The WeGame Blog

Hi WeGamers!

It’s only been twelve hours since the release of our database and we’re already thrilled with your contributions. While your enthusiasm has knocked us off our feet, your execution has left something to be desired. As such, I’ve decided to put together a series of short tutorials on how to really make your pages beautiful. Today’s lesson is images!

Adding images:

Let’s say you’ve just finished writing up everything there is to know about Master Chief. Your page is an encyclopedic codex of all information there is to know on Ol’ John… but your page still lacks something!

Of course! Images! It’s impossible to truly understand Master Chief until you see a big green metal man. Let’s see what we can do about that… First, let’s go to the upper right and search for Master Chief and see what turns up:

Great! There are plenty of pictures of Master Chief. Now let’s pick one and go to the image. There’s something new there on the right! It’s an “Add related page” box. You can click it and add an image (Or video!) to any existing page in the database.

We just type in Master Chief, and select him from the auto-complete! Great! But what if there weren’t any pictures of MC on the site? Or what if you already have a great picture of Master Chief you want to use? That’s easy too! Under the Master Chief screenshots page, click the “Upload screenshots” button. We’re greeted with this:

That looks familiar! Whatever screenshots you upload will automatically be associated with Master Chief. Now let’s go back to the page and put the finishing touches on it. Click the “Screenshots” tab, find the best screenshot you can, then hover the box in the lower right. Click the option that’s appropriate for the image, generally “Set as default image” and there you go!

Great! You’re done!

A picture is worth a thousand words,

-Jeff Gorndt, Community Evangelist, www.wegame.com

Hey WeGamers,

Today we are very excited to bring you a major addition to WeGame. We call it the WeGame Database. Very original name, huh? :)

Overview

The WeGame Database is exactly what you think it is: a database/encyclopedia about anything and everything related to video games. We’ve broken the Database into 8 categories:

Games
Video games from all kinds of platforms & systems.

Guides
FAQs, Walkthroughs, Cheats, or pretty much any form of longer text content.

Characters
Your favorite (or most hated) characters in video games.

Items
All the neat items, loot, weapons, etc, that you find in your gaming adventures.

Locations
Cities, dungeons, zones, areas, etc…

Platforms
PC, Xbox 360, Sega Saturn, etc…

Franchises
Star Wars, Disney, Mario, etc…

Companies
Nintendo, Valve Software, Infinity Ward, etc…

Structured Content

With the WeGame, every piece of content in the Database is related to another piece. For example, here are some things you will be able to look up:

• Who are the Left 4 Dead characters?
• Who are Zoey’s Enemies in Left 4 Dead?
• Which games does the Crowbar appear in?
• What are the cheat codes for The Sims?
• I want to know everything about Halo 3.

Powered By You

The coolest thing is all of this content can be created or edited by anyone in the WeGame community, much like Wikipedia. When you browse around the Database, you will find numerous ‘Edit’ and ‘Suggest’ buttons scattered around the page. Simply click Edit/Suggest and you’re on your way to making WeGame the best video game site out there! We will make a follow-up post in a few days to go into more detail on how the Database editing system works, but for now, have fun with it! In order to maintain a high standard of quality, Edits or Suggestions made by users will be reviewed before being published. Which brings us to our next topic! If you were wondering, editing the Database does give you WeGame gold and experience :)

WeGame Editors

In the coming days, we will be announcing our first batch of WeGame Editors. Editors have special abilities like:

• Create & edit all Database content without going through the approval process. Changes are instant!
• See all the Edits & Suggestions coming from the community and approve/deny them.

If you are interested in becoming a WeGame Editor, please post a comment on this post with your WeGame username and why you think you would be a good editor. Editors are expected to be very active contributors of the site!

Conclusion

Eventually, we want the Database to be your destination for finding anything you would want to know about video games. I’m confident with the power of the WeGame community, we’ll reach that goal in a very short period of time. We hope you enjoy the Database. Please contribute content if you happen to see something we’re missing, which at the start, is a lot! If you find any bugs, please e-mail us at help@wegame.com.

“WeGame licks you now.”

Hey WeGamers,

We released Playlists on WeGame a while back so you can organize your favorite content. Until now there wasn’t a way to easily discover other users’ playlists. That’s why we just released the Playlists page. On the Playlists page, you can browse some of the best playlists on WeGame and filter them by popularity or creation date. Have fun discovering the best playlists on WeGame. Below are some of my favorites:

• Champions Online Lookalikes
• Games Wallpapers
• StarCraft 2 Lego

Update: Video uploading has been restored.

—

Hi WeGamers,

We’re experiencing some issues with video uploading at this time. We will look into it and update this post when it has been resolved.

Thanks,
Jared

Hi WeGamers!

WeGame developer Coedman has been hard at work at the WeGame anvil forging out a new WeGame client! This version of the client has a new sound recording system that should allow Vista and Windows 7 users to more reliably capture sound, even on computers that don’t have Stereo Mix devices.

In addition, the client now supports Borderlands.

To get the latest version of the client you can either launch your current version, or download it here. If you encounter any problems at all, please contact help@wegame.com.

-Jeff Gorndt, Community Evangelist, www.wegame.com

Hey WeGamers,

A few quick updates that we just pushed out this today. Would love your feedback!

New Profile Navigation

Our original profile navigation design was getting cramped, so we went back to the drawing board and came up with a new vertical profile navigation. In addition, you’ll see the design of all the various profile elements have been refreshed as well.

Add to Playlist from User Profiles

When you’re browsing the Videos or Screenshots tab of someone’s profile, you can now easily add any item to an existing or new playlist.

Did you ever find a video/screenshot on WeGame that you felt was questionable in nature? WeGame has hundreds of thousands of videos and millions of screenshots, so it’s hard for us to find every piece of inappropriate content. However, we’ve just released a new & improved flagging system. Now you can help us identify content that shouldn’t be on WeGame!

Just visit any video/screenshot and in the description area you will now see a new ‘Flag Content’ button:

If you find anything inappropriate on WeGame, simply click that button and select the reason you think it is inappropriate. Right now, we allow you to select ‘Copyright content’ and ‘Contains mature content’:

Once you flag an item, a WeGame staff member will be take a look at it and take the right course of action. If we deem something potentially inappropriate, we may either remove it or mark it ‘mature’. Mature content items will now alert the user that the piece of content they are trying to view may be unsuitable for minors.

Hope you find this feature useful!

We here at WeGame are always looking for ways to improve the service and help it grow. About a month ago, we began experimenting with various different signup processes in order to promote growth. We did some research to see how popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace implemented their signup/invite process and began modeling our own process after theirs.

As a result of our experimentation, our signups began to grow. However, after we began to grow, we started to receive feedback from people who felt that our signup process & invitations were not clear. This resulted in our users sometimes unintentionally inviting their friends & acquaintances to WeGame. When we received this feedback, we immediately began work to make our signup process more clear. As a result of this work, we have completely removed the “Invite Friends” step of the signup process.

WeGame is a thriving video gaming community, with over a million people visiting it every month. We want to build a lasting company that continually provides value and entertainment to our community. We would never intentionally do something to compromise our users, as they are what make WeGame. We are sincerely sorry for any frustrations or embarrassments people may have experienced while visiting WeGame. We want to thank everyone who contacted us via e-mail or Twitter. Your feedback has helped us improve WeGame once again!

Image of new 2-step signup process:

Hi WeGamers!

We’ve added three new games this week. The WeGame client now records videos and screenshots from the following games:

• Aion
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Killing Floor

As always, if you encounter any problems don’t hesitate to contact help@wegame.com. Look forward to more great features and support for more games in the near future!

-Jeff Gorndt, Community Evangelist, www.wegame.com

Hey WeGamers,

If you’ve kept up with the blog, you probably know WeGame has the ability to auto-tweet whenever you start playing a game while running the WeGame client. This feature was disabled a week or two ago, but we have now re-enabled it after making some improvements. This version utilizes Twitter’s oAuth system so you don’t need to deal with entering your Twitter username or password anywhere.

Go edit your profile and click the ‘My Twitter’ tab if you want to give it a try! Note: all previous users of this feature will need to setup their Twitter integration again by going to the ‘My Twitter’ tab and authorizing WeGame with Twitter.