State of the Site: December

Hey everyone!

An emergency room visit, three weddings(including my own), a honeymoon, and a birthday walk into a bar. That’s 2024 on a personal level. On a business level, a lot has taken place behind the scenes and admittedly I’ve done a poor job of communicating who I am and the work that we do. So Hi I’m Dylan the Community Manager, Safety at Fandom. I function as the customer support, product support, and community manager for all N&R sites. I’m playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Stalker 2, and pretty much any grand strategy game currently. Below I’ll outline what we’ve done this past year and going forward this topic will become a monthly thing.

Experiments

Starting in February, we began running a series of cross-linking experiments. These typically lasted from 2 weeks to a few months and affected desktop and logged-out users on about 300 select community wikis. The goal was to see if wiki users care about News & Reviews (N&R) content, would engage with it, and visit the linked site. I'd like to run similar experiments for Giant Bomb, so please share any ideas you might have.

Here are some of the experiments we’ve run so far:

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

Tickets

We’ve logged quite a few tickets for Giant Bomb, focusing on issues with moderation tools, forum search bugs, terminator bot bugging out, and so on. Unfortunately, we’ve only managed to close a few mainly dealing with video issues since I know that’s a priority. I’m asking you all to raise any issues below or on the Bug Reporting board so I can work to get them addressed, and hopefully, with your support, we can push to have them resolved. Video playback has returned!

Ask Me Anything

I encourage you all to raise your concerns, questions, and feedback below. Whether they be personal to me or about the site as a whole.

Looking Forward

In 2025 we hope to have more cross-linking opportunities, resolve ALL technical video issues, engage more with the community, and have a collective N&R approach. With your support, I think we can get this done.

I have no issues to raise but wanted to say that doing this is cool and appreciated!

Glad to see an update on the tech side of things. Everything I always complain about would probably take way more resources than is feasible (namely reasons for users to use the forums again, like user update tracking, a space for tracking new blogs sitewide, the eternally cursed forum search, etc.). But good luck in 2025, and we'll be rooting you and the site updates on.

I'd still like to see forum search fixed. It's been completely non-functional for more than a year.

https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/forum-search-broken-1917858/

https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/premium-podcast-feeds-redirect-to-ad-versions-1914228/

Sounds good. It's nice to see that the site is not completely abandoned, and new features are being added.

Could we perhaps see the lists of both closed and open tickets? With any sensitive or disruptive information removed/redacted, of course. It might give us a better idea of what problems are known about and what your capacity to address them is, and perhaps also serve to clarify the difference between technical issues to be resolved versus less critical suggestions about site usability.

this is great, thanks for keeping the site up <3

Thanks for the info and hard work! I don't have much to mention, but the first episode of the Sonic '06 Blight Club has not been available on the site for a while. Is there a way to get it up and available for viewing/download?

Congrats on the wedding and thanks for the info!

Thanks for the update!

@sparky_buzzsaw:I'll see what I can do.

@chamurai I'll log a ticket.

@stopallthewords They're sort of all over the place to be honest because of internal changes but let me see what I can gather and have it for the next topic. For now, the goal is to sort of reset and even make duplicate tickets if necessary to make sure everything is logged/followed properly.

@atheistpreacher I know I have a couple of tickets logged for that, let me follow up with them using your links and comment.