Front Page Posts

[Devin]

Time to bring out the paddle. Over the course of lets say a while the quality of Portal news has dwindled and it's not the actual content but how it's being displayed on the front page. I've brought this up once before but it was mainly about the size of the images used as well as having a huge block of text rather than a summary. A summary which someone reads and if it intrigues them then they'll click on the front page post to read the whole article in the thread. Few examples of what I'm talking about;

Spoiler

http://puu.sh/4v4OV.jpg

(Full on news thread rather than a summary plus the image isn't centered. The image is also repeated twice on the front page post.)

http://puu.sh/4v511.png

(Do I really need to explain this?)

http://puu.sh/4v53M.png

(Just found this and don't know if it's just me but it's a bit long for a portal news story. Perhaps a summary of what the contest is about and talk about the prizes. If people are interested they can click to read more into it. Rules, restrictions, etc.)

http://puu.sh/4v57L.jpg

(Same as above but this one could do with a brief summary. Then a list of the games. Perhaps spoiler the spoilers? Just seems a bit long IMO.)

http://puu.sh/4v5av.jpg

(Uh. Nice quality thread there but the front page post image is huuuuge.)

http://puu.sh/4v5dW.jpg

(Same as the above.)

http://puu.sh/4v5eD.jpg

(Same as the above.)

http://puu.sh/4v5gM.png

(This is my own post which was front paged.)

I'm not a part of Magazine Staff anymore so I don't know what the limitations are since the change to Xenforo. I hope I'm not alone in seeing these front page posts as being a little unprofessional for being the first thing people see when coming to GBAtemp. A nice conformed layout for news would be awesome. Something clean that gets peoples attention and make them want to read more about the topic in the thread.

 

[Ryukouki]

Aren't the fonts also inconsistent at times, or is it just me?

 

[Foxi4]

As far as my thread is concerned, I wasn't expecting it to pop up on the front page hence I only spoilered videos - now that it's there, it'd be nice if the game titles were spoilered indeed. I do agree that the quality of the front page is... at times debatable. Before a post is put on the front page, it should be adapted to be there. By that I mean that it should be edited to be brief, informative and relatively small in size - quality rather than quantity.

Aren't the fonts also inconsistent at times, or is it just me?

This is a major problem these days which is why I suggested that all materials pasted into the Post field should auto-default to the standard font, however I was told this is rather difficult to code under XenForo... Which means that it should be the duty of whoever marks the post as a front page one.

 

[Ryukouki]

Why can't we just keep it simple like photo, quote of information, and small blurb with our personal opinion...?​

EDIT:

Spoiler

I'm sorry, but how is this news? The format is murdering my eyes...

 

[DinohScene]

Foxi4
Fix your font colours chap.


Yeh I also noticed that the portal doesn't have the news the Old temp had.
Not to judge but I see a lot of homebrew news and gaming news posted, yet they pin only a select few and or news which isn't really relevant to gaming...
I thought Temp was about games and systems?

 

[Foxi4]

Why can't we just keep it simple like photo, quote of information, and small blurb with our personal opinion...?

EDIT:

Spoiler

I'm sorry, but how is this news? The format is murdering my eyes...

See, this is the problem. Users can post whatever the hell they want in "User Submitted News" - that's why the section is called "User Submitted News". If a given piece is to be front paged though, it should be screened for quality by the staff in charged and edited/rephrased if needs be.

Users are not GBATemp staff members - they format their posts the way they feel comfortable with. GBATemp Front Page consistency on the other hand is the staff's responsibility - they're in charge of it and they hand-pick newsworthy material.

It's hard to blame the users for lack of front page consistency if they haven't put anything on the front page themselves.

Foxi4
Fix your font colours chap.

Impossibru - I always type using the default font and the default colour with the occasional italics or bolding.

 

[Ryukouki]

See, this is the problem. Users can post whatever the hell they want in "User Submitted News" - that's why the section is called "User Submitted News". If a given piece is to be front paged though, it should be screened for quality by the staff in charged and edited/rephrased if needs be.

Users are not GBATemp staff members - they format their posts the way they feel comfortable with. GBATemp Front Page consistency on the other hand is the staff's responsibility - they're in charge of it and they hand-pick newsworthy material.

It's hard to blame the users for lack of front page consistency if they haven't put anything on the front page themselves.

Thing is I remember the front page material being a lot more stringent to even be posted up there. I totally see your point, and yeah, this stuff really needs to be screened by staff. Instead of an immediate publish, it should have to await a queue of sorts and then a front page staffer or whatever can quickly skim it, and then give it the okay to be front paged. I used to write and work with a video game media site, and I remember having to have all of my posts get queued for the first month to ensure I was posting at a quality standard.

 

[Foxi4]

Welp. In any case, I've spoilered the games list in my thread - it should take up much less space now. I don't think I'll write a different summary/introduction seeing that it's old news at this point anyways.

 

[Devin]

Just going to get this thread a little more attention in case it's overlooked.

tj_cool
Costello

The main thing would be to establish a template for Magazine Staff to use in order to get a nice professional looking Portal news section. I know tj_cool implemented some kind of feature where all the front page news pictures were a certain size but perhaps it was taken out? I'm not sure what can be done as the front page posts seem to mirror whatever the original thread's first post is. Staff would have to edit the original post with a nice summary but the main content wouldn't be on the front page if they did.

Is there a feature that allows the front page posts and USN posts to be separate entities? So a Staff member could clean up a USN thread post with the template and then post it on the front page. Perhaps at the bottom put a "Read more." link to the original USN thread.

 

[Nathan Drake]

I would also like to bring this front page post to attention. I could have sworn we decided months ago, for probably the fifth or sixth time since I joined, that sales numbers of any kind weren't even USN worthy, much less front page worthy. I can understand we want more, active front page portal movement, but some time really does need to be taken to check quality against quantity.

 

[Snailface]

Good points Devin. It also kind of galled me when Hiroshi Yamauchi's obit was pasted over with a Dark Souls announcement within a few hours after his passing. Highly disrespectful to a man who's been so important to the entire game industry. We kept Steve Jobs up for a day -- it'd be nice to at least extend the same courtesy for Mr. Yamauchi.

 

[Costello]

It's a global effort from the moderating team and the magazine staff that needs to be made.
Obviously these posts shouldn't have been posted as is in the homepage, they should either be formatted properly or just stay in the user submitted news.
we're conscious of this, but any help is welcome Devin

 

[Ryukouki]

If you would like help, I'd love to be able to help out in my spare time, as well. I actually have time to do things now!

 

[Thanatos Telos]

Costello, tj_cool, getting this problem where pics are spreading over towards the new posts.

Spoiler

 

[Foxi4]

This is because Xenforo (or whoever posted them) picks the first image from the post and posts it as the avatar of the original poster if said poster has no avatar, and since those images do not follow the fixed dimensions of an avatar it results in a clusterf*ck... or so I assume judging by the fact that users with avatars do not break borders (see: Another World's post) and those posted by users without avatars do (see: the rest).

Nevermind, some users with avatars have the same problem, which only leads me to suspect that the image field doesn't resize itself correctly.

 

[Joe88]

noticed that too, seems the fp is getting worse and worse

 

[BORTZ]

Spoiler

love the new look

 

[Thanatos Telos]

Spoiler

love the new look

Already said it. You just got ninja'd.

 

[nukeboy95]

i know its been posted but

Spoiler

 

[Costello]

Yeah I've noticed this.
I've looked into it and I can't seem to figure out why this is happening, considering nothing has changed code wise.
I need to wait for tj's confirmation that he hasn't been working on anything recently