Before talking about my proposal about the future structure of Insert Coin, I want first to tell you what this blog is not about. This blog is not about the name, the mascot or the art design, this blog is about the structure and function. The other stuff is less important and more argumentative and therefore it will come in the next blog.
Structure
So now it is time to start talking about the structure. I made a mock up, to show you guys the structure. Remember it is structure and function and not about the art and title.
Behold, don’t mind the spelling mistakes
The tabs are below the title for fast access. If you want to go directly to the forum it would be annoying to always scrolling down. Retro Leo is for retro games, editorials will be blogs, reviews are reviews, forums are forums, and postbox is where you check you PMs. We can increase or decrease the number of tabs, or the might not be tabs at all, but the point is that you can reach everything fast and therefore it should be below the title.
Updating
The front page is divided in 3 parts: the headline, the photo part and the other news. The paper updating goes like this.
Because the current system works very well, I tried to keep it the system of updating as close as the current one as possible. The updating will work the same way, but with one key difference.
Updating as it is now
When the updater decides that the news is big, he shall have to fill in an extra 3 paragraphs. The first paragraph shall be the news condensed into one paragraph and the rest is extra info. The first paragraph must be filled in and the other two can be replaced by pictures if you just can’t give any extra info or if you are a lazy sod.
The structure of the head line, the 2nd and the 3rd paragraph are not mandatory, and can be replaced by pictures.
Now here comes the cool part: when a new big news update is done, it will take the place of the previous headline. The headline will drop to the other news and will have only the title and the first paragraph. This is why the first paragraph must always be filled in, because it will fall below when other big news takes its place. When clicking on the headline, you will still be able to read the 3 paragraphs.
Here you can see clearly that the drop from headline to the other news
The cool part is that the layout does not need to be changed every time you post headline news, you fill in the 3 paragraphs and the front page will automatically change. No editor is needed. That’s why the strict 3 paragraphs rule is enforced otherwise we have to fit the stuff in there, every time some one decides to do something differently. I have chosen 3 paragraphs, because 2 paragraphs are to low to fill the entire width of the page and 4 and higher is too much work. For the other news only 3 news items are shown, but we could lengthen them it to show 6, 9, and so on, by lengthening the page length.
About the big news, well we could do it like now, and only consider something big when it is really big, or we can decide to post one or two most important news updates per day. This is open to discussion, but it changes nothing in the way we update, only the frequency of the big news updates.
GG weekly
Some people like the aggregate news gathering and that functionality will not change. To the left of the mock up we have the news that is not deemed as important as the bigger news. These shall work exactly like GG weekly. The newest news is up and the older news is below, just as it is now on the front page. By clicking on the tab “show all news” you will be taken to a page with all the aggregated news.
The aggregated news will give you the option to order the news by day (like now), by console or other ways. It shall look like a job vacancy page in a newspaper. And it will have option of encircling news that you want to read later or crossing it out if you are not interested. You like you would do when looking for a job.
This guy in encircling things he is interested in
The updates will be done the exactly the same way as they are now, the only difference is when posting big news, than you have to fill in 3 paragraphs.
There will still be a place to comment on the new GG weekly place. This will give us an opportunity to talk about the news without opening a topic in the forum for every little piece of news.
Photo Part
This is the middle part of the front page. This is the photo part. Are there some screenshot(s) everybody has to see, than put them here. Or maybe there is a funny picture of gif of Cammy, Miyamoto or Ravi Drums, you can put them on the front page. You can put 1 big one or multiple smaller ones.
Archive
After some days a news update or pictures shall not be shown on the front page anymore, for this we need an archive, so that you might find it again. Something like we already have for GG weekly.
Summary
The front page newspaper will replace our current front page and GG weekly shall look like a job vacancy page. All the other things like blogs and reviews will have a newspaper like design in letter type and paragraphs.
Future
The next step is to choose a title and mascot/symbol (like the globe in daily planet). And we need also to choose what newspaper we shall homage. For instance New York Times will mean that the title, letter type and spacing will be exactly the same as they are in the real newspaper.
For no we will have only one front page and one GG weekly page, but we could easily do more in the future. But this is a good start.
Comments
I tried to make an idea that shall make all of us happy. Did I succeed? Did I forget something? You want to do something differently? Let me know! I shall edit this blog as we go.
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Well we all have different ways of updating. There are no standards all is fair game.
@Foolz and Darth
Thanks for the comments
@aspro
Agreed, functionality and clarity and the forums are important. But also the look is important. If our frontpage look nice, than we will have greater change of attracting more people. Why are you sorry?
@Yoda
I knew I could count on you to give a good comment. Now first I shall ignore your idea of public updating, and later I shall take it into account.
About the pictures
The pace of the picture will be fixed, so it is the guys duty, to fit it in or put more pictures in it. So I suggest a way to strech pictures to make it easier.
About Satire
I am all for it! It is possible with this stucture. We could also use the picture space for that also.
About updating
This way is used is designed specifically for minimising our workload. This shall not make our workload much bigger. The paragraph rule is made so that we do not need a editor, because we do not have one.
This was just to create a first step of the newspaper idea, and build a community. I still want to have an editor and stuff, but it seems to be to much work.
At least our frontpage will look prettier, and hopefully more people will be attracted to it.
I will adress your GGweekly idea later!
When we let everyone do their updates, we need to watch out for the duplicate data. This could be avoided by checking if the link already is used. And perhaps when in your title is Mario, all the Mario news of the week will be shown to make sure that it is not a duplicate.
About the chaotic structure, well it is supposed to look like a job vacancies page in a newspaper, they are usually chaotic in looks too. So that will not matter.
But the most important part is the decrease of workload. With that load gone, we can focus on the newspaper construction. Finding a editor and stuff will be easier because we are not bogged down scouring the net for news.
So my suggestion is to go ahead with my idea. Than in the meantime we (read mostly you) try to get GG weekly public for everyone. Than we can look and organize an editorial team.
Hopefully the improved look and forums will increase our members. We need to grow!
I suggest keeping the look of the site the same for now, and adding more features like forums, previews, editorials, ect., then expanding on the cool newspaper look after those are locked into place.
There is too much to read at the moment, I will have to read the comments and get back to you guys.
I think forums should address that need.
If we had some more volunteers we could keep GGWeekly running at the same time, but we were stretched before and now with hires unable to post it's getting ridiculous. It's only because Iga is doing more than his fair share that we have kept things going. If you guys can convince a few more people over for instance ASK Story is at the top of my list along with selbie and others, than we can grow a bit more.
I think having a publically accessible GGWeekly is unfeasible, it's open to abuse and people can screw around. I'm wary even at the moment of being able to post without having an account here actually. If some A-hole comes in, he can really screw around, even pose as a regular who cant log on. But also it would be a mess, we would have stories repeated endlessly and moderating would be as much work as posting. Plus this is the kind of thing that forums are for, people would post things that excite them there.
@Yo
I think you can have a set size for pics and just auto-resize them? I have a simple program which I can use to submit my pics at custom pixel resolution.
I think automating the process is a great idea for news updates. We should have a word limit but I think it might be too much asking for an editor at this point. We should keep the articles to a certain size and just trust eachother to write well and give suggestions here and there on a private board.
I really think we can have the best of both worlds in a site that doesn't all go up in one go and still has a good in-house style to it.
@Raven. I think the newspaper look will be fairly easy to implement, especially given how iga has outlined the automatic way stories shift around. Forums are a must for people who want to talk about specific issues though.
Be not so quick to cut GG weekly. I think we sould keep it for now, and discuss on our new forums what the next step should be! And making it open to the public can decrease our workload, but I want to hear Yoda's plan how to minimise duplicate news and how to stop people taking advantage of it.
@Yoda, can you give us an idea, how you want to make GG weekly work? I am really curious, can we also automate the process a bit?
I want it so that whenever someone has a link that they want to talk about, instead of just putting it in their post or topic, add it to the GG Weekly page. It would be like a bulletin board for gaming news.
Obviously if we got a large influx in numbers it would increasingly get less effective, but that's not immediate and not even sustainable; until I get a paid server we can't handle singnificant growth anyway. Similarly, Guest commenting is only available because it's not abused. If it became an issue, there would be more to it; the sign-up process is also vulnerable to abuse I know, but for now I opt for convenience to the user. That's what GG Weekly is, a convenience.
If I had captcha's and post-frequency limitations and just complete lock-down, that would be a currently unnecessary drawback.
Links are the obvious first check for automated duplicates. I can also write a generic SQL LIKE search to pick up similar stories, then do a more advanced filter in PHP.
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For a radically different approach, though, I could completely generate GG Weekly based on links in forum posts. Any link that is to a known gaming site (IGN, GameSpot, 1up, Kotaku, Neogaf, etc.) would be collected and generated (of course filtering out duplicates for quoting and such).
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And for pictures, the problem is that the layout will be flexible width. For your layout mock-up, that picture only works if all the columns are the right width. In a flexible width design, the columns would expand or shrink based on the settings of the user. As I said, every time an image gets added, the messier it is to manage. One could be worked in, two would be pushing it but possible.
And fuck you.