Weekly Product Update

Key details

• Merged pull requests: 5
• Core repos shipped: 2
• Priority areas: 4

Top Highlights

The homepage now shows total hours played, giving the platform's overall activity a clearer sense of scale.

Popular game ranking now leans more on real recent engagement, so discovery should better reflect what players are actually spending time with.

Creators can no longer review their own games, and self-reviews no longer shape public scores, counts, or reputation surfaces.

Canvas gained a new auto-paint workflow that helps the team bring prepared artwork onto the live board more reliably.

Platform Stats Tell A Clearer Story

Visitors should get a better sense of how much actual play is happening across The Grotto.

• The homepage hero now includes total hours played alongside the existing headline stats.
• That number is backed by a new aggregate playtime API, making the platform's momentum easier to understand at a glance.
• This gives both returning players and new visitors a more concrete feel for overall activity.

Popular Discovery Tracks Real Engagement Better

Browsing for active games should feel less biased toward recency and more grounded in actual play.

• The two-week popular ranking now prioritizes recent play duration ahead of simple play counts.
• A freshness-based tiebreaker was removed so newly uploaded games do not jump ahead just for being newer.
• The result should be a more trustworthy popular feed that surfaces games earning real attention.

Reviews And Reputation Got Fairer

This week's most important trust update was making sure creators cannot influence their own public review standing.

• Creators can no longer rate or review their own games from the game page.
• Existing self-reviews are filtered out of public review lists, detail pages, and user review views.
• Self-ratings also no longer feed into public game stats, search and favorites surfaces, profile review counts, section scores, or badge totals.

Canvas Operations Became More Repeatable

Behind the scenes, the collaborative canvas now has better support for shipping planned artwork at scale.

• A new auto-painter workflow can translate PNG artwork into the closest live canvas palette colors.
• It skips unchanged or transparent pixels and works through the normal authenticated placement flow instead of relying on a separate backdoor.
• That should make larger community canvas moments easier to execute while still respecting the existing bucket and cooldown rules.

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Source record

The Grotto’s official update was published May 10, 2026.