In the last news post, I mentioned that the ability to upload screenshots had become available for hub entries. A few games have already taken advantage of this, which is good--but now it's more important than ever to get your screenshots uploaded (if you're a BYOND Member), since entries with screenshots now show up at the top of our default search.

If you're wondering why we're putting so much focus on that, it's for a good reason: People like pictures. They want to know what they're getting into. Whenever I shop on eBay, I don't even look at auctions that don't have pictures of the item. The same is true of games--your title and description may not be enough to lure people in and get them to experience the great game you put so much work into. They want to see what the gameplay looks like. So for games that offer that glimpse, we're giving them first dibs on search results.

Another change we're making is to the "All Games" list. When you search for a game and you're looking at all games--not just the ones that are live or available for download--obviously the only reason to search is to find something to play. Some games only show up here because they aren't available all the time--some are hosted regularly, but not available for download. We still want those to show up, so people can use the waiting list feature. But then there are the stragglers, the dregs, the old abandoned hub entries where someone had a grandiose vision and it failed. Hey, it happens, but if someone finds that game in a search they're going to be mighty disappointed they can't play it. So if a game hasn't been updated or hosted in a long time, it's going to quietly drop off the search results. This should make it a lot easier to search through the many games that are available, even if they're not available right this second.

Speaking of searches, you may have already noticed the search bar in the menu at the top of this page has changed. We still have our old search methods available, as you'll see on our community page and games page, but for most users who just want to find something quick, or find something that our own search just doesn't do well like an obscure blog post, we're going with the experts: Google. The integrated Google search means it should be a lot easier to find posts and guilds for the topics that interest you.

Finally, in the interest of making it easier to maintain blogs and find posts by category, we've added a new feature: a power keyword editor. If you go to the Manage Site option in the Site menu, you'll see a new "Blogs" option. If you go to that page, you can search your posts by keyword and then toggle keywords on and off. We added this to help us organize Dream Makers a little better, but I'm going to be using it on my own blog too, since I can categorize a lot of posts at once without having to manually edit each one.