Hey, long-time lurker and Rondak's Portal expat here, wondering if I might provide some feedback.

One thing that I would really like to do is see all of the new games.  Sometimes, I might want to try a game in a new genre or system if I see a community for it, but it's not something I would normally actively seek out.

I think the ability to view games by creation date (or first post), or a quick link that would search for all new games (say, games that are less than 2 months old) would really help create vibrant cross-pollination.

Is that something that could be done?  Or am I missing some functionality hidden somewhere?

Not sure that "games less than two months old" would really help you, as that would likely amount to a couple of hundred games, with no guarantee that they are still active.

If you keep an eye on the Game Proposals, Input and Advice forum ( link to another game ), you will see new games that are being proposed, but have not yet been created (including when the GM actually creates them and posts a link).

The Browse / Search the Games function on the main page can be set to only check for active games that are still searching for players, and can be filtered by which ones have the newest posts.

Though you can search for games by newest post, it is limited by the need to select a genre.

+1 -- this would be something I'd use if it were available.

2 months is an eternity in pbp games.

And a sliding scale of times would be as simple as a dropdown that changed the parameter of the first post date searched.  Last week, last month, last 2 months.

But yes, I'd love to see what games are going up specifically without having to fish through each genre and system.  Just having that data available would be a huge boon to players, GMs, and even admins.  What's the community interested in?  Should I pick up new books and learn a new system if I want to play more games?  Are games going up for games I had given up as lost and haven't searched for in awhile?  Are games being mistagged, or am I misinterpreting a genre tag?

A list of hundreds of games is fine.  Even great.  It shows me that the community is really alive.

I'd love to see something like this, too, or even be able to look through games that are currently requesting players without selecting a genre or system.

+1 from me as well.

+0 from me.

When a game is created by the GM sometimes has nothing to do when it actually goes live. I've been in games where it took more than two months of fussing with the setting before the game actually starts character creation. And what about those GMs who recycle their games bydeleting all the old threads and starting over?  Those wouldn't show up as new, even tho they were.

Evil Empryss makes a good point. It may be better to go by "date when Requesting New Players was turned on for the first time" rather than "date game was created".

As for game recycling, I suppose those games would be left out in the cold as far as the snapshot is concerned, but that's a conscious choice on the part of the GM, rather than a flaw in the system itself.

No data collation tool is perfectly complete.  A new games directory wouldn't invalidate the Looking For Players / Interest Forums.  These forums might, in fact, get less congested.

Also, giving every game a one-time chance to throw up the New flag, or tying it to the Accepting Players flag (rather than just basing it on creation date) is a fine solution that allows GMs to get their backend in order.

It's still a 0 for me because it doesn't provide anything useful about the game other than its start date (or the date it started requesting players). It may be nice, but it's not critical, which is why I said zero instead of a minus one.  In the grand scheme of things, those are real low on my roster of things to consider when picking a game. I mean, if you found a game that's intro read like the GM had formed it straight from your personal dream of the perfect game, but found it started four months ago, would you really care that much about the start date?

And on a purely selfish note (I'll admit it openly) there are other suggestions being floated about that would take less work for jase to implement and provide more use to more users (like the search function being active in games and not just the public forums).  I'd like to see some of those implemented first.

+1 to the version of a view of games that recently flagged accepting players for the first time.