That's news to me OR Jason to the principal's office please

Jason, I recognize you have a lot on your mind right now, but I didn't want to patronize you with kid gloves -- plus, I know you want to keep busy.

I just thought I'd put it out there that the news initiative you recently put in place might be crushing our existing reviews initiative. At the time of this writing, the 12 front page spots are dominated by NINE news articles.

I know it's early going, but what are your thoughts? Do you think the fact that the articles help keep the front page from looking stagnant offsets the potential damage caused to review readership by the weight of the flood of news items?

It's tricky, because news articles provide all sorts of benefits you may not have considered, like (it seems) readier access to review keys and the general impression you mentioned that the site is active. It also fills out the database with assets and info so people come to the site and see that we are indeed providing info for games of interest. So there are a ton of benefits to it.

I'm aware of the dominance the news articles are showing on the front page currently, and that's something I will continue to consider. A lot of people do tend to submit their reviews on weekends, rather than during the slower weekdays, so it's natural in one sense that most of the updates the site will see during weekdays is news content. Meanwhile, news is rarely posted on weekends.

As I said, it's something I will continue to consider, especially once there's been enough time and activity for any relevant patterns to emerge.

Maybe something can be done to tone down the news posts when reviews are actually going up? Joe's 720 review and DE's comeback are utterly buried beneath 10 news items right now (10 of 12 spots!). I have a few reviews I want to release tonight, but I feel they'll be off the front page within two days.

Just so everyone knows, I'm looking at implementing some design changes in the VERY near future--maybe even today--that will affect this issue favorably (I anticipate). In a nutshell: reviews will appear in one large stream and news stories and some other content will appear in a separate column. I don't know how long it will take to test and implement. You may all see an early or even final version of any changes on the site as soon as tonight, and probably by tomorrow night at the latest. So expect sporadic weirdness for the next 24 hours or so and hopefully a good solution in place after that, in time for the weekend.

Jason Venter, a true man of the people. ^_^