Happy new year everyone! This was first posted on our Patreon.

Liam here for a fresh monthly update of stuff done, plans and so on. You know the drill, welcome back everyone. I hope your year is better than 2020!

Being totally honest and upfront here - January and February are likely to be quiet months. The UK is under full Lockdown once again, meaning we have far less free time for articles and livestreams (parenting) and so we will need to take a bit more time off than usual. The UK government decided to give UK citizens a single day notice on this <_<

I will also likely take a bit more time off through 2021 anyway personally, as I hardly ever did in 2020 and I don't want to burn out. Thanks to Patreon supporters / PayPal and more though - we don't depend on being "first" and having as many articles as possible in a day as we don't need clicks, only as/when we find something interesting it goes up. Thank you again for all your support!

Anyway...here's some stuff done recently.

User Statistics

- Little did I know, some of the points on the Trend Charts were out of order. This happened when points were missing (something had no one using it during a month) or it came later (a new option to pick). This is now solved and won't happen again. All the points are now and will always be accurate to the data due to the new way it's setup.

- Xfce is now correctly named (not XFCE). Sorry for the blasphemy.

Captcha

We've moved over from Google reCAPTCHA to the more privacy respecting hCaptcha for the Email Us page. The email page will also now keep the message if name/email was missing or captcha didn't work instead of blanking them out (wasn't intentional).

If this goes well, hCaptcha will then be moved over to user registration too on GOL. This is the same captcha system that Cloudflare now use, so we expect it to be without any major problems.

Patreon Goals

- We adjusted the stated Goals listed on our Patreon and their amounts, to be more realistic to ongoing costs and what we wish to actually achieve.

- As a reminder, if we ever end up losing enough funding to the point where we need to put up adverts again (not currently!) - all Patrons at the Supporter ($4+) level would remain advert free. Again though, we're not there or worried about it right now, just making things clear!

- One thing we have been thinking of is a $200 monthly "Sponsor" tier, for someone / a game dev / company to have a dedicated picture or something listed somewhere on GOL. Limited to 1 at a time. Any thoughts on that? Again, like above, Supporters wouldn't see it.

The main thing is, we just want to ensure we have the funding to continue what we do because we love Linux and Linux Gaming!

Misc

- The Corrections Report button was moved around to prevent missclicks.

- The Featured Article section at the very top of the website now has three articles stacked, if we have at least three set as Featured. It's much nicer than just one massive image and article link. Fits better overall I think and doesn't take up any more space than the original one. It falls back to a big single random banner if we have less than three. I also think it helps people discover more previous articles having three instead of one.

- Don't forget we now accept GBP and EUR on Patreon, not just USD.

- Articles posted since last monthly update: ~118


Have a great 2021!

- Liam