A small batch of improvements, fixes, and additions just in time for the holidays.
Welcome back to another installment of what’s new on Backloggd. We’re ending this year with a mini-update, aka 1.10.4, which includes a new default setting for activities, additions to the logs page, extended game info, and more. Let’s jump right into it.
Logs Page Displays — view more in one place
A user’s logs page is supposed to house all information about a specific game for that user, so it only makes sense to extend this to allow viewing specific elements such as reviews and lists.
You can now filter between logs, reviews, lists, and (when applicable) legacy data. This brings more data for the game to one place, allowing you to really focus in on displaying specific reviews and lists. I’m hoping to extend these options even further in the future, such as showing only journal entries or filtering by friends.
Other related changes:
- Changed: Logs now sort by last updated versus creation date to keep the freshest data at the top
- Bug fix: Logs with a review but without a rating weren’t displaying the review icon on the left side
- Bug fix: Legacy data button was showing no matter if you had legacy data for that game or not
Game Page Links —connecting relationships
Games are a unique piece of media in that there can be versions, expansions, bundles, remakes, and all sorts of variations that build off an original title. It can make navigating these game relationships difficult, so one step to help make that easier is by showing more of that relationship directly on the game page.
Now if a game belongs to another game in the form of a remake, DLC, expansion, etc.. it will now display that information just above the description, along with a handy link to the game it’s related to. This is replacing the little badge that would appear by the game’s title as it’s serving the same purpose but with more detail.
This feature is rolling out as the data gets filled in, so you should see it on more games as time goes on. (Tip: If you’re a Backer and want the update sooner, you can refresh a game’s data to make it appear!)
Another change to the game page is the version is now displayed on the right side if it exists, above a newly styled IGDB link. This is one of many steps in improving how a game fits in with the rest of its kind. I’m hoping to continue this within the year with the support for franchises, viewing these games from the parent, and more.
Other related changes:
- Bug fixed: Handful of PC platforms weren’t displaying the correct icon under ‘Released on’
- Bug fixed: Games without a cover could have their title overflow if the cover got too small
Profile Recently Reviewed — more at a glance
Your profile is the first page many users see when checking out your collection, so why not give them a better first impression.
That’s why you can now see your three most recent reviews on your profile. It’s a quick way to see what you’ve been up to and hopefully shine some more light on the reviews you’ve written.
Other related changes:
- Bug fixed: Readmore buttons were missing from profile bios, list descriptions, and list notes
- Bug fixed: Recently Played and Badge sections weren’t hidden when empty
Default Activities — keep the filters you like
The activities filters are a great way to narrow down what you want to see on your feed, but sometimes it’s understandable you just really don’t care about certain activities.
So now you can set your filters and save them as your default! This will then load in and be set whenever you’re viewing your friends’ activities or another user’s activities page. It will not apply to your inbound or outgoing activities. Activities are another area that can use more tools to help streamline what ends up in your feed, so hopefully this is one more tool to help your prioritize what you want to see.
Speedy Reviews — gotta go fast
This one is more technical but one of the greatest enjoys in life is seeing a high traffic page such as reviews go from 1.5 second latency to sub 500ms.
All-in-all reviews should load much faster now due to some optimization changes in the back-end. Meaning pages from the general reviews page, friends reviews, user reviews, game pages, and game reviews should see improvements across the board in terms of load times. This was becoming a big issue because some of the heavier pages, such as friend reviews, were leading to crashes due to how long it was taking. This should now allow them to load without issue.
NOTE: There is a known bug that is causing some crashes when filtering by a specific game but that should be patched shortly after this post gets released.
Other related changes:
- Changed: Escape the * character in reviews with \* if you don’t want to format
- Bug fixed: Reviews now display the rating for that log, rather than your overall game rating
- Bug fixed: Formatted links with a hyphen (-) in the url wouldn’t always get formatted
- Bug fixed: Certain characters such as < and > were not rendering correctly in reviews
That wraps it up for this update! There are a few other small changes / fixes that you can check out in the complete list of changes here: backloggd.com/changelog/#1.10.4
Wrapping up the Year
We have the GOTY event wrapping up on Dec 31st, so be sure to submit your entries before then as submissions are final and editing will be locked. Results will be released within a week after, finalizing Backloggd’s 2022 GOTY.
The next set of priorities will be to continue work on 1.11 which focuses all around revamping the home page and incorporating feedback from 1.10 into a redesigned log editor for an initial beta launch. Hopefully that won’t take the entire year because I have some big plans I’m hoping to get to, ones I know many of you will be excited to see.
As we approach the end of 2022, I wanted to share a special milestone that we just hit 100,000 registered users on Backloggd! Without all of you I wouldn’t be here today getting to work on something I love, so thank you for continuing to use Backloggd and extra thank you to those who support the site on Patreon. With that said, can’t wait to see what 2023 has in store!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BackloggdApp
Discord: discord.gg/Ac6XNNN
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/backloggd
Happy Holidays,
MrProg
