I want to keep track of the games that I play each year, so I’ve entered the start and finish dates for all of my games. In order to filter by the year I played them, I’ve created shelves for each year. Of course, this is getting a bit unwieldy since I now have a dozen shelves, but I couldn’t see any other way to do it since there is no filter for Dates Played. On the Games Details page I see that there is a Popular Tags line that sometimes includes a year (presumably the year the game was released), but I don’t see any way to actually apply tags to games. Where is it getting these tags from, are these GB tags that we can’t set ourselves? Of course, since I don’t see any way to filter by tags, I guess it doesn’t really matter, they wouldn’t be useful anyway. Is there any way to filter by year played or is the way I’m doing it the best solution? A calendar function would also be a cool addition, so you can see on a calendar what you played and when.
Another related question is that when I select one of my year shelves to see what I played in a particular year, all of the Platform information disappears. For instance, in my 2014 shelf I have Witcher 2, but it doesn’t show any platform at all. When I click it to go to the game page, it clearly shows that I have PC selected, but it doesn’t show up on the 2014 shelf. In fact, none of the games show platforms in any of my “year” shelves. The program does filter by platform if I select a specific platform in the Filter Options, so it seems like it’s just a display bug.
These are actually just popular shelf names that people are using for the game. I don’t know how useful this feature actually is, but I wanted to see what kind of shelves people were putting games on, so I built it.
I am working on the filtering and sorting by dates played. I actually pushed a change to the site last night that let you filter your shelf by date started, date ended, and it let you sort by those dates as well. It didn’t work correctly though, so I reverted it. I’ll work on it more this week and try again
I was trying to look around the web for examples of places that let you filter lists by dates, and wasn’t coming up with much. Goodreads doesn’t let you filter from what I can tell, and they only let you sort on your completed dates for a book. I suppose that’s probably what most people want though.
As to your last paragraph, it’s not actually a bug, but an annoyance with how I implemented the platforms thing. When you specify the platforms, you’re actually doing it on a per shelf basis. Therefore, if you only click PC on a Played shelf, but not your 2014 shelf, it won’t show up when looking at the 2014 shelf. I’m working on fixing that because that granularity is not needed.
Yes, being able to sort by the completed date would be great. That would be much more useful than sorting by date started. But it looks like a lot of people do have shelves for each year, so I guess I stumbled upon a reasonable solution. It’s nice that you can assign games to more than one shelf, which basically makes shelves just tags by another name.
I just wanted to point out one thing about the platform issue I mentioned. I understand what you’re saying about platform being specified per shelf, but that doesn’t seem to be entirely the case. Even if a platform doesn’t show for a particular game on a particular shelf, if I’ve specified a platform for that game on another shelf, the database still acknowledges that platform selection when I filter by platform. For example, Fable: The Lost Chapters is in my 2005 shelf, but I did not specify a platform. In my Played shelf I selected “Xbox” as the platform, but it does not show as the platform in the 2005 shelf. However, if I filter my 2005 shelf for Xbox games, Fable shows up. So as I originally said, it seems like it’s more of a display issue than an attribute issue. Fable has the “Xbox” attribute no matter what shelf I was in when I specified it, it just doesn’t display unless I’m in that shelf.
