Weekly Retrospective: 04/04/10

I started out the Weekly Retrospective to be a mixture of site updates and a round-up of all the important news from the week gone by. As you may or may not have noticed there’s been a decrease in the amount of news, with them being more centered around thoughts and updates. This is really the way they’re going to stay; we’ve decided now to drop the news posting on the site. It was sporadic and didn’t really fit in with what we’d like to focus on, which are feature pieces and blogs. We’ll still be covering the big events like E3, as well as posting some new trailers in the video section of the site.

Ah yes, the site update. The most radical change since we went live, we now have a completely new look. Done in the interest of keeping the most popular content on the front page for longer, there are now a few new features which should ensure this. The Featured Articles Slideshow (or scroll-y box, as I prefer to call it) now cycles through all the best and most popular articles from the previous couple of weeks. Underneath that is a list of all our articles, so you can see all of our latest content with a glance. Shift your eyes to the right and you’ll notice 3 new boxes, showcasing the latest Features, Reviews and Videos, so you can always easily find what you’re interested in. Shift them right again and you’ll see your profile box on top of latest post comments and forum posts, so it’s easier than ever to jump right into the discussion.

Whilst the site is still based on a readily-available theme, there have been a few modifications made by Kris, who you may know as Batman*, Raen or halbpro. A coding wizard, he’s been poking around in the inner workings of SG to customise it and make it all function correctly. You’ll now notice that the forums span the entire page, and aren’t squished into a tiny section anymore. The posts and pages have been made wider and only include the profile information and latest comments widgets, giving us a bit more flexibility. It also means there’s just less distracting stuff happening so you can concentrate better on the posts. There are a couple more tweaks to be made, but we’re getting there. One last thing, Kris is awesome. I don’t think he’s even human.

Something that I need to mention is how much certain people like to nab the content of others and pass it off as their own. We’ve had a couple of our articles passed around and used before, but all with the appropriate links and stuff, so we really don’t have a problem with it; everyone does it to transmit interesting stuff around, and it’s just the norm. What isn’t acceptable, however, is when people just copy and paste sections of your articles and then pass it off as their own.

One such website is TheGamersHub, who thought that we wouldn’t notice if they copied and pasted part of my NormalTanks review. Well, we did; I actually made an error in that paragraph (an extra word) which is also present in their article, showing that it was a straight copy. They didn’t even attempt to proofread or alter it in any way. Just because we’re a smaller site doesn’t mean that I won’t come down on culprits like a ton of bricks, regardless of who it is. We put hours into producing our content, so when someone just nicks something like that (however small) it’s extremely annoying. As a warning, we do notice when this happens. I know your website. I know who stole it. We don’t ignore it.

Anyway, now that all of that is out of the way, I hope you’re all having a fantastic Easter!

*Unconfirmed, but I’d put money on it. Probably a fiver or something.