Sorry it’s been quiet on the website for the past week. We’ve been pushing office move updates to our YouTube channel, where we’ve stayed constant in updating everyone what’s going on. The website has mostly been on hold while we finalize an office move. This is big news for GN, as it will allow us to significantly expand our testing operations and push higher quality, more frequent content that is testing-focused.

We are moving from 2.5 bedrooms in a house (after ten years of being located here) into a large office space, including dedicated rooms for testing, production, filming, and storage. All of this means that we can finally set up permanent test benches for coolers, GPUs, CPUs, fan tests, PSU tests, case tests, and more. Dedicated systems will speed-up our production in ways that we can’t articulate – for the past ten years, we’ve had to set-up and tear-down systems for each test, which takes multiple extra hours of work per test sequence.

Our goal is to finalize the move very soon. This will immediately increase our output of technical content. We have been fortunate enough to have significant support via Patreon and our store (including Modmat sales, shirt sales, posters, etc.), which has allowed us to make this expansion without increasing our reliance on advertisers. We are able to maintain editorial independence while expanding in large ways, which is rare and difficult to achieve.

Consider this something of an informal post. We'll be at CES shortly and, as always, will be covering the event in full-force and over a time period of about a week. Although most of our schedule is already filled with meetings between GN and hardware vendors, we keep spots open for break-out products or interesting items that we may have overlooked. For today, we are asking that you tweet @GamersNexus with the following things: (1) Requests for specific products or companies that you'd like to see features, (2) notes of major announcements made during the show that you would like more information on.

We've already done a lot of the homework, have meetings on the books, and have a content plan. That said, CES is impossibly large, and many companies bring so many products that we simply can't see them all. Even with an hour for a suite, we'll get caught-up in 2 or 3 products, then have to move on. GN will have two teams on-site this year, which means we have more capacity to respond to items that interest the community. Twitter is the best way to get that information to us during the show, and we've already had a large number of coverage requests for high-refresh monitors, OLEDs for gaming, and some product-specific opportunities.

GN’s main video producer, Andrew, has been on a bit of a vacation for the past week, and that will continue for a few more days. We’ve also got other upcoming travel this weekend, so content has been in a longer pipeline than normally.

Right now, the two of us at home base have been working on cranking away at upcoming CPU and case content. The cases are part of a renewed push by GN to expand coverage outside of “just” CPUs and GPUs. Not long ago, we added to our case testing by expanding into 3DMark testing for real-world scenarios, Blender testing (for more real-world scenarios), and fortifying our torture workloads. Our case reviews have slowly added testing with and without panels, filters, and optional features, digging for optimal configurations on a per-case basis.

As recently mentioned in one of our site update articles, we have now successfully -- theoretically -- moved to SSL for GamersNexus.net. The store page (which is a masked redirect to a SquareSpace page) should also be behind SSL, though we're still doing some troubleshooting on that. It's secure and behind a certificate, but it's a masked redirect, so might be some errors thrown about that.

Either way, there shouldn't be any issues with the change. The website is now forcing all internal HTTP links to HTTPS, moving us into the modern era for the site. Although not a big one, it's an exciting first step to a round of much-needed website and server upgrades for GN. There are still bugs with the site (comments, forums, registration, email), but we're working on those. If you encounter specific SSL-related bugs, please let us know via Twitter or comment.

We're finally back at home base. The past week of hardware news and pending releases means a queue the height of the door upon returning, so we've got a busy week ahead of us. Motherboards are in the mix, the Antec P8, multiple other new cases (a quick glance suggests four), feature tests for GPUs and CPUs, and more. We also have some serious website work to get done, including our final and official move to SSL (HTTPS), following which will be fixes to the comments section. We are also looking into overhauling the forums -- it's about time. This becomes a matter of determining how the community is split: A significant portion of direct backers are now in our Patreon Discord, but forums serve an important means for archival and 'slow' support with more searchability, so to speak. That needs to be overhauled. We're considering merging comments and forums on a per-post basis, but aren't sure yet.

Regardless, the first website update in queue is the SSL move, followed by some fixes to the comments and caching systems. These have been inhibiting us for years at this point, and with GN's constant growth, it's about time to get serious about the website's ability to handle an actual user base. This will also include fixes to email activation and the registration system, which has been bugged lately. We intend to keep the forums and comments open for all users in perpetuity, with Discord remaining Patreon-only (for now, anyway).