Is there a way to add custom entries? If not please add this asap, should be easy. It’s much needed as Giant Bomb db has missing games & doesn’t track DLCs. It adds great functionality as I can add Mods, DLCs, anything missing to the collection.
Custom Entries is easy way to fix DLCs topic which has come up many times. Given how DLCs are basically standalone expansions & should be own entry.
Also pls make Game Notes / Updates , searchable or searchbox, super useful, super easy
Interesting idea. It should be noted that standalone DLC does receive an entry on Grouvee. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon or Infamous: First Light are good examples. If the DLC can be played seperate from the main game there will be an entry on Grouvee. If such a game is missing/overlooked we can add it to the database.
Yeah, I wish GiantBomb DB covered all the DLCs. Or if there is GameRankings or MetaCritic API, as that lists DLCs as individual entries.
Custom Entries is the easiest way to do it, & very effective too for DLCs or missing DB!
@peter Check this, it’s a game collector app using same API but has custom entry (manual) Gaming collection app Game Vault for iPhone - API Developers - Giant Bomb
Linking that if it helps Grouvee dev. Feel free to nametag other devs.
Custom entries isn’t a bad idea. I’d have to think about a good way to do it, but it’s an interesting idea.
As for DLC, Giant Bomb has them in their database, they just don’t let API users get at it. I agree they belong in the database, I’ve just been afraid to take on the task of maintaining any large set of data like that.
I’d nametag another dev if there was one! 
somehow streamline the giantbomb creation process into something somehow semi automatic… could that somehow be done or worth doing? My thought is that grouvee users could go to a page (on grouvee) that more or less guides them through the process and helps them fill out forms, maybe even autofilling out some of it if it can find it with a google search, a gamebanana or a gamefront, etc. while secretly submitting the info and all that to giant bomb. maybe giant bomb would even help in some way, or at least give you their blessing and speedily approve or prioritize such edits done this way? Grouvee seems to need something like this whether it’s mods or new game entries. i have no idea how much work it would be to cook up some kind of page that guides a user through it and notifies them when done somehow via email but manually adding all these pages is a lot of work too. There has to be a better way than the game request thread.
i dont even know how to code but hope some of these ideas might lead to something. I think most users would be willing to go through some semi automated GB creation page. It seems like it would be the most doable but I really dont even know how much work that would be to make a tool that does that. a lot would go along with it more than just a crude form tool. You’d need email notifications of it and stuff that grouvee doesnt do. Still, figure it’s worth a mention.if such a thing were to be made i think the users would use it since it would basically be just as much work as posting in the forum to add a request entry.
I second that vote for a search function that goes a bit wider like @RusXFX describes… So, it seems a lot of things are interrelated here. Here’s a few thoughts on it. First, a bit on the situation with search. Some users are going to need a search to have any hope of finding… maybe anything. Second there are already quite a few tabs on the side there. This can make the lack of a search a bit difficult at times because some users are looking through that stuff to find what they do.
Third, the way the site works now is functional and you dont actually need a search to find your updates but you have to know ‘the trick’ which is to go the page of the game rather than your own page. something that not all find intuitive. haha this site is so l337 
Fourth, (and this is the problem), you can’t do this for comments! and it must be an update. And besides months down the road you wont rememmber where that ‘thread’ is, or who started it. if it was a comment an update or maybe your own review. Without search there isnt a way to find it and if you go to the game page you’ll be left scratching your head because you didnt post an update another user did therefore it’s nowhere, and you might not know which user did, so you can’t find it if you are friends and know them, or maybe they removed you as a friend or something because they didnt like you so much after you said final fantasy was the most overrated game since dark souls. lol. (I’ve caught myself looking for comments on these games that i thought were updates, actually. Therefore yes to search.)
one solution is maybe a filter that could work like a search by filtering by a game while on the comments section of your own user page that lets you filter titles down to look for a specific comment regarding relevant game. In this case you type in the name of the game ‘dark souls’ as a filter and it somehow can find your comment in the haystack of comments you’ve left as you are typing, whether or not you have the game on any of your shelves. no idea how much work that would be but users could figure that out maybe, and it would work well for this issue. It sounds like it would be involved to make it though, possibly more than a search. (I wouldnt know) However, If it could scan across reviews updates, notes, comments and all else a user does, thats probably even better for most people for some of the reasons i mentioned. we dont often know what we are searching for. Just the game its about.
i’ll mention it again to those of you guys playing mods. I do use the status update function as a note basically. It’s great. It works fine for it and i can use that to keep track of mods. and other stuff related to games and just post them as private updates. Not that i’m against ‘notes’ but this is for the time being the quick and dirty way to keep track of mods and make notes. and you can edit them like notes too. (My fantasy for grouvee is to more or less use a site like this as a blog and journal that keeps track of the dates of my entries) that are more or less ‘free and open’ (I also edit these updates/notes and write in reviews about my favorite skyrim mods as i play them, console commands, and cheat codes.) I just described how I use updates as notes which isnt really intended obviously, now here is how i would really like to use the status update feature:
form:Status update
entry:12/29/16
anchor: Skyrim.
field: "Didn’t do dark brotherhood questline."
tags: backlog, things to do, skyrim, new year resolution
i wrote a note on a game GB pulled but i did it adding associated tags to my updates/notes that i could search for later (or maybe at some point look at on a time line or visual that somehow represents time)… one thing i have noticed is how people use custom shelves as tags or keywords. At some point these shelves showed up on the game pages themselves.its kind of cool and makes me curious but Was that the intent? Would maybe a shelf+tag system that lets a user tag both games, and status updates/all user content they make be an improvement of the grouvee infrastructure or would that be redundant, too much or too complicated or too hard to develop? I would find myself using it extensively as I use very few custom shelves and in fact ALL my custom shelves could easily be replaced by a tag system.
Several have mentioned mods in db and notes. I described notes as i use them now i would like to use an example that might be a good compromise for how a lot of these issues could find a solution through tagging of games themselves:
anchor: Half-Life
tags: They Hunger, 1998, 2004, 3.7, FPS, Half-Life, Government is bad, Mods, Opposing Force, games to sample audio from, GOTY, played, unplayed, tools as a weapon,
Maybe that Mod is in GB or maybe it isnt. with a open tag system It doesnt really matter. I could simply add the tag ‘they hunger’ to half-life and maybe just ‘mod’ to a more generic game that i wanted to associate with the ‘mod’ tag. (I personally wouldnt use nested tags i dont think but it seems like it could be cool. but someone mentioned nesting shelves so thats a thought too) these tags could be nested in different ways. GOTY>1998 and Half-Life>Mods>They Hunger. I could search for my tags and they would show up in different places thats the main idea.
Currently I have some custom shelves like mods, multiplayer, VR, and replay value. All of those could be switched out with tags, if it were to happen. I would maybe move this ‘half-life’ (if it is on GB) from one shelf to another. maybe wishlist then to played or maybe i’d pull it out again if i want to post it for some reason or track it that i’m playing again. but i wouldnt get rid of most of my other tags like ‘mod’ ‘they hunger’ ‘FPS’ ‘2004’ ‘3.7 stars’ or whatever tagging system i am using. (and as you can see these tags are the kind of features several ask about such as half star ratings and themes and genres.) I might on occasion take off some tags depending on how i use them like ‘things to try’ ‘backlog’ ‘get when on sale’ ‘play with girlfriend’ etc. However the shelves i have? I might move games around on my shelves but they would more or less be permanent shelves, and be very basic shelves which is how in my head i think of a shelf. 
Now if i did this for a while with my tags in place I could go to the page for half-life and voila there are all my 200 custom tags of every mod played and unplayed and all of my ‘personal updates’ as well on the page with their own tags too, and they are even in hex color coded glory depending on what the tag is. Mods could be blue. Genres, themes could be green, i could color code release years if i wanted, even systems… This is really a lot less work and requires minimal databasing, and i could be as OCD as i wanted and it would just look clean on the shelf to see stuff on my wishlist and what what it’s tagged with. or filter my wishlist down to say ‘Co-Op’. I can easily click on a game or a tag and see what to make of it based on the tags or games that show up that others have made too. and if i were to use updates as notes and have been tagging them in a seperate tagging system i could do a search for a tag like ‘they hunger.’ on the my page screen to find my status updates tagged with ‘they hunger’
i could use html/hex colors to determine which of the 200+ half-life mods i’ve played and havent played. so new unplayed mods could be pink, etc. etc. I could switch colors of a tag rather than remove it, which is simpler than making an update (if i didnt want to bother with that), or i could just add the tag to a note ‘played, mod, they hunger’ with no real body field text. very minimal typing and work too. tagging games and tagging comments/updates/reviews seems like a good compromise in my mind to a few things people have mentioned lately. and if the tags are visible on the game page this could help content discovery in the same way the shelves currently show up, possibly with the benefit of being more specific. to make it a bit less risky of vandalism. three tag sections: one solely from GB, one from the grouvee user collective and one from the user itself.
Currently grouvee uses a system of shelves that functions like keywords or tags. (basically a lot of the keywords you in fact see as shelves) BUT i notice its a bit kludgey. to manage shelves rather than keywords, and some use it this way some dont. I would lean towards a basic shelf+open keyword system because I could basically keep track of mods i play this way using tags and notes and it would be less awkward to me to think of, and look for things. I could even have a color system on the updates/notes themselves to make my updates very easy to make sense of if i make posts about half-life several times a day i could find the posts about ‘mod’ quick using a search filter that narrows it down to only my ‘blue’ posts or whatnot if i actually do get that OCD (doubt it, just saying). (though this might not be something other users of the sight would want to see, all of a few users OCD colored tag posts haha) if there was a word cloud off to the side of my page or when i filter down to ‘half-life’ (or i go to the grouvee page for half-life and see a word cloud like the current existing shelves that are there right now) that’s another way to look at it. the word cloud could maybe show up on other pages as ‘suggested’ tags below the current tags other users have given that game.
I could also filter down my comments/notes/updates area with the half-life filter to find it and all the other ‘tags’ i create, seeing what i’ve tagged half-life as that way. Maybe a global search for two or three keywords like ‘valve’ or ‘mod’ would be nice as well depending on how grouvee users go about tagging things (can currently only search for titles). Currently there is no search for the shelves others make either that i know of (it might exist though!) I see utility in a word cloud of keyword tags similiar to what exists that could work in most situations for a user the same way a global type search in conjunction with the title filter system. I just mention it because grouvee already does have a tagging system of sorts. (I could easily just have 1-8 shelves that never get deleted and games move on them with a keyword system i filter down in this way) we dont need 100+ shelves IMO, i cant even imagine how to use shelves that way but i can imagine a tagging system that matches my tags and tags other people give it in convenient way and that’s not really the same thing as shelves such as ‘wishlist, played, currrently playing, owned, etc’ however those who have already done this and made lots of shelves could keep doing it i suppose. so it wouldnt disrupt their collection. i would imagine everyone would switch to a tag system, especially with search features.
of course if people actually did dwarf fortress it and actively added entries to every mod ever into giant bomb that could be useful as well to those of us looking to discover content and see what others have on their shelves. seeing tags people create that is open (and being able to search for keywords) would be useful too though. i am hoping this is a possibility and you like the idea and it could be done at some point, to me it just seems intuitive way to manage things.
That’s a lot of text!
There are a ton of great points in here. The main takeaway from it for me is that it needs to be easier to filter through and search your data. I like the idea of taggin notes/statuses, especially on the private side.
The shelves are designed as tags pretty much. I don’t see a whole lot of difference between having a whole bunch of shelves and a whole bunch of tags. Since @aqwelorr built the shelf search function, it’s real easy to find them in your list when tagging games.
I’ve got some stuff to add to my list!
Rather than a totally separate tagging solution, what if we just encouraged people to use hash tags like they do on instagram and everywhere else? If we had comment search, we could turn hash tags into search hyperlinks to make it even easier. Finally I suppose if you type a # character in the search box we could show an autocomplete list of hash tags in the search index and I think that would be a full solution without a full new tag concept.
I agree that in general shelves are best for tagging games, and I have more ideas about making lots of shelves manageable (I’d like to add the shelf filter to the shelf link list as well so you can easily jump to shelves, and I’d love to support multi shelf filtering). But tagging of status updates/comments I think is an interesting scenario that could be handled in a lightweight fashion with hash tags.
Tagging seems like a good solution.
thats a great idea…if i search for ‘dark souls’ grouvee knows i’m looking for giant bomb entries, but if i search for #darksouls (not sure about spaces) then grouvee knows i’m searching for user content. very easy for someone to use within the context of one searchbox. and people know what hashtags are, so it would probably be adopted. seems that’s the most pragmatic thing to do.
also an autosuggest hashtag popup or something when making comments. if i post on someone’s post that’s a child of the darksouls giant bomb data, my comment would be easier to find if it was autotagged darksouls. maybe that shouldnt even be a choice.
Is there any update on this? I’m new to Grouvee and definitely love the look and feel of the site more than other backlog tools, but a large chunk of what I play is obscure indie games not in the database which is a bummer.
Grouvee uses the Giant Bomb API, so one way to add to the database is by adding it at Giant Bomb which will then push to Grouvee. Otherwise you can post in the request forum and we will add to a the database as quickly as we can. I’m hoping to get a bunch added later today. I know that might not be the best answer, nor the one you’re looking for, but I hope it helps a bit. We do endeavour to get things added. A lot is automated through Giant Bomb import but some games are missed and it’s definitely a priority to get them added.
welcome. I feel ya. i actually created a giant bomb account to add stuff not in the database that i play. Anyone can do that but It takes time to go through that GB approval process since it has to be looked at by admins but you can add anything you want if you want to go about doing it yourself and be patient for admins on GB to approve your pages.
Maybe some kind of freeform-‘placeholder’ type entry that a user could later direct/associate to a GB approved database entry could be a kind of go-between for people that really do play only indie games? That way they could at least track things then later tie it to something if they wanted to do it as the GB database grows or edits are approved. Might be able to do something with the idea and use something like it in other ways too (such as mods, associating with a base game, etc.)