One of the things I've always liked best about this site is its superior integration between various parts of the site with each other. Particularly, how prominent a part of the site the forums have been.

However, I see one glaringly painful part of the site's interweaving. Once actually entering a section of the site - a news article, the forums, or the game database - all significant connection to other parts of the site end. You pretty much have to exit out of where you are, then click around to get to something else about the same topic.

With VGC 2.0, now is a better time than ever before to fix that.

First, when posting a new thread, oftentimes people are discussing news articles or games in the game database. I suggest that there be clickable popups on the Create New Thread page (or even in the Rich Text Reply page, too) that allow you to link your post to news articles and the game database. Basically, you'd have one button you click to attach a news article to it. Perhaps I'm starting a thread to discuss High Voltage Software's newest news announcements. When I click the "News Article" button, it will give me a list of news articles I can connect this discussion with. I want to select the ones about Gladiator A.D. and The Grinder. Upon posting my thread, two links would appear at the bottom of my post, in a separate frame (so not JUST as a goofy little URL or whatever that I could've edited in, but actually on its own table or something).

Same goes for game discussion. Start a new thread, click the "Link a game" button or whatever, and a popup appears that allows me to search the game database to link certain games.

Second, same goes for news articles. When a contributor posts a news article, there should be a feature allowing them to attach that news article to that game's database entry. This way, those that want to see more about the game would then be able to go directly to the database entry and see more about it.

Next, each News Article and Game Database entry should show that they've been linked to. There should be "Recent Discussion" links on both the News Articles and the Game Database entries to show when a thread has been created to talk about them, respectively.

Also, the Game Database should also show a list of News Articles discussing each game. Say somebody went into the page for God of War III. They get in there, and they see that there's a news article talking about new screenshots. They missed it on the front page, but thanks to the "Recent News" section on the game's database entry, they now can see that piece of information.

Finally, all News Articles should also connect to each other, like on IGN, as "Related Articles". Maybe there was a piece of news last week about the new Kojima teaser. Somebody seeing the latest news article may not know quite what it's talking about. With a better "Related Articles" section, now they can go back and read up on it!

These connections to each other, also, should be more than just "keyword" based. I'm talking directly connecting them to each other - actually selecting this game from a list to say "hey, this is about THAT specifically". More than just "related articles" but actually direct connections. Naturally, this would have to be moderated - perhaps there could be a new moderator position created to specifically police things like this? Who knows.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that everything should connect to everything else related to it. These functionalities would allow smoother operation throughout the website, and it would ensure that visitors have access to everything that they want to access. It would make VGChartz easier to navigate than ever before.

Thoughts? Complaints? Did I word something in a way that confused you? Do you think an idea I had can be improved? Share with me.

Thanks.

-tony

sounds good. I think its silly when they have a news article about something, and there's people discussing it, and then there's a thread about the same exact topic, and people are having a completely isolated discussion in the forum, yet they are both on the exact same news piece. These should be merged.

Right. If when posting a thread, you can link it to the news article, when people READ that article, duplicate discussions won't happen because you can see it's already being discussed.

Also, perhaps when you select a news article to discuss, it gives you a disclaimer saying, "Wait a minute! That's already being discussed here! Do you still want to create this thread?"

This way, you won't accidentally create the same thread again, but it still lets you create your thread if yours is discussing something else about that article (maybe the article is about the E3 Lineup, and someone else created a thread generally discussing it, but you wanted to discuss specifically what Nintendo has announced so far).

News articles have "related games" on the left hand side.
http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=3714

Also, game pages have links to related news (right below the sales)
http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=3714

I do agree that related articles should be posted in the news section. You could just pull all the related games related news articles, but I don't know if that would work all that well.

Soon there will be forums for specific games. I don't know the details, but I imagine they will be similar to most other sites that have forums for games. This should show users what threads are talking about the specific games.

As for forum linking thing, I don't see how that is really all that much better than creating a table on your own and pasting the link in there. Yea, some stuff would be automated like including images, but people don't even paste the URL's to the vgchartz news articles now, so would it really be used?

I sort of skimmed your post, so I don't know if I missed any major points.

I didn't see the "Related Games" thing on the side. I'd even looked for that already. Thanks, though. Glad to see it there. =)

The "related news" thing in the game database, if I'm not mistaken, is a keyword-based system. If that is indeed true, then it's not quite what I'm referring to. Also, I'm more thinking along the lines of directly linking news articles pertaining EXACTLY to that game, not necessarily just being "related". We could keep the "related news" section, but also have another set of links elsewhere that are for news articles directly involving that game. Not being "related" but actually "involved". Do you get what I mean?

The main thing I'm talking about, though, is that when you select something to connect it to, it puts a link on BOTH pages. Like, if you link a thread to a news article, that thread will have the automated image and link in your post, but it will ALSO put a link on the news article's page, linking to "Recent Discussion".

It effectively connects BOTH to EACH OTHER.

And yeah, most people don't put the URLs, but that's partially because it's more work. If you make it less work, and make it more detailed and attention-grabbing, more people will utilize it.