Originally posted by greg:
Thanks to iBrow for starting a thread like this. We’re definitely listening to what you guys have to say. Now let me address some stuff…
First, there should be a list of features that are already being worked on. That I know of, these are: Search & High Scores.
Good idea. I’ll start one today. There’s a lot more than that…
An obvious one: There should be a link to these forums somewhere other than the news section.
There’s a link to the forums in the community section, but our traffic reports are showing us that no one goes there. Poor featured developers. We’re planning to replace the “community” button on the top with a button for leaderboards and another one exclusively for forums.
One that would be very useful right now: make the forum be able to handle new line characters so you can format things to not just be big blobs of text.
You can do that with HTML… in other words, not very user-friendly. I agree that this should definitely be more intuitive.
Be able to turn on/off chat windows (what if I don’t want to chat while being in the game?), – External chat (not only in games), – Current game chat only (two tabs above that filter people only playing the game you’re playing or global)
Disabling chat is on our list of future features, so anti-social people can rejoice. We’re still discussing the possibility of external chat. The idea for the tab between global chat and current-game-specific chat is exactly what we’re planning to do, also.
By clicking on someone’s name, his work is also shown (by names, not necessarily thumbs too)
Yeah, we’re planning to expand what’s viewable in chat profiles, so soon you’ll be able to see a person’s games straight from chat, then click to go directly to them (the same way you can now click to go to a game someone is currently playing).
More than two hot and popular games on the frontpage
I agree. More on my opinion in response to Damijin here…
I think “Popular Tags” occupies far too much front page real estate. I like the tag system, but I have doubts about how many people really use it. That space could better serve to show off more of the most popular games so that new users have a 4 game selection of the best games on the site.
This is almost exactly what I would personally prefer, but we’re still discussing possible tweaks to the front page. I agree that people don’t seem to use tags, and I think a nice place for them might be in that little empty box underneath the categories, to the left of the news. Then we could have another category of games (maybe highest-rated? Though that would likely be the same as “popular”… any ideas for a third category, anyone?). I was thinking 3 games per category instead of 4 (but with an extra category, so 9 total instead of 8). I think that 2 is definitely not enough. What do you guys think we could do with the front page?
why are the posts limited to such a small space. this paragraph shouldn’t take up anything close to 2 lines, let alone 3. let them stretch from end to end. then every post wouldn’t seem too long to read.
Perhaps we could move voices to the bottom, and fill in the right column? Or, as Luksy pointed out, maybe voices aren’t even necessary…
I like the idea of improving the chat like being able to keep it on all the page of Kongregate. A private feature could also be useful.
You mean chat on non-game pages? Hmmm… I’m trying to imagine where that would go. And it seems like non-game pages are transitory (ie, they’re pages that someone’s just visiting on the way to a game page). Perhaps we could have a non-game-specific chat room in the forums section or something?
I would also like a way to mark game as incomplet or of poor quality. Those game are not exactly inappropriate but are more like work in progress. This flag could be use for : use of liscence material, lots of bugs, bad graphics or bad gameplay. I know this is all very subjective, but after, lets say 15 flags, the game is automaticly remove from the site. I think its important to keep the standard up. Or maybe just all those criteria fit under “inappropriate”. An explanation field when submiting inappropriate game is then in order.
We’re so far a little more lenient than Newgrounds, since games can’t really be blammed off the site. Our emphasis is more on promoting good games than deleting bad ones. But we’re considering having a way to “hide” games from lists, so they can only be accessed from within the uploader’s profile. This would basically be similar to adding filters to our games list.
Random game ftw.
I don’t know, man. I learned my lesson from the “random” feature on YTMND. But perhaps we could put a little random button somewhere, even if it’s not on the front page.
Some tags should be eliminated. Author tags and “contest winners”, as well as genre’ed tags should be censored so that the same “action” doesn’t appear every day.
Hmmm, so maybe I should stop going through and adding that “contest winner” tag to games when they win contests… Tags are completely user-generated, so anyone can add any tag to any game. We don’t currently have a way to delete tags, but we’re considering giving that power to each game’s uploader.
