Hey everyone, as I've alluded to in other threads, my next big development effort will be centered around various social / community enhancements. I feel as though the site is very full-featured in regards to collection management and progress tracking, so now I want to beef up the interaction and community engagement. I have LOTS of ideas for this, so I'm going to post them all here and welcome any feedback you have. I haven't decided what all I'm going to do from this list or in what order, so definitely let me know if something stands out. And as always, if you have any other ideas NOT included here, let me know!

Overview

• Achievements count needs to show up in the top section
• Add a Last Seen date in the top section
• Display a new Friends section that will display your friends as well as what they're up to. Maybe their last few activities, some high-level stats (games owned, completions, etc), current bounties, now playing, etc. It could also show stuff I'll mention later on. The main thing here is you should be able to see your friends and what they're up to!!
• There should be a timeline of your activity. This would include stuff you've done like entered a game in your collection, completed a game, etc. But also when you rate a game, enter a thought (see below), etc.

Comments

• Like we've discussed before, these will be very similar to how Steam does it. If you're viewing someone's Overview, their various comments should be displayed. We'll show x amount at a time and you can page through them. Assuming you're logged in, you'll be able to add a new comment.
• I'm not sure yet, but perhaps when entering a comment, you could "tag" it with a specific game? For example, you could post a comment like this "Hey, why haven't you played this yet!?!" and tag it with BAD RATS. I'm not sure this makes sense, but I'm trying to think of unique ways to expand this beyond just a "boring" comment system. But maybe we just start there and expand later.
• Your security setting will be applied to comments, so if you're public, anyone can comment. If you're friends only, then only your friends can. If you're private, nobody can. In addition to that though, there will be a new setting to disable comments on your profile. That will prevent users from commenting on you and will hide the section altogether on your Overview.
• Another thing I've mentioned before is the motivation aspect, but I'm not sure I'm going to pursue that just yet since we have the bounties. I know they're not related or anything, but I'm interested to see where that goes (more on those later) before tackling this one.

Gamer Thoughts

• These are the "sort of" reviews that I mentioned in another thread. The idea here is to enter some text to describe your thoughts on a particular game. This could be a review, a summary, your nostalgic memories, whatever you want it to be. There is no score / rating to give it since that's tracked elsewhere. This is purely your thoughts on a game. Make of that what you will.
• But it wouldn't just be text. I'd like to come up with a wide variety of "tags" that you could select from to help summarize your thoughts. So if it has amazing graphics, tag it with that one. Scary? Tag it. Funny? Tag it! These would be system-defined and separate from your collection / wish list tags. They would also not be called tags, I just don't have a name for them yet hehe.
• These thoughts would show up on the recently revamped Game Details page somewhere. Likewise, new thoughts (or at least links) would show up on the Home page. There would also be a page to search for thoughts based on tags and other standard filters (genre, franchise, etc)
• I'm thinking this is a good opportunity to utilize the Facebook / Twitter style of "liking" things. If you find some thoughts you enjoy, like it. Things could get rated up and that's how they could be sorted by default on the Game Details page.

Gamer Thoughts 2

• Okay, so I don't know what to call this. But this is a similar idea, yet completely independent from the above Gamer Thoughts. The idea here is something we touched on in this thread. This is for the "Twitter-like" messages. If you're playing a game and want to post something about it, you can quickly post a message and the game will automatically be tagged. These could show up on the Home page, Game Details page, etc.
• This would be restricted to just GAME-related stuff. So if you want to post about random other stuff, use the forums or Twitter :P Of course, I can't really enforce this since you could post something random on a random game, but I think you guys know what I mean.

Forums

• Detect when a user has been mentioned in a forum post if their name is prefixed with "@", so for example, "@moho_00". If a user is detected, the name should be highlighted somehow and if you hover over it, you'll get a very brief overview tooltip and you'll be able to click on their name to visit their Overview.
• Clean up the tabs on the Home page since the bounty threads can clutter up all of the other posts. I'm thinking as a first step, I'll just add a new tab OR have two separate lists under each of the existing tabs, one for bounties and one for non-bounties.
• Show an "Online" icon / text next to a user if they're considered online. Could also have a list below the various forum pages to indicate how many are online.
• Badges - This would be separate from achievements, although there might be some overlap. There wouldn't be nearly as many of these though. I'm thinking this is more for users that have participated for a long time, donated to the site (if and when that ever becomes a thing), and maybe some high-level stuff like owned x games, entered x completion times. I don't want a ton of these, but I think it'd be nice to have them in some capacity.

Bounties

• This is long overdue, but there should be a way to view the bounties you've previously participated in.
• We need to beef up the bounty themes a bit. Right now, I just pick games for a particular theme and randomly throw them up throughout the month. I'd rather have a dedicated section for these on the Home page and "promote" the theme a little more. As in actually show the name of the theme or something haha. But yeah, have these bounties listed in a separate section and possibly throw all of them out in the beginning of the month and users can pick and choose however they like.

Emails

Right now, the only emails you receive are the ones during registration. I have some ideas for emails that could be sent out to try and keep contact with users (to encourage visiting the site, of course).

• Post-registration - After about a week or so of registering, you would receive an email to ask how you're liking the site and provide some tips on more advanced features that you may not have seen.
• New Bounties - If a new bounty is posted for a game you own and you don't have it marked as finished or completionated, you would receive an email letting you know about it.
• Playthrough reminder - If you have a playthrough and you don't enter any time for it for like a month or something, you would receive this email. I don't think many people use this feature (outside of bounties), so this might not be all that useful right now.

Gamer Story

• This is something I mentioned in this thread. The idea here is to provide a "simple" report that reads like a book. It would be completely dynamic and hopefully unique to every user. It would basically describe your collection, gaming habits, etc. I'm particularly intrigued by this one because it would be fun to build :)

I've been thinking about the Gamer Thoughts 2 item (i.e. the Twitter-like messages) and feel there's a lot of overlap with the activity feed. So right now I'm envisioning a new page / feature that kinda merges the two. I have no idea what this would be called, so for now I'll just call it "the feed". Here are some raw thoughts I have, let me know what you guys think.

• Purpose 1 - Replace the existing activity feed to show what you and your friends are up to
• Purpose 2 - Provide a way to consume "thoughts" from your friends, as well as other non-friend users

So I'm thinking on this new page, you'd have two sections. At the top would be a bunch of filters (more on those in a minute). And below that would be all of the content in your "feed". There would be two types of items, which are directly pulled from the two purposes above. That means you have the old-style activity feed items and these new Twitter-like messages. You can use the filters to cater your view however you see fit. This page would not be publicly accessible, so you'd be the only one that can view YOUR feed. When you set filters and such, they will be saved so whenever you visit your feed, you're always looking at whatever you looked at last (in terms of filters, obviously there could be new data, which would always be at the top).

Okay, so let's dig deeper into these two types of items. Since this would effectively replace the existing activity feed, we need to determine which current activity feed items are needed moving forward. And also, are there any that should be added. Here's what we have right now:

• Added Game
• Started Playthrough
• Added Completion
• Finished Game
• Completionated Game
• Added to Wish List
• Accepted Bounty
• Completed Bounty

Assuming you haven't applied any filters, you would see all of the above activity feed items for you and your friends. Sooooo basically your current activity feed :)

Things get more interesting when we include the other type, which is the Twitter-like messages, currently known as "gamer thoughts 2". Anyone can post a thought, but it MUST be tied to a game. I think it's important to keep the focus on gaming / collecting, otherwise we get closer to creating a mini Twitter.

Assuming you haven't applied any filters, you would see all thoughts from you, your friends, and from ANYONE for the games you "follow".

At any point, you could post a new thought from this page, which would require you to select the game it's for. I'm thinking there'll be an option to quickly follow a game as you enter a thought for it. Otherwise, you can follow a game through other means (not sure where, but could be in a number of places). I don't think you should receive the old-style activity feed items for the games you follow, you still only get those for you and your friends.

One point of emphasis is to display the box art next to each item in the feed. I think this would go a long way in livening up the existing activity feed since it's kinda boring to just read through a wall of text.

I don't plan on adding any sort of retweeting, pinning, etc features, but I do think a "like" system would be useful. I could maybe see value in some of these features, but not sure they're required from the start.

I don't plan on adding the "auto-updating" stuff that Twitter does (where it notifies you of new tweets). If this is used heavily and becomes popular, I could easily implement something like that, but I don't think it's necessary for now.

Although I generally dislike "auto-loading" when you scroll to the bottom of a list, I think it makes sense in this scenario. So I'll probably forego the traditional paging system we have and opt for something closer to how Twitter handles it.

Another point of emphasis is on the filtering system. I mentioned this before, but I want the system to remember your filters. But there needs to be a wide-array of filters so you can focus on the content you're interested in.

Here's a VERY rough mockup of what I'm envisioning for the new feed page: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudbase.production/a4fad39c-8036-4609-a119-7d985083506e/20160302_124440.jpg

The top section includes the various filters that you can set. I'm thinking we'll display the text like "My Activity 4 of 8" and then if you hover over the "4 of 8" part, a popup will appear next to the text that let's you opt in / out of the various items. So those popup things on the right would NOT be displayed at all times (to reduce clutter).

The "Post Thought" button (text pending) would pop open a modal that let's you select a game and type in your thought.

The bottom section is, of course, the feed itself. As you can see, each entry will have a box art next to it (and possibly some high-level info like overall rating or something, not sure) and would link to the Game Details page. Usernames would be links to their Overview page. The date (and time) would be displayed below the message, as well as the heart icon / button that indicates you like the post (just like Twitter).

The icons between the box art and username is to identify what type of post it is. The first one is supposed to be a play button and the second blob looking thing is supposed to be a thought bubble :P

I love that you use a whiteboard to do your mockup planning. That's awesome.

The feed page revamp is pretty solid conceptually so far. Expanding the feed to merge with social features in a customizable manner should really help personalize things a bit more, make it feel less like a collection of database entries and more like the community site this place can be. (while also being a collection of database entries :P)

Pretty stoked about all the changes coming in as they have been. As it is now, even the forums are getting a bit more traffic, so it's feeling more lively here these days :)

If you want/need any help with layouts and design, feel free to harass me here (or over steam.) I always have time for design stuff, haha.

I'm a fan. What if you substituted the hearts (I'm assuming that's the equivalent of a like (Facebook) or Love (Twitter)) with something that matches a game idea. Not sure what that would be....but maybe like 1up, lives, stars, coins, something. Not sure if that makes sense, but incorporate game type ideas in all facets of the site.

@dhobo - I'm always open to any design layout / feedback you have. I think I have a handle on what I need to do for this first release, but I'm sure it will need some usability tweaks :)

@jwcooley - I like where you're going with the icon, but I'm limited to what's available in the icon set I'm using. There's a gamepad icon (which is used when displaying your points here on the forums), a Pac-Man icon (which probably doesn't make sense), and a star icon (which we're using for ratings). Given my options, I think a heart is probably the best, but will skim through the set to see if anything jumps out. Here it is, in case anyone is interested in looking as well: http://optimisticdesigns.herokuapp.com/landerv2/html/component-icon.html

I could always load in another set, but not sure if there's a gaming-related one (never looked).

If you need some custom icons made, I can do vector art for that kind of thing pretty quickly/easily. If you come up with a shopping list, so to speak, I can get something done up when I get time.

I'm starting to have second thoughts on NOT having paging for this new page. I find it annoying to try and find an old post in Twitter and I don't want to recreate that here. For example, I wanted to find the link to the Completionator shirt, which I knew I had posted on Twitter last year. So I had to scroll through all of my tweets to find it. Luckily I don't have very many :P Now I might just be a Twitter n00b and perhaps a search or filter was available. Nonetheless, it made me think that paging is really easy and this is NOT supposed to be Twitter anyways.

Thoughts?

Also, I don't think I mentioned this before, but I'm considering when you post a new thought, maybe you can categorize it. The default could just be something like "General", but you could select things like Progress and....well, I don't really have any others :P

And speaking of posting "thoughts". Does that terminology even make sense? Or should I just brand it as a "post"?

You guys may have seen it already, but the Feed page is now live! I didn't get nearly as far as I wanted (stupid arcade expo hehe), but it's at least functional. At this point, it's pretty much just a beefed-up version of the activity feed with more granular filtering. Now that I have the foundation in place, I should be able to make some nice progress next weekend.

The UI certainly needs some tweaks, but it should at least give you guys an idea for where I'm heading with this. Let me know what you think!

Nice! You really are pumping out stuff these days. I like the addition of social stuff as collection stuff gets a bit boring.
I like the comments section on the overview page, and that you can tag it with a game. Perhaps add a 'reply' option so you can easily post a comment on the others' page.
I also like the gamer thoughts you mentioned with the added icons\tags. Sounds amazing. Perhaps the term 'experience' is a better one, but english is not my first language so perhaps i'm missing the intended mark here.
Rating these thoughts (or liking them) also sound great, as you can really encourage people to post quality posts. I'm not sure about ranking these. Your thoughts #2 are also great, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I like the lifebar.io site for this stuff, and it would be great to see something like that also over here.
Forum stuff sound great, go for it.
Bounties.. perhaps it would be nice if you could set your own (private) bounties, or create bounties where others can join in. Of course there have to be rules to follow but it would be nice if I could compile a list of 'bounty game(s)' and set a date before which I have to complete them.
e-mails, nice if you can opt-out of those.
Gamer story sound like a nice idea, interesting to see what you can do with it.
Haha, I now see this thread has been alive for a week, and you already have implemented stuff. The whiteboard looks great, and your implementation looks great and works like a charm. I do think you should do something with the box art as it comes in all shapes and forms. I again refer to the lifebar.io where they are equally large but just a section of the box art. Thats fine with me as it really beefs up the looks and gets it more consistant. With the right css you can get a nice section of an image so I guess it should be fairly easy to do. Great of dhobo that he want to some icon creation, looking forward to see the first results :=D

Again, great work and keep it up!

I think the idea of setting up your own bounties would be a VERY cool idea. I believe it should be limited to one per person per month...but would ultimately have to be approved by Moho before it goes live.

Regarding the "personal" bounties, I think that gets more into another idea I posted on here somewhere about setting goals. These aren't really defined at this point, but it could certainly include completing a game by a certain date. Other ideas would be "add x number of games to my collection by a certain date". Or maybe "x number of Dreamcast games by a certain date". It'd need to be pretty flexible, but I think you guys get the idea. I don't think it makes sense to have others join in, if we go with a goal approach, but there could certainly be an opportunity to introduce that "motivational" feature I keep talking about. I think your goals should be public, just not really join-able or anything.

Also, in case you guys missed the release notes, I got the itch to work on the site this afternoon and did a few things. It bugs me when I don't complete everything I want to complete, so this at least gets it a little closer :P

What do you guys think about the "finished game" and "completionated game" feedback items? As this data becomes more and more visible, I'm thinking it should be meaningful and these aren't always meaningful. For example, I just completionated a game that had the incorrect status on it. And now it shows up in my feed, even though I haven't played it recently. I'm leaning towards just using completion times since those are actually "things" in the database, but wanted to see if anyone out there had any thoughts.

Hrm, I can see how those statuses would get annoying if someone were new and updating their library from a fresh start, but the use case scenario you did seems more like an anomalous entry that wouldn't happen too often after people have their collection info and status properly set. I guess my concern is that not everyone adds completions and completion times, so the finished/completionated messages would be the only way to see what someone's been up to in terms of finishing their games.

What about something like 'jwcooley finished game with a completion time of xx.xx.xxxx" or something?

@dhobo - Yeah, new users updating those statuses was definitely something I thought would kinda blow up the feed. I think you might be right though in that my use case was probably an outlier for the normal flow. And I guess as long as you can filter out those statuses, it's not a huge deal. I'd love for everyone to utilize the completion functionality, but one of the goals I have for the site is flexibility, so I agree that we can't rely on that.

@jwcooley - Right now the feed is very generic and couldn't support anything like that. It actually only collects the game, user, action type, and date. I've been thinking it should also collect platform, but I like your idea about the completion itself. Unfortunately, I will not be able to retroactively collect this data :(

So what is everyone's thoughts on "following" games? Does that make sense or should you just have a generic option of "include all game posts / thoughts" in your feed? For example, let's say someone who is NOT on my friends list posts a thought about Super Metroid. There could be a filter on my own feed that says to include these thoughts or not. Obviously, you have the ability to filter in / out thoughts from you and your friends (that's already wired up), but this would be for everything else.

I think "following" games is something that needs to be added, so this is really more for the short term than anything else. I feel the most important thing to do is allow users to start posting their thoughts and since our community is fairly small, I just don't see our feeds getting filled up with stuff we don't want to see.

Following a game sounds like it could be neat, but given the limited functionality regarding socializing on the site, I'm not sure what the benefit would be right now.

My first impression was that it would be a cool way to find people who have similar tastes and interests but there's no real way to interact with them outside of the forums... With the "gamer thoughts" thing, then maybe it would be better as long as it's being used, you could use the game following thing to gather impressions and feedback for a followed game passively in your feed.

I know it hasn't even been available for two weeks yet, but how is the Feed working out for everyone? I like it a lot better than the old activity feed, but I feel like I should be able to comment on items. That seems to be the main thing that's missing, for me at least. I think maybe notifications or at least a way to view which of my items have been liked and by who would be useful as well.

Agreed. Almost like Facebook where you can like stuff, comment, etc...and also see who have liked your posts.

I know the only thing that I dislike but can definitely live with either way is the filters for you/friends for what you want to see on the feed. I like the idea of being able to filter certain items out of the feed but not sure how else to approach it

What do you mean exactly with the filters? Do you mean you prefer having one list of filters, rather than two separate lists (for your stuff and your friends stuff)?

Just some feedback about the feed:
- You can like your own posts... i think you should not be able to do that ;-)
- Can't edit them or delete them.
- Can't insert a link to a screenshot or video to show off stuff ;-)

Excellent feedback!

I couldn't decide on liking your own posts. It seems like other sites tend to let you to it, but it's never made sense to me.

Twitter doesn't let you edit your tweets....but this isn't Twitter! So I'll add the option to edit them :) And deleting should definitely be in there as well.

Links, screenshots, and videos are all things I've considered, but haven't quite figured out how I want to handle them. I can do the links like we do on the forum, but images (and videos, maybe) would be awesome if they were embedded. I need to figure out if that's worth doing and if so, how I would go about it. Do you know if you post an image link in Twitter if it will display it as an image or just a link? I know you can upload an image and it will display it. Not that we have to mimic Twitter, but they're obviously doing something right ;)

Great!
Facebook lets you edit your post :-) But you can always see what has been edited. That goes a bit too far but editing would be nice.

About the image links, don't know how they do it, perhaps download it and see if it is an image.
With video links i know there are javascript\jquery functions you can download that just do that.

Are you able to tell who liked the stuff on your feed? I see several of my entries where someone liked it but I can't tell who. No big deal either way, was just wondering if I was looking in the wrong place if you can see the likes.