Can I crowdsource site data from members?

Over the weekend, I spent some time adding categories to some of the games on my side project, Switch Scores.

I used to copy the categories - or genres - from the Nintendo eShop. The categorisation process was fairly automated.

However, game publishers can add multiple categories to their games, and the categories are too broad. For a library of 13,000+ games, it’s not that helpful to trawl through nearly 6,000 games tagged “Action”. Don’t even mention the ultra-generic genre called “Other”. (Which, curiously, isn’t available as a filter on the Nintendo website.)

So, I decided to set up my own categories, and started assigning games to them. For a few years I had some help, but it currently falls to me.

You could ask: How useful is it to do this manual work? Why go through the hassle of manually assigning categories to ~40 new games each week? Does anyone care?

It turns out, people do use these pages quite a lot. Of the top 10 pages visited as a result of a Google search, 5 of them are category pages.

To help solve the problem, I’ve built a quick tool that monitors games without categories and checks them against a few keywords. For instance, games with “Puzzle” or “Quiz” in the title are likely easy matches. I still update them manually, but the suggestions help a bit.

This got me thinking… Could I crowdsource this data?

I could ask members to help fill in missing categories - but there’s not much incentive to do so.

How about if I make the logged in area of the site more sticky, so people stay there for longer?

What about if members could choose some categories they like, and quickly find games in those categories?

If this is a compelling addition, members may be more keen to help with filling in the gaps - because it’ll help them to find new games.

If not, I’ll just fill in the categories myself. But it’s worth a try. If it doesn’t work I’ll try something else!

FAWM 2025: update on the songwriting challenge

Last week, I wrote about my participation in a songwriting challenge, and how I planned to write 14 tracks in the month of February.

I’m writing this on 10th February and I’ve already managed to write nine tracks … well, actually ten, but I removed one from FAWM (Alley Cat Beat) as I wasn’t 100% happy with it.

Not bad!

You can hear all of the tracks on my FAWM 2025 playlist.

That’s all for this week.

Until next time,

Ben