A new menu item draws near!

That's right, the menu just became even more intimidating with the introduction of the My Stacks option. Stacks are a new feature that are essentially "lists of games". They are completely separate from your collection and in fact, you don't need to have games in your collection to put them on a stack.

This is a feature somewhat similar to GOG Mixes or the guides on racketboy.com. The idea is simple, just enter a title (and optionally, a description), then enter your games and type in some descriptions for them.

So you could show the world your favorite RPGs of all time. Or the most underrated platformers of all time. Or the worst games you've ever played. It's only limited by your imagination hehe

This is a super early version of the feature, but I've had such limited time to work on the site lately, I wanted to at least get SOMETHING out to you guys. As of right now, you can enter a new stack and enter the games for it. When editing a stack, your data is saved whenever you leave a textbox and you should see a confirmation message when it's finished (should be almost instantaneous).

Here's what I plan to add in the future:

• Re-order the games by dragging 'n dropping them
• Display a number next to the games on the Edit Stack page
• Display the box art next to the games on the Edit Stack page
• Link to the Game Details page on the View Stack page
• Allow users to comment on stacks
• Allow users to "like" stacks
• Show new stacks on the Home page
• Add a new menu item for "Browse Stacks" that will let you search / view stacks from within the community
• Instructions / help text to explain how stacks work
• Add a "publish" button that will let you fill out your stack data before anyone else can see it (i.e. it won't show up until you hit the button)
• Possibly add a way to delete or at least archive a stack (either way, it would prevent it from showing up on the site)

Let me know what you guys think and if you have any feedback!

Played around with it to stress test the new feature, seems to be working fine adding/removing games, editing text, etc...

Only thing I ran into is there appears to be a character limit on the stack title & description. You might want to have some kind of indicator in case someone tries to get wordy so they know before wasting time entering a bunch of text.

If there is a limit on the individual game descriptions, it's pretty generous, so no real problems there based on my filler text testing.

A small feature I'd love to see is for the description fields to account for newlines to allow for proper paragraph formatting. (Bold/italics/lists might be nice too, as per forum formatting)

Will help for larger text blocks if people can format them to make them more readable.

I wasn't sure on what the character limits should be, but I should've probably mentioned what they are (or were). They were 200 for the title and 2000 for the description (on the stack itself). I've increased those to be 400 for the title and there's no longer a limit on the description.

Game descriptions don't have a limit either, which is why you didn't run into any issues with those. I'll probably add SOME sort of limit to both descriptions, but it'll be a very large number and I can definitely add a number next to the textboxes to indicate how much you have left (and maybe only show it if your cursor is in the associated textbox).

I agree on new lines, the View page should definitely handle that. I also plan to add bold and italics, but now that you mention it, having lists would be handy too.

Love the new addition! I will be adding tons of these lists lol.

I just created a stack with my top 10 N64 games and everything worked without a hitch!

What do you guys think about these:

• Should there be a minimum amount of games before the stack can be "published" (i.e. it's available to view by others)?
• Should there be a maximum amount of games on a list?
• You can enter a description, which shows up on the top of the View Stack page, but what about a footer to kinda wrap up your list?
• Should you be able to select a platform for each game or is keeping it generic okay? This would really only matter if a game is drastically different across platforms, which is especially prevalent in the 80s and 90s. I suppose it still happens today with handheld releases.
• I also considered adding a "Category" dropdown selection, but wasn't sure what all to include. I was thinking things like "Favorites", "Underrated Gems", etc. There would also need to be an "Other" or "Miscellaneous" category to account for things missing from the dropdown. I thought this could be useful when browsing stacks.
• Currently, privacy settings are not enforced whatsoever on stacks. You can't get to the "My Stacks" page for other users and of course you can't edit them. But the View Stack page isn't restricted at all. It'll eventually only let you view stacks that are published and not archived / deleted, but right now there's nothing. Unless you guys disagree, I don't think I'm going to apply privacy settings on this particular feature since I liken it to the forum, which is also not affected at all by privacy settings. So in other words, even if you're set to "Private", anyone will be able to view your stacks.
• I thought about listing stacks that a game is included in on the Game Details page. Maybe it shows the title and you can hover over it to get the description or something. Of course, you would be able to click it to view the full stack.
• Waaaaay down the line, I thought when you're viewing a stack, you should be able to have a quick way know if you own a game or something. Maybe we show an icon / text like we do on other pages or possibly a checkbox toggle, not sure.

• I don't think there needs to be a minimum, people might want to have stacks as a WIP and add games at their leisure.
• Regarding maximums, depending on the nature of the stack, users might want them to be continually expandable (for instance, if you make a running timeline of game reviews stack.) Running into an artificial hard limit won't be the end of the world, you'd just start a new stack. Maybe have a way to link stacks in sequence? Eg: Top 50 Turbographx 16 games would be five stacks. 1-10 ---link to---> 11-20 ---link to ---> 21-30, etc...
• Footer might be okay. I can't see a use for it currently though. Maybe as a summary for much longer stacks (especially if they're linked like my above suggestion.)
• Keeping it platform generic is fine. If someone wants to be specific, they can add that info in the details.
• I can see how categories will be helpful for browsing, but I think leaving off category types could also be beneficial. If we come up with a set list of categories, that could pigeon-hole creative uses for stacks to some degree if people think "Oh, I can only make these kinds of stacks?"
• Private/public etc... is fine. I think if someone's making a stack the intent should be up front that it's for publishing your thoughts on the stack you're making to the site as a whole.
• As long as the game details page doesn't get too cluttered, it should be fine to add a section for stacks. Maybe once likes are implemented, you could list the top 3-5 liked stacks that a game is in.
• I don't see the harm in indicating ownership of a game in a stack entry somewhere.

In regards to my splitting stacks idea above, what about a table of contents (a la wiki styles) at the top of a stack page? Would help for longer stacks too, even if you don't split 'em up.

Also, I keep wanting to call these lists. Apologies if I missed any corrections.

Moho, what are your thoughts on being able to add pictures and videos to the stacks (like in my fox list on listal.com)? Because some lists may be, for example: Top 10 favorite characters from the Mario franchise. Since many will come from the same games, it would be nice to be able to input a picture and in some cases, videos, to these stacks. I have no idea how hard that would be to implement though.

I should've clarified what I meant by minimum games. It would be for when you try to publish a stack. So you could have 0 games on a stack for as long as you want, but there would be a check to see if you have the minimum amount if you try to publish it. Oh and I just wired up the publish feature on my lunch break :D

The way it works is when you create a stack, it's NOT published. You have to hit a button to publish it. Once I add the community-wide search and add new ones to the Home page, only published stacks will be included. The only person who can see un-published stacks is the person who created them. You'll still be able to edit a stack once it's published, so I would need to handle deletes so you couldn't dip below the minimum. I was thinking if we do a minimum, it should be like 5. It's probably a non-issue since there won't be a ton of activity, so might not be worth worrying about just yet.

The only real driver behind a maximum is to prevent users from just adding a ton of games for the sake of doing it. Again, it's probably a non-issue here in the early goings, but might be something to think about. I like your idea of linking stacks though, if we end up going that route.

And I keep calling them lists too haha. I couldn't decide on a name and it was holding me up, so I just went with stacks and figured we could re-brand it later, if necessary.

I hadn't thought about embedding images until I saw your fox list, but I love that idea. How does Listal handle it? Do they have you upload an image and then you can put it anywhere in the text? It doesn't look like they just link to an external image, so I'm assuming that's what you do. Allowing users to upload images isn't a big deal, but it does open up a big can of moderation since images can be..anything.

Listal lets you upload photos, however in order to get them in your list you have to embed them yourself. This was the trickiest part for me as I am absolutely garbage when it comes to coding and programming, even the simplest of things. I did end up figuring it out, but it was not noob friendly in the slightest...and I definitely see your point in saying that this can open a big can of worms. Is there a way you can set up that a list with images needs to be approved by a moderator before it gets published?

Here is the help page from Listal, it will be able to explain it better than I can lol: http://www.listal.com/list/listal-help-list

Hmm..I'll have to think about how to embedding images intuitive. There could definitely be a moderation layer where we show a generic image until it's been approved or something.

Also, I pushed out an update this evening, so now you can publish your stacks and there's yet another new menu item for browsing all of them! Oh and I made it so it follows the same markup stuff that the forums use, which means line breaks, bold, italics, lists, etc.

Published my first one :) Excited to see the stacks that users will create!

You guys may have already seen my release notes post, which includes some more updates to the stacks feature. But one thing I'm curious about is how you feel about the UI in general. I'm not crazy bout the View Stack page and on larger resolutions I only let it use about 2/3 of the screen width. I found it was hard to read lots of text when it went really long, at least in 1080p. That means there's a lot of unused space and in general the page seems kinda empty.

There are still things I could add to this page like basic game info (user's rating, community rating, if it's in your collection, etc), "like" functionality, related lists (if we do something like what @dhobo mentioned), etc.

In any case, the foundation is in place, so happy stacking :D

I like that you added the pictures of the game next to the description. It makes it much more aesthetically pleasing...also I like the fact that we can now comment on the stacks as well. That will be great for interacting.

I just pushed out a small update with the following:

• Added a New Stacks section to the Home page
• Added some text to indicate how many comments a stack has on the View Stack page
• Modified the box art and game name on the View Stack page so they link to the Game Details page
• Increased the maximum length of a stack comment from 300 to 4000...not sure why it was set so low in the UI
• Fixed a bug where stack comments were not applying formatting properly (@WhitsEnd, I think you had tried to submit an issue on this regarding apostrophes, but it was already on my list :D)

My apologizes you probably got several notifications lol. I wasn't sure if it was my computer or not so I tried several times to post my comment only to be greeted by an evil banana;)

I wanted to pop in and say that I love this Stacks feature. I'm definitely waiting on a "like" or "favorite" feature so that I may save a preferred list for later reference.

Thus far I've not created a very large stack but have a question. Can you add more than 10 entries? I ask because most of the recent stacks cap out at 10. Top 10 lists are well established but it would be cool to have an option for much larger Stacks... For example, if for some reason you wanted to write about every Mario game then that would take up more than 10 items.

Yep, you can create a stack with ANY number of entries, there's currently no minimum or maximum amount of games. So yes, you could publish a stack with 0 games at the moment :P

I think I'll probably put a minimum on there (maybe 3 or 5?), but I think I'll leave off a maximum for now. If we ever do put a maximum on, it will be a really high number.

@moho, just curious, is there anyway to make a notification alert if someone leaves a comment on a stack you made? Even a little red exclamation point like when you earn an achievement....that way you can see the feedback without randomly checking the lists you made to see. Like I said, just curious and not something that needs to be made a priority or anything. Thank you!!

That seems like a great idea, so....it's done :D

Oh wow, that was fast!! Thanks Moho!! :)

Finally got some time to dig into Stacks, and I love the feature.

Some comments :
- Can't de-publish a published stack.
- I can see a feature where you have private stacks. I use lists\categories to create game lists, but this gives more flex and you can order them (which is a great +). I can see me create a stack with games I like to play in 2016 but that's more or less a private list (for me).

I thought about de-publishing and / or deleting a stack, but not sure how that would work with comments (and eventually "likes"). If users have commented on a stack, it kinda sucks that the owner could just take it away. I'm assuming de-publishing or deleting a stack would really only be for things that you didn't mean to publish or started working on and decided to abandon (and you likely never published them to begin with), so maybe it's not a big deal (yet).

I hadn't thought about having private stacks, but I could see that being useful. And it shouldn't be too difficult :)

Something I would like for Stacks is the ability to modify one.

For example, a Stack I'm working on now is intended to be a place for me to keep a 'checklist' of the games from a certain genre that I own. As I collect more, I want to be able to add them to this same Stack.

Other than that, it seems great! Just published my first one today to test and it is quite simple to do.

I'm for private stacks and the ability to edit...and the only reason, at least for me, is so I don't have to add everything to a stack at one time. Meaning, I'd like to add a couple games to a stack and re-visit later and then eventually publish and make public.

Stacks are always editable, even after they've been published :)