Destructoid, I like you a lot. I just need to say that first and foremost. The criticisms & improvements I have here are only because I want Destructoid to be a better place, and I’m harshest on the things I love.

How ‘Bout Some Consistency
The frontpage of Destructoid seems to get more facelifts then Joan Rivers, yet it seems like some areas of the website have been left to be forgotten about. Compare how the headers for the frontpage look compared to the cBlogs section for instance.



Above is the frontpage as it currently looks at the time of this blog, obviously. Notice how everything is all nice and sleek and fancy with its grey buttons that do their funky "turn to black" thing when you hover over them? I like this, it's nice on my eyes and doesn't kill me to look at it.



This is what the cBlog’s page looks like. Kind of a stark difference, huh? This looks like something I would have found on a Geocities site, if Geocities still existed. The cBlogs section has looked like this roughly since I joined the community way back in 2009. It’s seen a tweak or two here and there, but nothing even remotely close to what the frontpage or even the forums get. And this bugs the hell out of the neat-freak in me.

Generally, I think some time needs to be taken away from adding new stuff all over Destructoid (and its spin-off sites) and needs to be redirected towards fixing the current stuff around here that is out of date or flat out broken. Go read Trev's recent blog on this same "Improvements" topic. Take care of the repairs before the improvements.

Does Anybody Remember Beta.Destructoid?
Well, do you? For the uninitiated, Destructoid Beta was a revamp that came to Destructoid a while back that was supposed to be the fresh new look of the site and bring in a bunch of features. Unfortunately it seemed like DToid 2.0 wasn’t anywhere near ready for prime-time as the site crashed frequently and had to be taken down for tweaks enough to be annoying. The end result was that Destructoid was rolled back to its previous incarnation, aka what it mostly is now, and now Beta.Destructoid.com seems to be dead and buried. Unfortunately, some of the great ideas that did come with it are dead now too.

-Upload multiple images simultaneous: A godsend for frequent cBloggers who like putting images in their blogs in order to break up walls of text.

-Set specific times to post cBlogs: This would have been amazingly convenient for me when I was posting 360 Friday Night Fights. It was also nice because then I could finish a blog when my mind was still in “writing mode” and I didn’t have to worry about my blog being pushed aside because it got posted at 10:45am before people view this or post new stuff.

-Copy/Paste directly from another text editor: While entering the BB Code has become second nature to me now, Beta.Destructoid’s cBlogs would let me copy/paste directly from OpenOffice Writer and all of the formatting I did directly in there, such as bold text and such, would carry over directly into the cBlog editor and I wouldn’t have to worry about any different code. Again, an extremely convenient thing since I tend to write my blogs down in Word or Writer before moving it over to the website.

-Modifying Comments: I think Destructoid as a whole rejoiced when we had that. No more double posts and annoying BBC errors! It was the magic eraser we all wanted.



Give Us Back Video Embedding!
Don’t think I need to say much more than this. Video embedding was removed from the cBlogs because apparently a new version of them was being implemented. This was seemingly two months ago and we haven’t heard or seen a single thing since then, and I miss being able to include videos directly in my blogs and also really want to do some video blogs badly. C’mon guys, give us back the old video embedding until you can actually get the new stuff working.

Pull in Sterling a Little Bit
I get it. Sterling is controversial, controversy brings in onlookers, onlookers are hits for the site, hits generate revenue and word-of-mouth for the site. But do you really want people coming to your site because you’re the site that has a guy with his pants down humping a Sonic the Hedgehog doll, or do you want to be known as the site that breaks news stories like the Jack Thompson story? I’m all for Destructoid having some personality and uniqueness to it, and I totally understand that Sterling’s sense of humor doesn’t mesh with everybody. However there are times when most people agree that Jim tends to get a little out of control, whether it’s simply trolling people or posting stuff that really brings no benefit to the discussion at hand. Truth be told I honestly can’t remember the last time Jim’s posted an article where he hasn’t overly injected his opinion into things instead of just reporting something.

I’ll admit, to me Jim doesn’t seem as bad as he was six months to a year ago when the “Jim to everyone else” article ratio was about 1:1 on the frontpage (for every one article written by someone else, there would be one Jim article). But I have to admit, this seems mainly due to the fact that Destructoid went on a hiring spree lately and got a bunch of fresh faces into the fold as interns.



How About Some Fresh Voices of Opinion
Like I said earlier, I’m all for Destructoid having some personality and all that. But why does Destructoid have to have just one big voice? I think part of the reason there is such a love/hate thing with Jim Sterling around here is because there’s really no other voice on par with Jim to counter-point him directly on Destructoid. Yeah we can all post in the comment section and have our opinions but c’mon, have you ever seen how Jim treats commenters who have different opinions from his? Yes we can cBlog on the topic as well, but a lot of visitors to this site never touch the cBlogs and honestly not enough community blogs beyond the “Bloggers Wanted” themes get promoted anymore. So writing a very well written cBlog in counter-point to something has gotten rather pointless since maybe a whole forty people will read it, and the target person(s) you wrote this for will never know it exists.

Getting back to what I said, people who would disagree with the opinions of Jim don’t really seem to have anywhere else to go on Destructoid. If you don’t agree with him you’re kind of left out in the cold with nobody to get on the front page and defend your opinions. I know there’s some Devil May Cry fans out there that actually have logical well-rounded opinions on why they aren’t excited for the new title that doesn’t involve how Dante looks now, but unless you dig through Destructoid you’ll never know of this since Jim just disregards logical counter-points and dumps people in the same bucket (sorry, I know this is the second time I’ve referenced Jim & DmC, it’s just the only example I can think about smack dab off the top of my head). Yeah you could look towards other websites for different opinions on matters, but why would you encourage your supporters to look other places when you can easily get different viewpoints to them without losing them? Sounds like that’s a better option for Destructoid, and this whole blog is supposed to be about improving the site anyway.

Now I’m not saying any of the other writers on Destructoid lack opinions, we still get the occasional opinion piece from Chad or Holmes obviously. But, besides Jim’s contributions, there seems to be a large influx of news articles and nothing to break up the stream of news (which isn’t bad, don’t get me wrong). I’m just saying, to contribute further towards the things Destructoid is currently doing, it would be nice to get some other fresh voices into the fold who could have their own opinions or perhaps even clash and counter-point with some of the other writers here on the site. And it’s not like you’d have to go far to find people who would do that, Niero. I’m sure a few people here in Destructoid’s community (myself included probably) would gladly step up and contribute with a few occasional bits of opinion.

Destructoid. I love you. Please keep getting better.