What Small Feature Would You Add to Giant Bomb?

Hey duders, I’m Chris. An engineer here at CBSi and I had a question for you; If you could snap your fingers and add one small feature/enhancement to giantbomb.com what would you add?

The reason I’m asking is to see what you guys, the community browsing the site, would love to see added. I’m not asking because we are out of ideas or don’t have enough we are currently doing. There’s also no guarantee any of the ideas posted here will be implemented. I would love for this conversation to be a positive one so please don’t comment on bugs or issues you have with the site, there’s a place for that.

Thanks in advance and I look forward to reading your suggestions!

Giving users the option to hide individual wiki boards from view on the main forum feed, so if they don't want to see topics about a certain game or platform they don't have to. A feature like this would be especially helpful around the launch of highly anticipated games to not only help people avoid spoilers, but to clean up their feed if they aren't interested in that game and there are 5 or 10 active topics about it. Been asking for this one since 2008!

Some type of scavenger hunt system

I second this one; it sucks to have to decide between using the forums for a week and having games spoiled just because a new game comes out

Also, I might be just missing it, but as far as I can tell we still don't have a way to quickly view a user's created threads, which has been missing since the Seaserpent redesign

A 24/7 chat channel that streams random giant bomb video stuff.

Replace the forum's weird format with the more universal one that uses BB codes. I still don't know how to arrange images here and the quote system is complicated.

@xanadu: Expanding on that, it'd be nice if there was a randomize button that took you to a random video page from over the years.

Absolutely. I entered this thread with the intention of posting this exact request.

Emotes built directly into chat ;)

I don't think this would be considered a small feature, but I would love a playlist feature for all of the videos, and hopefully podcasts, on the site.

It's the main reason why I still download GB videos and watch them in VLC, rather than streaming them in the video player.

It would be cool if we could save different types of playlists too, so we could build up different content backlogs to work through.

Roku livestreams... probably impossible.

I would love the ability to control the twitter feed on the homepage, preferably being able to enable or disable which staff member's account displays, or at least being able to turn it off.

This. Just a straight rip of XenForo would make me very happy.

Jeff was talking about the wiki not doing that much traffic, if I remember correctly. So Quests 2.0 to get people exploring it, especially for the people that missed it grinding the site to a halt back in the day.

Notifications / RSS Feed for Live Events in the top bar. If there's an RSS feed, people can use it with IFTTT to get text notifications of live streams.

I even wrote a server to do the feed and an IFTTT action, but it's hacky and would be great if there was official support.

I see my ideas were already posted, but ye, forum filter would've been nice. Actually add to that, filter settings for what content the main page displays (and maybe even how it's being prioritized). And yes, video randomizer would be awesome. Although I bet that's not exactly a small feature.

Buy Giant Bomb Video Buddy from @soup_menu and support it as the new official app. Improve streaming performance on mobile.

The ability to switch the site to a West or East-only view. I know it's one site, but they are starting to have unique voices (which I think was the goal), and if I'm in the mood for GBeast, I'd like to have the site tailor the content that way.

Park videos permanently in Continue Watching.

Having an endless chain of replies in live chat when you click the little speech bubble instead of just the previous 1 reply.

Mousing over an emote should tell you the name (like Twitch does) + emote menu.

Remove the Bug Reports forum from Recent Topics so that you don't get 50 locked threads popping up about "remove obscure character duplicate page from the wiki"

http://gbrandomquicklook.party/viewParty.html

Nobody uses it, though.

I would want to be able to save videos to an indefinite queue.

Supporting this because I like to binge. Sure, there's YouTube for some of the free videos, and there's QLCrew, though I forget about it most of the time, but playlists for videos, especially premium videos, that autoplay until the end of a series on the home site would be excellent.

Timestamps on the bombcasts.

I would love this so fucking much. I too love to binge from time to time and playlists would make that whole process much more enjoyable.

Random video button

A featured game/article on the home page ala Wikipedia's article of the day

Being able to search through audio files by the tags that they are given. Some wiki pages show some of the audio (Dark Souls) while others do not, despite being tagged (Oddworld : Strangers Wrath, The Witcher 3)

Being able to see a comment chain during chat would also be nice. I find myself often scrolling back trying to figure out what the conversation is about.

Last but not least, it seems tricky to put links into text whileyou're writing. Many times the link will just not drop. Adding links after the entire comment is written is pretty much necessary. Maybe something can be done here.

Not small, but I'd love a Netflix like display for all video content on the site.

A resume function for podcasts, like the videos have. Having to keep a podcast page open to keep my place is a slight annoyance.

I like the idea of a 24/7 chat w/ video playing. I know there are Discords and a site that does something similar but it would be nice if it was all vontsindd to GB proper.

Not necessarily a queue system but just a "save for later" list you can create.

Yes. I would like to see some kind of Watch Later list, like on YouTube. Digging through the current video categories to find a video from even a month ago can be tough sometimes.

Also, an "Up Next" feature on top of the "Popular Videos" column on the right of the video page. If you're watching a multi-episode series and you're on episode 9, it'd be nice if episode 10 was right there, ready to play.

An easy way to watch premium videos via PS4 or Xbox one. An app ideally available internationally. Using built in browsers on those systems is far too clunky.

A seperate tag in the videos drop down for UPF

A thousand times this.

Couple of things I'd love, firstly, and probably the most achievable, a 'like' buttons for comments, sometimes you just want to give a nod to someone, without having to reply.

The 2nd more of a pipe dream, the return of some sort of meta game, I loved the achievement tracking and quests of old, and I understand that gamification of websites is slightly old hat and difficult, but I thought it worked so well on here. Something completely new might be cool.

Hire a Product Manager. :) Not kidding: there's so much small stuff you guys could to improve the platform and to increase conversion of Premium subscribers. There's so much untapped potential on the 'non content' side of things.

an official version would be sweet. i would imagine a 24/7 mostly unmoderated chat would be a logistical nightmare, though (despite chat being ok like 90% of the time). i would be happy with a random giant bomb tv.

The current swatch internet time somewhere on the front page, with all event times listed in .beats would future proof the site.

Manually mark videos as watched/unwatched. Now with progress tracking I reckon that would be pretty easy.

Not as easy, but something I'd love to have: Community tags and highlights for content. Giant Bomb could learn a lot from QLcrew.com.

Besides the quests which isn't a small feature by any means. I think the random video button would be neat.

"Hey what am I going to get this time? A quick look with Ryan from 2009? A flight club video with Dave? Maybe a upf. Who knows"

It's not a small feature, but yeah, integrate some of the functionality from QLCrew.

Quests

Quick fire ideas include:

• Wiki Game / Character / Developer of the day
• Random "Quick Look" button
• Progress tracking / resume on audio podcasts
• Games released on this day list
• Ability to delete user blog posts (always struck me as strange that you can delete reviews and not blogs)
• Flagging / favourites system for videos

(This last one gets its own bullet point as its my most requested)

• A method of being able to filter out and view a list of all the guest articles written on the site

I really like some of the other suggestions so far - especially the hide board function and the suggestion for Live Events (great use of IFTTT) and the QLCrew enhancements would be awesome.

A small thing I'd like to see is in addition to Quote/Reply/Flag is something like a Star/Save function that I can pop back to via my profile. It doesn't happen terribly often but if someone throws out a good tip or some info that might be useful - it'd be cool to have instead of having to either bookmark the forum post or copy/paste somewhere else.

I'd like something that makes editing wikis and gaining points relevant again. Also in the early years following users used to matter more, I don't know why. So some sort of interaction between users, people and their followers would be cool too. I mention this because I've noticed that most of the "follows" happened in those years - nobody is bothered about that aspect of the site anymore.

While I know it's never going to happen, a way to manage your collection would be great. I gave up on using lists for this purpose a long time ago and I haven't found a good enough replacement or way to handle my collection ever since gamespot changed their collection system many years ago.

Some kind of playlist functionality would be awesome. To expand on this I'd also appreciate the ability to tell which videos I've watched and which ones I haven't watched yet. Same for the podcasts.

I kind of want to just sort all videos by oldest to latest and hit play and let it roll on its own. I don't like the idea of random videos, as I prefer watching things chronologically.

I missed this feature when I wanted to play an older game and at the same time get a feel for what else was happening around that time in gaming, just to help put things into perspective and to better understand its place in gaming history.

Integrating QLCrew into the site would also be appreciated.

@csl316: I'm not surprised the wiki doesn't do that much traffic, with the search function being very archaic compared to Google/Bing etc. I consistently type things in there and don't get the results I'm looking for. Whatever logic they use for the Wiki is either broken or not up to the task of modern search standards.

@brendan: Good point. These days if I want a release date or a composer for a game, Google gets me where I need to go within 10 seconds. Same reason I don't really use IMDB for info. The wiki here is just a fun thing to explore now and then.

• I stopped posting screenshots to the forum a long time ago because the quality of the image in the forum post was greatly reduced from the original. Has that been addressed at all?
• Add the page navigation buttons above the videos on the Videos tab. The Forums tab already has this.
• Another vote for Bombcast timestamps.

On the topic of forums, I'd like to go the opposite direction: I'd love to be able to extend that list another 20 or 30 posts, or have an alternate way of sorting them. I feel like the same handful of topics get surfaced and that sometimes makes it hard to find something to participate in.

Is there an easy way to create a party to watch a GB video with other members that includes a local chat?

Maybe also a way for members to annotate videos (think of the Soundcloud timeline).

A functional chromecast ability in the video player during livestreams. Currently have to cast tab using chrome browser which is not as reliable.