MAKE HARAMBE GREAT AGAIN

Only took flagging pretty much every single shitty almost certainly stolen escape game twice daily for months, but persistence pays off

August - Accrington, Amsterdam, Hannover, London, Sheffield

September - London, Bremen, Bielefeld/Cologne

October - Dublin

This message is to inform you that the following review, which you left for Trap on 12/26/03 at 8:14:04 AM, has been deleted

Better late than never I suppose?

This is how I perceive the discussions the admins have re: what to do with the people that put out two escape games/match three games/hidden objects games every day without fail

Why? I mean I know why, because either:

a) sites assume they must do to keep up with the times, regardless of how it might alienate the current audience

b) ANALYTICS tell them to.

This is, naturally, retarded. If a site is successful, it is generally because of the content that is provided, and the methods in which the content is supplied to the end user. Fuck up with the methods, and you'll likely lose users on both ends.

Let me look at my favourites and/or other sites that I regularly visit to get an idea of how they can fuck up:

Newgrounds: probably one of the only sites that tends to get it right. I think this is primarily because the owners are still somewhat independent of any sort of global chain site bullshit that might mandate garbage on to them, so have been able to redesign as to what the audience wants, rather than what any external stakeholders might think be a good idea. I still recall being in the NG office in '07 and getting a preview of how the new design would look, and thinking it was great. That's how all things should look

GameFAQs: Complete AIDS, and it has been pretty much since they sold out to CNET, and especially since CJayC left. Most recently they made a forced shift out of old versions, only retaining a "throwback mode" which they eventually removed increasingly quickly (I literally left the country for 48 hours and it was gone), before enforcing a completely new design, removing all old stylesheets, whereby the only way it was actually usable was to make wholescale changes to options to allow for a "least bad" option

Facebook: LOL

Gmail: LOL, I nearly switched back to a dedicated email client because the web version is so bad

Twitter: Also LOL, I only ever use this on my phone, but both apps that I use have undergone changes that completely break all functionality

Team Liquid: The main catalyst for this post. Large scale general design changes, breaking a ton of stuff, making things unusable fo various users with accessibility issues, hilarious given their main focus is dead games

BBC: Terminally broken for at least half a decade, causing me to switch to Grauniad for news, which is breaking their site as well, although slightly less badly

SBNation: The site literally hangs for half a minute on Chrome because it's so badly designed

Cheezburger: See above

Hattrick: Site is simply unusable on mobile, necessitating the use of an app

One of my football team's fan sites: Rolled out a change for mobile users which broke all notifications

Pretty much every site I list has been going for a long, long time, so isn't obviously failing. So why oh why would you roll out changes that will just annoy everyone and drive users away? I can't think of a single time where a site has made a redesign and added functionality I wanted. So why do they keep doing it?

Edit - and WHAT THE FUCK HAS HAPPENED TO THE SPACING ON BLOG POSTS

apparently i need to wait 5 minutes despite deleting the previous one. oh well, it gives me a chance to listen to this again.