Stupid Question of the Day

It is in the footer now... we will be tweaking the nav in the coming weeks.

We had some ideas that looked good on paper, but they didn't work out so we have to make a small tweak to the nav next week to account for some of those things now that we see it in action.

Thanks, ChangeAgent. There for a few minutes, I was afraid that you guys had gotten rid of the forums!

Yeah change is hard... Change is also in my name. :)

But ultimately we desire people to use their own profiles (through game posts) to have discussions... like the MMO one I sent out.... so this new nav reflects how the site will be changing in the coming months, focusing on content and conversations... log out and check out the new homepage if you haven't.

I like the new homepage! That's pretty sweet. It's definitely a lot more eye-catching than the old one, and is indicative of the actual activity that is taking place on the site.

It makes me happy that you like it Arislyn :) We'll be working hard on more and more features that show all the different activity on the site and enable you to quickly and easily jump into conversations like this one or others on the site.

Soon we'll be revamping your logged in Homepage which is something we're all quite excited about. It should be much easier to keep up with conversations on the site and see what is going on after the next few updates to the site! :)

I'm starting to warm to the idea of using the gaming posts as a way to drive discussion. Makes it easier to tie what we're playing and what we're saying to others into a more cohesive package. I think this may change the way I interact with others, and more of the gDNA community can share in my sparkling wit. :)

@mykalgaidin One thing you will see shortly is a NOW page that will bubble up in real time all of the conversations happening on the site... this will also help enforce how we want to drive discussion through the site.

And you hit the nail on the head about tying these discussions closer to your gamerDNA (based on specific games) so that the gameCURRENTs on the game pages (and on the homepage and everywhere we bubble that up) is full of lots of great game specific discussion.

So I am glad you are starting to pick up on that a bit. We will be doing lots to change the site to make it easier to get into conversations, easier to find/watch friends, etc.

I've been sitting over here thinking about it, and I'm wondering how you are planning on getting people to see all these conversations if they are new to the site?

The only entries that pop up on my home page are from friends. So, if you come in brand new and have no friends...then this is going to seem pretty empty. Plus, if you are like me and don't actually visit the game pages themselves, then the place is going to seem very dead to a newcomer.

I'll admit that I've been having a ton more conversations through my homepage than I ever did on the forums. But, I've been around for a bit. I have friends...that I made through the forums. Now that the forums seem so...invisible...I wonder what's going to draw people into talking in the first place?

With all the changes, I've lost track of a lot of what has been phased out or changed. Can we still subscribe to "watching" a certain game's activity and seeing that on our homepage? If we can, how apparent is that to the newcomer?

In the short term, there will be a new page in the top nav called NOW which will be a real time updating feed of all the new comments, conversations, images, being added to the site by users... also the member home will get an entire revamp to surface all of this.

So we are planning on attacking this directly. The now page was suppose to launch this week, but it had to wait for some other issues... so probably 5/5 for that.

Also, I think that QforQ will post a screen shot of it and explain your exact question in the forum.

Sweetness. I'll go read. :)

Hey Arislyn, I'll try to get a blog post up about the new site navigation and the NOW page tonight or at the latest tomorrow. Things are a bit busy/crazy today, so it may slip in tomorrow...but we're determined to get this info out there ASAP.

Hey Arislyn, we put up those blog articles I mentioned:

http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2009/04/24/gamerdna-site-navigation-redux/

http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2009/04/24/how-to-start-a-conversation-on-gamerdna/

Hope this helps out :)

I read those. Thanks, guys. :D

I really think that the NOW page will really help the situation and start to build the community more. In fact, I'm really looking forward to it. It harkens back to the days when we had a blog directory.

Speaking of which, will we be able to filter the NOW page? You see, I'm thinking that there are probably going to be a flood of auto-added entries that are a single line with no comments. Those are pretty darn boring. I honestly don't care if Player X played a game if they have nothing to say about it.

What I would like to do is filter for blog entries. Those are added by hand, so you know that the player has at least a little something to say about the game. Auto-added entries may or may not have anything of interest attached to them.

Yep we won't be showing auto added entries... unless the user adds additional content to them. It will only show content added by people.... as that is the starting point of the conversation.

Yeah! Awesomesauce! :)

This change should make a lot of people happy. From what I've read, a lot of people miss the blog directory (including me) and this should tickle them. Hopefully, it'll also appease those who were upset about moving the forums.

I'm looking forward to it! Because, as much as I hate to say it....I kind of agree with Sensationl, Dem, et al. about the forum games. I don't begrudge the people who like them playing them. I think people should be able to have fun on the forums however the like, so long as it's civil and doesn't break ToS. But, it seems like that and "Hai! I'm new" posts are just about all there are, anymore.

Being able to talk on the NOW page will be much more satisfying, I think.

If you think about it... this is how we want the site to work... you ask a question or post about a game or play a game... your friends see it in your feed... and we all talk about it... and if this conversation was about a game... it would bubble up on the game page... and with all these comments, it would be appearing on the NOW page... and people can still get into discussions... so it is like a distributed forum... which is sort of where most social media sites are heading...

Took me a bit, but I'm enjoying this a bit more than just using the forums. Will there be a way to see (Beyond the NOW function) when the posts we've been participating in are updated (beyond email alerts)?

Yep... we are doing a complete and total revamp of the member home.. it will have more filters/configurations and roll ups of useful information about what is happening both with your friends and with content you might be interested in.

As we said... this is just the first small step towards a whole new site.

Speaking of email alerts....will there be a way to roll all of your email alerts into a single notification per day? My inbox gets crazy full very, very quickly, now.

After the update, due to circumstances, I actually found the forums before I could find the main site. :)
Although I do think the forums, but also the quizzes and game sig images, are harder to find now, I never thought it was a big problem.
Reading the responses above and elsewhere I remain excited about everything that's happening to gamerDNA.