Hello IGN faithful, it’s your friendly neighborhood Community Lead once again with a few updates around our community plans. Since joining IGN I’ve had plenty of opportunities to join the conversations and chat with many of you and I’m looking forward to many more. One of the big things I discovered in the past few months while chatting with our audience and reading comments is that many people have been looking for an easier way to contact the moderators and staff. I am excited to announce a few new developments in those areas that I hope you all will use, particularly as they’ll be the groundwork for future plans.
Product updates
First, I wanted to highlight the work coming out of our Product and Community team based on your requests around various things like the app and website. We’ve made multiple improvements that I am sure some of you may have already noticed. Our most recent app update includes the ability to share your stories, as well as significant improvements to swipe-back behavior on both iOS and Android. As requested, platforms will display at the bottom of reviews, too. These are just a few of the improvements that made their way into Update v6.0.7. Check out the entire list here.
More Twitter Spaces
Next, I have a few announcements about our Twitter Spaces.
Lauren Gallaway — one of our very talented social coordinators — has been doing an incredible job hosting entertainment-themed Spaces for the past several months, covering Wandavision, Loki, What if?, and blockbuster films like Black Widow and Shang-Chi. Moving forward, I will be joining her each week as her co-host, so tune in on Wednesdays at 2 PM PT to hear us dive deep into the topics of the week with guests from around the web.
In addition to our entertainment Spaces, we are launching our second weekly Twitter Spaces that will focus on gaming. Another of our social coordinators, Colin Stevens, will be joining me Tuesdays at 2 PM PT as my co-host. This show will focus on the game releases of that week and more. We’ll be recruiting other IGN experts, including IGN’s reviewers to share some hands-on thoughts about the games around their launch. So set a weekly reminder to stop by and give us a listen! You’ll have a chance to ask us some of your questions about upcoming game releases, too.
Episode 1 airs Tuesday, October 12th and we will be joined by Managing Editor Samuel Claiborne to discuss Metroid Dread!
Office Hours and Outreach
On the subject of new things coming: direct audience interaction is a crucial tenet of our philosophy around building up our community, but we haven’t had a direct and easy avenue for our readers to proactively communicate with us. Now that I’ve settled into a regular rhythm around engaging with you all across all of our platforms, I'm excited to announce my office hours for anyone in the IGN audience that has questions for IGN or me. Starting next week, I’ll be available for 90 minutes every day, Monday through Friday, on a variety of our platforms. Currently, this will include IGN.com, IGN Boards, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Discord, rotating in that order from Monday to Friday. See the Calendar below that has my designated handle for each platform.
(This will also be the best way to ask or suggest questions we should discuss on our Twitter Spaces each week.)
Though I will primarily be in one location each day, I’ll still be monitoring our other channels, too. I will also be doing my best to respond to messages as promptly as possible during downtime, so I thank you ahead of time for your patience as I respond to each of you. Depending on the specified platform of the day, tag me @Jadarina, @Jada_rina, or @IGN (for Facebook) to get my attention. I will be doing my best to respond personally to everyone that pings me, but I may designate others from the team of moderators or IGN staff to answer in my stead if they are an expert in the subject matter or if it's after hours and I’m eating some pizza on my lunch break 😉
Finally, I have one last thing to spotlight. We’ve also set up a google form for the community to contact the entire community team. Submissions to this form will be only seen by myself, our moderating team, and other IGN staff when appropriate. I hope that this will help our weekend warriors, users in other time zones, and others that happen to miss office hours get the feedback and assistance they need.
Keep an eye out for my next blog post. I plan on releasing new updates around our Terms of Service, Moderation, and possibly more…
Jada Griffin is IGN's Community Lead. If she's not engaging with users here, chances are she's developing her own games, maxing the Luck stat in her favorite games, or challenging her D&D players with Intense combat or masterful puzzles. You can follow her on Twitter @Jada_Rina.