Wurm Team Blog » Website and Forum

Community News Changes

Poseidon GM — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:19:32 +0000

Hi, I just thought I would let you guys know that the way we are going to be dealing with community submitted news is going to be changing pretty soon.

Further to a request for feedback on the forum, one of the most common responses we recieved concerned a desire for more community based news, and more accessibility when it comes to submitting that type of news. So, I took a look at the old system, and it seems that there are some aspects there which over-complicate things and that means no news is either submitted or recieved.

I believe the obvious solution is to make article submission a little easier, and this is the new method I would like to try out. Fundamentally, rather than submitting news via the site, you will now be able to submit news via the forum. To facilitate this I created a dedicated forum account to which news can be submitted via forum pm.

This account is currently named Community News, but we might change that – i’ll get back to you on it. At the moment only I (Wossoo) have access to this account, but at the moment that should be okay because I am now able to publish articles directly to the website. I will be looking for more people to help out in the future though.

To illustrate how I imagine this should work, I will give a little step by step example on how the process will hopefully work out.

Player writes a news story.
Player submits news story as a Forum PM to Community News forum account, including any images required etc.
Someone with access to the account (editor) recieves articles via inbox.
Editor checks the article, formats it for the website and contacts the news submitter if necessary.
Editor publishes the article on the website in the relevant section.

Hopefully this method will prove to be a little bit easier and more user-friendly when it comes to submitting community news to the website.

Next on the agenda is making community submitted news more available. At the moment it sort of feels, at least to me, as if the community news is hidden away in some dark corner of the website to gather e-dust. At the same time, we want the top of the home page to remain informative and useful.

If you have suggestions for improving the visibility of community news, or anything else please add them to the feedback thread.

Me? A Blogger? Why would anyone care what I have to say?

Wolfram — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:39:12 +0000

I dunno why, but I was encouraged to add a few posts to this new team blog. So here’s the first, I hope your ready for bed, because that’s where you’ll end up if you continue reading.

Had a bit of a debacle with the forum this week. I had to open my big mouth & mention that it’s probably possible to get an RSS feed of Rolf’s forum posts so that you can keep up with things like news about the new server. Turned out that such a thing was not possible, so I did some research over on the SMF forum & eventually found a solution that seemed to work, implemented it & the server crashed 12 hours later, so we had to turn it off again. We also got reports that it was perhaps sending updates from restricted forums to the general public, despite this supposedly being impossible. Those 2 problems made us throw in the towel over the issue. Also, I owe Gurubear 5s for losing a related bet.

It’s not all bad news though, you can still do it from within the forum itself.

If you go to his forum profile, located here:

Rolf

you can click on a link near the bottom that says “Show the last posts of this person.” to get a list of all his posts (that you have access to).

On a different topic, I’m jealous of those players who are lucky enough to live in Sweden (& maybe neighbouring countries too) since some players are organising a meet up & Rolf has said that he can probably attend too. Have a good time guys & girls, have a beer for me.

Wurmian Meeting in Sweden

Here’s a hint for a wurm easter egg, make a spoon.
Happy Wurming,

Uze

Unexpected Website Move

rolfjan — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:31:00 +0000

Just as I was going to have dinner I noted that the player count was falling instead of rising towards the peak hours. I quickly noticed that our website said some evilness about being suspended and that someone responsible should contact the hosting company. I agreed but was of course startled when I realized that that person would be me.

We were told a few weeks ago to move out of the web hotel and order a dedicated server since we used too much of the shared web hotel resources. I ordered the server since I wanted to avoid hassle – the move was supposed to be unnoticable if we stayed with them. After a while I received an email with some passwords that I didn’t need at the moment and was happy that the move was so seamless.

Now it turns out that we actually were still using the old website. At the bottom of that email were some lines telling me that I had to change the DNS as well so that people are redirected to the new server instead. I did actually wonder about that thing before but thought that they had moved the ip address along with the website somehow. Now they kindly offer to move the website again for which I am very grateful.

Anyways, in public I will blame them a bit for not pushing the DNS issue more and me a bit for not reading the email to the end. But secretly, when I turn out the light, I will blame them only so that I sleep better at night.