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[Tracker]

I just suddenly had an idea I'd like to share with you. It is simple: given the fact that we've been delaying with the 'zine for two years now, mostly because of design problems and such, I tried to find a solution for this. Not a quick fix, but a long-term project.
We need to know that I recently became a follower of certain on-line 'zines and dynamically updated sites (such as theonion or cracked) and I noticed a big difference between them and us (without taking the general style and theme differences into account). We do have news, but those are mostly related to updates, which are one-way means of communicating with visitors. We might want to expand our community by metaphorically turning the site inside out*, doing some show and prove, and representing.

Practically, I suggest we should schedule the building of a new feature into the site (right after fixing the most violent bugs of course), which would be an e-zine zone. This would be the same as Abandoned Times, or nearly the same (in the sense of content). We would post the articles on site instead of creating .pdf files, which is a time consuming process. Using templates (like the News template we have when we post one, or more likely, the review templates) we could quickly share such information with a larger reader base. Maybe it's me but it was quite hard to find the last (and first) issue of AT, because it's hidden and it's like an archived version of an old zine from the 80s (which was the point of retro design, I know), but I liked the flashy reader-writer interaction and the dynamic flow of updates on other news sites. We barely have those things. Before anyone would flame me on this matter, I AM aware we are short on recruits for the grammar squad, the translation squads, and updates, but I believe starting a project like this could help us survive.
You say we barely have content to upload and are consuming our supplies way too quickly, I say why don't we create the missing content? We had volunteers for writing articles, and I think the relatively quick appearance of their works would encourage them a lot into writing, not to mention the mass amount of community feedback they'd receive after a hot "abandonware disappearing - reselling doomes us" or "imaginative games are disappearing - boring reboots are dooming us" article or anything like that. I hope you see my point. This would also solve our encouragement problem once and for all - who wouldn't want to feed his/her egoism by having the word in the gaming industry? Of course there would be grammar checks as serious as with reviews (you know, suprisingly or not I would not like to see any kind of "fuck gog.com" articles on site), but I think that wouldn't be much of a problem since the grammar squad rarely receives written material to work with.

I, stated once again, do not demand the invention of this feature right now, because I wouldn't like to have some buggy piece of crap pulled out of enthusiasm. No. I want something better. Then, having this project started and working, we would have all the advantages of printed gaming magazines with none of their drawbacks. We could have contests (a lot more contests), we could reward people who contribute, we could have a larger user group.

Let us turn that last sentence into a declaratory one instead of a conditional one by at least pausing for a moment to dream this vision.





*This means putting the hidden society of the forums into showcase, discussing some of the better topics in public... like 'Why are we here?' or 'Sick of boxshots' or 'Abandonia is a piracy website'

[arete]

Mmm, as far as the online zine goes: this is something I've wanted for some time. It's far easier using CSS stylesheets to do pages, simply because one stylesheet file==>many pages. And it would bypass the problem of uniformity of graphic design style (ie too many cooks spoil the zine).

What ezines did you like in terms of interactivity? (comments would be nice, but spambots might destroy us really fast :/ ...)

[Tracker]

Well, the only site I can think of is cracked.com - you know it. It's because it has chance of discussing an article right below it (we could easily make a link to the forums). And they're quite open regarding subjects as well. That is much more we have now. I see you see my point perfectly, that's what I'd like to see... That's all for now. First I'd like to see what others say about this.