Thawing out to deliver the latest on Backloggd.
Welcome to the new year everyone and welcome back to this monthly developer blog series. We had a big influx of users this past month so in case you’re new, this is a monthly blog post where I’ll give a run-down of what’s been happening behind-the-scenes are where things might be going next.
This month will be a bit lighter as January is usually the time for me to catch up on backend maintenance and bug fixes. Both of which had kept me pretty productive, with two minor releases 1.16.3 and 1.16.4 including some of those changes. It’s also a good time to refocus my goals for the year and roughly plot out what I want to do with the site in the coming months. Let’s go into that a little further.
Quick note: Trying out this Newsletter feature on Patreon as a replacement for Medium as having it be consolidated would be nice in the long term. I'll still post the same content on Medium while I try it out, so apologies for the duplicate posts!
1.17: Bundles
The next major update is expected sometime in February with a focus on better support for game bundles.
The first change being better bundle browsing, as soon you’ll be able to see the games that are in a bundle and which bundles contain the game you’re currently visiting. This just continues the ongoing effort to connect the game data in Backloggd by giving you a complete picture of what you’re looking at.
Next will be an extension of the editions feature introduced in 1.15 that allows bundles to be selected as an edition for a game.
The main difference here is that bundles will continue to be loggable on their own despite having this option. I think trying to merge them like editions would only create more pain as it wouldn’t be clear where to migrate existing data and bundles are a bit more unique that logging them directly makes more sense in various cases.
I’m still deciding how they’ll continue to appear on the rest of the site though, as bundles are responsible for the majority of the duplicate game clutter. And if they’re not being combined like game editions, then handling how their stats (num played, avg rating, etc..) isn’t as clear either. So something that’s still a work-in-progress and always open to feedback!
Improving Moderation
Another focus for these next few months won’t be as visible, but will be just as important, which is taking a stab at improving many of the in-site moderation flows. With the number of incoming reports constantly growing, I want to redesign some of the systems that moderators interact with daily with more automated assistance.
For instance, when a review is removed a custom text box needs to be filled with a reason. But maybe turning that into a dropdown of preselected reasons can help speed things up for the moderator while providing a more consistent response for people getting their content removed.
Another idea is to have a priority queue for reports, as right now they’re purely sorted by newest to oldest. But grouping them by content could help put a focus on more pressing matters.
Overall I’m looking to help us respond faster and more consistently across the site. It’s not just user content either, I know game moderation has been lacking in support as the amount of duplicate game pages continues to grow. So either way there’s a lot of effort that can be done to generally improve the quality of the site and I want to put that into focus for the first few months of 2026.
There are other exciting projects I have planned for this year as well, but I don’t want to jump the gun too quickly now ;) Stay tuned and stay warm (if in the northern hemisphere)!
MrProg
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/backloggd.com
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@backloggd.official
Discord: https://discord.gg/cMjGusjbwg