Collections and User Profiles have a new look

As part of the larger redesign of addons.mozilla.org (AMO), the user profile and collections pages just got an overhaul. They now match the new style of the rest of the site, but there are also some functional changes you might be interested in.

Collections

Collections let you save and share lists of add-on listings on AMO. Lots of people use them as a way to bookmark add-ons they want to get back to. They can even act as a sort of backup of what they have installed on their profile. Others create collections to share them online.

Here’s how they look after the update:

Collections were initially created as a social feature. This included features like voting, following, and multiple contributors for a single collection. However, these features weren’t used much by the majority of our users, and have become a maintenance burden. Because of this, we decided to remove these secondary features.

Another big change is that it won’t be possible to browse and search through collections on the site. If you want to share any of your collections, you can use their URL and post them anywhere on the web. We’re making this change because they have become a common vector for spam. This change shouldn’t disrupt how most people use them at present.

User Profiles

User profiles also got a style refresh:

The main difference is that, on the new site, only developer profiles are public. If you’re not an add-on developer, you can still access your own profile page, but other people can’t. Like with collections, this is a mitigation against spam. The main use for profile pages is to find other add-ons created by a developer, so that’s why those profiles will remain public.

Collections and user profiles were the last big features to move to the new design. There are still a number of small features that need to be ported over, and they will be handled in the next month or two. We expect to shut down the old site next quarter, so if you switched to the old design early in the migration process, this is a good time to give the new design another try.