Site Updates - Private Messages, iPhone App & How You Can Help

You can now attach new users onto an existing PM conversation if you want. The process is fairly straightforward, just go to the reply form at the bottom and add whoever you'd like to add in the "add recipients" box. The added user(s) will now be sent a copy of the entire conversation as well as have the ability to reply. Should you no longer wish to be part of a private conversation you can now click the "remove from conversation" button at the top of your PM to no longer receive replies from other users. We're aware of issues with actually finding certain users in the auto-complete drop-down and will have a solution to that out shortly. The new drop-down will search against your friends first before going into the general population results.

We are currently in the final stages of an iPhone version of Giant Bomb. It will be a full application and not just a web version of the site. Here's the deal: we're tossing around the idea of charging a small fee to access it. I know many of you guys are curious about just how Giant Bomb plans to bring in the loot to support our costs here. The honest answer is, we're trying to think up different ways for sites like ours to exist outside of pure advertising models. While ads will more than likely come onto the site more regularly in the near future, we'd love to find some better ways than the current IGN model of making the site half-ad, half-content. We'd like to at least try out this model with our mobile versions of the site as an experiment. I'll float out a preview in the next week or so with a defined feature list, but I thought it might be a good idea to see what you iPhone owners would like to see in our app. The first version will be read-only and not allow you to log into the site, view forums or access your profiles. Our final vision for the app is much grander, but first we want to make sure there's enough interest in the project and that you can have a simple way to view videos, reviews and news from the site easily on your iPhone. I'd also like to note that we in no way will try to influence or stop anyone from making free-to-use iPhone apps based on our API.

Not necessarily Giant Bomb-related but Comic Vine last week received a similar restyle to the one we had here a couple weeks ago. We've still got to give Anime Vice a similar paint job and then all three sites should be receiving alternate skin colors in the weeks following. If you're curious as to what Giant Bomb in white will look like, take a look over at Comic Vine to get an idea. I'll likely remove the greenish tint and make it a little more Giant Bomby but expect something very similar. In any case I just wanted to make fans of the white version of Giant Bomb aware that we haven't forgotten about you.

Lastly, I thought I'd do a short call out for some help with the New Games section of the site. If you weren't already aware, that page is generated by editing the dates of releases tied to games. It is not populated by the "Original Release Date" associated to the game itself. In theory this allows us to show release lists for each major region -- UK, US, Japan and Australia. In practice both the staff and the community haven't been doing a great job with it. If you have any time in the next week or so, I'd really appreciate if some enterprising users could take a look at keeping some of those release dates up to snuff. I'm considering appointing someone as a dedicated mod towards keeping that stuff up-to-date so if you're ever sent me a PM asking how you can help, you now know. Feel free to send me a PM if you're interested or run into any release specific bugs. Thanks.