[jim-greer]

Rate my carousel:

http://www.kongregate.com/

In our case, the whole homepage is links to games. The real reason we use the carousel has been mentioned in this thread - there is a lot of pressure to put things in a featured position. The fact is, only the first few positions are effective, particularly the first. But everything that goes in is initally in the first position, then gets demoted.

One benefit of that is that if someone comes to the site, plays the first game, then comes back 5 days later, they can expect to find the same game in 3rd or 4th position.

I'm open to other ideas, of course.

[roryokane]

That reminds me that https://www.fimfiction.net/ used to have a carousel in the header for featured stories, and it worked like you describe. Featured stories arrived at the left side and were gradually pushed to the right. It was kind of cool that the carousel started at a random featured story when I navigated to a new page – it increased the change that I’d find a good story, without making me read through all of the story descriptions at once. And I was successfully taught how to find old stories by moving farther right in the carousel.

Now, FIMFiction.net moved the carousel from the header to the home page, and made it much bigger. I hadn’t really thought about whether I liked that change – I don’t see featured stories as often, but I don’t have to scroll down as much to see the content of each page.

[nollidge]

I actually think they're OK for promotional purposes like this, although I'd prefer to see the arrow buttons bigger to call attention to them, and then it should not auto-switch. Also the switching animation should be snappier - faster, with no or very short accel/decel intervals.

[jim-greer]

Once you press an arrow, we don't auto-switch any more. Having a faster animation is a good suggestion. I'd like to make the buttons bigger, but space is at a premium there.