14 replies to this topic

[Mussi]

Hey guys and galls,

Is it just me or is the IOTD section less commented on since the big site revamp? It feels like there used to be a lot more participants in the comment sections. Any of you feel the same? If this is actually the case, what happened?

Also, the IOTD is not accessible from the menu

[Ashaman73]

Yep. I can't nail it down, but my interest changed from 'let's first look at the new IOTD' to 'there was once this IOTD thingy around...' with the revamp. Maybe the content is no longer as interesting or the IOTD is no longer as present as before the revamp, but something changed indeed.

Edit:
Hmmm...looking at the IOTD I noted the advertising above it. With all the colors and motion going on there I look first at it blending the IOTD out. This atleast explains for me why I'm no longer aware of the IOTD like before the revamp. Money rules the world

Edited by Ashaman73, 05 December 2012 - 12:30 AM.

[Hodgman]

I often look at the IOTD gallery page, but the web-2.0-ish "resize the thumbnail on mouse-over" effect almost freezes my browser, so it's a painful experience...

[edit]I've often got a HD video running in a second chrome window. If I close that, then the thumbnails animate smoothly...[/edit]

Edited by Hodgman, 05 December 2012 - 02:42 AM.

[jbadams]

the web-2.0-ish "resize the thumbnail on mouse-over" effect almost freezes my browser

You're right. I'm not getting anything close to freezing the browser, but the effect does look and feel very slow and unresponsive -- especially when moving from one image to another rapidly -- and it's such a small difference in size that it's not actually really useful; I still have to actually click and open an image to really see any more detail. As such I'd be in favour of removing that particular effect if it's not prohibitively difficult to do so.

looking at the IOTD I noted the advertising above it. [...] Money rules the world

Unfortunately it costs quite a bit of money to keep a site like GDNet running smoothly and advertising is a big part of how those bills get paid. We'd really like to work on both reducing the number of ads and weeding out any that are less relevant or particularly annoying moving forward with the site, but obviously we'll have limitations on what we're able to achieve without hurting the site in exchange.
I will comment however, that whilst some of the ads can definitely be distracting at times, I'm not sure if this is contributing in a reduced popularity of IOTD, as we have a similar number of ads in very similar positions to the old design -- if anything I think there's really less clutter on the surrounding page. There was some delay between the old and new versions of the sites where we didn't have an IOTD for a number of months, which probably contributed to reduced activity in that area.

[Mussi]

Maybe it also has something to do with being scattered all over? I guess journals play a bigger role than they used to and there's this community gallery...thing. Personally, I never check out the gallery. It seems like people are dumping their images, but with little community interaction, commenting on a single image belonging to a set sounds kind of silly to me.

Do IOTDs show up on the interesting topics or new content lists?

[swiftcoder]

Two words: comment notification.

The comments thread underneath the IOTD doesn't send reply notifications, the way pretty much every other thread on the site does (Journal comments also suffer from this problem). What does that mean? I comment once on an image, and never come back to discus it, because I never know another person has replied.

Contrast that with the old site, where IOTD comment threads would routinely stretch to 3 pages...

[Michael Tanczos]

Two words: comment notification.

I have added the IOTD forum back in, though I haven't experimented with comment notification yet on it. You can at least see new comments if you go directly to the forum.

[Gaiiden]

Two words: comment notification.

Yea. I thought the Journals had this fixed in the latest version...

[swiftcoder]

Yea. I thought the Journals had this fixed in the latest version...

To be fair, they didn't work for so long that I have pretty much stopped reading journals. If it was restored within the last few months, I probably haven't noticed yet.

[Bacterius]

To be fair, they didn't work for so long that I have pretty much stopped reading journals. If it was restored within the last few months, I probably haven't noticed yet.

Journal comment notifications are definitely working for me, though you might have to enable them manually in your notification settings (I don't remember if I did that or not).

I think the problem is that many IOTD's don't invite much conversation beyond "well done", "nice", etc.. as they are often just screenshots of full games at various stages of development (which is fine, by the way). I find the most active IOTD's are the proof-of-concept ones where people can comment by asking questions about the tech (which might also give rise to an interesting forum thread later on).

But there's definitely also a lack of members checking out the IOTD's - I find the number of guests commenting is very disproportionate to the number of members commenting, which shows that either:
- IOTD's have very good google coverage
- members aren't made aware of them or are not interested

One reason I can think of is that the "view gallery" link is not very explicit (at first I thought it linked to a list of pictures of the current IOTD) and is rather awkwardly placed next to the IOTD's name (and often gets split on two lines). An "all IOTD's" link next to the "submit your image" one would be more consistent, in my opinion.

The consequence of this is that past IOTD's are difficult to browse if you don't know where to look for, and since IOTD's only last featured for a day or so, members can miss out on them pretty easily. Add to that the lack of comment notifications, and it really doesn't make conversation easy.

[DpakoH]

also IOTD has some bugs, I am sure someone already reported them as they are not from yesterday, but anyway I am posting this image for the site admins. Please fix it

[jbadams]

I am posting this image for the site admins.

Thanks for the report! Did you get this error just viewing the image in question, or only when you commented, or...?

[DpakoH]

I am posting this image for the site admins.

Thanks for the report! Did you get this error just viewing the image in question, or only when you commented, or...?

only when the page loads after posting my comment. if i refresh the page again, the errors are gone.

[Michael Tanczos]

only when the page loads after posting my comment. if i refresh the page again, the errors are gone.

Ah there we go.. fixed.

[MrDaaark]

The mouse over zoom is highly annoying.

IOTD has never very been popular here, because this isn't a good site for creative stuff. It's a site where people have arguments about C#/C++ and other nonsense. A lot of the user base come off as anti-social shut-ins and have no love or understanding of game art, or gaming culture. It's just C++ talk, and whatever the newest rendering technique.

When you do see something worthwhile in there, it's usually from someone who never posts here! That Kung Fu Superstar thing looks awesome, but that was a drive by post by a guy who posted 4 times in 11 years. There is another nice looking thing posted recently that is just a static render made in some DCC packages. Out of place, regardless of how nice it is.

Then there is the posts that are "I took a bunch of models I googled, and implemented a buzzword buzzword deferred buzzword renderer". Okay.. who cares? That's not anything. That's like posting a picture of a screwdriver and a hammer. Do something with it first. Post a game. Make actual content. Buzzword renderer is not interesting on it's own. It's putting the cart before the horse (and sometimes, there isn't even a horse)!

A good IOTD gallery is ScreenshotSaturday.com that self updates by linking anything with the twitter tag #ScreenshotSaturday. I believe it was started by the TIGSource forums community, which is a great place to post screenshots and get feedback on your games. They have a nice section to make DevLogs too. The members there actually make games and discuss their creation. Creative talk. Not programming talk.

Not trying to hate on GameDev, it just is what it is. The people working on cool stuff are under NDA, and the artistic people are posting on sites that are better suited for good quality feedback and discussion. There is no real creativity going on here today. Just talk about how Java and C++ implement exceptions under the hood.