After MONTHS of development, we finally flipped the switch! The new member profiles and My Account area is live.

Here's an example of the new profiles: http://my.desktopnexus.com/komodo/
And check out your new My Account are here: http://my.desktopnexus.com

You should get a welcome message / tutorial when you first visit your My Account area.

What do you think? Feedback?

-----------------

In case you missed it, here's the welcome message:
http://my.desktopnexus.com/komodo/journal/new-profile-system-welcome-message-23/

And the follow-up announcement:
http://my.desktopnexus.com/komodo/journal/follow-up-announcement-24/

I totally understand about the plain. I do plan on adding additional customizations later on, but for now the profiles have become more Facebook, and less MySpace. The flashy backgrounds were nearing an end (see this thread for details), and the music players had to be stopped, otherwise Desktop Nexus would soon be responsible for paying royalties on the music played... and we just can't afford that with the low paying ads on this site.

Additionally, out of over 60,000 members who have accounts on Desktop Nexus, only 74 people had custom backgrounds and/or flash widgets on their profiles. This is a small percentage, and I do feel there are so many advantages of a clean, secure, uniform profile that it outweighs the bad. Sometimes when I visited a "customized" profile, the colors and background was so overwhelming, I couldn't even read the text and the entire navigation of the site became inaccessible. I'm sure you can understand why quality requirements became necessary.

Again, I have a few ideas for clean customization later on (including a custom background image, rearranging the blocks, and even perhaps small flash widgets), but for now I'm focusing my attention on building a solid site infrastructure that can carry Desktop Nexus onward into the foreseeable future.

Have you tried out the revised PM system, or any of the other new features?

I like this variant!

I like this

Ah-ha. That is the exact kind of feedback I was hoping for - the small things I forgot.
I just made a modification to the uploads page. When you visit your profile (http://my.desktopnexus.com) and click the Wallpapers tab, if you have an incomplete waiting to be described, it will now give you a yellow alert there. See it?

That's great to hear!

I also implemented quite a bit of a technology called AJAX, which should significantly speed up the new parts of the site. For example, in your My Account area, when you change pages, it only reloads the content area, rather than refreshing the entire page again (the old fashion way)... so it's probably half the load time.

Do you see the familiar red X now?