As a site GBAtemp has been around for more than 20 years. Starting as a place to share the latest GBA ROMs and later evolving into the forums we know today, we’re a site that lives and dies by its community, and it’s the larger community I’m hoping to reach out to today.

What I’m wanting from this is to see the general thoughts and feelings of the folks that log into the site daily, especially when it comes to reviews, news, and editorial content. The aim of this is to use the feedback we get to better focus our content and hopefully write things people enjoy both reading and engaging with, as well as covering more topics people are genuinely interested in. I'm really wanting this to be an ongoing effort to have the front page better reflect the unique nature of the site, and that starts with this. If you've got any thoughts, you can either reply to this topic, or if you're happy to provide some more guided feedback, @shaunj66 has put together a short feedback form that you can find below. Anybody filling this out will receive 100 XP on the site for their participation, so please do check this out.

Feedback Form

Please note XP is awarded manually and may take a few days to appear on your account.

I will take a moment to clear the air on a few topics I’ve seen come up over time on the forum, if only to save people asking and speculating going forwards. As an editorial team we aren’t compensated for our contributions to the site, be it posting news, bespoke editorial content, or reviews. While we are usually able to keep the things we’ve reviewed, we aren’t paid anything from those providing the items or game codes, nor are we incentivised to score things highly. Each reviewer tackles a game or hardware review as they see fit, with the score being their own decision. The only time I’m aware of where this hasn’t been the case was with our Tears of the Kingdom review, which Costello summarised here for those curious about that.

In terms of revenue streams for the site, GBAtemp is funded by a mixture of account upgrades and advertisements (these provided via Playwire). Sponsored posts have been run in the past, but where they were posted they were clearly marked as such. As things stand today we don’t run sponsored content, nor to we use affiliate links with items we review or cover more generally.

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I also want to thank everybody above who supports the site monetarily, but also those that just keep coming back and contributing. Whether you financially support the site or not, you are an important part of what keeps things running, and I do want to acknowledge that.

If anybody has any questions about the things I’ve said above or about how things run behind the scenes in general, by all means post them too. I’ve always tried to be transparent where people have asked questions, and I’m happy to answer anything to the extent of my knowledge.

 

[Jaxom]

I would love to see more hardware modding reviews/articles on the Temp, mostly its other YouTubers covering the topic.

Exactly my thought. Although you can already read a little about it on GBATemp, I mostly end up on YouTube for this.

 

[zxr750j]

I would love to see more hardware modding reviews/articles on the Temp, mostly its other YouTubers covering the topic.

Yes!! This!!!

 

[Pomegrenade]

20 years??? You guys are old...

 

[SylverReZ]

20 years??? You guys are old...

GBAtemp used to host ROMs when they first started, only to turn it into a gaming forum as they didn't want to get sued.

 

[Robmead23]

I check in mostly daily to keep up with the latest news and see what's new. All the staff do a great job and I wouldn't change the site if it has worked this long

 

[SylverReZ]

I check in mostly daily to keep up with the latest news and see what's new. All the staff do a great job and I wouldn't change the site if it has worked this long

I enjoyed the site by checking the latest news long before I signed up. The staff are extremely supportive, and it has helped me much in overcoming many of my challenges.

 

[ldeveraux]

I like the ability to tailor my news page. I don't want to see weekly reviews of the latest ewaste retro portable game console. We don't need it, stop promoting it.

Also some users are flat out jerks and I'd like a better way to block them. Not hide them, not hide their content, block them.

 

[Jahrs]

I used to use this site for Filetemp then that was removed and now I just haunt the Memes section. As for the reviews there are few things that made me go I want that but that's not the editors fault more and more stuff just seems to be in the growing pains era so I end up just waiting for a better one to come up. News is fine but not what I use the site for simply put most if not all news I see here I've gotten from my Google feeds again not an editor issue.

If I could add one thing to this site it'd be an easier way to find the memes section and a Goat section for the best memes from the all the pages.

 

[AndorfRequissa]

id really like to see the annoying fix your pop up blocker page fixed so everytime i visit the site i dont have to click on it. that drives me away from coming back as often because the stupid pop up. probably keeps others away too.

 

[ZeroFX]

Given the recent circumstances occurring with ROM sharing sites, it's better than not being a website at all.

A devolution still.

Post automatically merged: Aug 6, 2024

id really like to see the annoying fix your pop up blocker page fixed so everytime i visit the site i dont have to click on it. that drives me away from coming back as often because the stupid pop up. probably keeps others away too.

use ublock and block the popup, i only remember this site has a version with ads when people mention it.

 

[Payne]

(I believe the page 10 in the form is broken)

Well, I'm still very very new to this site so I don't really have any advice or specific thing I'd like to see here, everything in this site is very pleasant to me. Actually, there's still some areas here i need to know yet, hahah.

But i can say that the people in here are veery nice to chat with, at least those i usually talk to. Also I'm very happy thw GBAtemp is still working properly, +20yrs is literally almost my age, this website is part of the Old Internet that I love alot.

Echoing this.

Btw completed survey

 

[SaberLilly]

When i first started coming here it was strictly for 3DS mods and hacking as that's all i had on hand, then i started to branch out into the other areas, granted i still stick around for the hacking and modding scene but occasionally stick my head into the other areas if a topic is relevant too my interests.

 

[Pomegrenade]

GBAtemp used to host ROMs when they first started, only to turn it into a gaming forum as they didn't want to get sued.

Yep, used to frequent it back then too (I'm old )

 

[shaunj66]

The first batch of XP bonuses have been applied

Thanks to all that completed the survey so far and left interesting feedback!

 

[impeeza]

Thank you guys!!

 

[SylverReZ]

The first batch of XP bonuses have been applied

Thanks to all that completed the survey so far and left interesting feedback!

Thank you, Shaun. I've got the 100 XP bonus.

 

[Zerousen]

Just submitted mine! I only check in here every once in a while but it's nice to see some old faces and that the community is still going fairly strong!

 

[Error-1-2435-8325]

Hey everybody! Just poppin' in to say that this is one of my most frequently-visited websites.

 

[rvtr]

I do wished that I was in a Group DM with people tho.... Can't imagine how active one would even be

Hahah you wish. I'm in a group DM with over 50 people (beyond the limit!) and there is maybe one message every couple of days lol. It's hard to keep things like that alive.

which leads to the lack of guides, which can technically be addressed by just making them, but the problem still remains that guides like this will just get the same "this is stupid/useless/whatever and you shouldn't uninstall cfw/etc" replies until these people get bored of it and it stops getting replies, never to be seen again once it leaves first page. so the community attitude is what should be addressed, before anything like this could work

In defence of the lack of uninstall guides, things like unlaunch just aren't safe. It's not uncommon to lead to bricks, and DSi ntrboot hasn't been around for long. Most people still don't seem to know it exists.

If uninstall guides were created, lots of people would be bricking and you'd have a ton more threads asking for help. A few months ago none of those people would be help-able. And again, ntrboot is still new. People either won't be told about it or will not want to get a flashcart because it isn't as well proven.

Until a safe uninstaller is publicly released, it's better to ignore any threads asking about uninstalling, or to continue to tell people that it's unsafe. The community attitude may seem a bit rude, but I think we all have people's best interests in mind. (and the interests of those poor DSis that get trashed)

 

[4d1xlaan]

In defence of the lack of uninstall guides, things like unlaunch just aren't safe. It's not uncommon to lead to bricks, and DSi ntrboot hasn't been around for long. Most people still don't seem to know it exists.

If uninstall guides were created, lots of people would be bricking and you'd have a ton more threads asking for help. A few months ago none of those people would be help-able. And again, ntrboot is still new. People either won't be told about it or will not want to get a flashcart because it isn't as well proven.

Until a safe uninstaller is publicly released, it's better to ignore any threads asking about uninstalling, or to continue to tell people that it's unsafe. The community attitude may seem a bit rude, but I think we all have people's best interests in mind. (and the interests of those poor DSis that get trashed)

tbf there is already an uninstall guide for dsi, too. it covers testing your nand backup in emulator first to confirm it works, before restoring it, so you can at least know if your nand with unlaunch removed works or if it would brick. but at the same time, it could happen that the nand fails just from writing the backup to it lol. safe nand manager tries to mitigate this by only writing blocks that were modified instead of rewriting the entire thing, but still