 is the Slumberland Music Collab deadline.
July 22nd is the Love Me NG Art Contest deadline.
@ninjamuffin99 is hosting a Toronto Theater Meetup on July 29th!
August 3rd is the Underdog Audio Contest entry deadline.
August 7th is the House Music Collab deadline.
August 15th is Clock Day!
August 20th is the Pass the Mic Collab deadline.
August 26th is Robot Day!
August 31st is the Bar Hopping Art Collab entry deadline.
This past weekend Twitter had a rate limiting fiasco that served as another reminder that things don’t always get better or stay the same, sometimes they get worse. Not worse for NG, though, because some new artists gave the site a try!
Twitter will likely be fine but I do think moments like this are a good reminder that a diversity of platforms is important, both to not have all your eggs in one basket but also to promote competition that will make platforms better.
This past decade has felt a bit unfair because large companies dedicated a lot of money to get as big as possible as quickly as possible, making it hard for “realistically budgeted” sites like Newgrounds to compete, or even survive.
The bill has come due for big platforms and that’s a big part of why things are getting worse. Reddit recently made a mess with access to their API as part of a pathway to profitability, while Twitter is also trying to reduce expenses and find more ways to get people to pay.
Newgrounds isn’t immune to this, either; I’ve spent the past decade begging people to become Supporters. I do feel less pathetic knowing one of the richest people in the world is stuck doing the same now.
Whenever events like this happen, people on Twitter start talking about alternatives and their pros and cons. The biggest complaint about Newgrounds is that we don’t have a mobile app, which will remain a complaint for the foreseeable future.
The second biggest complaint is that we don’t have true multi-image support in the Art Portal, which actually is coming as part of the big Art Portal update that has been in development all year. The path has been full of surprises but it remains close! We wanted to migrate the Art Portal into the project system before expanding functionality, which is a lot of what has made this project so big. Here's how it looks on @PsychoGoldfish's dev server:
Happy 4th!
