[Site Update] Newsletters, Comment Replies, and More

Newsletters

Starting this week, we’ll be sending out automated newsletter filled with the content you are most interested in. How do we decide what content you’re most interested in? By looking at a) what and who you are currently following and b) any content you specifically request to subscribe to a newsletter on.

There will be two types of newsletters. The first newsletter will be tailored to the most recent content from anything and everything you follow on GameSkinny (authors, games, platforms, tags, or genres). This newsletter will be sent as often as there is a reasonable amount of content available for the things you follow – as frequently as once a day up to once a week for less prolific content.

The other will be section-specific newsletters. You can subscribe to a newsletter for a specific game, platform, tag, or genre. Each subscription will be sent independently according to new content availability. So you could theoretically receive separate newsletters for Minecraft, Playstation 4, and kickstarter.

If you don’t want to receive subscriptions, you can turn them off through your profile. As Lounge Lizards, I hope you will give the newsletter some time and let us know what works and what doesn’t so we can continue to improve it.

Comment Replies

Now you can reply to comments a little more directly. Click on “Reply to this comment” beneath a comment that you’d like to reply to. A comment box with @username will open directly below that comment. Once you submit your comment, that commenter will get an email letting them know that you replied and your comment will appear inline below theirs.

As part of the comment reply restructuring, we decided to change the flow of comments. Previously, newer comments would appear at the top of the comment thread. In order to make the flow of conversation more logical for replies, older comments now appear first with replies directly underneath.

Author Bios

This is not a real bio – the article continues below.

At the bottom of every post you publish is a new author bio block. This block has a short bio (pulled from your profile if you’ve set one or a surprise if you haven’t), your avatar and social links along with a selection of your posts. If you haven’t updated your bio in your profile yet, you may want to run along and do that.

More Relevant Content

We’ve added more ways to find great content from all over the site. From the homepage, you can see more of the featured and promoted posts from the past two weeks, as well as the most popular posts over the last two week period. From an individual post, we’ve added several new post listing blocks:

• related posts directly below the current post
• recent game-related posts in the sidebar
• active discussions near the comment thread

How can you help spread the love? Add relevant games, tags, and platforms to your post – this will help spread your content to more entry points across the site, and help others get more attention for their own posts. Just make sure to keep the meta data about your post relevant – don’t tag ALL the things.

And more

The last major change we pushed was a refactor of how we handle in-post images. We’ve updated the image handler so that:

• you can now post animated gifs
• you can now post larger images – we will automatically resize them to post width and link to the full-size original.

You can see examples of both within this post.

As always

As always with new changes, we welcome your feedback. (In composing this post, I’ve found a few things that need tweaking.)