Super SUGGESTION THREAD II Turbo: Champion Edition

Alright Everyone! The previous suggestion thread is bursting at its seams, and is unwieldy at this point. It's time for a fresh start! This will act as the new location for all of your Giant Bomb suggestion desires!
Note: There is no guarantee that your suggestion will be read.
READY GO!

built in IRC chat.

"built in IRC chat."

"Captain_Fookup said:

"built in IRC chat."

I agree; if gmail can do it with aim within the browser I don't see why IRC chat (barebones) can't be done.
"

Nothing big but maybe some cool downloadable wallpapers and icons.

"built in IRC chat."

"built in IRC chat."

I have a couple of suggestions I've been thinking about, and am planning on blogging about them in more detail, but since there's a new suggestion thread, I might as well outline my main idea here.

Micro-Reviews. Like twitter Micro-Blogs, but for game reviews. I've got tonnes of opinions about games, but I'm not the best writer in the world, and I often don't have the time/can't be bothered to write a full user review. So, a Micro-Review system would be brilliant. You could briefly summarize your thoughts and give a rating. They wouldn't be quite as short as twitters, but still quite short.

Now I know there's nothing to stop me from using the main user reviews system to write small reviews, but I know when I'm looking through user reviews, I want a detailed, well written review, not just a summary. Keeping the Micro-Reviews separate from the Macro-Reviews would be fantastic.

Also, I've heard people wanting to just be able to rate a game, like on gamespot and other games sites, which pretty much goes against the whole idea of giant bombs rating system, the idea that the rating is the least important part of a review. However this would give people the ability to rate games AND give a brief summary of their opinions, which would be pretty cool.

Micro-Reviews. Like twitter Micro-Blogs, but for game reviews. I've got tonnes of opinions about games, but I'm not the best writer in the world, and I often don't have the time/can't be bothered to write a full user review. So, a Micro-Review system would be brilliant. You could briefly summarize your thoughts and give a rating. They wouldn't be quite as short as twitters, but still quite short.

Just a suggestion to people providing suggestions in this topic, use bullet points. They are visual more tidy and easier to read!

Make a separate part about Video Game Medias. they're very various.

Also, Please do something with your embedded player for BombCast, every time I want to play Podcast my it responds with download request- that I don't like it because I only listen to the half of the rants and Downloading it is a waste of bandwidth.

"Just a suggestion to people providing suggestions in this topic, use bullet points. They are visual more tidy and easier to read!
"

"Micro-Reviews. Like twitter Micro-Blogs, but for game reviews. I've got tonnes of opinions about games, but I'm not the best writer in the world, and I often don't have the time/can't be bothered to write a full user review. So, a Micro-Review system would be brilliant. You could briefly summarize your thoughts and give a rating. They wouldn't be quite as short as twitters, but still quite short.
"

I'm pretty sure someone already suggested a "Games I own" list or "willing to trade" kinda thing. But I think it should be reinstated.

"Hamz said:

"Just a suggestion to people providing suggestions in this topic, use bullet points. They are visual more tidy and easier to read!
"

This is why I love both Hamz and The Beast!

I also propose that this topic is about 24 hours too early. ;-)
"

"StaticFalconar said:

"Captain_Fookup said:

"built in IRC chat."

I agree; if gmail can do it with aim within the browser I don't see why IRC chat (barebones) can't be done.
"

Will not happen, jeff said so some time ago when he and snide where on the BSHAF if i am not mistaking or perhaps the time he was on there alone. "

"Endogene said:

"StaticFalconar said:

"Captain_Fookup said:

"built in IRC chat."

I agree; if gmail can do it with aim within the browser I don't see why IRC chat (barebones) can't be done.
"

Will not happen, jeff said so some time ago when he and snide where on the BSHAF if i am not mistaking or perhaps the time he was on there alone. "

He said why?
"

"Snail said:

"Endogene said:

"Will not happen, jeff said so some time ago when he and snide where on the BSHAF if i am not mistaking or perhaps the time he was on there alone. "

He said why?"

He said that when people are sitting in a chat room, they're generally just sitting in the chat room, they're not clicking on other links, and seeing more adverts, and generating ad revenue for the site, and therefore it wouldn't be particularly beneficial to the site to have a built in chat room. He said he was happy for the community to keep doing their thing with the IRC."

1. ignore option

I was thinking. How about a forum where users can post their reviews and have them critiqued? So long as we have some members who are experienced with writing reviews and have enough time, I think that it would be a good system to help improve the quality of everyone's writing.

I hope the giant bomb team in the future allows us to add videos to the site like gaming videos and machinima and so on

I suggest that this thread gets stickied on the newest topics forum a few days. Now the update has come out, I'm sure lots of people have suggestions relating to it, so it'd be good to give this thread some extra coverage for a few days.

PC filter when browsing games (http://www.giantbomb.com/games/).

When you click on the comments button of something twice, the comments should disappear instead of showing the little loading bar again.

A couple of suggestions:

• A Facebook "Wall-to-Wall" style method for returning wall comments; ever since using Facebook the system implemented here seems needlessly clunky.

• A filter for automatically authorising wall posts from friends. I'm aware this could be heavily abused, especially with the staff, however a 'check list' like system of selecting certain friends for this option could be put in place?

• Make the twitter stuff two ways
• "shrink to fit" background picture option
  

"built in IRC chat."

"

• Make the twitter stuff two ways

"

"Metal_Gear_Sunny said:

"

• Make the twitter stuff two ways

"

That would surely have to be a decision made by Twitter? Unless there are open source components
"

Ahhh cool -- I honestly didn't know, I was very sure it was twitter-twitter or and twitter-outgoing.

Would be a pretty cool idea in that case then

It's a conscious decision not to post stuff on Twitter from Giant Bomb.


They could do it, because the Twitter API makes that incredibly easy, but I'd prefer a separate option if they choose to do it. And the ability to turn it off.

I have these suggestions / silly ideas right now:

• Bring back the Edit link in the image viewer (with checkboxes and all on the window that appears). It is easier to handle Deletion Requests that way... I can link images that way, too (another way of doing it). Or add a Delete option... but I prefer the Edit link...
  
• Let me change captions from the image viewer. (In case the first point above is not implemented.) Now that the thumbnails are resized smaller than they actually are I find myself looking at the images on the image viewer (then pressing Back and Edit Page to change the caption) more frequently than I used to (I could use multiple tabs in my browser... but it would be simpler not to).
• While editing Images, let me Add new gallery from another game / page. (This is a very silly suggestion, I guess, and not my preferred way of doing it... I'm saying it just in case it is wanted to keep the drag-and-drop style). It would work just like Add new gallery, except that what you type for the name will be a search for a game / character / whatever gallery instead. (A Create New gallery option would be needed, too, in case the gallery doesn't exist yet). Once you select a result from the search any image you drag to this gallery will be linked to that other gallery in some other page. (This would be a drag-and-drop style replacement for the missing edit button ->Search for a new gallery to attach this image to on images. I prefer the older method. What was needed under the old system was multiple selections). Right now I have to go to the other page(s) and use Add Image -> Search Site (or My Images if I uploaded it recently).
  
• Most important of all: let me select multiple images using Shift and Ctrl combinations.Not just one by one (multiple selections where I have to click one by one). Dragging and dropping can be unnecessarily "painful" without this. One by one would be better than not being able to do it, however.
  
• While posting images inside a gallery, let me "redirect" an image to another gallery just after I uploaded them to a page. I tried deleting an image, thinking it would just remove it from the current gallery so I could drag it to another, but it just disappeared. If it could stay in the page (maybe darkened) and I could drag it again, it would work, I think. I could do this very easily before.

• Delegate the choosing of images that show up on game pages / character pages to users with a certain amount of points (10000?, 20000?). Some "changing image wars" might break out, like with the default image, but I guess (and hope) it wouldn't be so bad.... If game pages should be controlled more by mods / staff... then just for character pages.
  
• For game pages mostly, but maybe the 3 "squares" that show images should be made to be of a similar aspect ratio as most of the images that will be shown there (automatically, choosing a single aspect ratio that works best). On adult games, for example, the areas are "widescreen" but I still haven't created such a game page with "widescreen" screenshots, so the squares should be 4:3, I think, to better display the screenshots...

The Question of the day on the top of the forums should be updated in line with the Question of the Week on the I Love Mondays video, and on the responses video they could summarize the best written responses too. That way people who don't want to video themselves talking can have an post their thoughts on the subject AND the Question of the Day would get updated more regularly.

- Still confusing to see who is being quoted when there is more than one quote

- Xbox Live gamertag / mygamercard.net feature that shows every GB user on Xbox Live at any given time (those that "sync" up or whatever) Great way to find new people to play with. E.g. you go to the Call of Duty 4 page and it will show GB users playing CoD4. Same for PSN.

-Gamertag badge/psn badge on our profile pages

This may sound odd, but the ability to categorize or label our blog posts to separate them would be nice. That way, if one was to click on that category or label, only those types of blog posts would be displayed.

Alexander said:

"- A friend feed, so we can see the activity of all friends and their posts, blogs, etc. in one place."

yeah quite right there brukaoru, weird I'd even used it earlier today. Stupid me.

• A fight between Willy the Giant Bomb and Rayman for control of the entire universe and the souls of all humanity

I would like some sort of Tag system for the Videos on GiantBomb. Right now there's a couple of categories and there's Recent Videos and Most viewed videos categories, but I don't know of a way to find say, a list of all I Love Monday's videos or all videos about a certain game or a feature series, or other series of videos that might exist. I would really love a Tags feature so I could just click "I love mondays" or "Diablo 3" Tags on a video and all related videos to that Tag is viewable in a list.

It'd be nice to put your name to the pluses and minuses you deal out.
I like to put a personal touch to my praise and scorn.

Had a brainwave after being on a Podcast train of thought.

How about a weekly video podcast compilation of all the videos of the week on the site? It would be great to be able to relive the likes of the Endurance Run eps and Quick Looks on the train home, and better yet, for simply showing off when I'm out and about. Its pretty much perfectly set up for it too because, if I'm correct on thinking, the videos can be chaptered and sectioned so that each individual video could be easily accessed or skipped to in a chronological of when they were released that week.

That's about all I've got.

Unless Jeff and Ryan want to make a Podcast dedicated to talking like Samuel L Jackson, I would be totally down for that too =P

A few suggestions:

The ability to merge image galleries.
The ability to edit which image is the default for galleries without having to go to that specific gallery.
Let us delete galleries (maybe there needs to be a point limit for this?)

Now that two topics have been unstickied from the newest topics board, so it's less cluttered I'm going to resuggest stickying this thread to the newest topics board for a few days to give it a bit of exposure.

On a video page, I miss the link it would have to the game's page it is about. Like for a Persona Endurance Run, on the left there'd be a link to the Persona 4 game page. I really liked that for the videos but now it's gone.

I briefly mentioned this in Sweep's blog, but I'm going to repeat it here. I'd like a link to this page on the friend's blog section of our profiles. Not just on our own profiles; I want to see it on every user's profile. Here are some comparison shots to demonstrate what I mean.

GameSpot

There's plenty of room for a link on the right side of the module title. And I think such links would be useful for the other profile modules too, so we don't have to go back up to the top of the page just to get to them.

If this is suggestions for forums then this site DESPERATELY need SIGNATURES! I dont get it, how can a forum not have sigs? Also next they need to have it where you can know what threads you posted in or not. In the forums there is no indication of what thread you have posted in. It really bugs me, add these two options and you got a member for life.

On multiple pages, GiantBomb talks about me as a user in the third person, specifically in the review section...

"This user has written 4 reveiws and his reveiws are rated five out of five..."

There have been a few other instances where I am refered to as a male when clearly I am not one. I selected female on my settings page. Don't I deserve a female title?
Small thing to ask in my oppinion.

"Normal" avatar support.  100 width and height max, upload from computer or host elsewhere.  No more of this stupid as hell "image too small" crap where I have to use a bloated image only too see it (poorly) scaled down as my avatar.  The avatars here are just lame, it's a basic feature, and like 1up.com, I have no idea how GB has screwed it up so badly.

It's 4 in the morning, so excuse me if I'm not making sense. But my suggestion pertains to forum moderation policy. Yeah. Basically, I think it would be best if when a topic made today happens to be the same as a topic made in August, the topic made in August will be locked and the topic made today will be allowed to go on. Topics that are 5 months + old are stale, and as such, will not continue to attract potential posters; I'm not referring to community discussion topics like "Answer Above, Ask Below," because that brand of thread receives hits often enough so as not to fall back beyond the point of relevance. Basically, eh...I think anything more will just be redundant. Hopefully I've gotten my point across, you're of course free to agree or disagree. I'm so tired. =(

"Zenexo said:

"If this is suggestions for forums then this site DESPERATELY need SIGNATURES! I dont get it, how can a forum not have sigs? Also next they need to have it where you can know what threads you posted in or not. In the forums there is no indication of what thread you have posted in. It really bugs me, add these two options and you got a member for life."

Sigs will never happen ever. That's the word from the TOP of the TOP.

As for the second thing, I really don't get what you mean."