Almost two years after its launch, we have redesigned Mininova.
The new design is not completely finished yet, but you can see it in action at http://beta.mininova.org/.
We are planning to publish this new layout, which should make Mininova less complicated and easier to use, along with some new features/improvements. Some of these features are already implemented, like:
- Better “General information” of torrents.
- Redesigned Upload page.
- The download content of a torrent is shown as a folder tree (example). This tree view works best with modern browsers, which have CSS3 support. The icons we used are from the well-known Silk Icon set, made by Mark James.
- The website now uses the UTF-8 character set. That means, for example, that torrents titles can now contain Chinese characters. More interesting news is that pasting the contents of an NFO file in the torrent description works great now (example). Just paste the NFO characters from your favorite NFO viewer between [nfo] and [/nfo] tags in the description area on the Upload page.
Some sections, like the Advanced search, are not working (correctly) yet. These things will be fixed in the future. The beta page is more about showing the new design.
Before we update the main website, we want to hear your opinion about the new look. Please comment on this blog post to let us know what you think about it and what could be better. Please also report all bugs and errors you discover.
Nice One Mininova Your Always 1# For My Torrents ^^
Spend that time making it faster…we don’t care about a new design….
COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLl
i have enjoyed thank you mininova.org team
@Dude:
We’re working on that too. The steadily increasing popularity of Mininova forces us to expand our server park from time to time. We just installed a new slave search server last week.
Working on a redesign doesn’t mean we’re not looking at other issues, such as the capacity problem. Stay tuned for an even better Mininova
the site is running very slow (timed out all the time) I’ll check again on a better moment, looks good for what I did see though.
Starpg, don’t think the site needs more graphicals, it will make the site load even slower it does now.
nice one
more mininova les war
wicked design -> Mininova gonna hit the roof
It looks good, but even though Dude seems to be a prick. I’ve got to agree, Mininova a year ago was a hell of a lot faster than it is today. I’d love for it to be as fast. That’s what attracted me to Mininova (that and the good, clean, simple design). Thanks for all the hard work.
The Advanced Search at beta.mininova.org works.
Gezz Mini make it look halfway decent. I mean its very practical but as far as look and comfortability it stinks. Its just all robot like and texty. Put some graphics around like torrentspy, they have a color bar indicator on the left of torrents to represent their health.
First of all i must say you guys/gals do an AWESOME job in the torrent scene, so please keep it up! but…
Maybe the css didn’t load correctly both times i tried the beta version but man it looked ugly, maybe i am just used to the menus at the top and the adverts to the right, where they should be!
dude, we read from left to right, yes if you want us to see the ads more put them on the left, but it is just infuriating.
yes the general information is a great improvement, but apart from that please just leave the “design” alone, it is near perfect as it is.
The old design was very easy to navigate already, but the new one does add some nice touches. What would also be great is a quicklink accompanying the torrent titles that goes directly to the comments (and shows how many comments have left) too.
Thanks MN!
“Added: 137 days ago by Crafty83″ I like that, the ‘user’ is clickable, but now it goes to a 404, were will it go eventually?
And will it be possible to edit your own uploaded torrents? I would like that function
also I would like a function that makes it possible to list all the by me uploaded torrent.
Well Im likeing the new colours.. but I like the Shortcut bar at the top that the current layout has, and so much the side navigation.
However, over all i like it.
I’ll say,
the color scheme is a bit confusing, let’s stick to the b/w.
the category panel on the left is a good point.
the jump to category thing is unneccesary.
neither is the RSS thing.
and the show all of today, thing, I mean just show it all man.
And many of us dont’ really care by which components this site is powered, or other copyrights warnings.
IMHO, let’s just keep the original one, you are already doing great in the feature department, it’s time to focus more on the performance, esp search speed/accuracy.
thanks any way, for your great efforts.
Hey, you guys are redesigning, then make the website lighter, less images please, and if possible cut down on the massive flash ads…
Good idea, a fresh look will be good. Take the time to put up a “Newbie tutorial” to tell new people how to download using torrents. (I get this question often and it would be great to just point them to a link.)
@Crafty:
Thanks for reporting, the 404 error should be gone now. We are already working on a page which shows all torrents uploaded by you.
And making it possible to edit your own torrents is a good idea. It might be implemented in the future.
I think it looks pretty good, I just don’t like the general information for a torrent, I really liked the lines, it looked a lot more organized… also it makes it look like dozens of other sites. the old layout was more original!
just my 2 cts.
well to be honest, i like the old design. its non clunky, simple and extremly intuitive.
the new design seems to give me an eyesore…
well my two cents.
cheers.
Hi guys, thanks for Mininova.
Comments:
1) Please allow a way to disable the horizontal shadow bar that follows the cursor around. For me it’s unnecessary and very distracting (it also lags the cursor).
2) I mentioned this for the old site, but it still pertains: When I click into a torrent for more information, most of the time I’m going there to discover which tracker it is, since that’s usually a good way to tell if a particular torrent is fake or not. That information is still not on the main “General information” tab. Instead, you have to click again to Details (it should be there too, but please also put the tracker on the main information page).
2a) If you ever get into AJAX, the General information/Details/Comments etc tabs would be the perfect place to implement it, since a page reload wouldn’t be necessary when clicking between any of them.
3) How about a column next to the seeds/leechers columns on the main page indicating the number of comments for a given torrent (or just a general indicator that there are any comments)? This should also be a hotlink allowing direct access to the thread.
4) It still doesn’t look like gzip compression is turned on. Wouldn’t that help your bandwidth situation if it was?
5) This may fall under the parts of search not finished yet, but unlike the old site, search results take two lines each rather than one line. This is because of the date/time information in the “Added” column now having to wrap.
Thanks
hi mininova team,
really liked ur new design but i got some suggestions to make with regards to the design.
1)remove the underline from the side navigation bar
2)instead on mouse over displaying the sections in the drop-down make it onClick
will keep posting as soon as i come up with more.. but seriously this one looks too good
Sunil
this new layout kicks ass…BUT: i really prefer the advertisements on the right with the margin small on the left :S other than that, the colors are SWEET!
Mininova; the best site for any torrent
Looks much nicer than the standard one. Still a bit slow though
That looks good, definitely more easy on the eyes but i hope the slow loading times and constant time outs are also resolved
love the new tree view, lol and i just noticed the new integrated spell check! nice touch. as for the issue with it loading slow or timing out i think its the ads doing it, try to find a way to make ads load after the rest of the page does
suggestion: add support for image tags (offsite of course) [image=http://www.naruto-movie.com/img/top_2006_ima01.gif] for example
on the upload page, the file/type/name fields are spaced out too much, put em closer together like they were before, and add type Anime > Pokemon
please make it update the seed/peer numbers more often! i downloaded one that said 1 seed 0 peer, and it had been up for 18 hours, there was really 100 seeds and 40 peers when i downloaded it.
also can you make it so we can pick our own timezone, really annoying having to use GMT 1 all the time, i think thats what it said before you added the top-10 stuff a while back. i’ll bet a majority of users are in GMT-5 (new york time) or GMT-8 (california time)
Actually the things that Jos is talking about I’m working on right now :).
The updating of seeds and peers will also be fixed pretty soon.
nice layout….i shall try it out to see how it fairs…….keep up all the good work
Nice idea, rather spend it making MiniNova quicker to the users & try to do something about all the stupid uploads that have been appearing more & more over the past months..
Its always good to see a fresh look..BUT..Its no good having Maserati if it only does 25Mph
un lucru bun merge super
I love the simplicity of the actual site, the new one looks a little bit too flashy.
I really understand your goals but the ad in the new version are a little too aggressive / annoying. I’d rather prefer a DONATE button!.
Love your work.
thanks
franco
I don’t like the new layout. The current one is GREAT, if you take out the stupid ads, it will simple and easy to navigate.
Donations are the way to go. People prefer to donate some money instead of being bombed with ‘targeted’ ads!!
I agree with ian, I do prefer having the menu and advertisement on the right.
Personnal taste. Overall it looks nice but I wouldn’t mind being able to see how many comments have been posted from the front page.
The folder tree design in beta is great !! Very well done.
But the blue white color scheme for torrent list is making it difficult on the eyes. The old design [b&w] was soft on the eyes.
From where did you guys pull the new dark blue color? IMO, the color in ”
mininova > Home” bar of old MN was cool.
Can the Width of the advt in beta be reduced to the width of the old ? Only the height of the ad will increase,but there will be more width for tor list. And yes, I agree with Carl, I do prefer having the menu and advertisement on the right.
wow.. the new design looks rocking!
much much friendlier design, easy to see new torreents than the other website, looks gr8!!!
THUMBS UP!!
Your search engine is broken again. look in today and see ncis 406[VTV] then search on ncis for same and sort in date order.. not there..bugger
I like the overall look and feel, but:
1. The advertisement that floats on the top left has got to go. If the page is too wide and needs to scroll horizontally, so you scroll it to the left, in Firefox the ad appears over all the content on the top left of the page so you can’t read it. See here for an example:
http://beta.mininova.org/sub/51/added
I really like mininova, but if this thing sticks around I’m out of here. (I could maybe deal with it if it was on the right side.)
2. I’d also like to see the number of comments a particular torrent has in the list view.
3. The tree view looks nice, but I think it’s actually a little less usable for big torrents, for example if you compare this:
http://www.mininova.org/det/471042
…to this:
http://beta.mininova.org/det/471042
It seems easier to get an overview of the information from the old page. However, I’d be completely in favor of the new one if you added some javascript to it so I could click on folders to expand or collaspe them.
Thanks for asking for feedback. Hope this didn’t come off as harsh.
‘Torrents uploaded by crafty83 (6 torrents)’
Thanks guys!
When clicking on the user name,
(too bad I uploaded 90% anonymously)
half of mininova is just SPAM. can you do something about that???
nice layout if you ask me, though a few things look just like stuff I have seen on other torrent sites like the pagination style. my conclusion is that its nice but not original. You should keep yourselves busy with performance instead of layout. my 2 ct’s
1.Yea, http://beta.mininova.org/sub/51/added needs horiz scrolling!
3. Comparing
http://www.mininova.org/det/471042
…to this:
http://beta.mininova.org/det/471042
The new folder tree rocks! Otherwise those 500 file was simply a chunk of unreadable text.But the folder structure makes it damn easy to grasp the file info!!! Thumbs UP.
One more thing.You may want to consider providing the login field in the first page itself instead of having to click the login link. The login & pass textfield can be provided on a single line at the top of the page. How about allowing logged in users to allow customizing the color of the site?
Well looks good but “Most popular torrents of the last 24 hours | today | yesterday” its kinda of tooo big
I like the new folder view, its much easier to understand the contained files, what I do not like is the color scheme used, looks way to much like another torrent site. Other then that it’s all thumbs up!
lame, just keep it as it is, the color are not attractive and the menu is less than adequate. and there is more ads
A new design is welcome as soon as it spends less time in loading the page contents.
WOW!!! The new design looks very nice and much cleaner looking. Good job!!!
“New torrents on today are Bold” doesn’t seem to work in the Beta (logged in and the option is checked). Tested in FF and Opera with Javascript enabled. Works on non-beta site.
Definitely a step backwards in terms of design. What were you guys thinking?
Actually the current design is nice enough… It looks pretty neat and simple.
But yeah, if you guys think it’ll benefit us all, proceed with the change!
Keep me surprised when I return from my Exams!
Good luck and thanks for everything, admins.
Nice & smooth…..better than ever!!
Keep up the good work dudes!!
Thnx for everything…
um… i prefer the old design… it was alot cleaner… although the old one did need a bit of touching up, i think it was a lot nicer than the new one… but that’s just my opinion…
nooooooooo - Not the best design I’m afraid. No real tangible improvement so it appears to me to be change for changes sake. Its a backward step as far as design goes but, anyway, forget design and start working on speed!!!!
Looks very good, easier to read and see the links.
CA.
I don’t like the bar on the left side, it takes up too much space, move it to the top!
for the record: I love everything about mininova. The fact that you use 100% valid XHTML and CSS makes me happy, PHP with nice URLs makes me happy, lighttpd makes me happy, I mean really, mininova is like the perfect example of a website done right (albeit with a capacity issue - you must construct additional pylons).
Personally I have never had a problem with the current layout, but I like the new one too.
Having played with the new design for about 10 minutes, I’ve decided the advertising on the left side is a horrid idea. Why? Well it looks horrible on lower res screens (10×7 and lower), and trying to intergrate ads better will get you many more clicks.
Just make the bar between the navigation tree and the download link go all the way across, and let the torrent info fill the entire width of the screen.
I agree with some of the other posters that the new look isn’t as good as the old one. The adverts on the left follow you down when you scroll and they aren’t even in English! And some of the text is too large.
OTOH, I like the Folder tree idea. That’ll be handy.
very good work guys, is a lot better on the eyes and no doubt it will run quicker
I really dont like it…
On a good note
i like the look of the graphics, colors are good … helps make it stand out more and easier
Like the fact all the programing is valid… (know html but taking xhtml/css class and if it dont validate you fail the assignment)
but on the other hand….
cant stand the add on the left
the menu bar i think sucks being top to bottom … i really love the left to right its just more user friendly
my great idea is take the new layouts graphics/colors/css/programing and implement it into the current look. Seems most people like the current look more anyways… but i know usually with all the work you have done … your not gonna really listen to the users and go back to the old way…. but hopefully you will.. i feel like this change is a torrentspy.com thing… they did a beta and everybody that commented hated like 99 percent and they went ahead anyways…
Hello, and thanks for keeping such a great torrent search engine running. My first idea on how to improve Mininova is the way it presents information on torrents. I would like to see the “General Information” tab and “Details” tab merged into one.
The rest of my ideas are about keeping Mininova the way it used to be, I think the webpage was great before so why change it.
Second, I liked the previous horizontal way of showing the links, now they are in a block on the left of the screen. Please revert back to the old behaviour.
Third, please place the advertisements on the right side of the webpage again.
The jump to category menu could be simply changed to just a horizontal list of links, it’s easier to navigate the webpage this way and will work better on old web browsers.
Thanks again for making such a great torrent search engine.
Dude great change … your website is allways my first for torrents … keep the great work…
I already said it but, I think that a single bar menu Is more compact that a column which forces the whole page to be less large for at least 3cm. And plus it would look like tabs.
I know it is less common for the eye to read each link in a bar, but adding an icon on them or bolding the first letter/coloring the text can fix it.
Or maybe it is for the ads just below that column to be nearer on the user’s eyes. If it is well I can’t give any advice
l like it but i think if you but a part for ps2 and dvd movie and anime covers it,s cool and i thnk it well make the web becom mush pupiler and more ppl well come that waht i think thx …..
B.D
i like the font, i can scan faster trough the torrents now
gj.
Hi Guys. This is the most sexual torrent site in the world. I always go to your site first. Thank you every one at mininover, keep up the awesome work.
as one of the shouters said this is actually a step backwards, the current design is the ideal example of simplicity, in fact i noticed many other website were copying it. if it gets too cluttered with adds and links irrelevant to torrents that might just turn us off
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Keep it simple and light blue!
I don’t know, guys. I think I prefer the simplicity of Mininova as it is now. I think readability is better on the current Mininova.
Also, I don’t know about the need for NFO graphics. Less is more, sometimes, and it’s nice just to have a few plain text words describing a torrent. The title is the most important, descriptive part of the torrent anyway. (Then again, looking at this http://beta.mininova.org/tor/469758 - it is rather nice!)
It would be nice if you could display the bitrates for MP3s so that we can see what quality of audio we are downloading.
Other than a slightly different colour scheme and fatter layout, I can’t see anything hugely beneficial about the design. There’s certainly more ads anyway, and the banner ones are a little obtrusive.
The old one’s just fine, if you ask me. Work on the performance and speed end (such as quicker for newly uploaded torrents to show up in search, more frequently updated seed/peer info) - that’s what most Mininova users are concerned about, I think.
Hell yea this is my 2nd fav site in the whole world
Nice downloads
Anything to get rid of that stupid bug-zapping commercial window on the right. Man that was annoying. Appreciate that the content of the adverts is out of your control, but at least you’ve replaced it with a far less intensive Google advert window.
Mininova still best. torrent site. ever.
well… using mininova for almost two years….. comparing both desings….
i love the new one….
much easier to use and i like the grphic image of the seeders and the lechers….
nice job mininovateam……..
very good design . i like this . simple as before but very useful and beautiful than before .
thanks
Its sux,i hate the ad on the left the scrolls
Irrok, get an adblocker and remove it, quit bitching.
it is a little brighter and fresher, but i don’t like that the ads column when it is on the left side.
keep the ads on the right, please!!!!
and continue to enjoy us you are good
SHIT !!!
Big thanks for your critics and suggestions everyone. To summarize, we could say:
1. The website doesn’t load quickly enough. We are working on that.
2. The advertisement on the left of each page is definitely not a good idea. It should stay on the right side.
3. As a result of this, there is no place for a vertical list of navigation links Since navigation on the right side of a page is not intuitive, these links should be in a horizontal bar, like the old (current) layout.
4. Some people suggested that the colors of the data tables are too blue-ish, which is irritating. I will try to find a better color scheme (with decreased color saturation) for the tables.
We will try to fix these things in the next update of beta.mininova.org.
There are a couple of other good suggestions, which might be adjusted in the future. Any further comments are welcome. We try to find the perfect layout
under upload section… no rule against uploading fake torrents?
I hope under this new layout and new fixes you made on your site, their will be zero fakes on the site. Sites like newtorrents.info has zero fakes on it, I’m hoping I dont need to double check torrents before downloading anymore from this website, otherwise your guys doing great job.
nice! can’t wait for it to be finished.
Hrrm, it certainly looks nice, but the search option still could use a better default sort order, either one stored in cookies or maybe ‘added’ or seeds:peers ratio as default sort order. That would be more useful than the seemingly (or is it lexical?) sort order.
Essentially i have to click on on of the columns every time i did a search, either ‘added’, ’seeders’ or ’size’
@ Random: looks fine in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 with no problems, i don’t see where you can possibly have that problem, tho it would be nice to keep the menu static like how frames work, dunno if you can do that in CSS or not, I’m no expert on that
menu does look better stretched across the top like it is currently, but what id like to see, is have Mininova title, search, and the menu just stay put, while the rest of the screen scrolls, ads would look better on the right side instead of the left
sorry but i love the old design you could go to size added catagory quickly without having to go through all torrents. like the old like supernova thnks my 2 cents
Get rid of the half naked chicks! We dun want a porn site! We want a Torrents site
Excellent, when is this new design being uploaded to the site?
Nice job!!! keep up the good work
Nice layout, maybe you could also make a dark layout from the same template, so people can choose wich one they want..
gr’s
sexy.
the categories menu should close itself a bit faster, though.
the current version is better IMO. your time would be better spent optimizing the database and fixing the search on the current mininova.
Hi is there a way I can put a banner on the website for my online business…
Please let me know…
Thanks.
spend some time improving this new design i’m not feeling it
Still very user friendly, but not overly flashy.
Not sure this is the best design ever…it is different, but not really better, cleaner or easier to use than the current one.
Links to comment numbers would be nice (or even inline ajax comments, although server load would be a problem), as crappy torrents tend to have more and it would make it easier to spot them.
There should also be an option to show all of today ONLY for a particular category, many times I only want to see one and am forced to load the lot. I am sure this will influence the server load.
just my two cents
I like the new one, the jump to category is really good, tired of scrolling. One thing I would like to see is the most seeds in each category. For example: I am trying to get ideas on new music, what are people most dl. I click on Seeds on music and it always shows most seeds of all categorys, not just most seeds of music. It only works if you search for something special and click on seeds. Still love the site, my nr 1 torrent site.
maybe it’s just me but when i do a search… say “studio 60″
i’m looking for the tv show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
it first lists them alphabetically which IMO is silly it should be by date first as we are mostly looking for new stuff posted.
also if with the likes of “studio 60″ you hit category to arrange them by category it then puts the results into group subsections like BOOKS MOVIES MUSIC SOFTWARE TV SHOWS
But the newest results are still not at the top of the subsections…. so i click the ADDED button in the TV SHOWS subsection which i think should just rearrange just the items in the subsection but instead it rearranges the whole lot of sections by date so they are all mixed up again.
That’s the only real problem i have with the site… but it is a biggie a right pain if there are loads of results and your trying to refine them… i know i could use advanced search..but it still should be possible in standard search
Mininova, i understand what your goal is but, come on! When an ad on mininova ranges from $300 to $8,500 (http://site.www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?opid=23253&afsid=1)
Cant you focus on the main issues. People dont give a shit about site layout, ffs u could use plain HTML and people would still come here. Focus on the main issues. dont waste our time with beta designs, we simply dont care.
it’s very nice, but i’d prefer not to see advertisments with naked (or with women or men).
PLEASE DONT CHANGE IT
oink
Very nice, Number 1 website for torrents, Very nice design
Loving the new colour scheme and RSS feeds but can you please move the column ads to the right hand side. It makes it much easier as we read from left to right. Thanks!
Also, would be awesome to have a section or box like http://www.torrentman.com on here. Mininova’s such a large site I think this feature would be much loved for the popular searches.
Oh and as said above, would be lovely to have a little column between Added and Name on the main page for the comments. It doesnt need to be huge, just a (0),(7),(24) etc to dictate the number of comments and be clickable to go to the /com page.
Maybe some sort of rating system? You can rate a torrent between 1-10 depending on quality or whatever. Can help for people to make decision to download or not as not everyone uses the aforementioned comments section. Maybe maybe, if comments were on the actual /tor page at the bottom of the torrent info, that would be more useful and more users would bother using them instead of having to browse to another page??
Hmm Yea, I would very much love to have General information, Details & Comments all together on one page under each other than have to browse different pages. This saves time and makes it easier when browsing lots and lots of torrents. You have all the info you need at a glance, perfect!
Torrent Upload page looks the same.
For movie uploads why not require a IMDB url to be supplied or it goes into an uncategorised/misc section. Looking at new movies on Mininova I spend half the time in another browser window looking up WTF the titles are. Also the existing categories apart from “childrens” are completely useless and I doubt anyone uses them for browsing.
Also some generic categories for TV uploads would be useful in additon to the existing “sports related”, ie: documentaries, science, history, news, sci-fi, comedy, etc. For those shows without their own category.
Looking Good, Keep it up