Site Front Page Revisions and other news

The site's new front page has gone live, as you may have noticed. Here's what's new:

* Reviews now display from newest to oldest, with up to 12 results. They are not sorted by staff/freelance or reader level, but are all in the same mix. There's a label on each submission to let you know which type it is, in case you care.
* News articles now display within the same stream.
* Guides are no longer listed on the front page. You can still view them by clicking "Guides" in the top navigation bar, however.
* You can see how many comments a submission has received from the front page.
* "Notifications" has been renamed to "Activity" to accommodate a link to the "News" archives in the top bar on the site.
* News articles now appear on relevant game profile pages, when available. Otherwise, game profile pages remain unchanged.

This update is intended to better highlight new content on the site, regardless of who wrote it. Previously, readers might contribute a brand new review and it wouldn't be visible unless someone scrolled down the page to check for that content specifically. Site regulars knew to do that, but casual visitors are often averse to scrolling.

I've added news back to the site in its final iteration. Now site staff and freelancers can post news if it suits them, or not post it if they don't care to, and the front page won't have a huge chunk devoted to content that isn't being updated. We get a lot of pitches and information from PR, and interview opportunities and the like. Now we have a place to put them, and news can again be linked to game profile pages. In fact, hundreds of articles from around 2012 are now live again, and can be perused.

Though it may seem like a small thing in some respects, this update is a big change that took quite a lot of coding on multiple pages around the site. That means that although things should be working as intended all over the place, I'll be monitoring pages for issues and making tweaks and adjustments accordingly (maybe some enhancements too). You may see some minor oddness on various pages for the next few weeks, as the site settles in, but hopefully there will be nothing major.

I'm excited about this adjustment and I hope you will continue to enjoy reading content on the site and contributing reviews and other content of your own. Thanks for your continued support!

I think this will be pretty good once we all get used to it. Good on you for working to improve the site!

Makes sense.

Now one can no longer take over the front page unless one submits 12 reviews in bulk. Take that, Gary, he of the four-packs.

In other, unrelated news, I spoke with Felix Arabia -- remember him? He promised to submit 12 reviews in bulk next week.

P.S.: I suspect this might improve overall views, since reviews won't get buried behind a click (aka oblivion) after a sudden two-review push of Kemco-made mobile RPGs by Rob or something.

I like the 12 reviews, all together, idea. As Marc said, it'll keep them on the front longer. I know there have been times when you've dished out 4-5 critiques at a time, I've waited until last to put mine up simply because I knew that if I didn't, mine would be dumped off the front within hours after getting it on, so with that not a concern, I'm happy!

The only concern I'd have is that if news-placing does become a regular thing, that could push reviews off quickly. I remember in the days of Gameroni, news was a common thing because there are tons of press releases out there and stuff happens daily, so if a person wanted, they could scroll everything off the front page in a couple hours with a deluge of tidbits, that while potentially interesting to any of us here, aren't the same priority/labor of love that reviews are to us. Which might be an invalid concern, since you did only post one news article with the altered front page yesterday.

Masters and Rob, I've been wanting to fix it so one person taking over the front page is less likely for a long time. This is the most obvious fix.

I understand that concern about news stories, Rob, but I don't see a ton of news articles coming through as terribly likely. On Gameroni, regular news updates was almost entirely the whole goal. Here it is not. If tons of news updates become a regular thing, we can expand the number of articles on the front page from 12 to 20 or something. Plus there is the "Reviews" link at the top of the page to see all the latest reviews, and so on. But as you noted, I did post only one news article yesterday. News is less likely to come through on weekends, which is when reviews are more likely to appear. And I don't have the energy to post 4 or 5 news articles daily myself anymore, and I don't think anyone else does. I'll be lucky if I can post one or two each weekday, generally. It's just that now the option is there and will probably be utilized a bit.

By the way, since Gameroni was mentioned: a stream of content like this is one lesson I did learn from Gameroni. It does seem to produce more traffic for content. And I've learned various other lessons along the way from experiments on various web projects, so really I'm just trying to apply that knowledge to everyone's advantage here.