State of The Ghost: 2.0

A semi regular list of things happening on Cheerful Ghost. Served up with an extra dose of rad-sauce.

New Faces on Cheerful Ghost:

In the last few days our community size has increased by 15% and Google tells me that the amount of new users on the site VS people that come back all the time is now a 50/50 split. That means for every two people that come to Cheerful Ghost one of them has never come to the site before.

I recently added a new feature to the site to help bring more people to the community as well. On the main home screen there is a button "Invite Your Friends" that you can use to easily send invitations to join Cheerful Ghost. I upped the ante with this feature in that you and your friends can earn trophies when they sign up from your invitations. There is a new ranking section for who gets the most friends to sign up. I hope you find the invitations fun and useful.

A bit more about the design rationale for invitations on the dev blog:
http://blog.cheerfulghost.com/post/22467200466/invitations-that-are-awesome

We support Card and Board Games

I play lots of different kinds of games. Some don't even require electricity to be played! One feature that people have been asking for is the ability to add Card and Board Games to their lists. You can now do that and many of you have seen a few new posts about Pandemic, Descent: Journeys into the Dark and Magic: The Gathering show up. If there are other board or card games you want added to the list let us know.

Welcome our New Site Moderators

A few users have been asking to help curate the Cheerful Ghost games list for quite some time now and I added that support into the site a few weeks ago. Tungsten, WhiteboySlim and panickedthumb are all site moderators and as such can add and edit games in the Cheerful Ghost database. Currently we track 20,708 games but that number gets larger each week. If you want a game added to the list, let one of us know and we can get it in. As the site grows I will enable more moderator functionality as the need arises.

The Long Road to Awesome

I want Cheerful Ghost to be the best place online to have awesome discussions about games. I want Cheerful Ghost to get more noisy with the voices of a few more awesome people. As such, in the next few months ill be primarily focused on growing the community. I have and am working on a few ideas in that vein, one being the new invitation system. Any suggestions or comments on what it would take to bring in more users are welcome.

Its an exciting time to be working on Cheerful Ghost because as we methodically grow the community what the site is is being defined. As I go to other video game communities I am continually reminded how great it is to have a rational discussion on games on Cheerful Ghost. All the responses to an IGN or Joystiq post might peak in the thousands but the makeup of those discussions is generally devoid of any interesting ingredients. Kotaku might have a million users but I have never felt more secure in making a choice about a game than from the discussions here. And rightly so, paid journalists that churn out 10.0 reviews for every Triple A game ever made are not you. What you say about a game is much more interesting to me and socially relevant than anything else in "video game journalism." But ill talk more about that in a later post :)

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that finds this site as awesome as I do. Its been a fun ride to this point and I thank you for jumping in the car and barrelling down the hill with me!