Simon Carless (1834) on 2/10/2014 3:56 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

Time for another Weekly Whale, and boy, there's been a few things going on this week - particularly on the code side of things. Let's check 'em out in a special code-centric 'Weekly Whale' update.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page - MobyGames was founded by Jim Leonard, Brian Hirt, and David Berk in 1999, and acquired by GameFly in 2010. As of December 2013, San Francisco-based Blue Flame Labs has acquired the site - and reverted it to its previous design. Myself - Simon Carless (community helper) - and Reed (designer/developer) are the folks who are making things happen.

So this was the week, finally, that Blue Flame Labs owner Reed got the local version of the site code running and was able to make changes. So this led to a sudden explosion of updates - in fact, we might have got a little bit overzealous, so we apologize for that - we've slowed down a bit now. But it suddenly became possible to fix a WHOLE bunch of stuff.

Let's go through each of the updates in order, linking to the threads for them, which have a whole heap of feedback and discussion in them.

• Monday, February 3rd update.

• A new header; Revamped displays for screenshots and merchants.

• Tuesday, February 4th update.

• New style for the left hand menu; Reorganized the game browser (platform, year and genre now prioritized above Sports Theme); Max site width [since expanded!] for a cleaner and more organized look; Lots of little misc. design tweaks and cleanup

• Wednesday, February 5th update.

• Threads now take 6 months before becoming inactive (was 2 months). The only reason I didn't increase this further is because it has database consequences, and don't want to push it too much right now ; Removed the "Your review becomes sole property of MobyGames" phrasing from the add review page; Fixed / changed the process for applying to become an approver; Max-width increased by 200px; Helvetica is now only used for titles and certain use cases (Verdana used in most places); Decreased game title size and removed underline

• Thursday, February 6th updates. Expanded credits information on developer pages. Now showing a breakdown that includes their credited roles; Added contribution dates to attributions on game pages (they were missing in the case where multiple users contributed to the same game); Moved tip of the day to bottom of homepage; Renamed "Non-Sports Themes" to "Themes" and "Sports Themes" to "Sports" on Game Browser (may take a while to show up due to caching)

• Sunday, February 9th updates.

• Introducing… MobyGoal! This is shown on the homepage, indicating what our current push is and current progress toward achieving it; Updated format of game credits on developer's pages. Now broken down by category, with role listed with each game; Additionally, Game Credits are now shown before Bio. The reason we did this is because bios are often A) highly outdated and B) often missing. If we can reverse A and B, it will be re-evaluated; Moved buy links back to the main view (when we moved them to the sidebar, performance dropped way too much); Added last update time to dev bios; Revamped game attribution to give more structure and make the contributor stand out more.

So what are we doing next? Well, ALL of the above was in a week, which is fairly crazy, huh? And even then during the week we added over 8,000 newly approved stats to a site that's already bulging at the seams.

We'll continue to improve the site over the next few weeks - if you dig into some of the more recent threads, you'll see we're discussing ways to simplify credits entry (without breaking the metadata we are collecting) and a whole bunch of other things.

Reed and I are really excited to keep improving the site, making it easier to contribute, and most of all to amp up the community as we strive to get to 1,000 arcade games in the DB and also start a drive to grab PC/Steam titles in the next few weeks...