Is it just me, or was the "recommended platforms" section accidentally removed from the drop-down of a game in the search?

Bonze Adventure and Jigoku Meguri

I would like to nominate Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments . It's a high-brow, mystery game with tons of unique puzzles. It's also probably the most approachable in the series as it has 6 bite-sized mysteries with amazing dialogue, great atmosphere, interesting deduction boards and it even allows you to come to the wrong conclusion.

In the Discord there's been lots of interest in MS-DOS games, so I'd like to nominate one that also has a modern version. Probably the best point-and-click I've ever played...

Full Throttle

I'm going to try again with Dust: An Elysian Tail.

Wai Wai World and Konami Wai Wai World

Edit: added 2 more

Taiyou no Yuusha: Fighbird and Taiyou no Yuusha Firebird
Nangoku Shounen Papuwa-kun and Nangoku Shounen Papuwa-kun: Ganmadan no Yabou

Edit 2: Added more

Disney's The Little Mermaid: Magic in Two Kingdoms and The Little Mermaid: Magic In Two Kingdoms
Ketsui DEATH LABEL and Ketsui Death Label: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi

Dragon Ball Z II: Gekishin Freeza!! and Dragon Ball Z II: Gekishin Frieza

I've been a little out of the Xbox loop. What are expectations regarding Xbox 360 achievements being discontinued?

A small question. How do I get a text to appear in the URL instead of the entire URL? As shown in the picture. There is only the name of the game, but if you click on it, it leads to the URL. I've tried a bit now, but haven't found how to do it. I know that you can enter a text in the URL field and it will be displayed, but either it doesn't work or the URL is still behind it. Thanks in advance for any answers.

Test (It is displayed as a URL but leads to nothing)
Test https://howlongtobeat.com/user/ThyReen (Text with URL. "Test" is displayed here but the full URL is still behind it)

Example of how I want it. There it leads to the full URL without it being displayed.

The easy way to do it is to highlight the words you want to appear as a link and press the URL button in the style section. Then write the URL and it will automatically format it for you. It looks like this but with brackets instead on parentheses.

This is a link

(URL=https://howlongtobeat.com/)This is a link(/URL)

Might be a little early but I don't want to forget again.

Dust: An Elysian Tail

I feel like it's hard to make it competitive when it's so easy to cheat.

April: Dust: An Elysian Tail.

Fool's choice: Octodad: Dadliest Catch.

Site Update:

Submit
- Time Tools restored to left on desktop.
- Quick jumps smooth scroll instead of instant, less disorienting.

Edit:
I'm still open to move them back on mobile but I need to sit with the changes for a bit to see how it feels. Desktop change was more so to enable the mobile changes.

The thought was that it may be awkward for new users to be presented with general stats and tools before the input form, which is the entire point of being on the page. Maybe I'm wrong too. Kind of depends on how many people use manual add. I don't use it that often so I prefer to be presented with my actual submission details first.

I would love to hear from more users on that.

I finally got to see the new mobile submission page and I personally dislike it. I can understand not wanting to present community data first when the purpose of the page is submitting personal times, but this feels really bottom heavy. Like all the most interesting and important data is at the bottom. It's like having a profile picture as the footer. It looks better to have the most impact at the top and trailing details below.

It's also confusing UX to have the main submission in the middle of the page. For a few seconds I thought I had to click on the buttons for the manual time form.

On desktop you can have your cake and eat it too with the boxart on the sidebar. I don't really know how to solve that for mobile, but I liked the previous version more.

I do like the tabs for each section. It's much more readable, cleaner and helps memory to separate those out horizontally rather than stacking them like previously. It might make slightly more sense to switch notes and video, so that notes is last.

Dupes:
Ronaldo V-Soccer & Ronaldo V-Football

Dupes:
Sword of Hope & The Sword of Hope
Push-Over & Pushover

I'm noticing some weird behavior when sorting personal tabs. It looks like sorting a personal list by anything with the prefix "Time" is sorting by personal times instead of global times. That doesn't seem very useful for lists of incomplete games, which is what I imagine most people use those tabs for.

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
Super Punch-Out!!

There are arcade versions of these games that are much different. Punch-Out on arcade only has 6 fighters, while the NES version has 14. Super Punch-Out arcade has 5 while the SNES version has 16. Most of the arcade fights get reused in Super Punch-Out, but these aren't simple ports.

I'm seeing a weird bug that might be hard to pin down. This is on Android Firefox. After a while all the graphs on the site stop showing up. Refreshing doesn't fix it, but opening a new tab will fix it.

Here's a screenshot.

The Mega Man Zero games are on the site. I believe you're not seeing them because you're entering Mega Man as one word.

Doesn't the Bulk removal tool in the options do this?

The collections are starting to look amazing. And I'm really excited for the review page. A few things could use more space...

I was wondering if you could massively increase the character limit on the collection description.

It would also be nice to have a toggle to expand the collection description to the full length used. There might be some opportunity for abuse, but it shouldn't be too much more than the forums. Not sure what the plans for reporting abuse are, but that tiny window currently isn't super usable. I have a collection that uses an image in the description: Worthwhile DOS Games

Also the notes have really short character limits and I'm running into some issues already listing episodes where games are mentioned. I noticed it might mess up how the lists look, so I can understand if that would be tricky to implement.

Dupes:

Base Wars & Cyber Stadium Series: Base Wars

https://howlongtobeat.com/user/jmdoane42/lists/4232/Metroidvania

I made a Metroidvania list a few months ago, 80% of which I've finished myself. I tried to make it comprehensive but there's so many little indy titles that I'm sure I left out.

Might be a bug, but I'm not seeing your collection.

It says "This user has not built a collection". Are they maybe private still?

Yeah, I was pretty conflicted on this.

I've gotten a huge volume of users asking to have it's own page so I basically did it to see what people would say.

It's pretty unusual to see like 20 - 25 people reach out in this amount of time to have it separated. Majority through the "Contact Us" link.

The main game had the alias so I don't think they had issues finding it. Could be a sign of it's popularity or the even the sites popularity.

I will likely combined them again but I wanted to see if people would notice and discuss the separation.

I was thinking we do something like what lowdefal mentioned in their edit. Currently the search seems to match the "search string" to the "main title" OR the "alias string". If either matches it returns the result. If we change the the logic so that if the search string matches the "alias string" BUT NOT the "main title" it will have a highlighted text (or a pop-out) that clearly displays that it matches the alias. Maybe do it in such a way that it will ".split()" the alias string by commas and displays the exact alias that it is matching with.

For example:
Type "Castelian" in the search bar. Right now "Nebulus" shows up, but there's no indication what the search is matching up with. If we just had a little box there that indicates it's actually matching up with Castelian, it would be less confusing. Maybe it could also have a tooltip that says it has been determined that the games have enough similarities to be combined statistically. (Although that doesn't seem quite as clean)

Not sure how to get images on here, but here's a simple mock-up: https://imgur.com/a/gO4PEqn

Yeah, a follow system is a good start to filtering the good stuff to the top. The question is more about how we decide what shows up in the main list.

Here are some thoughts for inclusion.

Types of Lists:
- Franchises, curated lists of games in a series/franchise.
- Official, features lists that I've created. Think "Year in Review" type lists for the site.
- Dynamic, managed automatically with parameters. (May be buildable by users)
- User, created by a user.

You'll be able to search them in the main site search in a new category (Games | Collections | Users).

User created lists are the ones in question. By default, they will be sorted by most followed. I don't want to surface every list here because so many lists make no sense without context. Search will likely look at Titles and descriptions. To avoid generic/confusing lists they need to be manually approved or have multiple followers.

Here is some work-in-progress of the follow system:

Collection toolbar will have 4 states:
1. When viewing your list, EDIT and DELETE.
2. When viewing someone else's, FOLLOW
3. When viewing someone else's that you already follow, UNFOLLOW.
4. (Not shown) Anonymous users, full width select.


Once you click Follow, the list will show up in your collections under a new group "Followed Lists"


This will allow you to quickly switch between your lists and followed lists. You can also go to someone's profile and see their lists / follows (following privacy settings of course).

Like I said, all WIP, subject to change.

Wow, you are way further along than I could have ever imagined. It looks amazing. I don't have much to criticize.

As for surfacing relevant results, it's tough. It's something that Google struggles with. It also relies on a lot of social interaction. So, it might just need to be released first and we'll see how the community interacts with it. I think that follows alone should be enough to start with. Then the community can decide which lists are important. I don't think there's anything wrong with surfacing all lists regardless of follows. People just won't follow confusing or low quality lists.

It does seem to need a little randomness though, otherwise it's just going to be strictly highest to lowest. But it also needs to be normalized for lists of all sizes and types. Maybe something that slightly adjusts the position in the list:

AdjustedValue = NumberOfFollows * (1+ (Math.random()))

For Example: 2 Lists with 10 follows. You get two different adjusted values.
Math.random() returns .9:
10 * (1 + (.9)) = 19

Math.random() returns .3:
10 * (1 + (.3)) = 13

Now a list with 8 follows but Math.random() returns .8:
8 * (1 + (.8)) = 14.4

Now you only show the users the real value, but sort them by the adjusted value. It adds randomness without completely shuffling everything. You can also divide Math.random() by a number if you want less randomness. Or multiply it by a number if you want more randomness. Also this won't boost lists with 0 follows, so the low quality ones stay last in the list.