We need your help!

**oniell121** · 09-09-2009, 11:58 PM

Now that I have your attention, I'll tell you what we need. One thing that we here at TG Content Development always need are news submissions. New news on our front page keeps it fresh and attractive to new visitors and helps keep them here to become apart of the community. Believe it or not, the CD team has a hard time getting new, fresh news for the front page of Tacticalgamer.com. As we get going with the revamping of the TG Content Development team, we need the communities help for articles, and ideas.

Now, you might be asking yourself, "What can I do to help?" The answer is simple. Post your gaming news, IHS events, hardware news, TG news, and almost anything else. You find out that an IHS is planning a scrim? Let us know! Did you hear about the latest version of your favorite game? Post it up! Did you see some cool new piece of computer or gaming hardware? Shout it out! Do you know about a significant event in TG? Speak up! Did you spy a cool development on the web, a cool topic here in the forums, great price on a game, or something(anything) that you think the people that visit TG would be interested in? Tell us about it!

Submitting content is a great way to get involved in TG. If you submit a news item then you have helped leave your own impression on TG. (There is also a very nice side effect of helping relieve all the work from the CD team.) Don't think that if you're not a great writer than you can't submit content. Far from it. Even giving us a link with a quick description is a big help. If you do want to submit an article, don't be afraid of misspelling things. The content submission forum is between you and the CD team. Our goal is to help get great news items to the front page and we will help you.

So, you want to write an article? GREAT! "But how?" you ask? It's easy. Just write about your chosen topic. Quote other sites, articles, interviews, and give us the facts on the news item. Know what else? Your news item does NOT have to be a page long! A two paragraph article is often a good length as we don't want to bore visitors to the site with LOTS of detail right off. If you want to write a long article you may by all means do so, but how about just giving us a brief overview of the article and a link to the thread of the full length version that you posted elsewhere in the forums?

Ready to go?
We only have a couple important things to keep in mind:

Please make sure your title is accurate and descriptive. Let us know what the article is about. A good title also grabs peoples attention.
Your post content should be largely original. Don't just post a large quote from another site without any substantial original work. If you can't write at least a couple sentences of original content, you may want to re-think the post.
Keyword Linking is a very important part of posting news items. Where possible, creating URL links to other pages or forum categories within the Tactical Gamer web site is highly encouraged. Search engines are indexing our web site on an almost daily basis and having appropriate keywords linked off the main page helps the spiders find the content deep within our site. It also increases the result position for TG when a search on those keywords is made. The current CSS style for TG allows for very "passive" links. Simply making a URL link to another area of the site results in that text being only slightly greyed out when reading the article. This is ideal for search engines while being non-intrusive to human readers. Links of importance for human readers can be bolded or colored to draw more attention to them.

So what are you waiting for? SUBMIT YOUR CONTENT HERE!!. We have our own dedicated, private forum for sending us your articles! An eager Content Development team will help you with getting YOUR news to the front page!

ScratchMonkey · 09-10-2009, 06:39 AM

So how is this different from starting a new thread with something a friend told me about? I routinely start threads in the General forums based on links my friends share in IRC. (Or I append to an existing thread if I can find a relevant one.)

**oniell121** · 09-10-2009, 01:17 PM

The primary reason is that with something being on the front page it is visible to any visitor that views the front page. That sounds kinda redundant, allow me to explain:

It is often true that people visit the site for the games. However, we get a lot of visits to the front page. Our servers messages in 2142 and BF2(I'm sure our others servers do where we can as well) both point to the front page. Google also indexes out site pretty much daily. Having relevant content keep us in search results for popular items. For instance, an upcoming article is about Battlefield: Bad Company 2. This is a popular search term. It can generate hits to the article and thus to our site. Thus giving us exposure into main stream content searches. The front page is not going to be a 100 percent effective way to keep visitors coming back, but it sure helps. If we keep current, relevant content on the front page, it shows visitors that we care enough to do the work to keep it fresh. Another side effect is keeping our own members informed of new stuff. That's always good.

This thread is to make community members aware that they can help TG out.We try to have one new article a day. This is made a lot easier if we have community support and input. After all, we don't want articles that interest only the CD team; we want articles that interest everyone. We can only do that if people tell us what they want by submitting ideas and articles.

ScratchMonkey · 09-10-2009, 02:08 PM

How about cherry-picking forum threads and using their first post as news stories? Then the front page becomes an accurate (if selective) representation of the community. And all it takes is a move from one forum section to another.

Taking that approach, what's needed is for people to open threads as if they might be selected for the front page. Knowing that one's thread might be "published" might be good incentive to invest extra effort into a polished initial post.

When I start a new thread, I tend to think of it like a blog post, so I have no problem with those going to the front page if you so desire.

**oniell121** · 09-10-2009, 02:50 PM

That actually is exactly what I was wanting. The only difference being was urging people to also post their posts in the semi-private submit content forum in addition to what ever forum they normally post in.

That is the normal way as of now. However, if you have suggestions on how to improve that system, please post them in the submit content forum as this doubles as a Contact CD forum. We are always open to new ways that would make life easier on members and the CD team.

I look forward to your reply.

ScratchMonkey · 09-10-2009, 03:52 PM

I don't post that often in the game-specific forums, since I don't play much anymore that TG hosts, but I'll try to remember that when posting in the General section.

Is there a way to have a thread appear in both its original and the News section, the way a Usenet newsgroup post can appear in multiple groups? If so, I frequently see threads in the Software and Hardware section that would make good front page articles, but it would be a shame if publishing them excised them from their original forum. (Check with Bamboo, our resident reporter of that kind of content.)

There's a "report post" button but it might be nice to have a thread button to nominate a thread for the front page, which acted like the report button but sent the message to the news team. This could also be another item in the Thread Tools menu, where one finds Subscribe Thread.

ScratchMonkey · 09-10-2009, 03:57 PM

Here's some recent threads from H&S that, with some polish, might have become full articles:

http://www.tacticalgamer.com/hardwar...-trumpets.html

http://www.tacticalgamer.com/hardwar...ia-center.html

http://www.tacticalgamer.com/hardwar...-dog-tags.html

The last one's mine, and had I been thinking of it as potential front page fodder, I probably would have structured it differently and added more verbiage to give context to outsiders.

**oniell121** · 09-10-2009, 04:00 PM

Thank you. I'll put these in the SC forum.

The technical questions are better taken to the Submit content forum where asch and the other TG admins can answer that better than I. Please do that; we are always interested in people ideas.

Acreo Aeneas · 09-11-2009, 05:37 PM

Another suggestion is to turn new threads made by Bamboo in the Hardware and Software section into a RSS Feed that people on the frontpage can subscribe to.

I know I've gotten quite a few PMs from new and old members when I jokingly had (still have) the words "Bamboo RSS Feed" in my signature.

**oniell121** · 09-11-2009, 10:33 PM

As a matter of fact, we have spoken with bamboo.

**Extinct** · 09-18-2009, 02:20 PM

ooo a Bamboo rrs feed would be amazing...

**oniell121** · 09-18-2009, 02:42 PM

I'll see what I can do. I'm not sure where it went.