Hello everyone, Liam here to give you another monthly overview. This was first posted on Patreon.

Articles

- Article search enhanced. It now searches using MySQL's match/against functions using both the title and text (originally it only looked through titles). There's also now a tickbox if you want to search just titles. This should hopefully give more results, and at times results you might have missed with just the title. This was an issue where we covered a game or bit of software that we didn't name in the title. It's just better overall to allow searching both.

- Will now show a link to the Forum + Discord at bottom of article search to remind people of places to get help if they can't find something.

Game/App Pages

Slowly getting back into tweaking them before we can properly link to the GOL DB. It now has a new address that's shorter: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/db/

As a reminder it will eventually have: guides, compatibility reports and so on. It's a long job but it will hopefully be worth it in the end. I just want it to be useful for people to have a central place to look up a game and all Linux stuff for it :). The closest we really have is ProtonDB which is obviously for Steam and mainly focuses on Proton - our DB covers a bit of everything including open source and more.

It already has support for: screenshots, videos, links to various stores and helpful sources, a list of GOL articles covering it + RSS feed for them so people can follow them directly, we can show the game engine used and more.

Stuff worked on recently:

- Overhauled the way we parse store links, making it a lot easier to add more/change how they're displayed. A continuation of the work from last month having game pages automatically have SteamDB + PCGamingWiki links (if we have a Steam link for them). Now it's easy to add new stores or remove links. Thanks to that we added the ability to have Stadia store links on game pages. Example: Embr. We do need to re-do the message about no Linux desktop support though.

- Work is well under way to add a fully-featured comments system to game/item pages. Nothing to show yet, but it's getting close to operational status. This will work just like article and forum comments, with the ability to link directly to a comment and so on.

As an example of a page with lots of info filled see Streets of Rogue.

Free Games Page

As part of the GOL Database work mentioned above, the Free Games page was overhauled with:

- A shorter and to the point intro.
- The search box no longer takes up an entire row by itself, instead it sits nicely with the intro area.
- Random featured images at the top, to bring attention to some good free games. Different on each reload/visit, with a nice CSS hover effect to give the full game name when you mouse over for some extra accessibility.

I'm particularly pleased with how much of an improvement it turned out to be, looks much better but it's not finished yet. The main list still needs to be more useful and look prettier which is the next step.

Question for you: what free Linux games do you think deserve to be in the featured banner rotation on it?

Forum

- VR/AR Forum opened.
- Advanced Search overhauled, it's much more streamlined and does the same thing.
- Links in the latest forum posts block in the GOL sidebar now actually take you to the latest post, like they were supposed to, which matches the latest comments block links behaviour.

Comments/Forum Posts

- Selective quoting implemented!! Highlight text in a comment or forum post, get a fancy button to insert just that. Took half a day to figure it out, then another few days to fix up cross-browser issues but it's a very useful feature to have.

Really nice to finally have this done, it was asked for quite a lot and can really help continue conversations without quoting an entire post and ending up with quote-inception. The button is a bit fugly but it does the job.

Steam Tracker

The Steam Tracker, which shows data over time has been upgraded with a date picker so you can fine-tine it. This also allows me to add more older historical data and have room to let it grow as time goes on without overloading the charts.

User Profiles

- Added "rel="me" HTML code to the links on your profiles for your Website, Mastodon and Twitter accounts. This allows you to verify yourself against your GOL profile across various services that look for it.
- Fixed adding Steam ID not working.
- Our PC Info reminder article gained a styling tweak, to bring more attention to people who don't have fields filled out.

GOL Code & Licensing stuff

- In case you don't know, the GOL code is entirely open source. We're also going through and modernizing some of it. We're moving what we can over to Composer, allowing easier PHP dependency management.

- We're also writing an actual installer (hooray) and once that's done Samsai will be looking into a Docker image for even easier setup and testing for anyone who wanted to get involved.

Even if no one ever helps with code improvements, the main reason why I keep it open source is simple: future-proofing. I don't want GOL to vanish if something happens to me. Having it open means someone can go and grab it and hopefully revive things easily which is another reason why I'm working to make that side of it better.

I'm currently thinking on the best way to provide an article dump in case that ever happens, haven't settled on anything for that just yet. Feel free to comment with your thoughts. Having some sort of creative commons license for our articles might be a good first step perhaps.

Final bits

- We're now uploading a fair few more videos to our YouTube, especially VODs of livestreams. For anyone who misses out on Twitch stuff :)
- We've opted into accepting multiple currencies on Patreon! We can now take GBP, USD and EUR.
- Articles newly live since last monthly update: 300
- Most importantly: stay safe


Peace and much love for the continued support, Liam.