It’s never a slow news day on Game Jolt. So much game news is posted every day that it can be hard to keep up with the announcements that might interest you the most.
On the current site, there’s a news feed on the homepage and that’s the only place. As news updates are posted, new ones push the old ones off the bottom of the page. There’s no way to sort news and there’s no way to browse older news.
So we decided to fix that.
{% pullquote Hot News and Followed News %}
On the new site, the homepage will show only 3 news updates, along with a tab to switch to your followed games instead. This way, you can see what’s most important to you. But that’s just the homepage. Now, you’ll have easy access to all the rest of the news in a sortable, paginated feed.
{% pullquote Game News tabs %}
On the news feed page, you can use tabs to view all the latest news, news from just games you follow, news about games that are still in development, or news from games that have already been released. We can tweak or add to those categories in the future.
On the homepage and in each category of your news feed, we now sort articles by a new ranking called “Hot”. It uses games’ follower counts to figure out the “weight” of each news post. It still sorts by newly added, but adds in that extra weighting, similar to reddit’s hot algorithm.
{% pullquote The new Hotness %}
This system still allows games without many (or any) followers to get on the first page of the news feed, but it moves them down the list faster than games with more followers. Unless, of course, they nab a bunch of followers with the amazing news they just posted!
Hot allows more popular and more validated games to stay near the top of feeds for a longer period of time while also giving new games a chance to be recognized. And, if you want, you can always switch back to sorting by New instead of Hot.
{% pullquote That’s a lot of news! %}
Catching up on old news is a breeze now, too. You can browse pages of older news, sorted however you like.
There will be continuing tweaks to the news system, but it seems like a much more solid base than before. We’ll see how it fares when we launch the new site, and then we can make tweaks based on the usage data we gather.
{% pullquote A news feed %}
We’re getting closer and closer to releasing #GameJoltNext. Most of the major work is being wrapped up, and we’re getting loads of great feedback from our testers. We can’t wait to show you more.
If you have any ideas on how to improve the new system and the news browsing experience in general, sound off in the comments!
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