Hi all!
It’s been a month since we wrote our previous blog post about redesigning Mininova. We got an enormous amount of feedback (thanks everyone!), and incorporated much of this in our ongoing redesigning process. We’re happy to announce that a new version of our redesign is ready for beta testing at http://beta.mininova.org/.
A lot has been changed since the previous beta version, the main differences are a new color scheme, the navigation menu (back and improved at the top) and the advertisement spot (switched back from left to right).
Of course we would still like to hear your opinions on the redesign. If you spot any bugs, please let us know! Constructive criticism is always welcome 
On another note, many users asked us why the site is so slow lately. The answer is simple: the site grew very big last months (both in amount of torrents and popularity) and we couldn’t add more server power. But no worries: we decided to switch large parts of Mininova to another hosting provider. The new server farm will be opened early December, so stay tuned for a blazing fast Mininova soon!
Congratulations, looking forward to the speed-up. That’s the bane of popularity I guess.
COOL!!!
Looks so much better…
Just my thoughts but instead of having the top 10 downloaded torrents shown, would it be better it show the 10 newly added torrents?
I like having the top 10 torrents on the front page. I like to know what’s popular on any given day.
Nice… I thought it was a cool idea to have the navigation on the side, it changes the typical design we have all come to know and love. and sometimes change is a good thing
fyi, the beta site looks fubar in Firefox (but loads properly in IE). Obviously needs some work before it displays correctly in Firefox.
Good news about the new servers though. I look forward to seeing the site more stable, considering it’s been practically unusable the last couple of months due to frequent timeouts.
Keep up the good work!
havent checked out the beta design, but knowing mininova staff its prolly really good.. keep up the good work…
well i got ie version 7.0.5600.6, i will have to check to see if there is a newer version. but the site looks messed up. the title bars are like 75 pixels fat vert. and also on the category drop down it overlaps “jump to category” and category and “select one” is readable which should appear under and not be seen when the drop down is up.
btw i just loaded it once more for fun and the title bars are good again. it must just have errored out before
@zedhead: The strange look was a caching problem on the servers, not a browser problem.
The problem should be fixed now.
Hi there. One thing I’ve noticed in this beta relative to the last, is that in Opera 9.02, once you get past the home page, and delve into, say, “Yesterday” or “Show all of today,” the names of the torrents become *center* justified rather than the usual left justified that they always were in the old version.
Is the new-torrents-bolded feature coming back? I miss that.
Also, will there be a way to turn off the highlight bar that follows around the cursor? I could easily do without that, or maybe one that just bolds the text on a given line.
Anyway, looking good overall, thanks.
Well I like it. Haveing the ads on the right is much less distracting. And its very nice to see the top navigation back.
I like the new Search cloud. and how it has sligh colour codes. Very nice update.
The colours are a bit strong, but its eye grabbing, and it gets attention, so I guess it works.
I think the ‘Location:’ section should be right under the Navigation bar… haveing it under an ad is sligtly distracitng. And it makes it seam like the ‘Location:’ bar is an ad, at fist glance.
And a note about the servers….. So many sites Iv seen, that try to releve server stress by storeing parts on other servers… it usualy doesng go well, and ends in massive data loss…. but a speed improvement would be very nice.
Any chance of another upgrade of the current server?
thats nice to hear you’re getting the speed problem fixed soon, and nice job on reorganizing it all.
suggestion: add a dropdown for “Home” on the menu to include “Main” “Today” “Yesterday” for those of us who’d rather go strait to today or yesterday from another page, also the details page is missing “latest scrape” time like http://www. has, that way we know how accurate the ratio is, if its been updated recently
zedhead: you need your head examined, the site works fine in firefox, other than it constantly “loading” after the page has completely loaded appearance wise.
Kouga you can do so already using if you are registered (and you can set that in your personal settings! :).
Jaryth, we are already running on multiple servers (7 , depending on how you count :).
Really? Wow… I didnt even know lol. I guess it does work.
So how is it separated? Are like… the scripts and stuff on one… and the torrents scattered over the others?
Would it be possible to run some javascript on the client that hides/folds
unused categories based on preferences stored inside a stored cookie?
Not to start a flame war, but I tend to immediately want to look past the
Anime & Books catergories, and having some Javascript hide/fold the top10
torrents from these categories would improve my personal user experience..
I emphasize using Javascript, as I imagine this would put the least added
stress on the webserver to accomplish the same..
Greets, Tim
I am impressed with the revamp, nice look without going down the over-designed road. I like the layout being as simple to use as the previous design.
Keep up the good work, you are a credit to the p2p community.
@Rick: The “center” problem with the table should be fixed, thanks for reporting.
The “New torrents are bold” feature is coming back indeed.
Hello. I love Mininova (both current and new beta), however, the main 2 issues for me are teh speed (but this has alredy been addressed) and Accessability for Visually Impaired users such as myself.
I know that speech software works great on the tables for where the titles of the torrents are, but when it comes to the top navigation, its awful. I dont know if your famillar with speech software, but there are 3 main ones(Jaws, Supernova and Window Eyes) and all do not read the drop down menus (cagatery, community etc). it just seems to be slighly anoying. Rather than having ruining it for everyone in this so sighted world compared to us blindies, wouldn’t it be possible to have a CSS style switcher somewhere to maybe change the style of Mininova to text only?
Just a thought! Good luck with the site and new servers!
I personally prefer the current logo and favicon, they look like a little more “transparent”. The beta one is more “brutal” or too much visible.
Still on some torrent list pages, the date makes the items take two lines, due to the lack of place of my screen (1024). I would display it like this :
26sep06/12:54 instead of 26 Sep 2006, 12:54
I would even hide 06 if it is the current year, and show 05 or 01 if it is another year.
Merging the seed and peer columns into one, still displaying in green and blue :
seed/peer
6/15
Seed and peer would still be clickable to sort the list by peer or seed.
Mouse hovering is also a good feature, but I would prefer a more discrete thing, like just making the like a little darker gray instead of a kinda “negative” blue which hurt the eye is some way, don’t know for others but for me it just makes want to put my mouse cursor away from the list.
For the rest, it is a simple 10 out of 10.
/me starts dreaming about more categories (in books for example).
Best designed site ever. Nice work
Waiting for the server switch.
Also some black theme with stylish posted would be a nice goodie
very nice i hope it all go’s to plan
The jump to category menu should be “on click” not “on mouse over ”
The rest is good
the advertizin banner on top disapear once a menu is rolled .not beatiful.
the color you choosed for the ‘on mouse over’ torrents is a bit strong ,grey would be good .
James, I’m not sure what browser you are using but firefox for one has the ability to disable the css style to ‘none’ (even without the css file mininova is still very well browsable) and the category’s would also be displayed perfectly in a list.
If you are using IE there will probably be a plugin available to disable it (not sure though). Or perhaps even use a bookmarklet to disable the css style.
nice if you’d been a little more up front about the hassle, once you spent the time down loading
i would suggest that the link to a file in the default view e.g. ‘/’ or ‘/cat/2′ should not be full row selection, i would rather link the text, not the table
I think you should have top10 torrents top5 new torrents for every catagory, this way new torrents have a chance to get to become popular aswell
Hey!!! Great job guys!!! The “Simplicity” feel is back again!!! I really like this version as compared to the previous one, keep it up guys! The ads are at the right side! Awesome, that place is perfect and does not disrupt the visitors.
However I do have one comment. With respect to the “current” design, in the table where all the torrent details are listed. Is it possible that the “blank” spaces aren’t linked and only the WORDS are linked? Hope you get what I mean.
Besides this, everything looks perfect! I love it! Now you guys only have to work on the speed; glad that MiniNova will blazing fast soon!
I really really hate the “Jump to category” menu… its quite annoying that it pops up once you touched it with your cursor… but besides that its better than the “old” new mininova
Hmmm I think you should change the Torrents in the past 24 hours hours links. The fonts are too large and detract from the rest of the site. And they just look too plain and fugly =). And I also think you should change the color schemes on either the top portion or the banners for each section. There are too many shades of blue. =). Other than that, the new mininova looks great.
I think in book section there should be more subdivisions–at least general divisions such as fiction & nonfiction. Librarysystem could give some ideas how to organize.
Using the beta site to check out the torrent, i noticed (in firefox) that the nfo is on one realllly long line. Other than that, everything is great!
i think its appaling to hear ininvited noise simple because i browse your website - PLEASE get rid of it.!
pp8357: We have contacted our “ad company” several times before to get rid of it, and they did, but it keeps reappearing :\. We will contact them again (and hopefully get rid of it permanently :p)
I think the site is looking much better. I like the colour scheme too. Keep up the good work guys
The new beta looks great, easier to read for me.
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Three cheers to the staff at Mininova!
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Look forward to the new server hosting and the expected resolved speed problem.
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CA.
thankyou for all your hard work, this site is don over all other torrent sites purely for its user-friendlyness.
new beta looks abit brash for me but if it works better then great, fonts too big and colours too furious if you ask me!
any chance of getting the xbox section divided into xbox360/xbox sections? would save loads of eye-scanning time.
peace, love and fairycakes to all!
spoons uk
For the love of god, can the site admins get rid of that bloody advert that buzzes. The constant reloading of the pages and the noise is doing my head in and quite frankly makes it unpleasant to browse the site.
I’m not complaining about advertising in general, just that one bloody ad!
Yes, please stop that fecking annoying ZAP the mosqito advert, you’re just creating more bandwidth usage for yourself by having that on there because of all the refresh attempts by all the visitors to get a non-noisy advert.
We are trying to locate the ad, but none of the admins sees it (different country then you guys probably)! If someone that sees the ad could give us some more info (like the javascript tags), we can get rid of it!
Thanks
The server changes are great, everyone will be very grateful of the faster site, but i don’t see the need for the re-design, the site is brilliant as it is, everyone knows where things are and it looks slick. Why mess with perfection?
congratulations very good work perfectly thank you
Keep the adds on the right hand side! Looks a lot better.
Sites very quick.. Like the new design .. keep up the good work guys!
I love the new speed of the servers, excellent improvement.
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Just noticed something, on my Mum’s laptop the site looks bad, the adverts on the right overlap over end of the torrent line covering the seed & leechers bit.
The res of the laptop is 800×600, the main site looks fine because the firefox browser windows extends to the right with a scroll bar at the bottom, the beta doesn’t seem to have the scroll bar available at the bottom resulting in the overlap.
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Any chance this can be fixed?
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CA.
Sorry, there is a scroll bar at the bottom on the laptop, the ads on the right appear overlapping the size/seeds bit.
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CA.
Im HAPPY with the work, torrents are organised nicely. browsing is better. KEEP UP with the good work. specially i like abt, FAMILY FRIENDLY SITE. NO PORN, NO RUDE. keep up
Congrats on the new design. I especially like the way you have managed to improve it without really changing it. It feels very familiar while being superior to the current design, so I’d say it’s a job well done
On the technical side, I couldn’t help but notice that pages were not compressed in gzip, is that because of the increased CPU usage or any technical reason? If you are caching whole pages (for users who are not logged in I presume) then you could store them in their compressed form and then negate the CPU increase while preserving the bandwith decrease.
Something else, when I first visited the beta site the page took longer to be displayed because of the new scripts and images my browser had to load. Have you thought about using CSS sprites for all the gifs? (http://alistapart.com/articles/sprites/) Even if they are extraordinary small, each of them requires a new HTTP connection, which kind of slow down the process, especially since keep-alive if off.
One last thing, even if you don’t want to compress dynamic pages you may want to compress the CSS files and JS files with LightTPD’s mod_compress. If I remember correctly, it keeps a compressed copy cached so it shouldn’t increase the CPU usage at all.
HTH & keep up the good work!
Please change the colours and table border and make more space between navbar and ads
Thanks guys, I haven’t had that buzzy ad for a day (very unusual. lol.). So it would seem that you’ve ditched it.
I like the new design for the site, I also imagine that it’ll speed things up in general.
Good job, keep it up.
A potential bug that the beta site seems to share with the current site: if I type “grey” in the search box, it suggests me “grey\’s anatomy” (with a backquote before the ‘). Sounds like a case of double addslashes, possibly because of magic_quotes_gpc?
Looks more like a downgrade then an upgrade :(. Maybe I’m just not a big fan of big fonts.
It looks good and clear at least more than the older one, but in my opinion it would look even better if you round all the corners of the categories.
i’d like it better if you increase the most downloaded for film. because there is not enough slot for the main page to fit all popular download in movie/film
Forget my last couple of posts about the ads overlapping.
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Discovered my mum’s laptop has Ad-Block-Plus installed and the top adframe was removed, all was ok when I disabled it.
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CA.
Hi, like the new design,
couple of small things,
the mouse over color seems quite bright now. I’ve been up all night and it hurts my eyes
. can you tone it down a bit ?
my resolution is 1024 by 768 and the rows seem quite a bit thicker than on the normal mininova. can you reduce the font by 1 maybe ?
Thanks, looks nice apart from that.
Hey Jos, how about adding this link to the upload page, its full of public trackers that doesn’t require registration and has been updated every week for almost a year now.
http://www.openlitebt.com/trackerlist/
Like the new layout by the way. Keep up the great work.
Really good jobs guys. keep up the great work! I don’t think anyone can thank you designers enough.
Just a quick thingie here. The Beta version looks really good and the original has turned into c.r.a.p. and most of all I don’t know wether it’s my connection or what but cannot download from either site. Page not found 404 is all I get. Have used mininova.org a lot and I’ve been very pleased with it as it seems to be the best torrent site ever!
Its really slow at times,hope u guys sort it soon..
I’m new with bittorent and mini nova I dont know how all this work where can I have all the info.
thanks you for your help
Hello!
Unfortunately your current “Sponsored Link” contains code that makes my browser crash, each time I open mininova. Could you please tell your sponsor to correct the code within the add? This would be greatly appreciated!
Greetings
Another Doctor
@superdes
I don’t know… how about you check out the faq.
http://beta.mininova.org/faq
Somehow, people always seem to post the weirdest stuff in the weirdest spots…
please tell me the password for the movie harry potter5.
Its the best torrent web site,good an thks
I would love to see mininova as it is now. the new design aint that particularly great nor any unique from any many others.
mininova is a class download site , but why do u keep that flashing advert saying people have won a laptop , theres allways a catch , like the phonecall costs £100 quid or something , its annoying , please take it off ur site ur better than that . otherwise ive not got a bad word to say , your a top site ,,,,, madness of mac
whats wrong with the site, takes forever to come up now?