Site quirks that's never been fixed.

Hey I love GB and I've been coming here everyday for a long time but the site itself has issues. Be it design or bugs, some problems have stuck around.

What things about the site nag you as a user?

Here are examples I've experienced and wish could be improved (a lot of them have been reported):

• videos are performance hog. on older computers, it can even be choppy. the fans on my computers kick in. doesn't seem to be an issue on youtube. (real issue)
• on iOS, the site frequently logs me out (just annoying)
• search engine mostly works but if you type something incorrect, doesn't really have the ability to suggest something similar. seems to be looking for something pretty specific. (this problem is not a day to day thing but can crop up when you just can't find something you're looking for)
• basic organizational stuff. for example, go to quick looks on the video tab and you'll find pages of great content but no way to filter all this stuff. no way to look by year, month, weeks, genre, length....content is just dumped here. This can also be really helpful in the endurance run page. you can't just goto endurance run and pick the game you want. If you want persona 4, you'll have to sift through pages and pages to find it. GB has a great back catalog but makes it hard for new and old user to experience them for the 1st time or re-experience them. (i think this is important)
• another thing about how video content is handled. let's say you're watching an endurance run or extralife. say deadly premonition vj 14. if you're on that page watching the video, the next video is not on the side of the page. what you'll find is popular videos so you'll have to have a tab open for the endurance page. (this seems obvious)
• hate the way images are handled. looking through screenshots of a game is just slow and pain in the ass. (maybe no one cares these days?)
• notification doesn't seems to work (not a big deal)

I miss the wiki editor suggestions they used to have on the front page. Also but not really a quirk, I miss PS3/PS4 trophy support and quests, those were both awesome.

Its mainly video filtering, but there is an google chrome extension which can help with that but its a bit wonkaloid.

Forum search has been busted for so long that I stopped trying to use it. I just use google to find old threads.

Also polls have been busted for like 2 weeks now.

Biggest thing is options on video search and sorting for me. Going to subscriber and having so many videos. Regular series for example can't be sorted in or out. Kinda crazy at this point not to have that.

I use Giant Bomb Plus for that.

This is the one thing that has bothered me the most about the site and I feel like I haven't been able to find specific threads on this site for years. Like you say I have to go to google to find old threads. GB has one the best and most passionate communities on the internet so it's kinda crazy that their forum search is so busted.

Whenever I switch to a tab with a video on it and absentmindedly flick my wrist down to play the video, I almost always click on something in the drop down menus and get sent to another page.

I miss video playlists. Like seriously. Bring them back.

Yeah, I often watch GB content on YouTube because of this.

That is really frustrating, especially when your progress on the video doesn't save.

@itwongo said:

Whenever I switch to a tab with a video on it and absentmindedly flick my wrist down to play the video, I almost always click on something in the drop down menus and get sent to another page.

This happens to me all the time. Luckily the resume video feature mostly addresses the issue, but it's still really annoying.

@liquiddragon said:

About the performance, I think Vinny has talked some about how Giantbomb's videos are encoded with a way higher bitrate than youtube's videos, could be because of that? Are you using youtube's flash player?

About the "iOS-logging out", have you enabled cookies in Safari?

The notifications work fine for me, the last update looks a little empty though for someone that doesn't get them that often.

During the sites beta there was this issue Ian and I (I think it was Ian) were trying to figure out that had to do with- why does the style bar (with the bold, Italicss, Underline, and other style choices above this text box) would detach from the editor and get stuck at the top of the screen, and this made it so it could disappear entirely or become unusable.

We thought we had the bug narrowed down to if you were moving down the screen to fast while the page is loading this would break it (which I was able to replicate many times so that was one part of this bug), but the bar still breaks to this day. You can't do it when the page is loading anymore so that was fixed, but that bar just doesn't like to stay put haha.

I don't know what causes it now, it seems so random at this point.

It's kind of funny. When they were on the jango platform the site didn't have any of these problems. It wasn't as pretty, sure, but the bugs were much more minimal. So much so you barely noticed them.

Edit: if you want a video filter there are plenty made by users specifically for giant bomb. There's a site that does it for you and also a couple of google apps. The engineers are aware of them and while they can't professionally use them they'd probably personally recommend them if I had to guess (because they're really good for the most part).

Qlcrew.com is an amazing tool for giant bomb videos. I should really donate to them for all that awesome.

@chu52 said:

I was about to complain about filtering videos in the backlog, but this tool seems pretty legit. Thanks for pointing it out!

@guanophobic: it's set to block 3rd party and advertisers. doesn't seem to happen on other sites.

@laszlokovacs@cornbredx@cornbredx: I checked out Qlcrew.com. looks cool but doesn't it seem crazy to use another site to enjoy this site? seems to really point out what a problem it really is.

You can use the chrome extension Giant Bomb Plus to do the same things without needing to leave the site.

@corevi: i understand and these are all cool but they are band-aid solutions. wouldn't you like to see them actually addressed within the site?

I remember when they started and even now time to time, they'll talk about how arcane gamespot got and i'm afraid if GB keeps sweeping issues under the rug, it'll only end up the same.

found another quirk just now. click on reply and the type doesn't start at the end of your id but at the beginning. not a big deal but it's an usability thing.