Once the podcast got to a listenable quality I was going to start pimping the hell out of the site... so that's kind of been my position up until now.
(to not answer your question directly).
However, speaking as the ever self-deprecating developer for the site, there is still as yet a missing level of polish that stands as a barrier to entry.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile^yoda, speaking as an end user, the ggweekly concept is so brilliant it's a little intimidating. People get the forum, I'm not sure they understand how ggweekly works (in terms of commenting).
I have not yet come up with a way to explain it any better.
Rather, the little things are what matter. Right now admittedly the menu system is imperfect, registration isn't inviting enough. Profiles are a bit ugly when someone hasn't writting any blogs or reviews or have any friends. Editing things is unintuitive. You can't yet edit forumtopic titles.
Those things bother me, and it is up to me to fix them. It's just not there yet. It'll never be there, because there will always be something.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
Yodariquo said:GG Weekly wasn't so much my concern. The title's obfuscation works in its favour as more intriguing than simply stating "News" as that can have the connotation of uninteresting. It should be at the least self-explanatory that it's a collection of news, though its Wiki inspiration may go unnoticed.
Rather, the little things are what matter. Right now admittedly the menu system is imperfect, registration isn't inviting enough. Profiles are a bit ugly when someone hasn't writting any blogs or reviews or have any friends. Editing things is unintuitive. You can't yet edit forumtopic titles.
Those things bother me, and it is up to me to fix them. It's just not there yet. It'll never be there, because there will always be something.
I agree there are problems. Anyway you've already done more then enough for this site already.
aspro73 said:^yoda, speaking as an end user, the ggweekly concept is so brilliant it's a little intimidating. People get the forum, I'm not sure they understand how ggweekly works (in terms of commenting).
I have not yet come up with a way to explain it any better.
Very true. GGWeekly and the Forums really aren't separated enough. Well more so that the forums are undermined.
One of the site's forefathers.
Play fighting games!
I also get the feeling that sometimes people (newissh ones) avoid ggweekly at first. Perhaps if it seemed to be more of a focus (I'm not explaining what I mean very well) and the forums more seperate from it as others have said.
Yodariquo said:GG Weekly wasn't so much my concern. The title's obfuscation works in its favour as more intriguing than simply stating "News" as that can have the connotation of uninteresting. It should be at the least self-explanatory that it's a collection of news, though its Wiki inspiration may go unnoticed.
Rather, the little things are what matter. Right now admittedly the menu system is imperfect, registration isn't inviting enough. Profiles are a bit ugly when someone hasn't writting any blogs or reviews or have any friends. Editing things is unintuitive. You can't yet edit forumtopic titles.
Those things bother me, and it is up to me to fix them. It's just not there yet. It'll never be there, because there will always be something.
Not the title really, but the concept. The fact that, "Hey there is a rolling conversation here" kind of like a chat room in slow-mo. That's something most people ate not used to.
It's awesome, that's why for new people it's something to figure out.
Don't take it as a criticism, please. As for you being satisfied with the site, as the creator "THE CREATORRR (Kratos voice)" you'll never be satisified.
aspro73 said:Yodariquo said:GG Weekly wasn't so much my concern. The title's obfuscation works in its favour as more intriguing than simply stating "News" as that can have the connotation of uninteresting. It should be at the least self-explanatory that it's a collection of news, though its Wiki inspiration may go unnoticed.
Rather, the little things are what matter. Right now admittedly the menu system is imperfect, registration isn't inviting enough. Profiles are a bit ugly when someone hasn't writting any blogs or reviews or have any friends. Editing things is unintuitive. You can't yet edit forumtopic titles.
Those things bother me, and it is up to me to fix them. It's just not there yet. It'll never be there, because there will always be something.Not the title really, but the concept. The fact that, "Hey there is a rolling conversation here" kind of like a chat room in slow-mo. That's something most people ate not used to.
It's awesome, that's why for new people it's something to figure out.
Don't take it as a criticism, please. As for you being satisfied with the site, as the creator "THE CREATORRR (Kratos voice)" you'll never be satisified.
In all honesty, I've never thought of it as confusing or unusual, but perhaps that's because I know the basis of it. I've always thought of it as merely comments as in a blog post or news story, much like you'd see on any Kotaku article, only more robust.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
We got a few new members recently, so I think we are moving the right way. There are still some things that could be done easier, like Yoda mentioned but the site is quite awesome already.
I think the greatest barrier of entry is not the technical problems, because Gamespot has plenty and still have half demented people joining them. I think VG Press is unknown for a large ammount of people and people rather join a more popular site, becuase they have a greater audience there.
Of course people might also be intimidated by the shear ammount of news we post here. And GGweekly can be difficult to follow, but it keeps the clutter away from the main forum. If I for example watched Gran Torino, I can say that at GGweekly, "Hey I saw Gran Torino". I do not have to waste everyone's time by making a thread.
But remember this site was started because we wanted to chill and talk about videogames with friends, without being censored by mods and have to deal with cunts. This is what we have achieved, but if we grow to fast we might lose it. So I saw we should grow, but slowly. We are awesome, we do not want to change that only for some popularity.
Iga_Bobovic said:We got a few new members recently, so I think we are moving the right way. There are still some things that could be done easier, like Yoda mentioned but the site is quite awesome already.
I think the greatest barrier of entry is not the technical problems, because Gamespot has plenty and still have half demented people joining them. I think VG Press is unknown for a large ammount of people and people rather join a more popular site, becuase they have a greater audience there.
Of course people might also be intimidated by the shear ammount of news we post here. And GGweekly can be difficult to follow, but it keeps the clutter away from the main forum. If I for example watched Gran Torino, I can say that at GGweekly, "Hey I saw Gran Torino". I do not have to waste everyone's time by making a thread.
But remember this site was started because we wanted to chill and talk about videogames with friends, without being censored by mods and have to deal with cunts. This is what we have achieved, but if we grow to fast we might lose it. So I saw we should grow, but slowly. We are awesome, we do not want to change that only for some popularity.
Gran Torino is well worth a thread!
On a serious note, this is not a moneygrab; we are not a business. Given that, if anything goes awry as a result of increased traffic, it's not hard to scale back.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobileYodariquo said:Iga_Bobovic said:We got a few new members recently, so I think we are moving the right way. There are still some things that could be done easier, like Yoda mentioned but the site is quite awesome already.
I think the greatest barrier of entry is not the technical problems, because Gamespot has plenty and still have half demented people joining them. I think VG Press is unknown for a large ammount of people and people rather join a more popular site, becuase they have a greater audience there.
Of course people might also be intimidated by the shear ammount of news we post here. And GGweekly can be difficult to follow, but it keeps the clutter away from the main forum. If I for example watched Gran Torino, I can say that at GGweekly, "Hey I saw Gran Torino". I do not have to waste everyone's time by making a thread.
But remember this site was started because we wanted to chill and talk about videogames with friends, without being censored by mods and have to deal with cunts. This is what we have achieved, but if we grow to fast we might lose it. So I saw we should grow, but slowly. We are awesome, we do not want to change that only for some popularity.
Gran Torino is well worth a thread!
On a serious note, this is not a moneygrab; we are not a business. Given that, if anything goes awry as a result of increased traffic, it's not hard to scale back.
I was more thinking, we get larger more people get over. The are are some fight, so we implement rules and become mods. Then we start modding people and killing all discussions. So we become, what we ran away from. That should never happen!
Iga_Bobovic said:Yodariquo said:Gran Torino is well worth a thread! On a serious note, this is not a moneygrab; we are not a business. Given that, if anything goes awry as a result of increased traffic, it's not hard to scale back.
I was more thinking, we get larger more people get over. The are are some fight, so we implement rules and become mods. Then we start modding people and killing all discussions. So we become, what we ran away from. That should never happen!
Simple solution would be to have both. i.e. include a feature for private boards; it filters out crap and avoids needless oversight. The rest of the site remains open for better or worse.
It's speculation at this point, anyway.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobileYodariquo said:Iga_Bobovic said:Yodariquo said:Gran Torino is well worth a thread! On a serious note, this is not a moneygrab; we are not a business. Given that, if anything goes awry as a result of increased traffic, it's not hard to scale back.
I was more thinking, we get larger more people get over. The are are some fight, so we implement rules and become mods. Then we start modding people and killing all discussions. So we become, what we ran away from. That should never happen!
Simple solution would be to have both. i.e. include a feature for private boards; it filters out crap and avoids needless oversight. The rest of the site remains open for better or worse.
It's speculation at this point, anyway.
Yeah, kinda acedemic. Seeing as we are not growing fast and probably never will be. Slow grow is better for our community either way.
Not a fan of a private board by the way, because we would be creating a VGPress in a VGPress. It's like Xzibit dawg, we know you like reading videogame news while you reading videogame news, so we made you a VGPress in your VGPress.
Iga_Bobovic said:Not a fan of a private board by the way, because we would be creating a VGPress in a VGPress. It's like Xzibit dawg, we know you like reading videogame news while you reading videogame news, so we made you a VGPress in your VGPress.
the ggweekly may be a not so easy to grasp right away because new people don't necessarily know how the vgpress came to be. they don't know that for months after the exit from gamespot's GGD all we had for communicating news and ideas and sticking together was a blogpost (growing to humongous lengths from the volume of comments) on the 1up site, which yoda first helped to format nicely and then built into this whole nice site.
regarding profiles, the only thing i can think of people might want out of a profile on a gaming site which they can't do on the vgpress, is create a "games i own" kind of database but this can't be done until the site has a cataloguing mechanism and stores some kind of official entry object for each game.
there was also a time when "we" were accused of being Nintendocentric but i think that has to have been put to rest by know as it's clear that there is no one company afiliated agenda. every bit of news is reported and linked to regardless of company, and everyone can and does discuss any game that interests them. also as it was said then, if we don't talk about what people want to be talking, they should simply join and initiate conversation themselves and we would partake happily.
so yeah to sum up: inviting people and having more people join should generally be a good thing and the vgpress is a very special place to begin with
___
Listen to Wu-Tang and watch Kung-Fu
bugsonglass said:...
there was also a time when "we" were accused of being Nintendocentric but i think that has to have been put to rest by know as it's clear that there is no one company afiliated agenda. ...
While I agree, I did chuckle yesterday when our top three threads in the forum were about Animal Crossing.
Yodariquo said:aspro73 said:Yodariquo said:GG Weekly wasn't so much my concern. The title's obfuscation works in its favour as more intriguing than simply stating "News" as that can have the connotation of uninteresting. It should be at the least self-explanatory that it's a collection of news, though its Wiki inspiration may go unnoticed.
Rather, the little things are what matter. Right now admittedly the menu system is imperfect, registration isn't inviting enough. Profiles are a bit ugly when someone hasn't writting any blogs or reviews or have any friends. Editing things is unintuitive. You can't yet edit forumtopic titles.
Those things bother me, and it is up to me to fix them. It's just not there yet. It'll never be there, because there will always be something.Not the title really, but the concept. The fact that, "Hey there is a rolling conversation here" kind of like a chat room in slow-mo. That's something most people ate not used to.
It's awesome, that's why for new people it's something to figure out.
Don't take it as a criticism, please. As for you being satisfied with the site, as the creator "THE CREATORRR (Kratos voice)" you'll never be satisified.
In all honesty, I've never thought of it as confusing or unusual, but perhaps that's because I know the basis of it. I've always thought of it as merely comments as in a blog post or news story, much like you'd see on any Kotaku article, only more robust.
Nah I much more so view it as a roaming message board because unlike Kotaku the messages don't just refer to a single article it's all the news story's in general as well as whatever is on someone's mind.
I see HUGE potential with this as no other sites do this. I mean just imagine if we had a significant amount of users of the amount of news that would be posted and how fast it would be as well. But there are just too many things that hold the site back right now.
IMO some big offenders are:
- Registering is pretty unintuitive. I remember that I invited someone and they told me that they couldn't figure out how to register.
- The VG Press theme. Fake news stories on the title page? Newspaper style and feel? The name "VGPress"? I'm not trying to say that this site should be "cool" and "hip" but its just too awkward feeling at times. And having the essence on a quickly dying medium (the newspaper) really isn't the best way to go IMO.
- The title page in general. Why don't we just have the title page (with the regular header intact) give us two links to choose from. One that leads to GGWeekly and one that leads to the Forums. This will avoid much confusion and unintuitivity.
- Just unintuitivity all around. I mean I still can't figure out how to edit news stories as well as many other things. I mean most of the site is intuitive enough, it's just little things here and there.
- The color scheme. While it isn't bad and really is a HUGE improvement from before. However it still doesn't mesh that well. It isn't appealing in a simplistic way like Neogaf, nor is it appealing in a complex way like Giantbomb. It sits inbetween at "fine" or "decent" IMO.
I'm not trying to down Yodo as he's done an AMAZING job with this site. I'm just listing what can be improve.
Iga_Bobovic said:But remember this site was started because we wanted to chill and talk about videogames with friends, without being censored by mods and have to deal with cunts. This is what we have achieved, but if we grow to fast we might lose it. So I saw we should grow, but slowly. We are awesome, we do not want to change that only for some popularity.
I see what you are saying but that's why we should only invite "the cream of the crop" posters we see in other sites or people we know that are cool. As Yodo said we aren't a business however the more the merrier and it wouldn't hurt to have some more variety in the site.
One of the site's forefathers.
Play fighting games!
SteelAttack said:Iga_Bobovic said:Not a fan of a private board by the way, because we would be creating a VGPress in a VGPress. It's like Xzibit dawg, we know you like reading videogame news while you reading videogame news, so we made you a VGPress in your VGPress.
Yeah. I like knowing everyone. I'll all for more users, but I dont want A-holes spoiling the place. I advertise on GAF all the time.
Best thing is advertising if you really want new members. Put a tag in all your sigs for other places, make blogs, PM invite people to a site tour page. That is essential.
Oh and maybe call GGWeekly this instead:
Knights of the Newstable
Where the just discuss weekly news
gamingeek said:Oh and maybe call GGWeekly this instead:
Knights of the Newstable
Where the just discuss weekly news
That sounds so cheesy. Let's call ourselves: The Wang Conspiracy.
One of the site's forefathers.