5punk

This past week I've been having a few ideas for posts that might generate a bit of discussion, the 'better sequels' thread being one of them, but I've been hanging onto the rest for later. I had a thought a minute ago though; we could write articles. Plenty of other sites do, and they tend to be easier to read than forum posts. People can still comment on them, and it might draw a bit more attention from the outside world. I don't know what it would entail exactly, so I don't know how feasible it would be, but I've got a few ideas for stuff that might prove interesting and naturally any 5punker would be able to contribute their own.

So far I was thinking of:
Top 25 influential games
25 things that should be in every MMONG
How to have fun in a MMONG without the grind

That was just while I was washing up, and there are enough creative 5punkers out there to stockpile articles to be able to release them at least fortnightly I'd say. So, techy people, is it easily doable? Creative people, are you interested? Everyone, would it be worth it?

Another splendid idea from Dog Pants!
I say we should most definitely do this and I'd like to appoint Pete as a potential writer, or perhaps we should team him up with buzzmong/Berk/other people that like to discuss, for added laughs.

Well I was thinking, for the lists at least, of putting it up on the forum for discussion then writing it up as an article.

You know me, always like to talk!

I think this is an excellent idea, and if we can pimp said articles in other places (pcg/rps maybe) then that'll be good too.

25 best 5punky games, books and films articles would take a lot of voting if it was done like that, but if everyone who posts, lurks and occasionally wanders past is poked until they answer then that should help with three very large and interesting articles.

Maybe a thread to let everyone post a game that is their favourite, or contains a single outstanding memory of gaming, even if the game is mostly shit. Then writing it up into an article?

We could do that with that thread on best/worst drunken moments.

Berk has a wiki article that's years in the not finishing, pretty much everything ever about pc tech. An easier, slimmer post in the same vein would work well.

A guide to look at that explains a bit more than the budget pc thread and before you request help from the bitches kind of thing?

Plus articles on things like the old rage cards and why there were great/sucked or "9800 vs 6600" etc.

I did have an 'article' type thing in mind a while ago about the first time I got truly addicted to a game and the games it has happened with since then.

Things that need to be in mmongs has to included urinating on people in rp servers. Possibly the single best thing in AOC (except maybe parking mammoths in silly places)

I don't think everything requires discussion on the boards first, just stuff that people might be able to contribute to. We could come to an agreement on the 25 most 5punky games, but stuff like stupid things done when drunk are better in a thread I think because it's more of a discussion than an article. I like the idea of your first addiction article; a personal piece that might be interesting to other gamers. There's probably a few Eve stories out there that might prove interesting even to non players. Like Operation Bubba, for example.

Dog Pants wrote:Like Operation Bubba, for example.

Is that the one where you got raped in a shower?

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:
Is that the one where you got raped in a shower?

No, that was just Bubba.

I think this sounds like a good idea, but it might be nice to stay away from the traditional ones such as 'top 25 games' etc. How about trying to do more educational articles such as 'Top cooking tips for geeks' 'Dice games for those who shave' etc. This way we might get something a bit different out of it. To try it out, it might be worth picking things from one of the news feeds as if there is enough interest in those it should follow on with 5punky articles.

randomgazz wrote:I think this sounds like a good idea, but it might be nice to stay away from the traditional ones such as 'top 25 games' etc. How about trying to do more educational articles such as 'Top cooking tips for geeks' 'Dice games for those who shave' etc. This way we might get something a bit different out of it. To try it out, it might be worth picking things from one of the news feeds as if there is enough interest in those it should follow on with 5punky articles.

Fair point, although ruling out top x of x is a bit harsh, we just need to be creative about it. Best 5punky games isn't a list of best games, but a list of games we can call 5punky. Innovastive games aren't neccessarily good, but pioneer something that other games have used ever since.

I was thinking about trying to compile a "HELP MY PC IS FUCKED" article of things to do before asking for halp with threads regarding general problems and solutions.

I've not looked into it properly yet so I haven't got a definate idea on how i'd slap it all together but I think it's worth while.

TezzRexx wrote:I was thinking about trying to compile a "HELP MY PC IS FUCKED" article of things to do before asking for halp with threads regarding general problems and solutions.

I've not looked into it properly yet so I haven't got a definate idea on how i'd slap it all together but I think it's worth while.

I've been meaning to do this for a while, there's a fair bit in the wiki, but it needs mushing into forum form.

How would you envision them appearing? As forum posts, wiki entries, or completely seperate entities like magazine pages, with a free-for-all comments? Would the formatting be the rather restrictive bbcode, the horrid wiki markup or something more flexible so that they could have inline images in the right place and stuff?

An easy way to do it would be to create a 5punk blog with anyone who wants to write an article as contributors, using the Wordpress easy install at DH, although this might feel a little disconnected from the main site - I'm not sure how easily we could link between the two or synchronise member's logins.

I envisioned almost an FAQ set up;

"try this"
"try more of this"

and then links to past forum posts for more varied problems and solutions. However, upon thinking about it, that may cause more problems as people end up going through the whole thread to find the solution...

I think Wordpress would probably do for formatting. Anery has one and it's easy and clear to read. It would be nice to get it all in sync with the rest of the site, like colour scheme, top bar, memberships. All part of the 'corporate image'.

I didn't have 'how to's in mind when I thought this up, but technical articles are a valid idea. They might warrant a difference in formatting though, like if your computer does this go here, if not go here. Like a Fighting Fantasy book.

Dog Pants wrote:I didn't have 'how to's in mind when I thought this up, but technical articles are a valid idea. They might warrant a difference in formatting though, like if your computer does this go here, if not go here. Like a Fighting Fantasy book.

That gives me the fear, there's no way we could cover anything like that level of detail and still be anything like useful.

I might get around to doing a proper troubleshooting thread in the hardware forum though, get people to the point they can be helped easily.

A wordpress thingy is easy to set up, but it'd take a few of our arty people to make it look like the main site.

We should link and "advertise" ourselves heavily on it, so people finding it would know it wasn't an isolated site. Not sure about what blogroll-type gadgets it should have. We should let the googlebots see it.

The userlist not being synced isn't a massive problem - the wiki's isn't after all. I think there's enough granularity in the roles you can grant - admin, mods, authors, contributors, commenters. Obviously a spam felcher and moderation on account creation/anonymous messages as WP blogs get spammed to fuck by those ruskies.

Not sure if we should use the comments built-in, or make a forum post for each article for discussion - harder to implement automatically, but no too hard for each author to do manually, and will avoid discussions being fragmented across two locations.

Also blog.5punk.co.uk, 5punk.co.uk/articles/, other?

Yeah, not a problem not having the two memberships linked. It's concievable that people posting comments on the blog posts might not want/use forum accounts anyway.

I absolutely agree about pimping 5punk; that's most of the reason I thought of the idea. If I've googled something I'm much more likely to read an article than a forum post, and that could lead to people who like our writing style looking further into the site. Obviously then, allowing googlebots is essential. Good point about the comments though. If it's feasible to have the comments and forum posts to be the same entity, reflected in both places, that would be very cool, but in reality I think leaving blog comments and putting a link on the blog to pre/post article forum discussions would work well. In the case of articles where the author has discussed it previously on the forum it might have a nice 'behind the scenes' feel for a reader.

Finally, 5punk.co.uk/articles/ gets my vote.

No idea how good this is because I haven't really looked at it, all I did was type "wordpress phpbb integration" into google, but you could try this thing or something similar: http://www.wp-united.com/

Blimey, potentially great find there. I don't know how the tech gubbinry works, but integrating WP and phpbb sounds perfect. Nice find!

I'll add that to the new forum, see how it copes. And yes to /articles/.
On a similar note, there is a mod to allow forum users to edit the wiki without signing up again.