BGA Meta

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. You can also find more information in this article where I walk through the various features on BGA.

Throughout the upcoming weeks, we'll be continuing to make progress on revamping our game pages, which will cover adding complexity ratings (rules vs. gameplay), possibly an "interaction level" rating, as well as making the mobile layout more intuitive. So have at it and let us know your thoughts on the current state of the game pages and what you'd hope to see the most!

And as always, thanks for making this a great community and continuing to provide valuable feedback.

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

How do you feel about the recent changes made by @trentellingsen? Specifically, there have been changes to simplify the home page, the presentation of the "all games" pages has been revamped, searching for a game will bring up related forum posts, and game ratings/scores have been changed to be easily distinguishable. There are a number of improvements to come next week such as adding complexity ratings!

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

And as promised, I will share some of my thoughts on our giveaways since there have been lots of feedback over them in the past months.

First, I'll start off by listing the most common questions raised, address each one of them, and then present my suggestions/ideas afterwards:

Questions & Answers

Q: What type of contributions are counted toward entries?

A: You currently receive 1 entry every time you comment or make a post (this is specified in the giveaway rules).

Q: Shouldn't contributions to the game pages give you entries?

A: It should, definitely. I'll go more into this below. And for clarification, this used to count in the way way older giveaways. 

Q: How about giving different weight to each type of contribution? (e.g. articles get more entries over others).

A: It's certainly something I've thought about in the beginning. But, there are issues to consider. (1) I won't go into the specifics but giveaway laws are a big headache and difficult to interpret. Uneven distribution of entries is one of them. (2) There's a bit of a... "social contract" element to this, where there should be an agreement among the community on what a proper article is. Here's a list of some issues to consider:

• Weight - How much more value does an article have over a regular post? Is it assumed that articles are inherently better?
• Length - How long should it be? Should there be a cutoff in terms of minimum number of words required?
• Content/Quality Control - Besides length, is the content quality material?

I'm sure there are more but I hope it gives you a picture of the potential problems that need to be considered. Free games are undeniably attractive and while the giveaway has been great for stirring up great discussion, the appeal of going after the big entry methods may lead to questionable content. But, it's definitely not out of the question and it should be up for discussion on how we should treat this.

Lastly, here are my thoughts:

• First, make game page contributions count toward entries. No questions there.
• We should entertain the idea of doing themed giveaways, where every month or two, the entry methods will get changed to something along the lines of: "Bounty Hunters" (entries only from adding game info), "Everyone's a critic" (entries from review posts/articles & writing reviews on the game pages), logging your plays, participating in polls for top games of 2020, etc.
• I'd also like to address the issue of opportunity for newcomers. I'd like to maintain a system where the most active users who build up BGA are rewarded for doing so. But, I also want to encourage new users to participate by giving them better chances. Because of this, I will hold additional giveaways with smaller prizes (in value) where each user will only get a single entry by participating (equal chances for everyone). I will be deciding which prizes I should consider, but for now, we currently have a decent supply of MtG playmats and board games designed by Trent from his previous business ventures. Any other suggestions?
• Prizes - I will be looking into the option of working with other online stores to buy e-gift cards in bulk at a discount. If it's promising, I may consider using these as rewards so that the users themselves will be able to make the order, except they would need to cover shipping expenses. This may be a good option to save shipping costs on our end for international users (especially once the community grows) while also allowing us to potentially run more giveaways than even now.

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

I feel like @trentellingsen already has a mountain of work to do so for this week, I'd like to get your feedback on what I could work on to make this community a better place.

Some of the things I do are:

• Forum community management & giveaways
• Content creation (written)
• A little bit of social media management

With that in mind, what are some things that you think I could do more of? And when it comes to content, would you like me to focus on picking up interviews again? or try my hand at doing analytical work in presenting our traffic data in written form? (write about top games viewed, changes in trends, etc).

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

Also, I apologize for the late post! I've been MIA since Friday because my wife and I were celebrating our 5-year anniversary (we got to play #Atlantis Rising (second edition) and will be giving a report on that today).

For this week, I also want to  throw out some questions on the play log feature--what sort of features, data inputs, statistics, etc. would you want to see? What would make you want to log your plays more or to share them with others?

This is a question for @trentellingsen and @philryuh, I guess. Do upvotes play a role in sorting of hot posts or comments, like they do on reddit?

Just curious.

I want to hear your guesses. I think it was @Sliddell11. 

I've been seeing posts about what we "need" to play if/when there is ever a BGA con. It got me started wondering, the community is small enough right now that there is a pretty good meta that can develop. And, it seems like certain games keep on coming to the foreground..... 

For a while it was #Star Wars Imperial Assault. But that seemed to be superceded by #Viticulture: Essential Edition. There has been a lot of buzz around #Root, #Clans of Caledonia, and, to a lesser extent, #Scythe.

So, my question is this. What game do you think is most characteristic of the current BGA meta?

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

Also, I read through everyone's inputs on last week's post about the forum structure. @trentellingsen and I will talk and see how we can improve the experience in the future.

As for me... I'd love to see a revamp of two main things:

1. Revamp the play log feature for ease of use and add interesting statistics to look at/share.
2. Game page - first, adjust the design/layout to be more efficient use of space and to show better hierarchy of info. Especially from PC, I'd like to be able to see all of the crucial info in one screen without needing to scroll so much. When you search for a game, I'd like it to take you straight to the game's page when you click on the suggested game title. Also, a game page doesn't show all of the pictures that users have added and some of the buttons don't work for "scrolling" to see the rest of them. Add weight/complexity ratings for rules vs. gameplay, and make this info prominent. I'm sure there are more, but I'd just love to see a revamped game page that will make me go to BGG less for info.

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts! (Sorry about the late post by the way).

Also, here's something more specific we could focus on for this week:

Some of our users have raised concerns on the current format of our forum, with the main issue around our forum's nature of aggregating all user posts. Because the general discussion and game-specific posts are all displayed on the main forum page, it can make it difficult to have a focused discussion around a specific game without generating threads that can go off-topic. To clarify, the main issue isn't that there are off-topic discussions happening, but that the nature of the current format makes it unclear when it's appropriate/desired or not.

Another issue that's been on my mind is that our current format isn't suitable for rapid growth in our community. If you think about how fast some of the posts can get buried even after a day, imagine how difficult it'll be to keep up with the pace if we grew 100x in size (and that's still nowhere near the size we want to be at).

So, here are some of my thoughts before I share my ideas for a solution:

• I like the conversational/friendly nature of our discussions. Our community certainly has a different feel in comparison to reddit and BGG, and I enjoy that.
• Our community is too small to call for a complete separation between general and game-specific forum posts. Assuming the game-specific forum posts could only be accessed/viewed from the game page, these posts will likely get zero traction/comments from users.
• I do agree that there can be off-topic threads. I personally don't mind them, but I could see how if someone made a game-specific post to ask about different strategies, it wouldn't be desirable if we had loads of off-topic threads happening. Again, I don't mind as much because we have threaded discussions where you can hide the "trees" (and again, it's due to the nature of our small-knit community where a lot of us currently know each other and are on familiar terms). Also, as others have mentioned, the issue is usually when it's not 100% clear that a post is for general or game-specific discussion, either due to the description of the post not making that line clear or because of the structure of our forum not providing that clarity.
• Even when I can't contribute to a game-specific post due to lack of knowledge or experience, I prefer to be able to see the post so that I could read others' thoughts on the topic. 

With that said, here are some of my ideas (please feel free to comment on this/add your own suggestions). Some of these ideas have already been discussed in the past and were going to be implemented in the near future:

1. First, make it mandatory for all forum posts to be assigned to a "topic" page. This will help provide more organization. I will also need Trent to allow me to assign past forum posts to topic pages if they haven't been assigned to one already (or if they've been assigned to the wrong ones).
2. As a side note, our forum needs a "Community Guidelines" section to make sure everyone's on the same page and for everyone to have one standard to point to if and when an issue comes up.
3. Keep the main forum page as is but provide better visible cues on whether a post is for general discussion or game-specific discussion. OR, the alternative could be to add a checkbox to specify whether the post will be visible to the main forum or not. If we go with this idea, I could also imagine that if a content creator wanted to "catch-up" after finding out about BGA, they could have an option to post 100's of their links at once if they're okay with having them default to not showing up on the main forum page. I'm split between the two ideas because while I like seeing all posts in one spot, the current forum format isn't practical to house a flood of daily posts that will happen in the future. At the same time, a post that doesn't show up on the main forum page will likely get zero traction due to the current size of our community (how would you feel about this? I personally feel like it would be discouraging for a user to make posts if they never get a response).
4. I think the best way for now is to keep the forum as is, but do two things: First, add better visible cues to distinguish between general and game-specific posts. Second, create a subscription based forum page view. You are currently able to subscribe to specific games, users, and in the future, to topic pages. This page will create a custom feed of content you're most interested in. This should be especially valuable when the community has grown much larger in size. I'd also imagine having an option to make this page your default. We could even consider having three separate views for the forum: (1) general discussion, (2) game-specific discussion, and (3) personalized feed.

Well, that's all I have for now so let me know what you think! 

Next week, let's focus on how we can revamp the game pages :D

First time checking out the site. Looks great! After a quick glance around, I was really interested in the historical lows feature. I see that you have Amazon on there, and I'm assuming it's US Amazon. Would you be able to implement the feature for Canadian Amazon? Thanks! Excited to start using this site more.

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

I'll keep this open-ended because I can't think of a particular question to throw out for this week.

Thanks as always and remember that the current round of giveaway ends on Sunday!

Ok, found an interesting one.

I created a response to this thread:

https://www.boardgameatlas.com/forum/TpUtEexVj3/do-you-ever-go-back-to-your-old-reviews-what-does-it-take-for-a-game-to-get-55-stars

I then went in and replied to my own comment.  Decided I should edit it on to my original comment.  

Hit delete on my reply...it deleted my original comment as well.  

Oops!

The main things that I go to BGG for are the following: 

1. Reviews - This is very User Driven so I will be doing my best to provide reviews for the games that I've played on BGA. 
2. Used Pricing - When I'm interested in a game, I try to see if I can get that at a decent price used either through the Geek Market, Auctions, or Ebay. Not sure if BGA gives alerts when items are back in stock for retail, but that is useful. Also, notifications for new listings in the used field would be fantastic! I'm not sure if BGG has a way for you to subscribe to 'new listings' in the geekmarket, but if they do it's probably kinda clunky like most things on there. Happy to hear that BGA will be implementing a market for users to sell games. In addition, a "sort by state, city" section would be AWESOME!!!!! One of the issues with buying used games come from shipping, which takes a great deal and makes it equal, sometimes more, than a new game. Having the 'sort by local' feature will help see what games are being sold locally at any given time. 
3. Auctions - Love this feature on BGG. Granted, took me a while to figure it out, but you know, clunky. Auctions on here would be great :) 
4. Forums - the forums on here already look better. I think links to folders for the forums for each game would be great. BGG has this divided pretty well (ish).

I'm sure there might be some other things, but I know a lot of this is user driven so keep it up, Trent and team. you guys are doing great. Remember that BGG has been around for 20 years, so it may take a minute or two to get some things going. The important thing is that you're listening and that matters!

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

Also, here are some questions I'd like to throw out for this week:

• What are some interesting/cool/useful info you'd like to see included in the game pages? (think complexity ratings, setup time, etc)
• I like the current "Your Plays" page (e.g. here's mine) but I'd like to see it getting revamped. I'd like an option to rank all of the games you own/played for a list display that you can sort through + BGA to compile a "Top 9" 3x3 grid out of it. Any other ideas you'd like to see implemented for this?

As always, thanks for continuing to make community a great one.

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

Also, here's a question I'd like to throw out for this week:

What's your biggest complaint about BGA/what's most lacking? What makes you come back to it? (besides the giveaways of course lol)

Lastly, reminder that the giveaway is ending on Sunday (1/19)! I'm so curious who'll win this one.

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

Also, several questions I have for you all are:

• How do you feel about the picture/gif commenting that got added recently?--I personally love it and will be adding in some of the pictures you've been posting if it's appropriate for the respective game pages (if it hasn't been done already).
• How do you feel about the pinned "What Did You Play This Week" post? This is the first week we've tried this so I wanted to see if you liked it or not. Are there other weekly posts you'd like to see pinned? "Game Trade Thursday" is one that comes to mind.although it will likely see much less traction (at the same time, it won't see traction since it gets buried pretty quickly. Also, keep in mind that this post is a stopgap until Trent implements a marketplace feature)

Hey - was planning on uploading some game photos but was wondering if you had any image guidelines posted anywhere. I usually have a small watermark on the bottom of my photos. 

Also - by posting am I waiving any rights to my images?

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts! Late post due to recovering from a cold :)

For this week, I'd also like to throw out this question--how would you feel about me pinning the weekly "What Did You Play This Week" post to be up at the top? A lot of you seem to go back to that post to just update what you've been playing throughout the week, so does it seem better to keep it at the top? I feel like this could be good especially once Trent adds in a feature to allow image commenting so that it's fun to do quick shares of game pictures/moments, while everyone can still choose to do an entirely new post to go into longer details about their night.

On another note, reminder that the current giveaway is ending tonight!

Ok, so I forgot to make my usual Feedback Friday post so I'm making it now haha

Pardon the title because I'd rather keep things consistent and it's going to bother me having one post that sticks like a sore thumb!

For those who are new, this is a weekly post where you can share your praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content, etc. So, have at it and let us know your thoughts!

I also like to throw out a question to get discussion going, and here's this week's:

How do you feel about the current lineup of weekly "automated" posts? Is it helpful for starting up discussions? Are there any we should change, add, or get rid of? Below are all of the weekly posts.

• Monday - What Did You Play This Week by BGAForumBot (I'll give you a special avatar some day buddy) - seems like the number of comments on this post has been going up with every week so our bot is doing a mighty fine job on this one.
• Tuesday - Questions for Our Next Podcast by me - I need to do a better job being consistent with these posts or make it automated haha
• Wednesday - Nothing
• Thursday - Nothing
• Friday - Feedback Friday posts by me and Kickstarter Roundup by BGAForumBot

Many users have requested @trentellingsen to add a weekly post for trades/marketplace for our users. If added, this will only be a stopgap until the official Marketplace feature is added onto BGA.

Is it possible to optionally hide the price when displaying my owned list? Since I already own these games, I'm not that interested in current prices and since the price has the biggest font it detracts a bit from the list view in my opinion.

Thanks!

Got praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content creation, etc? Let us know here.

• When in dark mode, there are several visual issues with copy pasting in the comment/post description section. Backspacing on the beginning of a line that has something pasting in gets highlighted in white. Sometimes, I've seen text coming in black. I can't think of all of the different combinations at the moment that makes it bug out, but I made a long forum post recently and it was just filled with scattered portions of text coming in highlighted, in black font, etc. Again nothing big, but it dampens the user experience.
• Another complaint related to dark mode--there are buttons that essentially disappear/impossible to see because the button color blends in with the background (e.g. the button that you can click on to bring in the option to add the game to one of your lists).
• After the font color switch, there are some areas where the text doesn't get highlighted when you hover over it (e.g. the "topics" and the flairs area on the left of the forum)
• I would've complained about the doubling up of notifications that occur (e.g. when you receive a reply to your comment in a forum post that you're subscribed to AND that person has @'d you) but I believe Trent already resolved this issue so that we don't bombard Jamey with a bunch of notifications.
• I use the article post feature quite often, and it can get really REALLY buggy for inserted images and captions, where clicking on an inserted image will sometimes make it jump around to different spots in the page or make it disappear--have you run into these issues yet @indigopotter?
• In the "List" page, you can see the preview of a game that you're trying to add to one of your lists (owned, wishlist, etc). The preview image comes in way too big.
• This is more of a wish/question for everyone--I wish we had a more "practical" set of game recommendations based on certain parameters instead of just the "Mechanics" options on the top bar. To explain what I mean--when I go around the different communities, the same questions tend to get thrown around when people are looking for recommendations. Not that it's a bad thing, and I actually enjoy seeing people's recommendations and their personal take/experience with those games, but I'd personally like to see something along the lines of "Date Night," "College Party," "Office Lunch Time with Co-Workers," etc. Of course, setting the parameters for these types of topics would require a lot of generalization, but I feel like it would be more fun to go through the games that come up. Maybe it'd be more appropriate to create a forum topic for each of these? I honestly don't know, but just sharing my own experience where I feel like I'm visiting our game pages way less often these days.

• Hit interview #50+--I'm currently at somewhere around #22
• I'd like to get in a solid theme onto the website--a mascot, a shopkeeper for avatar library, forum bot, error page, etc where it will be like a world-building process playing off the idea of Atlas, exploration, maybe even a Kingdom Hearts-like idea of an explorer of different board game universes? As long as it doesn't come off as obnoxious/cliche'd
• Catch up to Board Game Prices level of traffic by mid 2020 (organic traffic is basically the ones where people find you on google). We own BGP, so it's all good, but I'd like to see BGA catch up. BGP's organic numbers are currently about 10x BGA's
• Special events--could be a charity/support program where BGA will donate games to communities, or when our revenue has gone way up, maybe it could even be us purchasing and giving away 100 copies of a game to support a particular designer. Ever since I started my interviews, I've been getting more and more of the desire to promote industry professionals. We could even try something like providing an all-expenses paid trip to have a designer come join me and Trent and spend some time to do a live interview, game playthrough, etc. It'd be nice if we could do something like that with a forum user too

Over the last 2 weeks, I've been working on improving the look and feel of the website to feel more like the same brand with coloring and styling. What do you think? There's a new header, link colors, and button colors.

All feedback welcome :)

Got praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content creation, etc? Let us know here.

For this week, I'd especially love to get your feedback on something that Trent and I have been thinking about. Although BGA has been growing consistently, time and money are our biggest limitations to growing faster and implementing all of our crazy ideas (full disclosure: Trent is on BGA full-time and receives minimum wage while I juggle a full-time job in addition to doing half-time on BGA with minimum wage--and we're hoping to continue as long as possible without going under lol). Because of this, we are thinking of setting up a way for us to receive donations that will directly shape the website and for us to continue to build something awesome together. Couple of thoughts/things to figure out are:

• To have complete transparency on what sort of items will get implemented when funding is reached (along with a realistic deadline and goal amount)
• What sort of goals should these be? It feels odd to set something like "BGA App Implementation" or "Revamping the Play Log Process" as goals when we'll eventually get to these anyway
• Should it be like Patreon style where you set one major item(s) per funding goal? Or displaying a list of items that will change in priority according to which receives the most amount of support from users?
• Maybe not just setting practical goals, but having rewards for donations? (allowing some level of profile or avatar customization?)

I'm sure there are way more things to think about but wanted to start getting everyone's inputs. Really appreciate everyone for making this community great and please know that we won't start strangling everyone for money xD

Edit: Oh and also, don't forget that the current round of giveaway will end 11/26! Good luck to everyone and let's see if there's an upset this time :)

I've just finished adding a feature where you can subscribe to a game. That means whenever someone makes a post with that game linked, you'll get a notification so you can join in to the conversation!

All feedback welcome :)

Got praises/complaints/wish features for our forum, game pages, content creation, etc? Let us know here.

The latest feature updates were for tagging users and subscribing to forum posts. Trent got the first versions in quickly and while he'll be working on improving these features, let us know if you experience an obvious bug.

Trent is also working on one of my requests for a profile preview that will come up when hovering over a username. It'll display the user's avatar (a little bigger than the usual) and other basic info. Here are couple of thoughts I had for this feature:

• Easily accessible snapshot of user's profile - things like avatar image, username, maybe the user's number of coins
• Display the title of your favorite game
• Something for content creators--link to your social or latest blog post or article post on BGA
• Maybe--show the title of the game you most recently play logged
• Maybe--show link to your most recent review that you gave on BGA's game page

It will probably be too much info at some point (although good use of icons might help to make it intuitive) but let me know what you think about this idea!