Hey gang!

With the v5 upgrade coming soon and the insanity that will surely follow, I wanted to get the approval queue back to what it should be (5 – 7 days wait) instead of the 3 or 4 weeks it managed to get to. So over the last few days I have been spending hours going through the queue and approving tutorials and I am now back to 6 days woohoo! So currently there is well over 100 tutorials in the approved queue, which means there's enough in there to keep showing new tutorials on the main page every 30 minutes for several days.

So for anyone that was getting annoyed with the huge wait times to have your tutorials approved, I want to assure you that I was not ignoring the problem and I will be making a big effort to ensure it doesn't get backed up again. Ideally I would like the queue time to be only a couple of days at most.

Funny to think that there was a time where I was so excited to get one submission and would be approved within minutes! To get 5 tutorials submitted a day was like WOW!!! Now it's more like 105 a day. A huge thanks to everyone that takes the time to submit their tutorials to our database… we wouldn't have much of a site if it weren't for you webmasters and tutorial publishers submitting your content.

That reminds me, hope you guys dig the new Publishing upgrade on v5, it's pretty much 100% awesome with added awesomeness added for good measure. For anyone out there that doesn't have a site or enough bandwidth to publish large tutorials, don't forget you can publish and host them right here in our publishing system for FREE! And with the new site coming up, Publishing will be even easier to use and you get rewarded for them!

More to come on that very soon.

Thanks again everyone!
Dan

Well I for one am sick of looking at this layout and I'm ready to start playing with v5, what do you guys think? There's still stuff that needs to be added like the new topsites, but I'm thinking maybe we should just go ahead and change the site and start playing with the new toys. Nick is finishing up the ad system stuff so at least out advertisers can start using it right away, then I think we'll go ahead and launch.

What do you guys think? Should we go ahead and get this thing rolling more or less as-is and keep working on it on the fly?

Dan

Hey all,

I think it's about time for another little update on where things are at on v5 don't you? The Publishing system is just about done although it looks like the video integration will have to happen AFTER launch because we are hitting too many snags and it's slowing everything down development-wise. Nick spent the last week redoing the entire image directory structure as the old system was a wreck and I have asked him to try and finish publishing by this Monday. Once that is done we can finish the ad system and toplist and then final touchups on the forum skin and we should be good to go.

I'm really sorry about how long this is taking guys, no one is as stressed about it as I am to be honest. Once the site is live, then both NG and Chaos can work on various areas so the other features that won't be ready for launch will be up and running hopefully fairly quickly.

I am hoping this can all be wrapped up in 4 weeks or less, so cross your fingers. A huge thanks to all the die-hards that have stuck with us for so long, I promise it will be worth it soon enough!

Dan

What exactly is the deal with everyone named Tiago having a ridiculous amount of creative talent? Officially, 100% of the Tiagos I know are AMAZING artists or designers of some sort… ok so I only know 2 guys named Tiago, but 100% is 100%. So today I want you guys to meet the awesomeness that is Tiago Hoisel.

Tiago is a young man at 24 (he hits the quarter century mark in a couple of months) and resides in São Paulo, Brazil and is already developed some AMAZING graphical skills, producing some fairly jaw dropping caricatures and paintings. Please visit his personal site at hoisel.zip.net or you can check out his CGSociety page at tiagohoisel.cgsociety.org and bring something to clean the drool. I noticed he was recently featured on Digg, so he seems to be attracting a huge audience right now, and he deserves it. So congrats Tiago on all your current and future success, keep up the awesome work!

Enjoy all!
Dan

I admit… I am a bit of a nerd when it comes to certain things. I love my Sci-Fi movies, I love books about dragons, I drool over Transformer CGI goodness, and from time to time, I have been known to go apesh*t over VERY cool case mods. And today I found the best case mod ever! OK, well since that Doom case I lost my mind over a few years back…

I LOVE Wall-E and I love case mods… combine the two and you get one hell of a nerdgasm! Check it all out at acidcow.com and let the drool flow!

Dan