A midyear check-in for Backloggd.
Welcome back to another developer update where I’ll be recapping what’s been going on since the 1.12 update released and touch on what’s to come.
Debut of the Replay Event
Having just wrapped up, the 2014 Replay Event was a new event that explored revisiting Game of the Year for years that have already passed. It was great to see excitement around this event and makes me excited to try more of these in the future!
I had originally picked 2014 because it was simply 10 years ago but in retrospective it probably wasn’t one of the strongest years for games. Expect future Replay events to jump around, rather than simply increment.
I’ve also heard feedback on how remakes/remasters should fit into events like these and will consider how to better handle edition eligibility in the future.
Reviewing the 2024 Census
Earlier this May I had put out a survey surrounding general topics on Backloggd to gauge how the site has been performing. I received an overwhelming number of responses, so thank you to everyone who took some time to input their feedback!
92% of responses are very satisfied with Backloggd as a logging site, which is fitting as 83% of responses say their #1 primary use are to keep a virtual collection of their games. The following primary uses are more spread out which shows people are coming to Backloggd for a variety of reasons:
- Journaling when finishing a game
- To read reviews / ratings of a game
- To find new games to try
44% of responses are very satisfied with Backloggd as a social site but at the same time a smaller percentage of responses say their primary uses for Backloggd are for social activities:
- To write reviews for others to read (22%)
- To follow friends’ activities (13%)
- To create lists for friends (2%)
Now this doesn’t mean the social aspect of the site isn’t important, it just highlights the primary use comes to logging with social being a secondary use. It does indicate there could be more to improve on the social side to make it a better experience to pair with logging.
All-in-all lots to learn from the census results, more events were one of the highlighted feature requests which inspired getting the Replay events.
Maintenance Catch-up
Something I’ve been consistently working on since the last minor update has been tweaking and adjusting systems behind-the-scenes to squeeze better performance out of the site. Y’all have been busy creating so many logs, my poorly optimized database seems to be hiccupping trying to fetch them all. I know how frustrating daily slow downs can be though so I’m still working on fine-tuning new ways to reduce the load. I’ve already made big improvements to the home page, reviews, and lists loading. I still recognize there’s more work to do as traffic continues to increase.
Reducing the Repetitive Tasks
One focus for the next update has been planning out how I can better manage my time with the site. Being a solo developer means I don’t only do all the coding, but also respond to support emails, build out moderation tools, fix duplicate games, and help address reports. Honestly, I’ve been lacking in all of these one way or another as it’s become too overwhelming with the amount of catch-up there is. So to address this, I’m working on building better automated systems and tools to use to help speed each of these systems up.
I’m back to the drawing board on how to handle game duplicates as it’s been too manual even since the 1.9 update which was supposed to fix this. I plan to have in-site reporting for duplicates, with a feature to submit which game it should point to. I’ve already started listening to data from IGDB on when games are deleted on their side to make it easier to find which games are obvious duplicates on the Backloggd side. Ideally these changes will also allow me to enlist dedicated help, giving power to a few select “duplicate moderators” who can act on this faster than I can.
QoL Features
Another focus is to play catch-up on improving many of the existing features with highly requested fixes / changes. For instance I hope to make the time tracking feature more prevalent, allow comments to be edited, and continue to improve how series are tracked. Hope to show more of these improvements later on!
That’s all I have to share for now, personal updates such as moving to a new apartment, taking some summer time off, and playing too much Civ VI have also slowed things down a bit.
Big thanks as always to the now +1,000 Backers on Patreon who are bringing me closer and closer to the possibility of working on Backloggd full-time!
Until next time, see you on the site!
MrProg
Twitter (X?): https://twitter.com/BackloggdApp
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@backloggd.official
Discord: discord.gg/Ac6XNNN
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/backloggd
