Table of Contents – Changelog


  • 2020 – October – 2021 – October
    • [ANNOUNCEMENT] Firstly, this update to the changelog has taken way too long, we really apologize, but we’ve done a lot and you’ve probably noticed.
    • [ANNOUNCEMENT] Giveaways have also been silent for far too long, the planning is that we will start again at the latest January 2022, but the expectation is slightly earlier than that for now. We’re going to do this a little differently to be able to reward people in a better way.
    • [NEW] Archive – We have a total overview of all items we post on a yearly basis, neatly split per month (with the exception of the releases themselves) See; https://www.nintendoreporters.com/en/archive/ 
    • [NEW] Check it out – Once you’ve read an item, you’ll get a subtle option to check out another item.
    • [NEW] Extra Site sound toggle – You can determine at the bottom left whether or not you want to allow extra site sound, this includes for example the sounds when commenting, posting a quick response and notifications for logged in users. Pay attention; This toggle does nothing about the videos on the website, that is not the intention at all.
    • [NEW] Page transitions with funny quotes – Nobody likes to wait, but if you have to wait a little while … a nice quote is also nice, right?
    • [NEW] Support us – At the bottom left you will also find an option to support us. This is partly made possible by Donorbox and everyone is free to decide for themselves how and how often they want to support us. Any help is of course always greatly appreciated.
    • [NEW] Releases – Nintendo Collection System by console, so you can also easily search per console for a specific release that starts with something.
    • [NEW] Releases – Favorites added; Check out the most favorite Nintendo releases from the NintendoReporters community, also by console. See; https://www.nintendoreporters.com/en/releases/favorites/ 
    • [NEW] Releases – Now Playing added; See which Nintendo releases are most played by the NintendoReporters community, also by console. See; https://www.nintendoreporters.com/en/releases/now-playing/ 
    • [NEW] Releases – Beaten added; See which Nintendo releases have been played through the most by the NintendoReporters community, also by console. See; https://www.nintendoreporters.com/en/releases/beaten/ 
    • [NEW] Releases – Wanted added; See which Nintendo releases are most wanted by the NintendoReporters community, also by console. See; https://www.nintendoreporters.com/en/releases/wanted/ 
    • [NEW] Releases – Overall better distribution of everything you can think of in terms of releases.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Reading progress – became user only, see it as a small bonus option.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Comments Emojis – became user only, see it as a small bonus option.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Comments Users Online – became user only, see it as a small bonus option.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Comments Who liked; We disabled this option because this was relatively server intensive.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Social sharing – We have stopped share counts, although they are fun, they are very intensive and caused problems mainly from Facebook (on the dev side Facebook)
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Bol.com / Amazon ads – We no longer use them because they 1] don’t really yield anything, 2] Amazon requires sales to happen and otherwise cancels your Amazon Partners account. We still don’t think Ads is great. For now we have decided to use Adsense as a filler for our visitors. Guests get an Adsense free experience.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Global Comment Notifications – Display has been revised a bit, but also made it random to offer more diversity.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Robots.txt – This one a little better set up to meet everything we stand for as NintendoReporters.
    • [BACKEND] CLI (command line interface) actions extended with own custom actions for quickly updating release info.
    • [BACKEND] Overall optimization of workflows, we can’t say too much about this unfortunately.
    • [SERVER] After some testing finally made the switch to Varnish 7.x, more performance more speed more happy users.
  • 2020 – June – October
    • [NEW] Reading progress; a bar that indicates how far you are reading an item.
    • [NEW] Social sharing; Better, lightweight social share icons with share counts. so that you can also see what is popular based on that.
    • [NEW] Ads; Bol.com / Amazon ads – At the bottom of every page you will find custom ads for games on Bol.com (NL) and Amazon (EN).
    • [NEW] NintendoCollectionSystem; Included in footer with link to own website.
    • [NEW] Login highlight; Some people seem to be unable to find the login area otherwise.
    • [NEW] Login with Discord; It is now possible to log in with Discord, see; https://www.nintendoreporters.com/en/account/login/
    • [NEW] Comment Emojis; Now there is a dedicated option for adding Emojis
    • [NEW] Lazyyload DOM Monitoring; DOM monitoring watches for changes in the DOM and dynamically loads newly added elements.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Realtime comments; Avatar bigger which makes it more noticeable and provides a better view.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Ads; we had to puzzle a bit with our Google Ads, but they now work as we envisioned.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Comments; Clearer indication of when the comment part starts.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Comments badge; From now on will only be shown on the home pages if there are comments. (in other places these are always shown)
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Comments box; Removed unnecessary / unused options to make the option as clear as possible to everyone.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Comments overview; Display improved, see; https://www.nintendoreporters.com/en/comments/
    • [ADJUSTMENT] Forms; For all forms, the send / submit button will from now on only be displayed if all necessary fields have been completed. This also helps us to further combat SPAM.
    • [SERVER] Cloudflare APO (Automatic Platform Optimization); We have been using Cloudflare for a long time and are now making their new APO technology to get the most out of our platform. More information see; https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-platform-optimizations-starting-with-wordpress/
    • [SERVER] Cloudflare HTTP/ 3; We have been using HTTP / 2 for better performance for a long time, but now also have HTTP/3 support from Cloudflare, but not every browser supports this yet, see; https://developers.cloudflare.com/http3/
    • [BACKEND] Custom display of the entire backend; This improves our workflow.
    • [BACKEND] Scripts and Styles Manager; made a better solution to manage assets (scripts / styles) at page level.
  • 2020 – March – May 
    • [NEW] NintendoReporters is now available in both the Netherlands and English as a Google News publication. (see http://googl.com/#q=nintendoreporters)
    • [NEW] Better AMP version. If you don’t know what AMP means, it stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and offers a much lighter version of the website.
    • [NEW] Faster website by prefetching and prerendering URLS that you hover over and in the viewport.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] We’ve put a lot of effort into processing Nintendo Switch prizes and release information faster (such as publisher, dlc, demo, voice chat, etc.) .
    • [NEW] We have created a specific Nintendo Videos section, with which you will only find items with Nintendo videos.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] The best, worst, upcoming and recent Nintendo releases now feature pagination.
    • [ADJUSTMENT] The best and worst Nintendo releases views have been tweaked to better reflect the purpose of these options.
    • [FIXES] Fixed some minor rewrites issues
    • [FIXES] Mobile and tablet displays have been improved.
  • 2020 – February
    • 2020-02-29;
      • [NOTE] – We try to make adjustments less often, partly because of other activities. But with new developments, the change log will always keep you up to date.
      • [NEW] Guest comment notification; Subtly point out to guests that creating an account will make life easier when it comes to comments and more.
    • 2020-02-22;
      • [NEW] Full HD support; We have optimized the website for larger resolutions, the website will scale to a resolution of 1920px (full hd) from now on.
    • 2020-02-15;
      • [NEW] Theater Mode added to videos; This is specific for resolutions above 1100px. So that videos inline can be displayed even larger.
    • 2020-02-14;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Larger videos; Adjusted the size of sticky videos; just a bit bigger and nicer to use.
    •  2020-02-02;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Collection management adjusted so that actions happen immediately and are directly displayed. This also at the front with the single release; This should greatly benefit the user experience.
    • 2020-02-01;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Following the e-mail template adjustment, we have also checked all forms to ensure that all information is correct.
      • [ADJUSTMENT] The Mail template was not included in all emails. That has been corrected.
  • 2020 – January
    • 2020-01-31;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Small re-styling of homepage so that it comes across better in Dark / Night mode.
    • 2020-01-30;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Everything about logging in / registering / forgotten password has been revised; not everything went exactly the way we wanted here. PS: We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. However, that is now completely a thing of the past!
    •  2020-01-27;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Breadcrumbs for extra custom parts regarding releases are also now setup correctly.
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Explanations on collection page have been revised, clearer, shorter, faster!
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Small fix Nintendo Collection System transfer (transfer from wishlist to collection). Could also be used for future releases and that is not intended.
    • 2020-01-26;
      • [NEW] Collection / Profiles; Minimize and maximize components by clicking on the Console images. Makes it more practical to use.
    • 2020-01-25;
      • [NEW] Best / Worst rated releases per systems have been added, so you can quickly see what is good / bad per system. Please note; this needs to be supplemented even further from the Nintendo Collection System … but then it is already there.
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Feedback button disabled on Feedback page, slightly overkill.
    • 2020-01-23;
    •  2020/01/21;
      • [NEW] We have setup a lot of url aliases page / endpoint level so that you should always end up well even if you only guess URLs.
    • 2020/01/20;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Server updates implemented, including jump to the PHP 7.4 branch; net some more performances.
    • 2020/01/18;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Adjustments retrieving the Nintendo Switch eShop prices; very technical adjustment but necessary.
    • 2020/01/16;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Display of Global Comment Notifications has been adjusted; More subtle display
    • 2020/01/14;
      • [NEW] The Nintendo Collection System index has been added to every page; This allows you to quickly switch to every possible Nintendo game!
    •  2020-01-13;
      • [NEW] You can now link directly to a video in an item; hover on the video and top right (or top left if the video has become sticky) to be able to do this.
      • [FIX] Apparently a video option has been killed in the past, the time-code links no longer worked the way they were supposed to, that has now been fixed!
    • 2020-01-12:
      • [NEW] Home page now provides links to date pages, via the headings such as “Sunday 12 January 2020”; this means that the date pages are usually promoted for 1 whole week from the homepage and not just alone from single item pages.
    • 2020-01-11;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Problems that came up with the 2 adjustments before this where solved; We apologize for any problems that this maintenance has caused.
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Default URLs that where not multilingual or should not be able to work that way where also made multilingual (pagination, search, comments.)
    • 2020-01-10;
      • [ADJUSTMENT] SEO adjustments that were still planned, with an eye on bilingual, where implemented; mainly better urls such as for nieuws / news, geruchten / rumors, handleidingen / guides, enquetes / polls. In addition, we also made sure that in terms of ‘parts’ we can use just a nintendo-switch instead of a nintendoswitch etc. In short, quite drastic in terms of Technical SEO.
    • 2020-01-08;
      • [NEW] Work has started on Project NCS, more on this soon;)
    • 2020-01-07:
      • [ADJUSTMENT]
        Global search filter (see below) now also provides remove filter options + correct counts on all components.
      • [NEW] Global search filter for Collection and Profiles; can now filter everything from collections to wish lists with 1 action.
    • 2020-01-06:
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Optimization made to the underlying code of the collection page / profiles; Tech very substantive, but much better handling now.
    • 2020-01-05:
      • [NEW] Filters for the Collection and Profiles; Quickly see per item whether something is in a collection, favorites, now playing, played games or wish list.
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Way of loading / checking Quick Reactions changed; If they cannot be loaded for whatever reason, the block will not be displayed.
    • 2020-01-04:
      • [ADJUSTMENT] Comment field moved below comments; so someone who comments SHOULD be informed. SHOULD because we cannot force people to read the comments of course.
      • [NEW] Total number of comments per language, added to Comments; transparency towards visitors etc.
      • [ADDED] Search Filters extended with a date filter; From now on also filtering is possible using date periods.
      • [NEW] Total number of items per type, per language, added to the Sitemap; transparency towards visitors etc.
      • [NEW] Decided to introduce a changelog from 2020 so that changes are easily visible to everyone.

Why a Changelog?

Well that is actually very simple. We want to keep you informed as much as possible about new developments within NintendoReporters. That also applies to what changes on our medium.

For any questions / comments etc please feel free to let us know!