RF Generation Message Board

RF Generation seems similar to BoardGameGeek ( http://boardgamegeek.com/ ) in a lot of ways, so I'm sure there are a lot of nifty ideas from there you guys could borrow.

Features on BGG I like, and would love to see in a video game variation:
Some variant on Geek Gold. Geek Gold is a nifty little rewards system for submissions on BGG. Submit a new game, get some GG. Submit a picture for a game, and have it accepted by a mod, get some GG. There are a handful of other ways to earn it, as well, and users can transfer GG to each other (so users hold GG auctions, et cetera).  GG is used to buy perks for accounts. Microbadges (think a couple mini-avatar slots underneath the main avatar), avatars, and some other stuff.
GeekLists. These are variations on forum threads, where each post is tied to a board game. Kind of hard to explain, but here is an example : http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/31845 . This would be awesome on a video game site to contain all of those lists people always want to do. "Best NES games", "Most Expensive Turbo Grafx Games", "Games I Loved as a Kid and Don't Like Now", et cetera.

They've just got a lot of tools that empower the community, the entire site is driven by user contributions. Users add new games to the database (like here), users submit reviews of games, users can post rules questions / rules variations, et cetera. Here's a sample game page : http://boardgamegeek.com/game/3076

They also offer collection tracking (like here), along with wishlists.

The community for BGG is pretty large, considering how niche board games are. It would be awesome to see RF Generation hit critical mass like BGG, so users can start organizing some of the more interesting things that happen over there. One of my favorites (I haven't participated in one, but I find it really interesting) are the "math trades". These are nifty, computer assisted multi-user trades. See : http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/93555 and http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/287152 for more info. Obviously there is nothing stopping people from organizing that here now, so I'm only pointing out all the other types of contributions that could be taken from a site like BGG for RF Generation.

I love what you guys are doing with this site, so I figured I would drop some suggestions from my favorite site for a different hobby.

So many people have contributed to RF Generation. The product of the many, many submissions of so many different people would be the RF Generation you see today. We try very hard to give credit where it is due, by allowing users to credit their contributions on each page.

We have something similar to geeklists. It's a feature that we call List 'em (http://www.rfgeneration.com/news/list-em/), as moderated / written by Tan. It's a lovely feature, and encourages people to as the title suggests, List 'em. Tan's currently taking a break from the site to enjoy the finer points of life, but he'll be back in the future.

Math Trades is a risky proposition. We're not in the business of coordinating trades, and we'll allow you guys to figure out multiple trades if you wish. Going in to the realm of math trades opens an administrative and legal quagmire that I don't think we wish to go down.


As far as something along the lines of "Geek Gold", while we've been logging submissions since October of 2006, we don't log the most minute of details, but just enough to create the submission statistics found on this site. A system similar to Geek Gold would require significant coding changes.

In the future, we hope to allow multiple reviews. That should be part of a game progress tracking system that I intend on coding at some point in the future. I can't say for sure what will be in the final product of the game progress tracker, but I hope to make it a nice tool.


Thanks for the suggestions! We'll certainly keep them in our mind as we move forward into the future.

Yeah, the math trades weren't as much a suggestion for you guys, I was just pointing out one of the cool features that communities end up generating when given a powerful set of tools and encouragement.

I'm a big fan of the geek gold system, having a tangible reward for contributing, and a way to display it is a lot of fun. When you see a user with an avatar and a complete set of microbadges on BGG, you know they are a valuable member of the community. Not to belittle those who don't contribute, just some incentive.

Also, your new server is awesome. I managed to get my PS2 collection uploaded in no-time, the search was wicked fast, and everything was smooth.

I like the idea behind their Geek Gold system. I think we should definitely consider something similar, even if it's not so exact. I think something like a microbadge for the top overall submitter and for the top approver for each month and top 3 for each year, could definitely get some people to submit more. Kind of like the "Thanks for the Submissions" blog posts of each month, but something that sticks with you that everyone can see.
The contest has gotten a ton of people submitting more. There was more than 1,000 more submissions in May '08 versus May '07, and that's with the site being down for half the month. I think it's clear some people need some kind of incentive to submit; even if the microbadges only give us 100 more submissions per month, I think it'd be worth it.