Though I doubt you'd share, I'd be super curious to know what traffic has been like since the layout change. It seems to me like the forums have become a fairly useless wasteland. That and the original articles are the only reason I ever came to this site (for what, maybe 6 years now...). Hacker News, Reddit, Kotaku, gamasutra and my RSS feed are WAY better sources of industry news or "one stop shopping" than gamedev ever was or currently is in. But you guys got probably 80% of my day's worth of web traffic. Now you get maybe 5%

IMO, if you're focusing on news I think you've totally misunderstood what makes this site worthwhile.

I think that without the forums, this site dies. Outside of my workplace, there has never been another resource that I could find that has been filled with such experts in this field as gamedev has been. It will suck if that continues to fade away.

Totally unrelated: it's been strange to me how much the loss of my old user score from the old rating system has disincentivized me from coming back. I'd guess I'd always used that as some kind of self-worth to the community... w/e

Please fix the forums... (recent threads up above the fold on the homepage so I can just hit F5 while I'm at work without necessarily being logged in)

In the new botique web era, niche wins, same-same catchall loses.

-me

Ah, rep... aka 'another feature which got broken'... note how yours is 946 and mine is in the mid-60s, not bad considering I had close to 1970 on the old system... I complained about this when the site rolled out (not so much because I was hit but because it was massively inconsistant) and all it got was a vague reply and that was all..

Ah, rep... aka 'another feature which got broken'... note how yours is 946 and mine is in the mid-60s, not bad considering I had close to 1970 on the old system... I complained about this when the site rolled out (not so much because I was hit but because it was massively inconsistant) and all it got was a vague reply and that was all..

Yeah it's bs. Certain mods got close to 1000 rep when the new system was implemented. Yet, regular members either got 0 - 60 but had a much higher rating in the old system.

It's a conspiracy! The illuminati of GDnet are tryin to keep us down.

In fact on the rep system; it's now completely usless.

The main complaint about the rating system (beyond its existance) was that it was just a number with no idea as to what posts etc caused the rating change.

New site launches and huzzah! per post ratings, now we can feedback per-post which not only serves to let the poster know something is wrong with it but also indicate to other users that the post probably isn't very good.

At "some point" the ability to see how a post was rated was removed; so now we are back to basically the old system, but with a bunch of people with a large amount of rep and some with smaller for no other reason than their data happened to come across better from the old site and once again the ability to see what posts caused the problem and what post aren't worth paying attention to is gone.

It should be noted that, like other changes, this was dropped on the site without the mosd even having a small amount of heads up (I only found out when I came to rate up a post, the page refreshed and the rating buttons were gone but the post still had 0 (zero) next to it.. in fact, why even have that number there now?).

You know what... some how, in some way, you've managed to make the rating system WORSE on the site... and for that achievement I salute you, gg...

[quote name='phantom' timestamp='1302966331' post='4799141']
Ah, rep... aka 'another feature which got broken'... note how yours is 946 and mine is in the mid-60s, not bad considering I had close to 1970 on the old system... I complained about this when the site rolled out (not so much because I was hit but because it was massively inconsistant) and all it got was a vague reply and that was all..

Yeah it's bs. Certain mods got close to 1000 rep when the new system was implemented. Yet, regular members either got 0 - 60 but had a much higher rating in the old system.

It's a conspiracy! The illuminati of GDnet are tryin to keep us down.
[/quote]
*Points at my rating* I'm not GDNet+, or staff, or a moderator. My rating started off higher. Why? The old rating *started* at 1000, and let you go up or down from there. The new rating system *starts* at 0, and goes up or down from there. So to transfer, they just took your current rating and subtracted 1000. For everyone, including staff and mods.

My old rating in the mid 1600s became the same thing minus 1000. So my rating on the new site started at somewhere in the 600s. The old staff who were 2000 or so, became 1000 or so. My guess, but I'm not 100% sure, is that the people less than 1000 were brought to 0, instead of negative, giving them a "fresh start". Some users have since then, gone into negative on their own. Also, a few users the staff mentioned accidentally got skipped over when they made the transfer and got reset to 0, they weren't sure how. You could PM a mod to fix it, if you believe yours is actually incorrect.


(YourOldScore - 1000) = yourNewScore

At "some point" the ability to see how a post was rated was removed;

It wasn't removed - just ruined.
They made it so the rep of a post only shows positive or negative if it's at or above 3.

Like this:
if(postRating < -2)
ShowRating(postRating+2)
else if(postRating > 2)
ShowRating(postRating-2)
else
ShowRating(0)


Which results in:

• PostRating . . ShowsValue
• -5 ................... -3
• -4 ................... -2
• -3 ................... -1
• -2 .................... 0
• -1 .................... 0
• 0 ..................... 0
• +1 ................... 0
• +2 ................... 0
• +3 .................. +1
• +4 .................. +2
• +5 .................. +3

Which, I completely agree, ruins the value of the whole thing.
I do think that they should hide the first -1 rating (makes the site seem friendlier), but two -2 ratings should then show up as -2, not -1.
And positive +1,+2, etc... there's no reason whatsoever to hide that!