Readers, we’re not perfect. Far from it. For example: For eight entire years, our website looked like this. (Shhh, I know. It’s OK. Just don’t look at it again.) We’ve come a long way since then, but we’re still always looking for ways we can improve. …Or at least, we’re pretending we are, for the purposes of this post.
Welcome, then, to GameCola’s Suggestion Box! This is your chance to suggest new features for the site—any ideas you might have for how we can become even more the best videogame website on the entire Internet. A few ground rules, though:
1) I can’t guarantee that I’ll use everyone’s suggestions, firstly because I code about as well as gnats do taxes, and secondly because it’s possible the suggestions will be really bad.
2) Be polite. GameCola is the result of a lot of people fueled only by passion trying to put together the most entertaining website they can. Constructive criticism is useful, but try not to make us cry (unless we really deserve it).
And, that’s it! If you have a suggestion related to the website’s features or use, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section of this post.
Paul Franzen is the founder of GameCola.net and the writer/designer of Life in the Dorms, an actual videogame. Learn more at paulfranzen.wordpress.com. 
I’d like to see a browser plugin that lets you search GameCola’s archives!
You know, Jeddy and I were just talking yesterday about getting a better search function–one that ranks results based on, you know, relevance, instead of just publishing date. Would that help? I’ll move that to the top of my list; shouldn’t be too tricky.
Actually, if you could throw in an option to filter by date OR relevance, that’d be cool; I think they’ve both got their uses.
I will see what I can do!
You can try building a special page which scrolls down as in Pinterest using your archive. This way, I can quickly check the screenshots and images of the games I like.
Perhaps you could put the “Podcast at Gamecola dot net” in the appropriate section in “about GameCola,” since that’s where Jeddy goes to get a lot of the topics.
Updated! Well, I added it to the Contact section, anyway (replacing Jeddy’s personal contact, since this makes more sense). Was there somewhere on the About page it should go, too?
Ah yes, that’s what I meant. Sorry, I scrolled up to check the name and I guess I looked at the wrong one :P
How about a list of all the columns.
Actually, I’d second that one. We could have a separate page with links to the archives of all our columns (or, at least, all the columns maintained by current staff writers). Along with it, we could have a roster of our current staff members with links to all their work, and possibly a roster below that of former/inactive staff members.
I guess this is where I’d put a technical issue. My school computer has ceased to be able to use the chat function, as well as a few picture don’t show up. I’ve tried both Firefox and IE, and updated my Java again. When I mouse over a weird hyperlink thing at the bottom I get a “javascript:void(0;)” message. It only seems to be this computer, my old home laptop seems to work with it just fine. Any ideas guys?
“javascript:void(0;)” is just a common shortcut for having Javascript code execute from an A tag. Like, there’s code that executes from “onclick”, but they have to put something in the “href”, so they fill it with “javascript:void(0;)” to force it not to send you anywhere. It’s commonly used for links that open a popup window, or, for example… The GameCola chat!
Not sure what could be causing it, really. Strange that it would happen in multiple browsers, but only on that computer. Try clicking the link and see if the chat pops up.
Your school board may have blocked access to chat functions on its network of computers in their schools because it’s not education-related. I know this school board has done that for certain websites, such as YouTube.
I guess that makes sense, but it was working before… strange. Perhaps they updated the block? It doesn’t work very well usually.
Technically speaking, there wouldn’t be a way for them to determine what constituted a “Chat function” to be blocked. They could disable Javascript in all browsers, which would prevent the from chat working as a side-effect of a much larger issue.
On GameCola, the rotating articles on the front page would just show the most recent article. Google Ads shouldn’t be showing up. Basically, any website where anything changes after the page is loaded wouldn’t work. Google would let you type in words and hit enter, but wouldn’t do the automatic search thing and wouldn’t give you a list of suggested searches.
I can see this being a possibility. Let us know what you can find out…!
Mine blocked the website entirely :(
Yeah, so did mine. :P They also blocked the games section of fanfiction.net, but no other part because… logic.
Though I know we had one in the old design and it wasn’t really a hotbed of activity, a forum might be useful now that there seems to be a more steady readership. Plugins like Simple:Press look to do the job nicely.
Mobile site?
Ooh, I like that one. I’m always on the go.
AWESOME! I’m so glad to see the staff list in the sidebar now. It’s in my contract to always find something to complain about, though, so I think the list should be higher up on the sidebar, and I demand freshly baked cookies to go with it.
I agree with getting cookies.