When we began working on the GameRevolution redesign, we knew we wanted to revamp the forum. With over 282,000 messages, nearly 100,000 members, and interest expressed within our community, we knew we had to make it happen. So, it became one of our earliest requirements for the project.
We are happy to say this dream has become a reality: the revamped GameRevolution forum is real, and it's coming as part of our redesign scheduled for next week.
The new forum is more than just a change in visual design, it's a complete overhaul. We have moved over to a new platform that has provided the potential to realize the goals that we imagined.
The layout will follow the same design language as the new front page with a focus on minimalism and readability. It will be modern, free of distractions, and run with faster-paced page load times.
Below is a screenshot of what an in-development version looks like. Note that the main page, in addition to the forum, can and will see adjustment (i.e. Wii U will become Switch on the header) between now and launch, including color changes.
On the right side of the forum you will see a list of members online, as well as the five latest posts. On many forums, this is found on the bottom. We wanted to make sure this information was as accessible as possible.
And don't worry, all the existing posts will come along for the ride. That means if you're a long-time user, your thousands of posts will not be lost.
Some oldschool features of GameRevolution will not be coming along for the ride, including Vox Pop. This might be disappointing, but what we found were that some of these features were difficult to find, rarely used, and/or just didn't make a whole lot of sense. The new site is about simplicity and making sure you have access to the greatest content within one or two button clicks.
But we don't want community blogs and user reviews to go away, thus, we will be making moves to encourage users to share these styles of traditional community-oriented GameRevolution content on the new forum.
The biggest advantage of this design is a single location will house all community interaction—outside of comments, that is. Blogs will no longer be difficult to find by the average user who didn't understand how to access things like Vox Pop previously, they will simply need to click the Forum button on the top of the page, and then visit a corresponding section.
We will be making efforts to inspire engagement on the forum to help extend interaction between users beyond the confines of the comment section. You might see a weekly recurring forum feature make an appearance, polls, forum specific giveaways, and other neat things that we hope will make the forum an attractive place to visit.
We appreciate your support, and are incredibly excited to share what we have been working on next week.
– Jonathan Leack, Executive Editor of GameRevolution
