Our Return Journey Begins!
Welcome back to TPDb! We're excited to announce our return with revamped payment systems, lightning-fast performance, and improved search functionality. Enjoy exclusive discounts and perks as a token of our appreciation. Stay tuned for more updates! 🚀
WEREBACK to receive 60% off a new subscription of TPDb Pro (for those with an active subscription, we will be doing something for you as well!) and for the month of March, the cap on amount of monthly uploads has been removed! Designers, let's see that backlog you've been working on 😍Cue the drumroll! 🥁 After a brief pause that felt like an eternity (at least to us!), we're back and ready to rock like never before! While we wanted to cram as much as possible into this post, we'll leave the TPDbook club hour for next time, and you can expect more posts to come over the coming weeks. Now enough of that, let's jump in!
As you may or may not know, TPDb has been under a pause for the last two months due to a disruption caused by our previous payment provider. While unfortunate, we erred on the side of caution and implemented the pause for several reasons:
- It helped alleviate the financial strain caused by our inability to process TPDb Pro, bundle, and gift payments – halting our revenue stream
- It allowed us to operate with a lower footprint, reducing overall expenses
- It allowed us to minimize any downstream effects on our users, both financially and non-financially
- We utilized the time to work on much-needed upgrades! 🚀
While we won't cover the entire situation in this post, we will be delving deeper and you can expect another post about the situation and our road to return in the near future! Now let's get this party started! 🎉
We're Back!
Counting down to the moment you've all been waiting for: it's February 27 23:59:59, it's TPDball drop time! Seriously, we were working right up until the TPDball drop, tuning performance, and prepping for launch just before the day came to a close! All you college students know what I'm talking about 😎 And boy was it a successful launch!
A Token of Appreciation!
Once again, we'd like to deeply thank each and every one of you for your continued support, patience, and understanding while we navigated the pause. It was a tough time, though the community grew stronger and we came through it together! We'd like to thank each and every one of you with the following offers:
- No monthly upload cap for designers – let's see those backlogged creations 😍
- New TPDb Pro subscribers can enjoy 60% off their first month using discount code
WEREBACK- Check out our plans to find out what Pro's all about!
- For those who are existing TPDb Pro subscribers, we've got you covered and will work with you over the coming days!
What's New?
Where do I start? Well, at the core, our payment provider has been completely migrated from Stripe over to Lemon Squeezy 🍋! However, there's so much more!
Payment Provider 💸
As mentioned above, we've completely migrated over to Lemon Squeezy 🍋 and we couldn't be happier! While there's a number of benefits for us as a business, there's also a benefit for our end users. From a more streamlined experience during checkout, to payment, billing, and subscription management, email communications, right to order history. Users should now have a similar, easier, and more familiar experience for all things billing. They've got an outstanding offering and we're excited to have chosen them as our new provider of choice!
Performance 🚀
Two words – "DON'T BLINK". Seriously! If you've been to the site since we've been back up, we hope you've noticed and enjoy the rocket performance! We're super pumped about the enhanced performance and thrilled we could improve a massive pain point that many users experienced! If you haven't noticed, try not to blink as you refresh the home page two, three, or even 10 times watching it load in under a second! 👀It's okay, I'll wait....you didn't blink did you? With the pause, we took the opportunity and time to make some much needed changes to the platform in almost every way. The biggest being performance. We carefully reviewed all highly used and important pages to optimize them as much as possible – with the goal of having the page respond in under a second. While we haven't optimized every page, and know it's not perfect, this is a huge step in the right direction and there's a lot more to come in the future!
Search 🔍
I know you know where I'm going with this! If you had the opportunity to use the site prior to the pause (if you're new around here, headache avoided!), you know the search was ... lacking to say the least. It was slow, clunky, didn't always work, and don't even get me started on the results🫣Well...we're happy to announce that we've spent some time increasing our horse power and educating the elves on what results would be more relevant. Don't worry, no elves were harmed in the process! Not only are the results returned faster and are more relevant, but we've also shifted around the way the search page looks and feels to bring more results to you faster! While similar to performance, this new chapter for search is a massive leap ahead of what we previously had, and there's a lot more we have in store for search! Here's a brief overview of the changes to search:
- The overall performance of search results has been improved and you should receive results in under a second
- The results should be more relevant to what you're looking for
- Double the amount of search results are returned and displayed each time you search
- Search results are now categorized between the different sections – collections, movies, shows, etc...
- Each time you search, you can see a rough count of results for each searchable category. Bonus!
That's Not All!
Wait?! There's more? Yeah! We've got a few smaller goodies as well which we hope will supercharge your experience.
After careful consideration, and reviewing a large number of requests for show metadata modifications, we've decided to have specials enabled by default for all shows! Previously, we relied on if the show had specials or not from TMDb (our metadata provider), or requests to have the specials season added - however, we decided to enable it for all shows! While we understand that not every show will have an official specials season, we respect that users may consider various different items as being under the "specials" season – and now, we've got a place for your poster!
For designers, while editing a set with multiple posters - think Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) with an infinite amount of posters, we've got you covered!
- Upload fields are now sorted with the most recent listing being displayed first – allowing you to quickly update sets as new content becomes available (this also applies when uploading a new set)
- While editing a set, there's a little green check (✅), or red x (❌) to easily display which entries have and haven't been uploaded to yet
- Don't worry, it looks way better than the emojis above
What's Ahead?
While we wanted to cram a lot more into this post, we'll be splitting everything else we had planned into other posts which will be released in the near future! While the pause may have set us back slightly, we're not going to let it affect us and we've got an awesome year ahead planned! ✨ We can't wait to share it with you!
Oh, and if you haven't noticed, we've got a shiny new blog! Consider this your official invitation to join us on this wild ride. Buckle up, it's going to be one heck of a journey!
Welcome back to TPDb and let the adventure begin! 🚀