GameCola Is Back! Again!

You heard right (or, are about to read right, if you didn’t watch the video)—GameCola is BACK!

Again!

You may also be noticing that things aren’t just back; they’re better than ever! I mean, have you SEEN the site on mobile? ARE YOU LOOKING AT THIS SITE ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICE RIGHT NOW?! It looks great, doesn’t it?! No, seriously, I don’t own a smart phone—please tell me how it looks in the comments.

Oh, right. If you just tried to go comment, you may have noticed a side effect of all the updates: all of your passwords have been changed, and some accounts have been deleted altogether. It’s easy enough to change your password by following the instructions on the “Lost your password?” link.

If your account has been deleted, I’ll have to apologize…we had exactly 8,000 user accounts in the database, and only 92 had ever posted a comment. We moved those 92 accounts over to the new site, and dropped the rest. If you’re one of the other 7908 accounts, feel free to create your account again!

If you’ve visited our front page (do you visit our front page, or do you just go straight to the posts from Facebook or Twitter?), you’ve likely noticed the new Featured Articles section at the top. This is better than the thing in the same place on the old site—and not just because it has navigation buttons. The list of posts featured gets generated every day based on age, article rating, and view count. Your votes and views help determine what gets on the list! Kind of like the Top-Rated Articles page…which has also been updated, if you haven’t seen it!

And, have you SEEN the sidebar? It’s right over there! That way, on the right. Take a peek. I’ll be here when you’re done.

Did you SEE it?! Random articles! GCDotNet on YouTube; the letter G, the letter C, the word Dot, and the word Net! Facebook and Twitter!

There are even more changes behind the scenes. The GameCola backend is now a lot more modern, making it easier to update from now on and less likely to crash and lose months worth of data. Contribution and editing has been streamlined and simplified.

That said, we’ll wrap up this update with a final big change:

GameCola will no longer be following the post-a-weekday format.

Like the shift from email newsletter to website newsletter, or from website newsletter to Actual Internet Website, GameCola is changing it up once again. It can be difficult sometimes to put up a post five days a week, and that can lead to drops in quality—and at the same time, limiting ourselves to only one post every day can make it difficult to get breaking news out in a timely manner. We’re hoping the change in format will make us more responsive, and also shift the focus from quantity over towards quality.

As your Editor-in-Chief, I’d like to take a moment to apologize for the unexpected and extended hiatus, and I want to thank all of our fans (and staff) who have stuck with us through it all.

Enjoy the new site. I hope it’s been worth the wait!