Great Hierophant wrote:

One of the issues I have with the general look is that it fails to take advantage of the fact that most people use widescreen monitors currently. The sides are frequently left unused and all the information is condensed into a little box in the center of the screen. The Mobygames' design is very bad here, as everything takes up more precious vertical space.

The fixed size is also bad for anyone trying to access the site with a mobile device, requiring side scrolling, too. I have never tried to access the site from a smartphone, so it may have a mobile style or some other way for these devices to access the site, but it would probably not detect a netbook.

I also very much agree with you about the images. They should not resize an image on a page without resmpling the image. Most browsers will render such images too blurry to be usable. Older smaller images should be replaced with larger ones in lossless formats. Dump the JPEGs.

Malik wrote:

I guess the *previous* owners have already finished counting their money then.

I sincerely doubt that this is what happened, when by all accounts the site was barely covering its upkeep costs (if at all) at the time of the sale.
Not that this excuses the *new* owners from what's happening now, but the fact remains that in real life one cannot always make the ideal choice. The whole thing could've been handled better, but I see too much misdirected shit-flinging that should rather be aimed at GF themselves.

Great Hierophant wrote:

I didn't like how it upscaled images. I always prefer nearest neighbor scaling to scaling that gets done (looks like bilinear). The only way I could get nearest neighbor is by using Opera, and I don't like Opera.

Yep, I hated that too. Fortunately I easily fixed it in Firefox with the Stylish add-on and the following rule:

1@-moz-document domain('www.mobygames.com') {
2    img#screenshotimg { image-rendering:-moz-crisp-edges; }
3}

Great Hierophant wrote:

One of the issues I have with the general look is that it fails to take advantage of the fact that most people use widescreen monitors currently. The sides are frequently left unused and all the information is condensed into a little box in the center of the screen.

Alas, that seems to be deliberate. At one point after the redesign was launched, the main page had a background advertising some current best-selling title (I forget which), and Corn Popper's forum post seemed to indicate that the fixed width was precisely intended to accommodate 'changing backgrounds' - that is, the wasted space is supposed to be GameFly's way of monetizing the site.
Of course, right now even *that* is broken, which should give us a clue about the level of competence we're dealing with...

I'm sure someone is tracking the hits the site is getting before and after the redesign and if they fall too much they'll have to do something to bring them back up. The best thing you can do if you want the old site back (besides forming a torch and pitchfork brigade in the forums) is to just stop visiting the site.

MobyGamer wrote:

Malik wrote:

the owners are still keeping their mouth shut tighter than their own ..., and ignoring all the faithful contributors' pleas. Guess they are busy counting the money they got from Gamefly.. bast...

The owners are GameFly. The previous owners have had nothing to do with MobyGames since 2010.

So they kept contributions going by dangling a carrot (the redesign and bugfixes) in front of all the contributors when they were never going to get anything.

Disgusting. Simply disgusting.

The other day I visited the site, and the names of two out of three of the top contributors (the only names you can see on the main page) were :
YID YANG Has Left In Protest
MobyGames was killed by GameFly

Guess they are busy counting the money they got from Gamefly.. bast...

I don't think it took them very long to count it.

Is the site just going to be overrun by the likes of Gary Acord (shudder) and other iPhone crap now? I hope there's someone left holding down the fort.

I really liked yid yang's reviews. The internet just got a little less interesting.

Jorpho wrote:

Is the site just going to be overrun by the likes of Gary Acord (shudder) and other iPhone crap now? I hope there's someone left holding down the fort.

Atleast we still have Vogons 😀 Not any Iphone crap here so far

YID YANG Has Left In Protest Bronze Star Contributing Member (164169), Sep 15, 2013 wrote:

Corn Popper is the one who is getting paid for precisely that - communicating with GameFly management. But for some reason he is awfully surprised whenever I blame him for the shit that is happening. Every time he pretends to be an innocent lamb just forced by his evil masters to be the courier of bad news.

No, Rob. You aren't innocent - you and Jim Leonard and Brian Hirt sold this place, sold it without telling us, without warning us, without answering any of our pleas, coldly and smugly and cruelly ignoring our anxiety. You were supposed to restore our faith and rebuild the site, and all you've done is just the opposite.

So it is your fault - yours and Jim's and Brian's and whoever else was the nominal owner before you sold MobyGames. Everything that happens is your responsibility, and if you've got a shred of decency left, you'll have to fix it.

vetz wrote:

tleast we still have Vogons 😀 Not any Iphone crap here so far

Never trust anything you don't have the full SQL and/or wwwroot dump for.

Malik wrote:

YID YANG Has Left In Protest Bronze Star Contributing Member (164169), Sep 15, 2013 wrote:

Corn Popper is the one who is getting paid for precisely that - communicating with GameFly management. But for some reason he is awfully surprised whenever I blame him for the shit that is happening. Every time he pretends to be an innocent lamb just forced by his evil masters to be the courier of bad news.

No, Rob. You aren't innocent - you and Jim Leonard and Brian Hirt sold this place, sold it without telling us, without warning us, without answering any of our pleas, coldly and smugly and cruelly ignoring our anxiety. You were supposed to restore our faith and rebuild the site, and all you've done is just the opposite.

So it is your fault - yours and Jim's and Brian's and whoever else was the nominal owner before you sold MobyGames. Everything that happens is your responsibility, and if you've got a shred of decency left, you'll have to fix it.

I need popcorn to follow that thread and I don't have any! 🙁

Mobygames isn't the only site to get an ugly terrible corporate makeover this fall...

leileilol wrote:

Mobygames isn't the only site to get an ugly terrible corporate makeover this fall...

Win8, Youtube, Google Images, <insert any google service here>, PC Magazine, Mobygames, now Slashdot - this plague's spreading even to developer / sysadmin tools like freaking phpMyAdmin, which over the past couple of years has had its default UI progressively butt-raped with useless javascript transitions, options hidden behind more scrolling, clicking and "unhiding", and more whitespace than Greenland. This trend in interface design is entirely hideous and needs to die already, no exceptions.

If the web had a Shitty Design Police, I'd force sites like these to spend two years in Times New Roman and/or Courier (not New) as a corrective measure.

leileilol wrote:

Mobygames isn't the only site to get an ugly terrible corporate makeover this fall...

Yuk that's nasty too. Enough with the large images already, I don't go to slashdot for the pretty pictures.

I've removed Moby from my favorites toolbar 😢

You can add Just Adventure to the list of bad redesigns. A website modeled after Metro.

Maybe all the designers have stopped using the PCs altogether and are using only their windows 8 tablets...

I renamed my Mobygames account and changed my email to something that i don't remember anymore, since it's too painful to continue my involvement there..

vetz wrote:

Atleast we still have Vogons 😀 Not any Iphone crap here so far

Here, this was done in 20 minutes or so, like all designs of this kind probably are.

It has tiles! It has shitty clashing colors! It uses Segoe UI! It has BIG images! It takes two pages to show what can be shown in two rows of text! It's social!
IT IS THE FUTURE!

Ugh.

VileRancour wrote:

IT IS THE FUTURE! […]
Show full quote

IT IS THE FUTURE!

Ugh.

@VileRancour - that's appalling, I've reported your post as being offensive 🤣

leileilol wrote:

Mobygames isn't the only site to get an ugly terrible corporate makeover this fall...

The comments over at slashdot regarding the new format are many, considered, and pretty much all negative. I wonder if they'll just forge ahead with the change regardless. Probably.

I don't mind the Slashdot layout. It's much cleaner than the old one, but at the same time less sterile feeling. Maybe driving away some of the crotchety old Linux-as-a-religion sysadmin types will attract a fresh crowd.