Another Sunday night WordPress upgrade…

… aaaaand, everything works fine. Hooray! :D

Due to a recent glut of spam and maybe-spam comments, I’ve written up a short comments policy. It was pretty much our moderation policy anyway. This way, you’ll know why your comment didn’t make it. Here are the highlights:

• No hate speech
• Be constructive
• Read the whole post
• No spam
• Normal sentences please

Here’s the full comments policy if you want more detail.

We’re changing the way we review games.

You may have noticed that our reviews are a) not what you’d call timely and b) few and far between.

More often than not, I find that I want to discuss a particular aspect of a game, rather than the game itself. What normally happens is, I decide to save it for the review and then never get around to writing the review itself. Even worse, when I can’t find anything nice to say about a game, I simply don’t write anything. Instead of continuing this bad habit, we’re making a change.

The review category will still be there. Rather than writing full reviews in a single post, we’ll probably split a review up into a series of posts that explore the more interesting characteristics of each game, good or bad. This way, I don’t feel bad for absolutely slating the occasional free game that comes my way and you get more thoughtful content. Each post will be tagged with the game name, so you’ll have no trouble finding all our comments about a single title, should you want to.

I’m upgrading the site. Things may behave strangely for the next few minutes. Please rest assured that the Ancient One has not awakened in restless R’lyeh and havoc is not being wreaked upon the Earth. Probably. [1]

All done.

In keeping with our new look, we’re being much more proactive this year. You’ll find more frequent reviews and an almost-regular posting schedule. But first things first – I’d like to know who you are.

Why? Well, aside from the simple fact that I’m curious, we’d like to know what kinds of games you play. May as well review the stuff you’re actually interested in.

The other reason is this: As well as our new game videos category, we sometimes run sponsored videos in the sidebar. This week a Superbad advertising video has been available to our UK readers and.. well, let’s just say that some parents would not be impressed. It’s not explicit by any means. It just has a few dildo-shaped items in it.

So, here are a bunch of polls to tell me a little more about you. Please be nice. If there’s anything you want us to cover more (or less) often then leave a comment below.

Age

Poll Answers

Gender

Poll Answers

Video game genre

Poll Answers

Platform

Poll Answers

Thanks! I’ll post the results late next week.

Here at The Average Gamer, we’ve been plodding along for just over two years with a design that I hacked together myself. It was ugly but servicable.

We now have a proper theme, designed by a proper web designer and everything! I have tweaked it here and there and it’s lovely. It’s a complete redesign so if you’re subscribed to the feed, stop by and have a look.

You’ll find featured posts, support for Gravatars, space for videos and lots more.

What do you think of the new look?

Today I was told that our right sidebar hasn’t been displaying properly in Internet Explorer this week. This was due to a long URL in a recent comment. I have now fixed the problem. All items should be displaying properly. For those who were affected, I’d like to recommend the Firefox web browser. It’s free and works very well.

Let me know if you encounter any more bugs in the site, please. You can comment or email me directly through the link in the sidebar.

Just a quick note to acknowledge our slightly-altered colour scheme and layout. I got bored of the blue on blue with blue concept and I’ve moved a few things around.

Hopefully all will go well.

Hooray, nothing broken! All done, normal service resumes on Wordpress 2.1

Hey, this Wordpress upgrade cuts off posts at the “more” tag in the RSS feed. I’m don’t like that. I’m definitely a full-feed kinda girl. I’ll try and sort that out over the next few days. In the meantime, many apologies if our site feed goes a little crazy.

I accidentally deleted the first post in my How To Write an RPG Journal series when trying to delete a comment. Cue much panic, though not quite as much as the time I accidentally deleted the entire website.

Lucky for me, Bloglines had cached my post. I will be re-posting it shortly, so it will probably show up as new if you are a subscriber. Sorry.

Can anyone recommend a Wordpress plugin to prevent this from happening? I’ve searched around a bit and found the Trashbin plugin but (heehee!) rather ironically, the author has lost a bunch of his/her websites and data due to a RAID hardware control failure.