Forums > MobyGames > State Of MobyGames - August 2014.
Simon Carless (1834) on 8/24/2014 6:32 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
Hey folks,
[NOTE: please switch to flat mode to read the entire message!]
For all you valued MobyGames approvers, users & browsers, just sorta wanted to do a mid-year update with what we've done this year so far, how you've helped, and what kind of progress you can expect in the future on the site.
[WHAT WE'VE ACCOMPLISHED]
Since Reed and myself took the site over from GameFly last December, we've collectively:
- Rolled back the 'unfortunate' redesign that almost killed Moby towards the end of last year. (Hurray!)
- Made a number of cosmetic and flow-related changes to the site that have cleaned it up quite a lot - largely done through March.
- worked with you to roll out a bunch of new platforms (particularly arcade!), get the 'Approver+' privileges rolled out, add a couple more admins.
- managed to clean up a chunk of the approval backlog with the help of approvers and admins - right now, with the exception of MobyRanks and one or two other areas, we're no longer HIDEOUSLY backed up.
So I'm actually fairly happy with where we are - there's good new info being added to the site all the time, we're approving 5-6,000 new items per week, nobody has quit or set anything on fire in the past couple of days, etc :P
However...
[WHAT WE'VE HAD ISSUES WITH]
It's safe to say that we hoped to be a bit further along with the site, and there haven't really been any code changes for 4 or 5 months now - not totally clear when there will be, either. The reasons for this are pretty straightforward:
- The age of the codebase and the fact it's written in Perl (not a common language any more) means that the site is fairly difficult to update. That's partly the reason for the failed GameFly redesign, of course.
- While we were hoping to making some SEO optimizations and increase our pageviews, we discovered that most of Moby's profitable traffic disappeared after a Google Images change a year and a half ago, and can't easily be recouped. Sadly.
- The revenue from MobyGames after expenses (in the low hundreds of dollars a month) means that Reed can't really devote any time to updating the site (even were he comfortable with Perl, which he is not!) His ideal is that he recode a bunch of the site in PHP, but his other paying consulting jobs is what he has to concentrate on right now.
So because of this, we're still hoping to engage someone who knows the codebase and/or Perl to start working on a list of changes, and we do have some $ put away for that, but code changes will have to wait until that time, sadly. (With the exception of some UI changes, perhaps.)
[PRIORITIES FOR WHEN/IF WE CAN FIND CODING TIME]
Just to give you an idea of what we would like to work on if we found the right person, given all the priorities we potentially have:
- There's a little bit of UI work left - particularly the companies page, which is still horrific, and also fixing up the platform overview page to look nicer and also include a picture of the console & basic info about it. [Reed can work on this.]
- Vital bug fixes, such as the credit corruption issues when re-editing, missing credits from rejected devs, autofill that messes up credits, etc.
- Best of the smaller fixes in Bugs/Suggestions forums: many are easy to do but would make a difference on a daily basis! Might also include optional shorter user reviews, etc...
- Create ability to upload other image types (flyers, ads, feelies, cover spines), plus 'official screenshots' with date listed & no caption - allows us to use GamesPress' gigantic image archive.
- Create ability to upload official videos (GamesPress/elsewhere) or community-created playthrough videos to a special Archive.org collection and have them archived in lossless format and also streaming on the MobyGames game pages.
- Create 'unofficial credits' for developers & allow devs to identify as a developer and then add multiple credits for all the games they've worked on; unofficial credits would appear below/separately to official credits with disclaimers.
- We still would like to do selective item auto-approve for certain contributors/circumstances, with auditing & lookback ability - eg MobyRankings for contributors above a certain score, and gradually roll out from there. Also look at multi-approvals so you can approve lots of items at once.
As for code help, please PM me if you have suggestions or recommendations. We're still hoping to find someone!
Also of note (since a version of this update this got posted in the Approvers forum) - our test Archive.org video account is up and running.
Cavalary (11445) on 8/24/2014 6:56 PM · Permalink · Report
Well, like that the short reviews thing wasn't included again in this shortlist (in the way the idea was back then, I mean - could still be nice to have them added as character-limited comments that don't need approval showing up only on the mobyscore page, alongside the person's scoring of the game, sort of as a short explanation of why they picked those scores)... But out of what was, do hope that the official screenshots will be displayed separately from the main, user-contributed, ones.
As for the Perl issue, judging by file extensions RPGamer seems to have a similarly old codebase. Wonder if they have similar issues and could be interested in some collaboration or at least experience/ideas exchange. Just a wild random idea out there.
Simon Carless (1834) on 8/24/2014 7:09 PM · Permalink · Report
Oop, yeah, optional short reviews is still something we want to do - I edited it in there.
And yes, official screenshots will be VERY clearly separate and labels, because we know that sometimes they are pre-release and don't reflect final game. But they are also sometimes quite interesting.
Rola (8483) on 8/24/2014 8:47 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
What I find very sad is that for years I've heard "capitalist pigs, if only you would liberate the website code we would carry the standard of revolution there!", but when Simon announced "OK coders, if you want to help - step forward" there were only crickets chirping...
Any news on LOC cooperation?
Игги Друге (46653) on 8/24/2014 10:00 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Rola wrote--]What I find very sad is that for years I've heard "capitalist pigs, if only you would liberate the website code we would carry the standard of revolution there!", but when Simon announced "OK coders, if you want to help - step forward" there were only crickets chirping... [/Q --end Rola wrote--] It would help if one could simply SVN it and look at it to see if it's understandable or not.
Simon Carless (1834) on 8/24/2014 10:22 PM · Permalink · Report
We're not quite there yet - even the 'get a local environment working' steps are >20 separate stages in length and take multiple hours. However, if regular members think they could code Perl and are serious, please PM me and we can get you set up. (We're talking to one or two people who have expressed interest!)
Игги Друге (46653) on 8/25/2014 9:32 AM · Permalink · Report
Yes, but say that you just want to have a look at the code without going to the lengths of setting up a development environment.
MobyReed (325) on 8/26/2014 12:45 AM · edited · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Игги Друге wrote--] [Q2 --start Rola wrote--]What I find very sad is that for years I've heard "capitalist pigs, if only you would liberate the website code we would carry the standard of revolution there!", but when Simon announced "OK coders, if you want to help - step forward" there were only crickets chirping... [/Q2 --end Rola wrote--] It would help if one could simply SVN it and look at it to see if it's understandable or not. [/Q --end Игги Друге wrote--] It's Perl, of course it's not understandable. ;)
But really, the site is well thought out and architected I think. The tough part mostly comes from the fact that it's using a dead tech (Perl) and the complicated nature of the site itself. Especially in regards to the approval flows, etc.
Simon Carless (1834) on 8/24/2014 10:26 PM · Permalink · Report
The Stanford/UCSC project - which also includes interest from Library Of Congress - is a multi-year project around metadata definition - so as they can use any of our data, I think they'll hit us up. It's a bit more 'how we can use library definitions for movies and apply them to games' in general, though.
But Stanford and NIST are archiving a lot of the Cabrinety Collection and so if there's clear legality on that, we can possibly link to disc images. (But as we know, copyrights for games are often a problem!)
LepricahnsGold (142745) on 8/26/2014 7:42 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start Rola wrote--]What I find very sad is that for years I've heard "capitalist pigs, if only you would liberate the website code we would carry the standard of revolution there!", but when Simon announced "OK coders, if you want to help - step forward" there were only crickets chirping...
Any news on LOC cooperation? [/Q --end Rola wrote--]Sadly, I would have volunteered to help with the coding but I know NOTHING about programming. Not Perl, C++, HTML, nothing.
András Gregorik (59) on 8/25/2014 1:45 PM · Permalink · Report
Congratulations on everything listed in the [WHAT WE'VE ACCOMPLISHED] section.
On the other hand, the [WHAT WE'VE HAD ISSUES WITH] section suggests that Moby's development seems to be permanently stunted. The SEO loss seems to be a major blow in itself. Hoping for the best.
Simon Carless (1834) on 8/25/2014 2:16 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
Well, the good news is the site is stable - and honestly, I suspect Moby was losing money during the end of the GameFly era anyhow due to the additional resources on it, even with that extra $. So it's at least 'break even' and sustainable :) We just need to find a coding white knight now. Ideally :P
R H (3) on 8/30/2014 5:01 PM · Permalink · Report
- While we were hoping to making some SEO optimizations and increase our pageviews, we discovered that most of Moby's profitable traffic disappeared after a Google Images change a year and a half ago, and can't easily be recouped. Sadly.
Well, I told you how to do it but you wanted to play 100% by Googles rules while they are fucking us webmasters at every possibility.
And you should have promoted your patreon a lot more. Removing it fron the header after some weeks was not very clever.
Simon Carless (1834) on 8/31/2014 2:44 PM · Permalink · Report
RH - it became clear that the Patreon wasn't going to get to the stage where Reed could work on the site anywhere near full-time, and so until we work out who the new coder(s) are, that very incremental amount doesn't make a lot of difference.
Maybe if we end up paying those coders through the Patreon we'll re-promote at that time :)
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 9/1/2014 6:35 PM · Permalink · Report
Maybe R H is thinking of the long tail, but I guess you folks figured that if it was going to happen at all, it would be soon.
R H (3) on 9/2/2014 8:26 AM · Permalink · Report
Exactly
Think at the Wikipedia as example and how they get their funds together, they do it from time to time with campaigns which are visible to everyone and have to be clicked away.
That way they reach their funding goals it seems.Other sites have a small rectangle/square image linked to patreon with one sentence about it, here on MG the patreon campaign looked almost like they don't want to advertise it really.
..I can be wrong with that of course, as someone who is in the "website business" for a while now that was just my impression.
Bigger is the problem with the lost impressions through googles fucked up image search which HAS to be cheated to still be able to get impressions through images at all.
Rola (8483) on 9/1/2014 10:53 PM · Permalink · Report
[Q --start MobyReed wrote--]whether it would work[/Q --end MobyReed wrote--] It could work better if only you had more fans. Not people who enter the site to find one game they forgot and immediately leave. Just look at that damned Facebook stats, I can show you mere DOS abandonware site that has 18k followers. That's what you get for being a niche site for self-proclaimed game historians, not a popular site among gamers... Think of the last guy who wanted to mine our data and merely build a frontend to it and profit from iOS app...
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 9/1/2014 11:37 PM · Permalink · Report
I still think that we should offer download and play of all the PD / shareware games that we offer, making us not just a database but also a games portal.
Victor Vance (18100) on 9/2/2014 1:42 AM · Permalink · Report
Maybe in the form of related game websites?
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 9/2/2014 5:13 AM · Permalink · Report
Yeah, but those links rot, and this could allow us to present the game in a browser frame with our ads etc.
Nélio (1976) on 9/1/2014 11:49 PM · Permalink · Report
I always thought that the site's name was poorly chosen given what the intent was/is. "MobyGames" doesn't sound like the definite database for anything. If the casual visitor immediately realized what this site was all about, he'd probably bookmark it and spend much more time here.
You have sites like IMDb (Internet Movie Database), Arcade History, Arcade Museum, ipdb (Internet Pinball Database), and countless others that convey so much better what their focus is.
Of course we all now have grown to love the name, but if you objectively think about it, it's kind of lacking in "definitiveness".
Pseudo_Intellectual (66362) on 9/2/2014 5:13 AM · Permalink · Report
It was always a horrible name. One of Trixter's chief sins.
Игги Друге (46653) on 9/2/2014 12:04 PM · Permalink · Report
I agree.
Rola (8483) on 9/2/2014 1:11 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
I never liked that name either (and back in 1999 there were indeed more unused domain name choices than today), but the name isn't the most important. Heck, it could be worse, today we'd be called gamr.com, to fit the trend...
But no matter how many reviews Oleg writes or how many forgotten platforms Kabushi adds, it won't help much with the following crucial issues:
Cavalary (11445) on 9/2/2014 2:43 PM · Permalink · Report
About that last part, I'm still saying price comparison service.
AND if that'll be a tab on the game page, could also add a section on said tab for people selling / trading / giving away copies. Should cover the older games, different platforms and so on. Link to what people say they'd trade in their havelists (and show the user's wantlist if you click one), or instead of posting on the forum have those who want to sell tag the games they're selling and have it show up on said games' pages, with link to the site where the sale takes place if there is one, price for each game and a duration or something to make sure we don't have dead entries there if the seller doesn't come to pull it once it's done.
Will take coding though.
Rola (8483) on 9/2/2014 3:27 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
Did you ever click on the Buy/Trade tab? It's mostly what you've described.
Cavalary (11445) on 9/2/2014 4:31 PM · edited · Permalink · Report
Don't think I did. Just knew that there were a few shop links that led to searches, no info actually there, under links in the old one and assumed it was the same thing. Still misses direct link to want list. And it's just the trading, nothing about selling, no way to add sales on other sites like those occasionally posted on the forum, nothing about stores...
PS: Also doesn't restrict by platform if you just click one.
Simon Carless (1834) on 9/5/2014 10:17 PM · Permalink · Report
Def. reading, still working on getting coders up and running. (We have a couple interested right now, but we'll see how we do!)
CalaisianMindthief (8172) on 9/21/2014 8:24 AM · Permalink · Report
Btw, it seems to me that we've long since passed 10000 games added in one year milestone, according to this January the 1st newspost. Right now we're at 88,017.
Simon Carless (1834) on 9/21/2014 3:56 PM · Permalink · Report
Wow, that's actually super impressive - so that's a 16% increase in game SKUs (individual platforms for games) in just 9 months. Might highlight that on front page :)