Hey everyone, a while back, a few Giant Bomb users asked what they should do, especially on the weekends, when Giant Bomb Infinite goes down, a poll or video isn't working, or the entire Infinite chat simply becomes unusable. The new directions I have to share are relatively easy, but here is a little backstory about Infinite and why it's the most brittle part of the site. Some will deny what I'm about to say, but Infinite has always been a bit of a buggy mess. The reason is that the entire feature was made over one weekend by a single engineer as a fun side project, and its popularity was even a surprise when it first debuted. That engineer has since left the site.
With that preamble out of the way, what should you or anyone else do when you notice Infinite not working? For example, the most common issue involves people picking a video using the poll feature only to discover the selected video does not work on or is incompatible with Infinite. 99.99% of the time, these issues require a manual reset of Infinite, which requires a staff member to go into the CMS to flick a switch. To make that happen, here's what you can do:
Option #1: If you are in the Giant Bomb Discord, go to the "Site Tech Issues" channel and drop a message saying that Infinite is down to @dtoast. Remember to include him in your comment!
Option #2: If you do not wish to use or sign up for a Discord account, comment in the following thread, but ping @dtoast saying that Infinite is currently down.
Remembering to ping @dtoast with an @ is the most crucial part. A common situation is that people are dropping comments in Discord that Infinite is down, but without a ping to Dylan, he only knows to fix it when he checks the Site Issues channel. Again, fixing Infinite is NOT HARD, and you shouldn't view notifying him as an inconvenience.
On weekends, depending on when you file your bug report, it may take time to process your request, but it will be done as soon as possible. If needed, I can try to reset Infinite.