Introducing a revolutionary new website concept to VG247 - comment section avatars

Hello! It’s been a little over a month now - hopefully you’re still enjoying the new-look VG247, which also has some adjustments to the style of its content and will continue to do so going forward. If you’re one of the people who hated the design when we first launched, I hope you’ve gotten a little more used to it and also that some of our subtle tweaks have helped to fix the things that bothered you. Many of the changes quietly made in the background have been based on your feedback.

Today, we’re launching a revolutionary new concept on VG247. Prepare your soul, because this is earth-shattering new website technology: you can now have a custom user avatar in our comment section. We’ve applied for the copyright to this idea, just like we did when we came up with the now-standard concept of review scores.

Joking apart, right, here’s the deal: we know the comment functionality on VG247 is a little bit bare compared to Disqus, the third-party tool that we had before. But Disqus injects a bunch of advertising-related cookies and the like onto the page that we can’t control, which in turn can slow down the page. It was a faithful tool for many years, but we knew we wanted to replace it with a new thing on the new site.

But launching a new website is hard, especially when you’re porting tens of thousands of pages of old content and making sure it all works. Adding Disqus to the new site and then replacing it later would only create even more work - so we launched with our own system, but that meant that the launch comment system was pretty barebones, as our hard-working tech team had a very long to-do list before launch.

We really want to build a community around VG247, and that’s why we’re promoting more discussions with our weekly ‘what we’re playing’ posts and the like. And obviously, we want you to scream out how right we are in the comments of opinion pieces. So we’ll keep updating the comment and user account features in line with that.

We’re open to suggestions from all of you, too - but I can tell you that comment upvoting and a proper alert/notification system when somebody replies to or mentions you are in the works. When will they come? I don’t know, when they’re ready, shut up. But the point is, this system is something that’ll grow over time.

Don’t forget, this new account system is also a ‘ReedPop Account’, not just a VG247 thing, so you can also use it on our sibling site RockPaperShotgun right now, and eventually also on Eurogamer, once we’re all on the same technology.

So, yeah. Go set your Avatar. Here's how to do it:

1. Log in to your account
2. Go to 'Settings', and then 'Profiles'.
3. Set your Avatar.
4. Er...
5. That's it.

There. Your beautiful face, or an image of an anime character you may or may not have an unhealthy relationship with, will appear next to your glowing discourse. Keep it clean, in line with our community guidelines.

It seems like as good a time as any to also remind you that you can become a paid subscriber to VG247, giving you an ad-free version of the site and a letter from the editor that's only for this special group. If you want to support us in this way, you can get all the details and sign-up over on the subs page.