OK, they are live. I think they’re working. Let me know!
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I’m starting to work on more filters/sorting options for these shelves, and I have a question for everyone. Do you look at/use the Date Added fields at all? @mmuffins asked to be able to sort by it, which you should be able to soon, but I think the way I’m handling that field needs to change. Right now that field is stored on the shelf entry. So when you add a game to a shelf, it automatically fills that field in, and it’s not editable. If you take that game off of that shelf, that entry goes away, and so does the date. That’s all fine obviously in terms of the individual shelves, but when you’re looking at your whole collection, there’s really no persistent Date Added to collection field. Right now I just display the earliest Date Added field from any of the shelf entries.
My question is, would it be useful to have a field that is separate of the shelf entries that stores the Date Added to your collection data? The field would be editable so you could fill it in if you wanted to really dig in and say you bought a game in 1983 or something. It would also autopopulate whenever you add a game to a non-wishlist shelf. This field would display on the game page, and on the All Games list.
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I think I can make a preferences button that would bring up a dialog where it’s not intrusive and not overcomplicating the interface. That would solve @LucaLink’s problems too. That way people who want a clean, compact interface can remove all the fields they don’t want.
I’m still interested to hear from the people who do like the Date Added field 
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Big fan of date added. I use it frequently, especially if I forget to record dates manually and need to check that retroactively. I also use it frequently enough when looking at my backlog.
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It’s definitely not going anywhere. Do you like the idea of a field that can be edited on the All Games and individual Games pages that would keep track of when you added a game to your “Collection?”
What I’m envisioning is that all of the shelf dates would stay the same, but you’d have a field that shows up on that All Games that is the editable Added to Collection date. This is kind of the first step in adding more metadata to everyone’s Collections (like # of copies, physical, digital, owned, etc) that I’ve been wanting to do forever.
Maybe it’s too confusing?
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Holy cows, the new filter is amazing, that solves a lot of headaches I had when looking at my backlog! A couple of things I noticed when playing around with it:
Only the first filtered-out shelf is persisted across page changes, e.g. open a shelf with and filter out two or more shelves. Go to page two and check the filters again, all but the first filters will be discarded.
I realize that I mentioned the term a while back, so I probably have only myself to blame, but reading it on the page, I’m not sure if “Subtract games from these shelves” is the the best wording. Worst case, someone could think that the option removes games from their shelves. Maybe something like “Don’t show games from these shelves” would be easier to understand?
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Truth be told, I’m not actually using the DateAdded field that much. I noticed that the option to sort by it was missing because I just happened to be curious what the oldest games on my backlog were before switching to the new layout.
That said, the option to hand-curate a date for when a game was added to your library overall would certainly make sense for people that are serious about their games library. The concept doesn’t sound too complicated, but I imagine the front-end implementation could be because it might be difficult to get people to understand why there are multiple added dates, and why some are editable while others are not.
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Took me a minute, but I figured out why it was happening. I’ll push the fix with my next update here soon.
Agreed. I’ll change it.
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I’ll definitely leave the new shelf style on by default, really like it.
One thing that added the cherry on top for me was adding some highlighting to the game titles. Maybe it’s just me getting old, but I found that this little splash of color makes the whole site much easier to parse since it helps the game title pop more, and my eyes are immediately drawn to it.
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Maybe I am lost, but would that mean the date I added something would not be erased when I move it to another shelf? Would that add more permanence to date added metadata? If so, please sign me up.
On another non-shelf but date related note, is there a way to grant us the ability to see the exact date we made post? Right now dates are relative. I know the data is there, it’s just not public facing right now (unless I missed something). I sometimes also tend to look at the date I posted a status update to figure out when I started a game if I forgot to manually record that.
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That does look nice. Did you just throw a custom CSS sheet in your browser for that?
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Pretty much, yeah. I’m using a browser extension called stylus which lets you inject custom css on pages, and I just added a color property to the title-link class.
Well, I ended up doing a bit more than that. Mostly to cut down on vertical whitespace and reduce the size of some elements. But I don’t know if I would call these other changes an objective improvement, they are really just there to account for personal taste:
Here is the full stylesheet I used.
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I like the idea of having a different coloured title for games - as i’ve been using the new shelf page more & more I’ve been noticing some visual things. Using the old shelf page columns, it was easier to separate/quickly look for important info across columns ; each column had the same piece piece of info, quickly scannable, and the biggest reason I stayed until now with the old style. I could ignore any columns with info i didn’t care about & my eye didn’t jump all over the place searching when I just needed to know what systems I have a game on.
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However, the new shelf page is a giant block of text that I need to read each label to figure out first. Would it be possible to attach/replace some words for icons, especially for things like
- “Your Platforms” (attach an icon for platforms listed →
PC, 
PS3) - an (+) instead of (Add)
- a calendar icon for dates etc. (like the screencap in @/gaminggremlin’s post above) is easier to differentiate visually).
- Keeping text or edit buttons in the same place also helps with this; on the old shelf page “edit” was always above the platforms listed per game & so it stayed in the same place regardless of how many platforms were listed.
- “Your Platforms” (attach an icon for platforms listed →
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I understand if that isn’t possible or worth it; I just come from a website that had a lot of icons that helped make for a clean look & I’m a visual person too. I’m just switching between old & new style right now because I can’t stay with one right now. They each have pros/cons & different information available at first glance.
My question is, would it be useful to have a field that is separate of the shelf entries that stores the Date Added to your collection data? The field would be editable so you could fill it in if you wanted to really dig in and say you bought a game in 1983 or something. It would also autopopulate whenever you add a game to a non-wishlist shelf. This field would display on the game page, and on the All Games list.
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Personally I skip “Date Added” & “Released” more often when quick scanning like above; but still use their sorting/filter/informative abilities. Like @/BMO, I use them to add dates to things i’ve forgotten to add myself or can’t remember, or to sort through my backlog. So having it autopopulate with dates when moving between non-wishlist shelves , as well as being able to add my own rough years or dates would be amazing if it isn’t difficult.
- But I do have some questions like if it auto-populates between non-wishlist shelves, will it only keep or show the earliest date it was added to any shelf [Date Added to Collection]? or per shelf [Date Added to ShelfName] (played, backlog etc.)?
- & how it would handle different releases being added to shelves? (will each release get its own little date box, bc technically they are different games?)
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the option to show/hide/hover extra pieces of information which I use but don’t need all the time would be helpful. Maybe having these options per shelf like I assume filters/sort to work, because I use each shelf with different views, for different reasons, & in different ways.
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A question, will we be getting the ability to add statuses from the shelf page too? I use my statuses like a gaming journal and have a silly workaround since I use it so often. I noticed it’s easier to see that I can add playthroughs & platforms from the shelf page, so I was curious if it’s in the plans, especially if you decide to add the ability for users to toggle on/off different pieces of information?
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Love the new design! 
If I may, I have some suggestions, apologies in advance if any of these have been mentioned before.
- When you are filtering have an indicator show that a filter is active.
- Show a count of many items there are when filtering.
- Number of items per page is not functioning and if you are able to get it to work… filtering resets the amount again.
- Right now you are capped at showing 200 items per page, is it possible to just have the page load more in as you scroll down to have an infinite scroll option?
- Adding/removing shelves.
- My Shelves as a hamburger menu next to the name of the shelf to increase usable space.
As to a compact mode, here is some more potential design inspiration.
https://trakt.tv/users/donxy/lists/marvel-cinematic-universe?sort=rank,asc
It is from a site called Trakt that tracks tv and movies instead of games.
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Let me sort through all the suggestions here. Thank you @GlitchtheGameGremlin @shoebox94 @mmuffins and @bananamanjoe. I like most of the ideas you guys are putting out there. Just have to figure out what to do
@BMO, yes, there would be another field that stores the earliest Date Added field from any shelf. You’d also be able to edit it if you wanted. It’d be stored like all of your platform data. As for seeing exact dates, if you’re on a computer, you can hover over the relative date and it gives you the exact date. I’ll have to see if I can add that functionality to a phone interface.
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Since we are already pitching ideas anyway - I just had a conversation with a friend and he had a really cool idea:
So basically a way to automatically find people with game ratings similar to your own so you can browse their backlog to find new stuff. Since you already know that you are likely to have similar tastes in games, chances are that you will enjoy games you find that way.
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Haha. About the only thing good I’ve come up with is crowd sourced recommendations. I could let users go to a game page and recommend up to 5 other games to associate with that game. I could do some kind of scoring system and show the 10 most recommended or something. I’m not good enough with math to cobble something together that would actually generate good recommendations.
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The new shelf style looks great.
However sorting doesn’t seem to be permanent anymore ? Like I sort the shelf by title name and once I leave the shelf and return, it resets back. The sorting option always had a permanent effect in the old shelf design. Can this be patched ?
Also, any possible way to show my rating for the games when I change the view to Tiled ? Like show the ranking below the game’s cover in this view.
Also, the releases feature don’t seem to appear in the new design when choosing the “list” view.
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I’m still working on everyone’s ideas, but I did implement the platform limiting this morning. No matter what view (All Games, specific shelf, tiled/list) the platform filters will be limited to what platforms you have specified on that view, and the available platforms will be limited to any platform available for any game in that view.
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Interesting. I guess when I was testing it this morning I just didn’t notice that at all. I’ll get it figured out. Thanks for checking it out for me!
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