Man, I am so glad we didn't launch before E3.
The biggest compliments I've seen paid to Giant Bomb so far revolve around just how much there is to do on the site. It all starts with adding information and pictures to the wiki pages (and racking up points for doing it) and y'all have, of course, been absolutely blitzing that stuff. I'm also especially proud of the stupendous community features snide, coonce, andy, and Ethan have built for you guys to play around with. With the friends network, image galleries, blogs, a what-I'm-doing-now status tag, RSS feeds for everything you do...well, it's a lot to absorb, innit? So much that you might miss something.
Lists are one piece of the profile puzzle that hasn't gotten much airtime yet. You can add anything--a game, person, character, location, or whatever--to a list, right from that thing's wiki page. There are the obvious built-in lists like game collection and most-wanted games; you can probably figure out what those are for. But lists are also, like, totally useful for ranking all the cutest boys in school! (I nominate Kyle for 14th place, does that sparkle with everyone?) Um, what I'm getting at is, you can create a meaningful list about anything, as evidenced by this phenomenal group of the greatest mustachioed figures in gaming our friend and moderator MrJared assembled. Seriously, check it out. If that doesn't communicate the power of the list feature, what does?
Truly, our hearts have been warmed by the creativity, inventiveness, and just plain hard work you people have displayed this week. Here's a few noteworthy examples:
- User DarthStone has vowed to translate all of our reviews into Spanish and post them on his profile blog, because all the game coverage sucks in Latin America, or something.
- We knew the various Halo pages would get a lot of attention right off the bat, and indeed the MJOLNIR Armor wiki has come together nicely. It's a good example of what devoted fans can put together on the site. User MaSuTa also went buck wild on the Fire ProWrestling Returns page. (Dude, stick some images in there!)
- As noted on the Bombcast this week, the Hamburger forum remains shockingly on-topic. There are now hundreds of threads STRICTLY ABOUT HAMBURGERS. Remember, every single wiki on the site has its own forum. Personally, I'm planning to camp out on the Roberta Williams board at some point.
- If you're looking for some ways to make this world a better place, why not add information to some of the mindblowing concepts some users have come up with, like Unreliable Narrator or Games With Numbers Where Letters Should Go?
- I have to recognize the serious effort our first wave of moderators have put in so far, working tirelessly to approve your submissions and keep the forums relatively civil. The initial popularity of the site caught us with our collective pants down, and the mods are helping us get things under control while we figure out exactly what the hell we're doing here.
Lastly, as Ryan just noted on the news blog, we've rolled out a new crowd-based image moderation tool that will let you, the people, help us push submitted images into the system at a much faster rate. You'll even earn points for doing it (soon)! The more images you guys deal with, the more wiki submissions we can focus on. Now is the time for every good user to come to the aid of his web site. Won't you do your part?
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