State of the Site: January

Hi there!

GameSpot: Episode XXV - A New Hope

Or, in other words—Happy New Year! It’s been a busy time with a lot of pending work, but going forward, this should be back to a more regular monthly schedule—that’s the goal!

Now, let’s get into the details.

Experiments

Starting in February 2024, we began running a series of cross-linking experiments. These typically lasted anywhere from two weeks to a few months and affected desktop and logged-out users across about 300 select community wikis.

The goal? To see if wiki users care about News & Reviews (N&R) content, whether they engage with it, and if they visit the linked site. I’d love to run even more experiments for GameSpot, so if you have any ideas, send them my way!

Experiments We’ve Run So Far:

• GameFAQs Guides & Walkthroughs Widget: A right-rail widget featuring the latest GameFAQs guides and walkthroughs relevant to the wiki.
• Re-run of GameFAQs Guides & Walkthroughs Widget: Same as above, but with an improved design and more relevant content.
• GameFAQs Player Stats Widget: A right-rail widget displaying user ratings from a GameFAQs game page that corresponds with the wiki. This has been our most successful experiment so far.
• GameFAQs Stats - Mobile Drawer: The same as the Player Stats widget, but designed as an experimental mobile drawer.
• GameSpot News & Galleries: Featured news, galleries, and videos directly related to the wiki.

Tickets

As always, I encourage everyone to report bugs—either in this topic, on the appropriate board, or through the support system, so issues get logged. The same goes for light feature requests.

I’ve spoken with product managers, engineering managers, and directors, and they assure me they want to know about issues—otherwise, they won’t be aware of them!

Looking at Jira, we currently have around 54 engineering tickets logged for GameSpot. Here are a few key ones:

• Bluesky embed: Hoping for this to be done soon—seems like an easy win.
• Forum spam issue: Should be resolved in the next sprint.
• Stacks giving an error: I’ve been pushing this issue and have a follow-up meeting about it soon.

Forward

Speaking of community collaboration, I’ve received stakeholder approval to:

• Start hosting additional News & Ratings merch in the Giant Bomb store.
• Open the store for potential community collaborations—so if you have ideas, send them my way!

This will also help me advocate for store-related issues that may arise. I’ve got some big ideas in the works, so stay tuned!

Additionally, after multiple discussions in our monthly moderator meetings (shoutout to thatpinguino on the GB side), we’re launching a modcast (name TBD) featuring mods from different N&R sites.

• The first episode still needs to be recorded and reviewed by Giant Bomb stakeholders (Dan / Jeff).
• If all goes well, GB will host it moving forward.

More details soon!

Hope everyone’s had a great start to the year—I’m feeling optimistic about 2025.

Thank you!