Now beyond the scope of the main post, I wanted to weigh in with my own personal opinions and ideas.
Chief among these would be something of a post rounding up, organising, and summarising press releases for a given week. In my mind this could include AAA updates, upcoming indie games, interesting tech, and even be a place that emulation handhelds could be brought up in a somewhat peaceful way. Where topics garner a lot of attention, future updates on the subject could be revisited as individual posts separate from the roundup. That way relevant topics stay on top, and the roundup-style posting would remain meaningful for not duplicating information. This is something I’ve started to put together, so I’m eager to see if it pans out beyond sounding like a reasonable idea.
Next, I feel like something of a review and editorial content suggestion box could be a nice idea. If there’s a bit of tech or a game you’re particularly curious about, it’s useful for us to know. It’s easy for a lot of interesting stuff to fly under the radar in terms of reviews, and as a team it can sometimes be difficult to see good content beyond our own usual interests. Outside perspectives are always useful. The same goes for editorial content really. If for example you’ve seen me review a handheld and think it’d be good to see a separate post going further in depth on a topic not touched upon as heavily in the review, it’d be great to hear about it. Nobody on the editorial team is paid for their contributions here, and we all have jobs and obligations outside of the site, so we might not be able to cover everything that would be suggested. Having said that, there being direction of what people are actually interested in genuinely helps so much.
My last point will probably be the most controversial, but I really think people need to lay off with the DMCA posts. To me it kills a lot of the spirit for a site like this. It feels like people don’t care about the homebrew projects anymore, or those ROM hacks that people have put copious amounts of effort into. When more than half of the discussion devolves into “inb4 DMCA” instead of actually talking about the topic at hand, I just feel a little defeated. I’m not saying Nintendo or other companies aren’t going to take down fan games, hacks, whatever in the future. When they do there’ll probably be a news post from us saying so; I guess I just want people to actually enjoy these things again. Could we just make a DMCA thread in the General Gaming forum, or even EOF that people can contain this to? I don’t want to be a person to stifle discussion on a forum of all places, but surely people must see they’re already doing this themselves after a certain point?
But yeah, that’s me. I’ve been writing here for the past seven years at this point and I’ve still got a lot to learn. I really like GBAtemp, and I want to write things people are interested in. As I said in the main post I’m happy to answer any questions people might have about how things are run, or how I write my posts. I’m really hoping we can get some good feedback and ideas that we can run with to make the front page something everybody can get onboard with.