Hello readers. I have a quick update on what to expect on the blog for the next couple of weeks.
For the next two weeks, we’ll be running some old reviews from our sister site, The Lowdown, for the first time on et geekera. While these games and reviews are several years old, they will be edited updated slightly so that they won’t be quite as originally presented but the gist of the review will remain the same.
So we’ve managed to get an extra code for Tales from the Borderlands. Since I already have one, there’s only one logical thing to do: Give it away!
We’re running the contest through gleam.io which will randomly draw one winner from the entries. You can earn up to five entries into our contest. The giveaway starts now and closes at 11:59 PM EST on October 31st. We’ll contact the winner with the code on November 1st.
The giveaway is closed and the winner has been contacted. Thanks for reading.
So this post has been months coming and probably desperately needed since March when et geekera was last updated.
I meant to write a big State of the Union post for January 1st but I had other things to do like holiday time with the family, travel for my day job (I don’t get paid for et geekera despite whatever adds WordPress puts up), playing games and summarizing news. That meant that the State of et geekera address got pushed back but I thought it was a good way to bring the blog back from temporary hiatus.
With all the changes to Steam and the addition of the new curation and discovery options, I thought that now was a good time to launch our own group on Steam. With almost 3,000 fans of the blog between WordPress, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, I thought that we can start doing some community things like gaming together and other events beyond that.
You can find the official et geekera Steam group at steamcommunity.com/groups/etgeekera.
We also have our own Steam Curator list that you can follow.
As I mentioned earlier this morning, today is et geekera’s one year anniversary of existence. The traffic, comments and readership grew far faster than I was expecting since we were jumping into a very big, very competitive pool of geek interest blogs.
Now that we’re one year in, I think now is a good time to do a big picture examination of the direction of the blog and I thought I would solicit some opinions about what you like, what you don’t like and what you’d like to see in the future.
After the jump, I have a few polls and a feedback form to give us some feedback.
Hello and welcome to 2014! It’s been exactly one year since we launched our little corner of the internet for geeks called et geekera. I was originally planning to do two or three posts a week over here and instead I’m doing two or three posts a day. It’s funny how things work out when you actually get down to business.
Anyway, to mark one year of this little corner of the interwebs, here’s a look back at the top posts of 2013.
Read the rest of this entry
Yes, we’re still going to be making our list of the seven best games of the seventh generation of video game consoles. The first article is just going through final edits now before being posted on Friday while the next two are most of the way through the first draft.
Seeing as the list hasn’t been finalized (though I have five or six games that I’d call locked in), there’s still time to nominate one or more of your favourite games from the current generation for the list. A couple of games from the first round of nominations are in the 7 For 7 list so your voices are being heard.
You can nominate a game (or games) by leaving a comment below, firing us an email to etgeekera [at] gmail.com or filling in the submission form below.
The first game will be named on November 15th with a new entry every Friday until the end of the year.
I’ve been starting work on a fairly substantial new feature series for the blog but would like some help while I’m still in the planning stages. We’re working on 7 For 7: The Seven Best Games of the Seventh-Generation.
We’re less than three weeks from the launch of the PlayStation 4 and four weeks from the launch of the Xbox One which means that the next generation of video game consoles is finally upon us. Given that the current console generation is what Wikipedia calls the seventh generation, I thought that now’s a fitting time to look back at the seven best games released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.
I thought that I would call upon you, the reader, to help put together with your nominations for the best games of the current generation and your thoughts about your favourite games. You can leave a comment below, fire us an email to etgeekera [at] gmail.com or fill in the submission form below.
The first part of the series is targeted to go live on November 15th.
A quick hello to everyone who has come to et geekera from WordPress’ Freshly Pressed. Thanks for stopping by and giving us a read.
If you want more from et geekera, you can hit that Follow button up top. Our most recent popular posts are listed in the column on the right. We can also be found on numerous social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
et geekera 
A Quick Note About Comments
Sep 8
Posted by Steve Murray
I’d like to just talk for a minute about commenting here on et geekera. We don’t get a lot of them here but we get a few. The problem is the setup that I go with on the WordPress platform. You basically have three options: 1) Comments off; 2) Comments come through as submitted; and 3) Comments set to pending until I approve them or straight through with a previously approved comment.
My experiences on The Lowdown Blog tell me that letting every comment through is just a way for spam bots to ruin your comments section and I like the discussion so I went with pending my approval. The Akismet spam filtering service on WordPress isn’t perfect. On TLB, a lot of spam comments come through. Over here, I’ve found a few comments that were legit go to spam rather than pending and other comments that were clearly spam go through to pending approval. Even after approval, there are a few of you that are still flagged as spam. Seeing as I’ve got over 1,500 spam comments saved up in my spam comment folder from the last two weeks, I’m not going to be able to through all them to see if they’re actually spam or not.
So if you’re not seeing your comments straight away: 1) I may have to get to approving it; or 2) It’s been flagged as spam. Since I can’t be checking comments for approval all the time, it may take minutes or hours for it to go up. If you need to get my attention about approving or un-spamming a comment, you can email us at etgeekera [at] gmail.com or tweet us @etgeekera.
Just keep in mind that if you’re not adding anything to the conversation, you’re not getting approved, even if you ask politely. To the guy who tried to comment this morning on a Doctor Who review with a link to his blog and Facebook page: That’s spam and you’re not getting approved. To rebloggers: Add something to your reblog besides “Reblogged by BlogX” and you generally get approved. To everyone who writes “cool article” or “nice” while making sure that there’s a link back to your blog: Write more than two words. Say something that someone might think about replying to or liking your comment. That’s when you’ll get approved.
I’m not trying to be exclusionary or pretend this microscopic part of the geek blogosphere is the most important place online. I want to make sure that 1) You know what’s happening with comments on the blog; and 2) We foster some healthy discussion and dialogue on the blog. That doesn’t mean I’m going to censor critical comments. It’s just that after seeing all the crap with the so-called #GamerGate (column coming this week), I just want to make sure this is still a nice place for people to read and talk.
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