New GarageGames.com Feedback

#221 I love Torque, and try to stay active on the site while working on my project with the engine. Hats off to Garage Games, but I'm sorry to say this new site is a real chore to navigate through. I've also faced many bugs and missing functionality, which tells me it was prematurely rolled out live. Maybe its just me... but I really wish the site would get rolled back to the way it was. The organization was way better before. It seems we even lost categories, so I need to search for everything or scroll through page after page of listings. The products pages were especially better before in their categorized thumbnailed fasion. Now it takes forever to browse and see what is available.

Again, I appologize if this seems disrespectful. I only hope the site improves, and hopefully this feedback is worth something.

Thanks.
-Dante

#222 Just popping in to see if the site is usable yet. Did notice this though when updating myself with the thread.

Orion posted:

Quote:
hey Deborah,
fwiw i emailed you as "deborahm@gargegames.com" on wednesday last week, and the mail bounced. gmail tried to deliver it a few times, and finally gave up on saturday with:
--------------------------------
Technical details of permanent failure:
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect. Learn more at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7720
[gargegames.com (1): Connection refused]
--------------------------------

You are using gargegames.com not garagegames.com

#223 On the main blogs page... clicking on another page number, just brings up a page that says "Page Not Found"

#224 @vernon -

!!! hah, you are right! thanks.

#225 My latest blog entry seems to have been deleted - or at least it is not present amongst my latest blog entries. I can't check if it is on any of the lists on the what's new and blogs pages, since pagination does not currently work. I don't have the url to it, so I'm not able to see whether it's really deleted or not.

It disappeared sometime after it rolled off of the featured blogs list. (I don't think it matters, i'm just showing off.. :) Is there a way to bring that back somehow?

#226 Navigation horrible, too much white (or did a CLOUD just drop on my head?), most of the page wasted on a banner at 1280x800 laptop resolution. That's just the forums!

Now onto a far more serious matter: The store.

I've pointed people here for an alternative game engine, and there are times I wish I could point them directly at TGB, for indies, no source. This is not doable! I can barely find the product group, and to actually see that a cheaper option exists, you need to add it to the shopping cart and UNTICK the pro option for TGB. People close the page and think TGB is $250, then forget about it.

It was a mess before also, but at least it was easier to find out that there were two options. For me to find the pricing of TGB's versions and quote to people, I need to either log out (clicking the purchase option is impossible - I already own it) or find a review with recent prices (good luck with that).

I think a star just fell in the distance.

#227 Not sure if it has been listed ... but you can't change your password using the settings tab on your account page.

It gives an error stating that the e-mail address has already been registered ... although I only changed the password and not my E-mail address.

#228 New posts within the Torque Game Engine (Private) section do not show up (for me) as unread.

#229 This site is absolutely horrible. I can't find anything like I used to be able to. GG go back to the old site please!

#230 I never click on the "What's New" tab anymore. Why not go back to using a Blog/Resource rating system and let that determine what is "featured"?

I find myself missing the Community Snapshot area. How about re-allowing the ability to post "work" examples on our profiles once again?

Taking into account the missing Snapshot area and the boring plain text Details area on our profiles, the new site doesn't allow us to show off our projects and/or products the way in which the old site did.

#231 Unlike adding a new post, editing a post takes you back to the first page once again.

#232 Wow. Haven't been here for a few months... Great improvement to the site :)

#233 Would be nice to be able to click back after viewing a search result and not have a page has expired warning.

#234 The "Community" banner at the top of ALL community pages is unneccesary in my opinion. It might be nice to have it on the "Community Home" page, but not on every single forum page. I'd much rather immediately see the forum post than the banner.

#235 I'll second what Michael Hall said above... I don't see Torque Game Engine (Private) in View All Unread, but I do see Torque Game Builder (Private).

#236 Today's release, for those of you taking score.

Just so you know, we've been logging most of these issues into our bug tracker since the launch of the site, and we keep reprioritizing for the next release. We'll let this thread run a little while longer, then we'll probably lock it down with a summary of the things already mentioned in here and start a new one, since this one's so long and hard to follow now.

Thanks for all these suggestions/recommendations! Having so much feedback has made it easy for us to figure out the things that need to be nailed down first, and we'll continue to work on the things you've requested, plus more. Our next push will be Feb. 18th. Keep posting in here until I start the new thread!

#237 Some more constructive agressiveness ;)

* The "Community" banner is really distracting. And I like Apparatus, but not to the point of looking his picture every time I click on a link. Also, it makes the scrolling worst.

* There are undocumented possibilities in the Markup language; lists, for instance. Could be the reference expanded a bit?

* I've mentioned before my disliking for the scrolling on summary kind pages (like "Whats new"), but I laughed when I've got this:


Scrolling within scrolling?? Oh Came on!! Please...

#238 I would like to see a better way of browsing the Resource Database.
Boasting about having a large community developed resource DB is great .... but it's useless if you can't "casually" browse it in a good way.

#239 Search: fixing the broken (Array) tags for resources, using them with searches, showing them as clickable tags for one click tag searches. Display a cloud of the most popular tags somewhere.

More important would be a system which weights keyword search results better. I miss that from the old search. Now I might find what I'm looking for, but it's never at the top of the page. Just enter a name to see anyone's profile or blog.

Further down the road: community maintained version management and vote system for resources - think digg.

Another nice feature would be an automatic keyword based short list near a resource that would show a top 10 of similar resources and forum posts ordered by relevance.

Better relevance weighting is the key to an efficient search. Not a 5 mins task, I know, but it would be very very nice to have.

#240 The "USER has created 'x' threads" is an incorrect number (for me anyway), and when you click the link to view the "and 'xxx' posts" it only shows about the first 30 or so most recent posts with no links to older posts. It is also missing the organization (ie. forum categories) that the old site had when you clicked through those links on users profiles.