First off, thank you for all the kind words about NG this weekend and thank you everyone who has become a Supporter!
On Friday morning, kaptainkristian (YouTuber) posted an amazing video about Newgrounds that summed up the site better than I've ever been able to. It was a top trending video on YouTube and got a lot of attention on Twitter as well as hitting the front page of Reddit.
I made a post about the video and emphasized how much NG depends on support from the community, in particular subscriptions to our Supporter system. Our supporter count began to skyrocket as fans old and new were coming in and getting inspired to help NG.
Then the real difficult question came up... Do we still launch our April Fools gag at midnight? We had a gag planned where NG switched to 100% renewable solar energy but it involved a message popping up, telling people they were running out of power and asking them to aim their monitor at the sun. The screen then faded to black and shut down the site. The original incarnation was actually super trollish and would have rendered the site mostly useless for the day. @PsychoGoldfish put some quick changes in place, adding an actual "April Fools!" message and a cookie so it wouldn't happen endlessly. We probably should have planned it that way all along and the end result didn't seem to make anyone too upset. Who knows though, maybe we lost tons of potential new fans. Maybe it gained some too though.
We also use a word filter whenever April Fools rolls around, so anyone who tries to acknowledge the joke ends up making a bunch of weird references to the theme - in case you noticed lots of people talking about revolutions of the earth, basking in the glory of the sun yesterday. The filters don't get baked into the text in the database so all those posts are back to normal and boring now.
ANYWAY this post is mostly to bump my Praise the Sun post off the front page. I'll have more news in the coming days, as well as the Best of March.
Oh and to answer some common questions from people who haven't been to the site in a long time:
1) You may noticed some pages of a textured design while others have a more flat design. The flat design is our new "transitional" layout, meant to look a lot like the old layout but with new HTML and CSS that adapts well to mobile screens. We're rolling this out one page at a time instead of trying to do one giant update, like the massive 2007 and 2012 redesigns.
2) No NG doesn't depend solely on Flash like the old days and we have adapted to MP4 video (with an html5 player) and html5 games. We even created free software that does best-ever SWF to video conversion, so that we can preserve classic content and make it work on mobile. Most of the animation you see on YouTube has been using this all along.
3) Yes the Audio Portal does still use an SWF audio player but has an alternate for mobile and will be getting replaced when those pages switch to the new layout. If you want to see something cool, go here and click the thumbnail for the first song on the list. It will play in-page with an html5 player and will play through the entire list, even on your phone. If you follow musicians on NG, you can do the same thing on your audio feed.
Thank you again to everyone who has become a Supporter! This sort of response fills me with hope for the future of NG. I've added a $2k stretch goal for April to cover the Pico Day prize money, the same as last year but this year we might actually hit it, which would be awesome.
