• Boiled

    05/11/2010

    Posted in: Gaming, N4G

    This week I haven’t so much been playing games (except for playing the word “jester” in Words with Friends), as I’ve been playing around with our newly launched NewsBoiler.

    We recognize that geekery is not limited to gaming. Oh, no, geekery abounds! With that in mind we’ve taken the magic social news aggregation bits of N4G and plugged in different areas of interest, from anime and manga geekery to football (erm, soccer) geekery. It’s been fun bumping into N4Gers on the new sites, and having new members join the network goes a long way to keeping the mystery alive.

    Every site in the network has its own fans and staff, allowing for focused communities – made fun by the people that are just as passionate about movies and TV as N4Gers are about gaming! That said, it’s easy to be a part of multiple – or all – of the NewBoiler sites. Your login is the same across the board, you just need to activate your membership.

    The launch marks more than the addition of new sites, though. There have been a number of changes and features that I’d like to highlight here:

    - Tickets: With our new Contact Us page, you can submit a ticket on anything from a glitch to a business inquiry – and since tickets go to a central hub you’re going to get an answer faster, from the staffer with the relevant info.

    - Contests: We will have more of them – not just for the contributors. Sometimes there will be a cash prize, other months may have other prizes. We will also run similar contests on the other NewsBoiler sites, and more info will be posted on this soon on each site’s contest page.

    - Source Index: Using the source index you can find a story by its source, even rate the source and its content. The content rating is super ninja – below a “Read full story” style link on a sub, you click the “+” next to the URL.

    - Friends: If you’ve got ‘em, you can add them. In addition to the old Track feature (which is Twitter style in its unrequited nature) you can now add Friends. If you’ve got more than one, they can be sorted by site or viewed across the whole network, creating a personal hub for contacting them or seeing what they’re up to. Your feed will then display the latest actions of all, just Friends, or just Tracking.

    - Moar Social Network-y-ness: I’ve always viewed N4G as a kind of RPG, and now with more character customization! Currently you can update your status on a specific site or network-wide, and in addition to an avatar you get a sort of perma-sig – a personal banner that appears on your profile. There will be more features added in the future.

    - Comments: You might have noticed – no more OpenZone. There’s a new bubble voting system – comments can now acquire both a positive and negative status based on community votes, and are labeled accordingly. Comments that receive a lot of negative feedback will collapse and can no longer be replied to. The system is now also harder to game, and all accounts have been reset to 3 bubbles (which is the new default). The old system was badly abused so setting all accounts to the same starting point was necessary for the new system to work. Also: you can reply to a reply. But not reply to a reply to a reply, that’s just crazy talk.

    - Forums: Ok, so those aren’t new. Yet. The forums will be updated, but first we want to sort out the mainpage bugs. We have made a temporarily fix for the log in problems, but at the moment new members will not be able to post in the forums as they are not fully integrated with the main site yet. Bummer, we know, and we’ll fix it – and make it shiny and new.

    -iPad Channel: YAY! Why am I so excited about this? I don’t have an iPad – but I think the N4G contributors will appreciate the magnitude of the addition. ;)

    There is a lot more to be read on our DevBlog, and I’m answering some of the bigger Q’s on Twitter, but I think this covers some highlights.

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