What are your thoughts on the amount and quality of the news posts that are Top XX List related?

Personally, I'm starting to see way too many of them. Some of the lists are absolutely rubbish. I think that 99% of these lists are all biased and are the opinion of a single blogger/editor/etc. This of course gets replies to the news post saying "this game should of been first", "that should not of been on the list" and so forth.

The approver team has agreed in the past that too many lists should not be posted. They can be fun but there's just so many of them. In fact, I know one website (can't remember the name but I believe they're owned by AOL) creates a top 10 list every week. They even call it "Top 10 Tuesday". One list a week is quite a bit and it's starting to get a little overboard. I've seen comments like "not another shitty list" .

What are your thoughts? are list news posts starting to get a bit excessive?

I always wondered how lists are even accepted to GameGrep. Like Anime said, they aren't news. Maybe approvers should just not approve them anymore until someone says otherwise and see how things go? The only people who will probably miss them are those that only submitted them to gain points because they couldn't find worthy news. Anyway, I really think that maybe taking a break from them altogether for a little while would be a good idea, but that's not my decision to make, just throwing a suggestion out there. I think a lot of times gaming websites like to create those little lists if they notice they haven't had enough news for the week, so they gotta pull something out of their ass.

There are some lists that are good, however. Lists that aren't someones own opinion. An example of a good list is the top platforms which go off of sales figures. I believe we've already had that, though.

I'm starting to lean towards that direction, Lord Sion. Personally I find there to be a bit too many lists now; albeit I'm guilty myself of posting a list post before

Well, I wasn't thinking of the legitimate lists based on facts. What I should have said was that approvers should hold off on accepting things like "The Top 10 Most Influential Games of the Decade" or whatever, because those are pure opinion and are the ones that spawn the "This list is stupid, why isn't Halo in there?" comments and crap like that.

I know, I remember a few weeks back one was submitted called "top 9 list of game scenes involving elevators" I'm all for diversity and am very lenient considering that this is all opinion based but some lists are just too obsecure and usually just revolve around people bashing the shit out of it.

So yes another crackdown is needed

We (approvers / mods) came to an understanding way back when this first became an issue. The standpoint was decided upon, after even "banning" any Top List news posts, that they were OK but only in moderation.

Reasoning was mentioned in the first post of this thread as well, but, I'll reiterate; The issue was that GG was being filled with these lists and more substantial news would get pushed down / drowned out because of this, you would get people always commenting "not another shitty list". It was getting to the point that you think "GameGrep" and you expected to see a Top List article or two. We don't want the image that the only thing you can find here is Top List articles. There are a couple sites who consistently pump out Top List articles; GamesRadar does one Top List on a weekly basis, for exmaple.

While there is the supporting category, it doesn't mean people can flood submissions with Top Lists. All good things come in moderation.

The main issue for me is that the front page, spotlight and even top articles shouldn't be filled with all these Top List articles. I want to read news, not Top Lists. Now, I admit that some of these Top Lists are amusing, however, to compare them to something it's like those tabloids you see in the supermarket. They're fun to lol at every now and then but you would rather see substantial magazines, EGM, GamePro, Maxim, etc.

I could look into a weighted factor that makes articles categorized as Top Lists harder to gain points, or, needing say 1.5x more points than a normal article before it shows up in the Top Articles, featured, etc.

Silver Mirror made a good point as well in his last post. A list such as "top 9 list of game scenes involving elevators" is just...well, I find it rather silly and not so news worthy. (Heck, people complain about RabidChinaGirl's posts "this isn't news! !!!"). For the time being, I think the current methodology for handling these types of articles is doing well. If they're obviously ludicrous like the one Silver Mirror mentioned then they can expect it to be rejected. A Top List article can still be approved, but, approvers will be keeping in mind moderation and keeping these types of articles to a decent rate without "flooding" GG with Top List articles.

If anyone has suggestions or any thoughts on the topic (or really any topic), I am totally open to them. This isn't a "set in stone" rule, we can change our approach on topics such as this as per user feedback (:

Please note that an articles score doesn't relate to people clicking "rate it". Multiple factors are taken into consideration for the score.

ie: First article in your link, DS; http://gamegrep.com/top_list/3587-top_ten_us_bestsellers/
Doesn't have 53 people rating it. Looking at the statistics only 2 people have rated it.

To expand on the search pages results:

• The total results from "Top" are aprox 871 articles
• Refining that to a more "strict" relevance (however it still contained the Top Spin article): 129 articles
• Refining it to only count articles with a score of 100 or above: 85 articles
• Refining it even more to articles with ratings of 400+ using articles with id's: 2286,4211,8131,5241,4911,10762,2059,4569,6079,2889,6211,4694 and looking at their statistics the article with the most "rate it"'s is 2059 with 22 rates.

This may give some insight on popularity in terms of users rating these top lists articles. This doesn't discredit the article for not being popular, though.

Personally I don't like top game characters, or bad guys list articles. All they are is people just reporting their favourite _____, I don't see why a few people's opinions need to be posted here, unless they are someone quite important.

I do however enjoy seeing top sales lists though.