list is supposed to put indexed projects in order of last updatd
It is not. One might expect it to work this way, but it does not.
It is the order of publishing date and bumps happen by latest manually staff approved major devlog.
Popular sort is indeed a secret combination of different factors and criteria. There is a post somewhere, where it is described, but it has not much info, besides what one can guess already.
The criteria for approving a devlog or the bump involved is not known to me.
If they would approve every major update devlog, it would be full of devlog bumped games. I do not like that system. It is disadvantagous to devs that just do updates and not brag about it with a devlog.
Popular changes slowly because of the feedback loop of people looking for popular games.
One expects it to be that way, because that’s what the official descriptions imply.
Staff having to manually approve listings from devlogs is unexpected. It’s also discouraging when we look at what gets through to the list and what doesn’t.
That’s becayse despite what Leafo (site owner) insists, Popular and Most Recent lists matter. They are promotional.
I don’t know why— with everything else happening, it shouldn’t be— but it’s hard to believe the organizational priorities here are that bad.
Anyhow, what No Time to Play (Community moderator) has been suggesting all along is we need to focus entirely on offsite promotions. The indexing system is not for most of us as creators, collectors, players, or readers. We have to rely on each other to share links.
There's an official description? Where?
The recent is called newest, actually. The title is latest. And the link to it is recent. But unlike some tags, I did not yet encounter a description, what it is supposed to be. Or what exactly is new/recent/latest. The publishing date, the updating date, the release date, whatever. That a devlog can screw sorting is indeed quirky.
Appearing in recent is only big, if you have zero marketing. It is 5 minute fame. That's my opinion too, and I think I read that stance several times by leafo. But I do not recall popular sort beging regarded the same. They see the whole indexing discoverability as a bonus, which has consequences, like how they take sometimes weeks to index a thing. But of course being on top of popular is important. One needs only look at all the video comments from youtubers crosspromoting the games and themselves.
