Small Request When Sharing News

[Nick Calandra]

Hey folks,

Glad to see so many of you are already enjoying the forums! I wanted to make a small request on new threads here going forward.

A lot of news is shared here and discussed and as we work to merge our forums community and main website community into one entity (more on that later), it'd be great if you could share links to our own work instead of outside sources where possible. We tend to cover a lot of the bigger stories, so having those linkbacks in our forums helps us out a bit and may even drive more discussion back and forth between the two areas of the site.

If we didn't cover the story, no big deal share whatever source you wish, but in the case that we did cover it, if you could swap out those links we'd really appreciate it.

Thanks all!

 

[CriticalGaming]

Why dont you guys post a thread of your latest news article on the forums when its posted on the main site so that people just popping in will see it and wont post new threads about things youve already reported on?

 

[Nick Calandra]

Why dont you guys post a thread of your latest news article on the forums when its posted on the main site so that people just popping in will see it and wont post new threads about things youve already reported on?

Eventually we'll have the capability to automate that, but for right now we're just doing a 100 other things so honest truth is it's a matter of remembering to do it haha.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Eventually we'll have the capability to automate that, but for right now we're just doing a 100 other things so honest truth is it's a matter of remembering to do it haha.

As you said, it's remembering to do so among the other stuff going on, so it's a "help us out?" sort of thing, and I appreciate that. But even if it's not automated, I kinda feel like that should still be on The Escapist staff to make a thread for it themselves, so that we can add to the discussion in said thread and avoid flooding the topics that come out. Not trying to sound ungrateful with you doing a ton of things, mind.

Looking at the site itself, I don't even really know where to start on finding said news, since I don't see a "news" section. Would it be under Opinions? Columns? Something else? And if it wasn't covered, then I don't know how much digging I'd have to do just to come to that conclusion. I wouldn't mind a tip on making the digging easier, if one was to try and help out.

I wanna ask for clarification on this part though... "but in the case that we did cover it, if you could swap out those links we'd really appreciate it. " So, if we had a source for some news we wanted to use in the OP of a thread that added to the discussion in its own way, and The Escapist covered it as well... Would you rather us add The Escapist's content as a source to the thread, or replace the source we had in mind with The Escapist's content instead?

 

[Nick Calandra]

As you said, it's remembering to do so among the other stuff going on, so it's a "help us out?" sort of thing, and I appreciate that. But even if it's not automated, I kinda feel like that should still be on The Escapist staff to make a thread for it themselves, so that we can add to the discussion in said thread and avoid flooding the topics that come out. Not trying to sound ungrateful with you doing a ton of things, mind.

Looking at the site itself, I don't even really know where to start on finding said news, since I don't see a "news" section. Would it be under Opinions? Columns? Something else? And if it wasn't covered, then I don't know how much digging I'd have to do just to come to that conclusion. I wouldn't mind a tip on making the digging easier, if one was to try and help out.

I wanna ask for clarification on this part though... "but in the case that we did cover it, if you could swap out those links we'd really appreciate it. " So, if we had a source for some news we wanted to use in the OP of a thread that added to the discussion in its own way, and The Escapist covered it as well... Would you rather us add The Escapist's content as a source to the thread, or replace the source we had in mind with The Escapist's content instead?

Yea, tech removed it from the main nav a while back, I'll have them re-add it back on Monday. All of our content hits the front page though, or you can go to escapistmagazine.com/v2/latest

As for the clarification. If it adds to the discussion in its own way that's fine, just talking for like general news coverage. Per say the Crash Bandicoot thread, we covered that a few min after Gematsu broke the story, so it's worthwhile for our own community to link back to us to read our coverage and discuss that. If that makes sense.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

As for the clarification. If it adds to the discussion in its own way that's fine, just talking for like general news coverage. Per say the Crash Bandicoot thread, we covered that a few min after Gematsu broke the story, so it's worthwhile for our own community to link back to us to read our coverage and discuss that. If that makes sense.

It makes sense, sort of. In more clear cut terms, I'm more or less asking if this is a case of "We want our coverage to be included in the original post, as well as other sources if the user so wishes" or a "We want our coverage to be the only coverage sourced in the topic's original post" sort of thing. I do agree that linking back to The Escapist's content is a good thing to do. It's simply the words you used before, "swap out those links", that is making me curious about what exactly you mean by that.

02/07/2020 edit: The eerie silence on that matter makes me even more curious

 

[Drathnoxis]

Why dont you guys post a thread of your latest news article on the forums when its posted on the main site so that people just popping in will see it and wont post new threads about things youve already reported on?

This. If you want something done right you should do it yourself. Yeah it'd be great if people did your job for you, but people are going to make threads in the way that's most convenient for themselves, and double checking to see if the Escapist has already posted the story is probably not going to happen. How about when you see something that the Escapist has covered you post the link to the Escapist article in the thread and then people can read it for comparison. Or not. I rarely ever follow links as it is.

 

[Dreiko]

I genuinely have no idea which of these things you have or haven't covered. If I somehow do end up knowing, sure, I'd link it, but no way in hell I'm scouring your annals when making a new topic. Maybe make a feature which lists news when a new topic with a matching keyword is being made? I dunno. You could make a topic about these things yourselves too, a matching topic for everything reported. Didn't we used to have a "featured content" subforum before? That's prolly what you need here.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Didn't we used to have a "featured content" subforum before? That's prolly what you need here.

I vote for this. Leave the other subforums for the usual content, rather than get the Escapist featured content all mixed in and muddled