Here are my thoughts about HOT games: The "Hot Games" link should feature new, exciting and up-to-date games. Instead, it defaults to "of all time" and shows the same old titles week after week. Those are not "HOT" games. Show the weekly hot games by default and ensure the selection formula chooses games that are actually fresh and hot. People come here to find new and hot games. Recommendation: Default to "weekly" rather than "all time". There's also a forum category for "Hot Games". Geometry Dash is listed as a "hot game" but it's been out for years and the last post was a month ago. Recommendation: Ensure the "Hot games" category is used for hot games, otherwise the site appears out of date.
In the mobile app days the hot games list was literally why I opened the app 20 times a day. With the loss of the mobile app I bookmarked the page and went directly to that page for a few months (never great on mobile, but it worked). With the new redesign it feels legitimately broken most of the time - sometimes listing only 1-2 games, while other times it just breaks and lists nothing. When it does work, it certainly doesn't match the relevance of the old list, which seemed pretty in-tune with what was going on with the forums (my next step when an app looked interesting). As you've mentioned it defaults to all-time, which feels very counter intuitive if not contradictory to what I think of as hot. I finally updated my bookmark to the weekly version, but those still don't seem to line up with reality, and again - just flat break much of the time. Equally frustrating, on mobile the screenshots for whatever hot app I look at is generally very awkward/difficult to scroll (iPhone 8+), and it requires numerous clicks every single time to get to the forum, which is where the action is. I was honestly fine just jumping right to the forum, which (if I recall) generally had the screenshots at the top anyway. I don't want to just jump on the hater train, but this experience is the primary reason I visit the site maybe 20% of what I used to. Please revisit your hot games list and simplify access to the forums, and I'll happily support you guys.
Looks like we both joint TA in 2010! I agree that people visit TA to see hot games, so a dynamic hot games list would be good.
The Hot Games is broken, it's not working as it is intended to for a variety of reasons. I would love nothing more than to have it get fixed but it's very difficult for us to get many resources devoted to these types of problems. I'd like to say that someday it will be fixed and working like it used to, but how long "someday" is is anybody's guess.
I understand this advice is unsolicited, but why not engage your community for technical help? I can say from experience that these types of issues are not actually that complicated in the grand scheme. There are quite likely numerous people in your community with adequate skills and a drive to help just to support something they enjoy (at no cost).
