GiantBomb has a great premise. Users make edits, moderators approve or reject those edits case by case, only the best submissions make it through. That's the idea, anyway. In practice, I'm not finding that to be the case...

About a week ago, I made several edits, most notably blurbs for games I like. I like blurbs a lot. A little one or two sentence that summarizes a game. It's a challenge to fit a 50+ hour game into two sentences, but it feels good to pull it off. It feels terrible when your efforts go to waste though.

Case in point, I wrote up my own blurb for Eternal Darkness, one of my all time favorite games. I thought about the blurb for a long time, finally coming up with a 50 word description of it. I felt the description was true to the spirit of the game. I was proud of it, to be honest. I'm rarely proud of anything I write, but I took pride in my blurb. I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but it had something to do with the main character, the 1000 year struggle for humanity's fate, and the game's main object, the Tome of Eternal Darkness.

Several days later, my submission was finally approved. The system works! And then a day later, someone else's submission was accepted, completely replacing mine. Had their submission been better, the system would have worked as designed. The cream of the crop would have risen to the surface. Only the best blurb would have survived, and I'd have been happy about it, although I'd have been sad to see my blurb vanish. But no... the new blurb was worse than mine. Much worse. Worse both in context and in grammar.

It basically said "this is a zombie game where you can loose your sanity through insanity effects."

That's wonderful. A blurb about this game that's much more refined than "that insanity game," and yet that's the blurb we wind up with. THAT is insanity.

So anyway, I'm done making edits. If the moderators are just approving anything that's in their queue and aren't bothering to research or at least read the thing they're approving, then the site just plain doesn't work. There's no reason to have moderators. I don't envy them and all of the submissions they have to look at, but the site is fundamentally flawed if they don't put real effort into what they're doing.

Maybe it's just one moderator who's slacking, maybe it's the whole team, I have no way of knowing. All I know is that what I wrote is gone forever (where's the undo button?). I'm not sore about it. It's simply a big sign that says "don't bother."

GiantBomb badly needs some sort of edit history, where either users or moderators can revert changes.  I agree that what you described is terrible.  What's worse is that users with 1000+ points can make live changes, without moderator approval, so it could well have been that someone replaced your carefully worded blurb just cause they knew they could get free points.

It seems the best way to get points right now is uploading images, or defining relationships between games / characters / concepts / etc.  It's not really worth it to put in the effort to write something good, knowing full well it'll probably be replaced by barely punctuated sentences from points fiends.

Yeah, an edit history like they have on wikipedia would be much appreciated. At least with that, it wouldn't be very hard to restore something to what it used to be. The users with 1000 points are going to be an issue too, but if the moderators aren't carefully considering every edit, then it's probably not going to change anything when users can make live edits.

I have a story about game concept/objects too. :) I saw that Power-up was missing last week. I couldn't believe anyone hadn't added that yet, so I created it myself. I found a good picture of a Mario mushroom, uploaded it, wrote up a descriptive blurb (again, one that I was actually proud of), then waited for approval. It eventually got approved, but at the same time, someone else had the exact same idea as me, and his Power-up got approved too. Not to sound snooty, but his description paled in comparison to mine, even though it essentially had the same essence. What's funny is that he uploaded the exact same mushroom image that I went with! A day later, the mods decided that only one Power-up belongs in the database, so mine got axed since his probably got approved the earliest. I'm not bitter about it, it was just coincidence and one of them had to get axed eventually. Kinda sucks though all the same.

Heh.  I've actually been on the opposite side of the coin, twice now, when writing blurbs.  Both times, the blurb was either empty or pretty non-descriptive when I looked at it.  So I submitted an entry for each one.  In the same time frame, some other user must've observed the same lack of info, and put in their own blurbs before mine.  And in both cases, my blurb quashed theirs!  In one case, I feel my blurb is more punchy.  But in the other, the blurb I overwrote was clearly better than mine.  At the time there wasn't a way to cancel pending edits, so I watched in mild horror as the better blurb was lost forever.

Anyways, writing good blurbs or descriptions is hard work.  To wit, it took me about twenty minutes to come up with the description text for Tank, which garnered me 7 points.  It took me all of three minutes to fill in some relationships for David Sirlin, and that scored me 8 points!  I know what I'll be doing more of, for the time being. :)

It is definitely a challenge to come up with a good blurb, especially after they put that 50 word limit in place. It's very gratifying to come up with a good one and see it show up on the site. It's pretty crushing to see it vanish though. :\

Agreed there needs to be a way to cancel pending submissions. I think they addressed that on a recent podcast, so that should change I expect. That, plus an edit history plus a few other things here and there and I'd probably go back to editing games again.