The State of the Ghost 1.0

If people like these kinds of posts, ill keep them semi-regular and to the point about Cheerful Ghost and what direction the site is headed.

Ill try to keep this as brief as I am able :)

A month++ ago I launched Cheerful Ghost to my friends. People seemed to think it had potential and as I listened to your feedback I made improvements to make the site awesome. Based on our small but absolutely dedicated following I can now say that this is the most fun Ive had in gaming in years. Seeing what you guys play and having meaningful dialogs on those games is magical. I wasn't sure it was possible to be part of a community that can rise above the typical douche-baggery and karma whoring that plagues the Intarwebs.

As I have listened to your feedback and whats the most important to I wanted to let you know what I will be working on in the up-coming weeks to continue to make Cheerful Ghost rad-sauce. That said, Cheerful Ghost will not be made or lost on features, it will be even more great if it can grow.

In no specific order, the goods:

The largest and most important thing I will be working on is helping attract people that love video games to Cheerful Ghost. The next set of stuff I will be working on is generally all related to that important goal.

1. We have a fair amount of users that have signed up to the site, posted content and have wandered away over time for whatever reason. People are busy and often times they are not thinking all Cheerful Ghost all the time. With that in mind I am going to add email notifications that are not annoying to gently remind people whats going on. This email will be east to opt-out of and will only go out once per week IF the user has any site notifications they have yet to read. The email will also contain a cool short list of the most popular game conversations since they last logged in. If the user doesn't want to get this, it will be easy for them to opt-out of.

2. A few people have noted they want a "General Gaming" category we all have access to so we can fill up some space with stuff that doesn't fit into a game we have in our lists. I agree, this is important so I am going to add that to everyones list. If you have any ideas to the specific wording of this that will go in all our game lists, let me know your thoughts.

3. I am going to build a system to easily Tweet, Facebook or email a link to your friends that you can use to drive them to Cheerful Ghost. If any of your friends sign-up using this method you will get special trophies and rankings. Think invitations but on your terms and not focused on email only.

4. People have wanted the site to have Platform specific pages for the PS3, Super Nintendo, PC or any other platform we have games listed under. I am going to add this support and a few other bits that will be interesting and useful.

5. Over the coming weeks I am going to figure out how to attract certain game players to Cheerful Ghost from communities I respect. Minecraft, World of Warcraft, Steam and Diablo 3 are some of the people I am going to be talking to.

6. I am going to make a few YouTube videos to help spread the world about Cheerful Ghost. I have some ideas, ill let you know when they are finished.

Id like things a bit more noisy and id like to add more awesome voices to our mix so my focus in the next few weeks will be to grow the community. Anything that gets us closer to that I would love to know about and if you have any ideas, feel free to let me know. Want to talk to me about something else, I am listening.

Chowda wrote on 03/14/2012 at 07:00pm

Thanks for the work and improvements so far! You've definitely polished up some of the rough edges. Look forward to seeing new faces in the near future.

jdodson   Admin   Post Author wrote on 03/14/2012 at 07:03pm

Me too!

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