About eight months ago, we relaunched this website with a brand-new, mobile-friendly design, smoother e-commerce functionality, and a richer publishing environment for the Current. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about the new site, along with a fair number of helpful critiques, feature requests, and suggestions for improvements. After the new site survived its first flash sale in October, we turned our attention to the inbox, and frequent visitors to Criterion.com may already have noticed some little changes taking effect over the past few days.

First off, we’ve made some changes to the navigation bar, which pops up when you click on the three lines at the top right of any page on the site. We’ve added links to each section of our shop page, and we’ve listed out some of the most popular categories on the Current, making it easier for you to navigate to what you’re looking for.

Some customers had trouble figuring out how to sign in and out of the site (it wasn’t that easy!), so we’ve added a convenient My Criterion icon to the top navigation (it looks like a little person). There you’ll find your account information, orders, wish list, and place to log in and out. Very soon you’ll also find “My Collection” there. Restoring the My Collection feature that allows users to track the Criterion editions they own was by far the top request from longtime customers. We are happy to report that the My Collection feature should be back online in the next few weeks, and any Criterion.com purchases you’ve made during the time My Criterion has been inactive should be reflected in your list.

What we won’t be restoring are the custom list features. After doing a deep dive into how much activity there was in the custom lists, the amount of spam and bot activity they invited, and the moderation they required, we struggled to justify bringing them back. At their best, the lists opened up new pathways in the collection and served a social function, but in the end we decided to leave that activity to other platforms, like Letterboxd, that are focused on social sharing, reviewing, and list-making. If you would like copies of your custom lists for your records, you can write to Jon Mulvaney ([email protected]) at any time and we will make arrangements.

Finally, we are retooling the search function of our site. The new search should be much snappier, and once it goes live you should have an easier time finding what you need on the site, navigating back to your search results, and clearly identifying which links lead to films and which lead to articles in the Current. Look for these and other changes to appear over the course of the month of February.