GameSkinny Updates April 23rd, 2014

We have some terrible news. Our developers have been working hard making fantastic changes to GameSkinny every couple of weeks (sometimes more often than that) for more than a year now, and we've never even told you about it.

Yeah, we know, that wasn't cool.

So going forward, every time we release changes to GameSkinny, we're going to announce what's new, different, and awesome. Here's our first update:

Changes on April 23rd, 2014

New article sidebar

The old article sidebar featured a scrolling list. We found that users weren't big fans of this since it could scroll independently of the rest of the page and look a little confusing. So one of our devs put together this handy list of some other articles people may want to check out, and it will change length based on the length of the article it's presented next to. Fancy!

Dashboards are fixed in Firefox

For GameSkinny contributors using Firefox, the last several weeks have been marked by a distinct lack of dashboard graphs. Our devs have fixed that, all hail the return of the graph! If you haven't been using your dashboard, you can find it under your user profile; it tells you all about how many people are reading and commenting on your GameSkinny articles.

Links in Lobby articles are automatically no-followed

This was done to discourage posting of pointless spam articles that make the Lobby less awesome and fill our editors with rage. If you've been posting spam, it's now even more useless than it was before, so stop.

Old (but Important) Updates

GameSkinny Link Search

The very best act of karma a writer can commit is linking to another GameSkinny article - their own, or another writers. With the GameSkinny Link Search tool, you don't need oracle-like knowledge of all the thousands of articles and games that are covered on GameSkinny to link to something relevant.

Why it's Important:

By adding relevant links to other authors or to your own work, you encourage readers to check out more stuff while they're here. The more we all do that, the more exposure everyone has. You get more readers, other writers get more readers, and readers find more awesome stuff, easier. Win / win / win.

How to use GameSkinny Link Search:

1. Select the text: Pick a game, common topic, news item or some other relevant bit out of your first two paragraphs, and highlight it.

2. Search for links: With text selected, hit the magnifying glass icon in your tool bar. It will automatically search on the text you've selected and return related articles on GameSkinny, all your articles, related games, tags and platforms as relevant. You can preview any of these to make sure it's what you want to link to, or change the search text to look for something slightly different.

3. Assign the Link: Just pick the thing you want to link to, and GameSkinny will do the rest!

That's all for now, but there will be more SOON (TM)

We've been carefully watching what GameSkinny readers and writers are using (and what they're not) and some big site changes are in the works to give you more of what you love, and less of what you don't

Have suggestions, feedback, or ideas? Comment! We love to hear from you.