It's been a while since I posted an engineering update so here goes! I'll talk about some of the stuff I'm working on but keep in mind this isn't an exhaustive list, the rest of the team has their own list and I won't be covering everything that's going on, just what I can speak to personally.

So here's my list:

1. WIKI

I said in my last update that we are going to start concentrating on Wiki a lot more, and we are! We have a solid plan for moving forward and work has started on some major improvements that should make wiki editing and moderation a lot less painful. Stay tuned for more updates, there's a lot of backend engineering going on right now so it'll be a while before you see any changes on the editor side, so hold tight! Massive engineering efforts like this take a while (if you're doing it right that is) so it'll be slow going (especially since we can't drop all of our other tasks)

As part of this we are working on some API stuff that could be pretty awesome for developers, we want to expose this vast database of all video game knowledge in a much better way!

2. Video Streaming

I know a lot of you have been having issues with live show streaming lately. We are having some problems with our streaming provider Akamai. We are working through the problems with them but as you can imagine with a company that big and a site this small (relatively) it's tough to get their attention. They are working with us though so we'll get this mess sorted out.

In the mean time I've written some code into our video player that 'should' help recover from dropped connections. This is really just a bandaid though until we sort things out with Akamai.

More info here: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/wcarle/blog/on-the-subject-of-live-streaming-problems/111630/

3. Premium Billing

The billing system rewrite is mostly complete and we are in the cleanup stage now. We've brought back some features that have been missing for a while (like gift subscriptions.) Things should be a lot more stable now and hopefully billing issues should be few and far between. There will inevitably be issues I'm sure but we're in a good place to quickly address those now. This project is my baby and I really want to make it work 100% so if you have issues/frustrations let us know!

4. Account Management

We just finished up a massive rewrite of most of our account management code (Thanks Steve!) Things like password resets, username changes, etc. etc. It was a bit bumpy for a while as any giant rewrite will inevitably be, sorry if it caused any frustrations. Giant Bomb accounts have been migrated like a thousand times between different systems so we're trying really hard to clean them up and get them all working.

5. Search

Search is still a bit rough on the site, we know. Search is reeeeealy hard especially when dealing with complex data structures like our wiki (Google won't let us have their algorithms). We are constantly tuning it to get you the results you want. jSlack rips his hair out next to me every day trying to get it right. He's been doing a lot of work on it lately so you should be seeing some gradual incremental improvements.

Well this turned into a really long blog post so I'm gonna finish it up here. If you have any questions feel free to ask!

-Will