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How's that news feed workin' for ya?

Cornstalks · 2011-08-19T16:57:12

I know this was a heavily debated topic awhile back, but I thought it might be good to go back and look at it again now that the dust has settled a bit. To be honest, the way the current news feed on the front page works is useless to me. All of the topics have 1 like (except for one, which has 2, but it's not even at the top), and there seems to be no type of order or anything. I used to use the news feed on the old GDNet, but this new one is a useless RSS feed to me. My suggestions: Make things have topics (or tags) & color coded. i.e. "postmortem", "industry", "APIs/Libraries", "Game Review", etc, etc. Ok, these aren't very good tags I've suggested, they're just the ones that came to the top of my head. But hopefully you get the idea. Right now it's just a randomly sorted mess. If things were tagged, I could then choose the things that I'm interested in (I like postmortems usually, but I don't really care much for industry news (i.e. studios opening/closing)).Realize the big "like" button isn't working that well. Sure, a few people click it. It's big, it's prominent, I see it, and I don't want to click it. Sorry, I don't have a useful suggestion for this one, but it something to consider.Bring in the GDNet touch. Ok, so I know GDNet is super understaffed and all and our wonderful staff are working very hard (thank you guys! (and girls)), but the current news feed feels like a cold robot. Remember the good old days when Trent's 6 year old mind would make me laugh, Tiffany's opinions would make me nod my head, and Drew's links would make me click like crazy, etc? I'm not saying you have to go back to exactly how it was. I know that won't work with how things are. But I'm talking about bringing in the GDNet touch again. Making it feel more personal and alive, and not so much like a cold robot. Brainstorming time?Do you want me to use the news feed? Cause it's kinda not on the screen at all when I load the main page. I have to scroll down an *entire* screen's worth to see it. My suggestion? Simplify the front page. I know, there's lots of awesome things about GDNet we all love and we want to be able to access it all from the front page, but... the current layout ain't workin for me. Sacrifice something, cut down on the large amount of screen space each "box" takes up... heck, even consider not using "boxes"... or "round squares"... or whatever the heck it is they're called. Or allow me to rearrange the "boxes" and close certain ones so they don't display... you know, customize my front page. Wasn't that the original plan anyway? Well that's what I have off the top of my head. What are your thoughts? P.S. No, I'm not trying to resurrect something. What I'm trying to do is review things now that we've gotten a little more settled and can see better what is and what isn't working.

GDNet Comments, Suggestions, and Ideas Community

Started by Cornstalks August 12, 2011 09:38 PM

12 comments, last by Gaiiden 12 years, 8 months ago

jbadams

26,386

August 19, 2011 01:45 AM

Not just in terms of how we deliver news, but what type of news we deliver. For example I would go for cutting out all industry business-type stories altogether and simply focus on new dev tools, processes, updates, releases. Bringing back the Dailies and their editorial style could be the one window into the whole industry each day, the rest would all just be the latest products, tech and methodologies - not Company X buying Company Y or Company A using Technology B...

Sounds pretty good to me, I've pretty much no interest in the overwhelming majority of those business-type stories, or of game reviews that don't include a design analysis or post-mortem for that matter, and whilst I can't speak for your entire audience I would suspect that as developers the majority would have a similar opinion; we're interested in new technologies, different approaches to development, what went wrong during project-X, etc. -- we don't (for the most part) care that Zygna bought out yet another small unknown developer.

The site also has an audience that is generally pretty technically proficient -- we don't need or want you to build a feed of news from other sources, because if we're interested in news from any given source we probably already have it included in our own feed.

- Jason Astle-Adams

Michael Tanczos

5,681

August 19, 2011 03:56 AM

The site also has an audience that is generally pretty technically proficient -- we don't need or want you to build a feed of news from other sources, because if we're interested in news from any given source we probably already have it included in our own feed.

By we though do you mean all people who have taken the time to aggregate their own feeds? I'm not certain every viewer does the same thing with news that you are doing though.

This view (which is the default) doesn't suffer from a lot of the problems that were suggested.. but the variety of news isn't their either since Gamasutra stories seem to be dominant.
http://www.gamedev.net/?vm=t7

deftware

1,778

August 19, 2011 06:01 AM

Personally I chose occasionally because there are tidbits that do catch my eye, and I eventually get caught in a scrollfest much like I find myself doing when I visit say slashdot for instance.

I'm not sure if it's just the layout change but it seems there are more actual news items now than before, which I assumed was the result of utilizing some automated system of sorts. Whether or not this is the case I do feel that I'm being offered more game dev related news than before, and it's nice to see it compressed so elegantly and uniformly, being the perfectionist/minimalist that I am. I was only disappointed that the old IOTD wasn't transferred over to the new database, but it was a relief to see that an archive of such antiquities is being kept online.

All-in-all I'm just glad gamedev exists after all these years because of the forums, which is where I spend most of my time here.

Gaiiden

5,720

August 19, 2011 04:57 PM

Something I've been thinking about would be to keep the news stream the way it is but add a new option to the pull down menu that lets you choose how to view it. This new option would be "Editor Selections" or something like that and what you will get is a date-ordered listing of posts that have either been submitted directly to the system by news editors or other people (and approved by editors), or pulled from the larger feed when it is "Liked" by an editor. Voting on items would still be available in this stream however it would have no effect in this particular feed itself other than to let the editors see what people are interested in. However for others viewing the more general streams it would have the normal effect of bumping the news item higher in visibility.

Basically, it's the old news stream within the new news stream.

Drew Sikora
Executive Producer
GameDev.net

How's that news feed workin' for ya?

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