Oh yeah, I've been meaning to ask, what is up with the badges? They never worked for me, so does this mean they are broken for the whole site?

They update who should get them about twice a year, so at some point you'll get a handful of badges.... then again in 6-8 months if you earned more. It's weird but it's like an achievement system with such a delay between the action and reward that no one goes out of their way to earn the things I reckon.

Aye lol, and it's not like you can even do a bit of trial and error like you could if they were updated as you "earn" them, so if you think a badge is broken and you do an attempt at what should give it to you, you could have to wait 6 months+ to find out if it worked or not. All they are is basically a reminder that some aspects of this site were half thought through plans which never got enough attention to finish off what needed to be done with them and them being left on the site in the half baked way they are is just a sign of not caring enough to remove a failed (more or less) portion of the forums.

Thanks for this thread, spemanig, and also a big thanks to Machina for his answer detailing what's going on.

I agree that the first and foremost is to fix everything that doesn't work as it should and, once that's done, start thinking about what new features can be added.

Oh, and I couldn't go without giving a big thank you to both Trucks and Trunks for all the work they do for this site.

Without delving too deep into the history of this site, could someone briefly explain what the "split" was that was mentioned in some of the above posts? I guess there was a group of members that left VGC for another site?

Okay, that's fair. Also, are Brett and ioi the same person?

Apart from the small fixes and features that I can do on week nights after work, I have many bigger projects that I think would be great for the site. 

- Bringing back the Prediction League. With Machina being reliable when it comes to keeping the numbers up to date, I think this would be a perfect tool to get the community involved in the numbers once again. For that to work, the HW situation would have to get better which pretty much means ioi (Brett) would have to give Machina control over the HW numbers. Worst comes to worst, the Prediction League could start off based solely on SW numbers at first.

- A mobile version of the site. That's a huge one. Both in amount of work required on my part and in the potential payoff for the site. In 2016, not having a mobile version is almost a crime. I don't have access to the site's stats but just from the comments on here, I know there's a whole lot of people navigating this site on the phones even though it's quite horrible to do so right now which tells me that a mobile version would be incredibly beneficial to the site.

- Bringing back to game DB. Before I know what I can do about this, I have some homework to do. VGC currently gets its data from GameWise but I'm not sure exactly how the transfer goes through. I think the first steps would be to bring back functionalities like the game collection having recent games and then I'd look into whether or not bringing back the adding/editing of games is possible.

The badge system works with a page I can access to hand out all the new badges. So it's not automatic, I've just launced that page so new badges will be handed out now.

At first, they was only VGChartz and then it was split into many subsections gamrConnect, gamrTV, gamrFeed, VGC, gamrReview. Many sections were eventually abandoned. gamrReview continued for a while on its own website but it was merged backed into VGC in April last year.

Thanks for the clarification. Specifically with the Prediction League, can you delve into more detail with what that is? To me, it sounds like just a forum contest like many of the ones we already do. While I agree that it would be a perfect tool to get the community involved with numbers, isn't this something the (other) Ambassadors could do just as easily? Why does it specifically need your skills? Or am I misunderstanding what it is?

Also, what exactly is wrong with the game DB anyway, functionally? 

The Prediction League was an official forum contest, you could bet VG$ (what we had before points) on the upcoming game releases and latest hardware numbers. When the numbers were updated VG$ was awarded according to the accuracy of the predictions. This was all done automatically, meaning the prediction were stored in the site's database, the results would automatically change your VG$ total.

A forum version of the Prediction League was already attempted in the past but it's way too much work for the person running the league and even for the users wanting to play. Interest died down very quickly. The project I have is to bring back that automated version of the prediction league.

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Edit: Forgot to answer about the DB. We used to be able to add games to the DB ourselves, add release dates, cover art and other details. GameDB admins would go over the information and if everything checked out it was added for everyone to see. This had the huge advantage that our game DB was always up to date as users would rush to add a game the moment it was announced, all games had their respective cover art and release info. 

Thanks for clarifying!

Is there a way to make them automatic? I don't care much about them personally, but like others mentioned, there would be a lot more incentive to go for them if they were instantaneous. And everyone loves achievements right?