ConayR

You're just a spammer, Raikoh. That's what it's all about. ;P

This whole thing is blown out of proportion. Their stance on the subject, whether they dismiss it, feel sorry or whatever, won't change a thing. It's not gonna change what happened, it's not gonna make anyone happy nor sad, it's not gonna affect the future. It simply doesn't matter at all.

It's not a matter of life and death, it's not some sort of a disgrace that would require group suicide, it's not something of that magnitude. Not even close. It was an idea that some people liked, some people didn't. BFD! It did not affect anyone's life so why does this thread go on for 7 pages? Don't you have anything interesting to do with your life and bitch about such a meaningless thing, discuss it to death and spend time on foreseeing the future (oh what are they gonna say?!) that doesn't really matter?

Hello World!

I've been visiting GiantBomb.com semi-regularly pretty much since its inception but it hasn't been till today (well, yesterday local time) that I've decided to register. Big Live Live Show Live contributed a bit I guess. As a software developer I look at things with a significant nerd-bend but I've decided to dedicate this first post to my initial impressions of the site from the account owner point of view. We all know that content around here rocks and that's something that doesn't require any emphasis. :)

First the bad stuff.

Navigation is really inconsistent. I'll probably file a bunch of bugs on this topic (not hoping for the fix anytime soon) but let's look at the very simple thing, the top-level navigation. There are two "dimensions" in which you navigate the site, let's call them content and personal. Content is everything you access via the red bar on top and personal is pretty much gathered in your profile tag in the top right corner. They both have pretty nice drop-down menus, but for some unknown reason they behave different. Content reacts on mouse-over and personal reacts to the click. What's even worse is that closing personal menu requires clicking on the nickname itself and clicking anywhere on the screen is not enough.

That's really bad and leads to some nasty situations, potentially even data loss. Let's say you're editing your blog and you hover over the Browse menu item in the content menu. If you expect it to behave the way personal navigation does, you click on Browse and... lose all the stuff typed in the editor. And you may expect that dynamics if you were browsing your profile, achievements, quests, etc. and got used to clicking to close the menu. It's all muscles memory and can be trained but it would be much better if it just was consistent.

There are some other tiny things that break the overall experience, most of them related to the amount of JavaScript this site is packed with. Image management is a complete dog in probably any browser other than FireFox. Which I dislike with passion. ;] Opera - blocked. IE8 - broken. What the heck? Some CSS is busted here and there as well and there are some other UX issues I find annoying. I'll probably bitch about it on forums as well. :)

Now the good stuff.

Boy is this site awesome or what? :D Content is KING but pretty much every single feature here makes sense. The way Wikid is organized is well thought through (although there's some crap content here and there that could use some cleanup; and will) and pretty much everything you'd expect is here. But social aspects of GiantBomb and definitely the crown jewel of web development. Stuff like FB, Twitter and achievement synchronization are cool but features from blogs to interactive wall to the way forums are implemented (and have bio instead of signature) are pure gold. No fluff, pure "let's socialize boys and girls!" functionality. I like it.

Don't have much to say about the community itself YET since I've had this account for what? 5 hours? But I'm hoping for the best.

So yeah, this is my first blog post on this site, I hope you report it for deletion and have a good time in general. :)

Cheers!

I was about to report the same thing. :) Regardless of the length of the list (e.g. http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/conayr/very-long-test-list/46-42814/) it is presented this weird way. Since numbering is part of the page rendering on the server side it's not browser- or os-dependent (like, say CSS content+counter-reset attributes would be). It also seems fairly easy to fix since pagination size is fixed and the only thing missing in the numbering formula is the initial offset, which is always (page-1)*50.

+1 for fixing this one. ;]

It's pretty surprising how well this thing did. It seems like a DLC that's completely upside-down yet it works. Capcom had some balls to try this DLC-ish, paid-demo-ish thing and proved that polished content like this actually sells. I hope to see more of the try before you buy stuff like this in the future. Episodic content didn't really catch up but perhaps this is a fair middle-ground. :)

So I guess I can't post on forums and less then 2-3 minutes after that comment on a news story if I'm a new user. (if that's not the case then there's a serious code bug and not a usability bug)

Fair enough. But what's troubling from the usability standpoint is that I get an error message and no way to save my comment for later. Have I known that upfront I would have copied my comment to a clipboard. Which is a workaround only if you know the bug exists in the first place.

Please feed us with the error message but don't wipe the comment from this flawed but still fairly usable editor. Pretty please.

Repro:

1. Start a new account.

2. Post on forums (say, in the thread "Say hello").

3. Go to http://www.giantbomb.com/news/ and comment on the news story (in my case it was the "Dead Rising 2: Case Zero Shatters XBLA First-Week Sales Record" one)

4. Cry.

System:

Win XP SP3, Opera 10.61 (retail, not beta)

Hi there! After watching The Big Live Live Show Live I've decided to finally register. It's amazing it took me this long since I've been lurking ever since the site started. But hey, better late then never. ;) I'm Dom, I'm 28, I hail from Poland and there's probably more stuff you don't care about I could share. And I will, since I'm a complete nolife everlurking troll. =]