Andytizer

I thought that Option (2) was the natural choice, but I can see some disadvantages raised now by hungry_eyes. It is better for us to remain impartial where possible. Option (3) is not ideal in my opinion, as our 'Series' page is not an ideal place for a user to land on as it looks like an empty page, people might miss the right navigation. Perhaps sticking to Option (1) is the simplest for us, as we also follow Wikipedia's policy, and it is chronological and impartial. It also means that we don't change the names of a game article once it's created - this stops problems with people hotlinking to the wrong pages e.g. [[Tomb Raider]] will always take you to the same page. If we start swapping article names like [[Tomb Raider]], [[Tomb Raider (1998)]] and [[Tomb Raider (2013)]] people are gonna get confused if they come from external links. If they reboot again to create [[Tomb Raider (2020)]] we don't want to be in a position to have to rename again.

These changes look really nice, improvement over the older ones, thanks for doing them. Are the !? unknown template updated, because the old one is still showing for me. However in the long term, I'm still planning on using the icon font pack e.g. http://icomoon.io/app/ - this allows speedy loading, css magic (easy to do things like hovers and animations) as well as a consistent icon look across the wiki.

I have spoken to the developer I was in contact with, and he may be able to start as early as Friday. I'll keep everyone posted on the progress.

Just to update everyone - I have put out more feelers to the world for developers, including Masked_Turk's company who I hope will reply soon. I've received an interesting proposal from an experienced IPB developer who can give a good rate and will be able to start work on the 2nd August. However we still have yet to make a final decision, more offers are still appreciated.

Hi hungry_eyes, this is great, I would much rather work with Jan and his company rather than gamble with an unknown developer. I will get in contact with them about doing this specific IP Board bridge. However I do hope that Jan continues some of his free contributions to the site, including his fantastic CSS skills :). CiMExchange looks really good, similar to Simtropolis. With this type of setup we'll have a much tighter and more integrated community website.

We've been planning to migrate to IP Board for some time - there are some very big and exciting benefits to using this system to manage and grow our community, including plans for a new community orientated News website focused on PC game fixes (to replace the Port Report), a proper Downloads system with comments, ratings, tags, filters, etc., as well as far superior Forum and community features. Ideally we would like to implement a single sign-on solution, so that a user logging into the Wiki can use the same credentials on the IP Board, as well as commenting on the News website, and also editing the sidewikis. The goal is to use IPS Connect to integrate with the master accounts on MediaWiki. However we've hit a roadblock in terms of development, and we will most likely need to pay for web development help externally to integrate to a professional standard. Our last Kickstarter in January was a resounding success and has helped create a large fund to purchase games for writing articles for almost every single release in 2013 - so far we have supplied over 80 full game keys. In order to fund the new Forum integration, I would like to discuss starting an additional new Kickstarter project to raise development funds. The goal would likely be between £500-£1,500, as this is the range of the quotes I've received so far. The final choice in developer would require careful consideration of their cost and their skill, experience and professionalism. Surplus funds could also be used for developing customisations to the board and integrate new features, for example, it would be good to have a proper comparison slider that would pop out into a Lightbox - the kind of custom work that a professional might be able to supply. Some of the Kickstarter pledge rewards could be repeated from the last one, and Pridit has also made a suggestion for opening up a private members forum for ALL past and future donators and Kickstarter backers, and run various competitions and giveaways just for those contributors. Interested in hearing feedback on this.

Done!

Hi can someone help to make a template please, one similar to Stub and Cleanup but for Assignment - basically to say 'This game is available to be requested for free - information available here.' and link to a thread. You can use an icon from the front page like the HELP one. Thanks!

Port Reports at the moment I am letting slide, because I am intending to replace it with a more collaborative, 'news' type service once the new IP Board comes into place. Port Reports are not appropriate for every game, however if you are keen to do one for any game please get in contact with me and we can discuss and make a judgement.

Assignments is something that is quite central to the growth of the wiki. We aim to cover new games so that we are always relevant. However because of my dayjob workload, I am having trouble keeping up with everything. Please help out by: 1) Updating the Notable releases template on the main page. Getting this always up to date will help the community to focus on newly released games. I am thinking we should keep up to date with ALL Steam releases now, this means cross-referencing with Steam's 'New releases' and 'Coming soon' tabs. 2) Please make more requests in this forum for new games. We have a warchest from the Kickstarter and I'm happy for us to use it to help keep the site up to date. Comments and suggestions welcome.

Thanks this is an interesting idea Rabika - /r/Gamedeals is an enormous game-buying subreddit. Whilst we could suggest to throw our affiliate codes in there, I don't feel that we deserve it more than any of those charities that are already established there. However if other 'private' websites do make it onto there, I'd be happy to throw our hat into the ring too.

I've detailed some of the issues experienced in a recent reddit post in this forum thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=374&p=1207#p1207 I'd like to remind everyone not to 1) link to specific reddit thread that supports PCGamingWiki, and 2) not to downvote comments that criticise PCGamingWiki unless they do not contribute to the conversation. Reasons are stated in above link.

Well we ended up going with something along the lines of hungry_eyes' suggestion here: The post was extremely successful, nearly hitting the top 25 of /r/all before it was 4 hours old. However I made a crucial error in replying to this post and linking to the reddit thread, which constitutes 'vote manipulation' and then the post was removed by the mods around hour 4. Please remember to be very careful around posting links to individual threads on reddit that support PCGamingWiki, as this may be cause for them to be removed. I also received this message from an /r/gaming mod: "in addition to the amount of downvotes on basically all of the slightly negative comments in the thread makes us suspect vote manipulation." Please consider the official line on rediquette "Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it." If you happen to come across PCGamingWiki being mentioned in a thread negatively, please don't automatically downvote it unless it does not contribute to the conversation.

So we've discussed some marketing ideas in another thread and we've explored a few of the options which have proven very successful. Nicereddy made the suggestion of posting up a meme to help promote the site. This is especially important as the Steam sales are coming in the next 3 weeks (details from 2012 here) and I hope to get the word out about our project and hopefully attract new blood and new editors. I've been experimenting with creating a PCGamingWiki meme on livememe. Would love to see our community create new memes and text based on this (scroll to the bottom, click 'Add Captions'), or you can make a new meme based on a new image. Edit: I have discovered that quickmeme have been banned from reddit for vote manipulation, so I've changed the links to use livememe.com instead of quickmeme. However I do find the quickmeme generator a bit easier to use - you can use the PCGamingWiki meme on quickmeme and we can reupload the complete to imgur in order to get on reddit. Maybe after we have collated a few, we can do a vote on which is the best, and where we should post them to to get the most exposure. My main target is reddit's /r/gaming but it could also apply to other image boards too, although I am not familiar on the rules on /v/ etc. Some details on the meme rules on reddit's /r/gaming. Some examples I created:

I'm no expert on Linux/WINE so I will have to defer to others for guidance. Let's say that the WineHQ ratings are no good as Soeb says, is there any value in placing a link to the relevant WineHQ entry somewhere in the infobox (or the new SMW Infobox that Soeb has been working on). It just seems a shame not to link to (what appears in my non-Linux using eyes) a resource for fixing PC games.

Some further clarification: Links to pcgamingwiki.com inside comments have never been automatically moderated. However, posts as links may have been moderated if 'Automoderator' is a moderator in a given subreddit. If your post does get caught in the spamfilter (as in, it does not appear in the /new/ queue) then you should message the moderators and also let me know. I was informed about the unban around 9pm GMT on 24/06/13, but I was not clear about whether it extended beyond /r/Games and /r/gaming. Nicereddy, the work you've been doing has been fantastic and I have certainly noticed the influx of traffic from those comments. As long as our supporters maintain that 90% of their activity is non-self-promotional, as you have been doing, we'll be golden.

In mid-2012, I was penalized for excessive promotion of PCGamingWiki on reddit, which resulted in a shadowban meaning that links to pcgamingwiki.com would get stuck in the spam filter of reddit. Around 6 months ago, reddit admin Deimorz kindly lifted the ban on /r/Games last year, and I'm happy to announce that the ban should now be lifted for reddit in general. This also means that pcgamingwiki.com links can be posted to the very large and influential /r/gaming, which was the subreddit that provided the very first large influx of users and editors of PCGamingWiki back in February 2012. I would like to remind our community members that excessive promotion of any sites that you are affiliated to constitutes spam. According to reddit, "If over 10% of your submissions are your own site/content, you're almost certainly a spammer". No matter how much you want to spread the word about PCGamingWiki, I would like to make sure people respect the 10%/90% balance, and to contribute positively to other online communities. If anyone from the PCGamingWiki community would like to promote the site reddit, I would like them to consult me first. This is to make sure that we do not want to break any spam rules which may result in a permanent shadowban on the domain. Many thanks, Andytizer/Daily_concern

I'd agree that it looks better (more like disambiguation) to have at the top as it is done here: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Serious_Sa ... _Encounter Also I like Pridit's change on the EVE article's Key points to show multiplayer community activity, as this has a big effect on whether a game is worth picking up or not.

FYI Soeb is working on a new Audio settings header too, so that kind of information can go there.

It would be nice to have a discussion about the Key points section as it is getting very bloated and unfocused. Perhaps we can institute some ideas and rules for what goes where. Key points I created this because I wanted a very simple way of telling a person who doesn't know anything about the game, the 2 or 3 very most important things. However, it has become a 'catch-all' place to dump all information, e.g. has 7.1 sound, has modding capabilities, etc. which I don't think are very 'key'. Key points are more like: - has unfixed killer bug, e.g. save game corruption - no FOV/widescreen resolution/etc They could also include 'essential' things that 99% of people would recommend - i.e. your enjoyment of the game would be severely hampered without considering these first: - Dark Souls' DSFix - Fallout's FIXT - Deus Ex New Vision omd Things like console commands, other mods - we could place these in a Other information header which could sit above the Issues fixed/unresolved section. My suggestion for rules for Key points: - Include information on crippling bugs and missing features - Include the most important setting or mod - which 99% of people would consider essential - Limit to a total of 4 key points (any more, and it can hardly be considered 'key'

Following a conversation with Piotr, GOG.com games are now added back into the press account where all future titles will be shared. If you have access to the account you should be able to see a new batch of games. If you're interested in getting involved please contact me.

Thanks I'll take a look at the issue.

Thanks for the support Newmansan. I intended to consult you as well but you weren't online right before I wrote the announcement :). Also I intend to create a screenshot comparison system (using the sliders) which will work on both the new IP Board Forum and the Wiki. The technical details are a bit hazy but it should be quite simple to implement.

After much discussion with our moderation team, it has become clear that the current forum system of PHPBB3 leaves a lot to be desired. Whilst the forums have served us very nicely over the last 7 months, I do think that a more feature-complete piece of software will be more suited for our ever-growing community. I have pulled the trigger on purchasing a copy of IP Board, a pricey piece of kit (all in all, $250 license for the first year), but we hope that it will have a marked improvement on our community. In addition to the IP Board forum software, which looks and performs and looks great, I am very excited about two specific modules: - IP Downloads - the same system used by the ST/Exchange by Simtropolis. The module will allow us to rate and categorise individual files. It will particularly help with areas such as Gunpoint Wiki's forum which hosts a whole load of custom levels with no filtering or rating. In addition to custom levels, my hope is that the new software will allow PCGamingWiki to preserve exes, zips, profiles and fixes for their games for a whole new future of PC gamers. - IP Content - after the huge success of our blog The Port Report, I would like for us to expand our intake and draw more widely from the community for commissioning features like Port Reports, modding guides, interviews and features. Using IP Content, and taking another cue from the home page of Simtropolis (which uses IP Content), any PCGamingWiki member will be able to contribute to our new community website. A team of editors will be in place to promote/edit/proof-read forum posts and external articles of interest that are submitted, and all community members will be able to comment using PCGamingWiki forum and wiki accounts. My hope is that we will create a formidable daily PC game news website that focuses on the issues we care about - DRM, FOV, optimisations, control customisations and good PC ports. Eventually we will archive the The Port Report in its current Wordpress/Disqus format and integrate this into the new IP Content. I intend for the new site to sit on the subdomain community.pcgamingwiki.com - please let me know if you have any specific feedback on how this is implemented. Here are some additional features I hope to implement, if you have any more please comment: - PCGamingWiki and new Community site to share cookie sessions. - Forum and Wiki profiles to be linked in some way (e.g. Forum profile linking to contributions and user page). JRWR is currently working on implementing the new software, which may take a few weeks. Complications includes bridging the accounts between MediaWiki, the subwikis and the IP Board. Many thanks for his hard work, we will keep you updated as progress is being made.

If it's okay, I've merged this into this article: http://gunpointwiki.net/wiki/Level_editor to put all our information in a single place.