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"Increasing traffic"

Back when the forbearer of this site sold games (as SR) there were lots of nice news articles about gaming.

Even though it's now we're a big part of the happy freeola family, I still think there could be a place for gaming news. It would be an ideal companion to the cheats section and encourage more traffic on this site (plus for the company, naturally).

You could even get us to contribute, I wouldn't mind writing articles for an official looking news page.

For this to work, then ideally, there will be as little Staff maintenance with this as possible.

Cheats + Walkthroughs etc works, because the public are motivated to submit cheats by potentially get something back for their contributions.

As far as news goes, there's an awful lot of it, and I heavily doubt that we could give a GAD award for every post..! Not only that, but the news has to be accurate and spell-checked etc. which takes much more time from Staff. Whereas, at the moment, the whole moderation process for newly submitted cheats/walkthroughs is pretty straight-forward and not overly time-consuming.

I have an old (now fairly dead) site (here) where the public would sign up, submit news, then I would moderate it and approve it. It only died because I didn't have time for it.

I don't see why we couldn't do something along those lines...but staff can't really spend much time (if any) looking for news... it's not practical. So it would really be down to Moderators / general public.

The way I see it working is this:

Have an official looking page with news for each console and general news (tabbed?).

Time allowing, Staff are assigned to finding news stories (from other sites to start with and then through contacts if things progress) and us lot send in news stories either by email or through some portal here. These are checked and added.

What wouldn't work is a News forum as the main page, it has to be official looking with pictures and layouts. The game forum could be linked to this for further chat.

Reviews would be great too, again with some of us reviewing as we do now and staff reviewing games where possible. If we're lucky this will get picked up by Metacritic and you'll be able to do a deal with games publishers to get review copies in the future.

One idea, which I'm sure you'll think is being raised for selfish reasons but is actually (IMO) a good idea anyway, is to pass on review copies to a select few forum reviewers, particularly if staff time is hard to come by (I can't see Tony watching all his staff play games all day!) so we can then review titles before they come out. In fact, it would be a great promotion and a good spin on the usual review sites (reviewed by actual gamers for gamers, or something along those lines).

News, as I stated, would at first come from other sites (with acknowledgement). There's no need of worrying about people then going off to that site as you'd make a point of selling this site as a place to gather all the other site's news in one place, far more convinient than going to tons of other sites and with a few of us helping we could gather that news pretty soon after it breaks.

Again, you'd eventually build up enough reputation to get exclusives straight from the developers themselves.

I'm sure someone will point out holes in my logic, but I still think it's a pretty good system.

McLong wrote:
> Garin wrote:
> pb wrote:
> You could even get us to contribute, I wouldn't mind writing
> articles for an official looking news page.
>
> User generated content is the road to the promised land, the
> rest of the internet realised this 5 years ago. I suspect it
> might take Freeola another 5. :P
>
> ...Fairly sure Chat, Cheats & Walkthroughs are all
> user-generated?

Lol, Job Title: 'Cheat Submitter' :D

Garin wrote:
> pb wrote:
> You could even get us to contribute, I wouldn't mind writing
> articles for an official looking news page.
>
> User generated content is the road to the promised land, the
> rest of the internet realised this 5 years ago. I suspect it
> might take Freeola another 5. :P

...Fairly sure Chat, Cheats & Walkthroughs are all user-generated?

Erowid wrote:
> but then I think it's doubtful
> we'd be able to post anything unique that couldn't be found
> elsewhere.

90% of the time that's probably very true for every gaming site on the net, unless you're someone like IGN perhaps... or have a cool uncle that works for a game developer.

But it's what this site is missing anyway - an online blog/news area specifically aimed at the gamers' scene :)

The thing is, pb - without sounding too cynical here (I hope) - there won't be the same desire to draw people in that special reserve used to have, as they don't sell games anymore.

Like you say though, if the forum members themselves were to post the news, it could work - but then I think it's doubtful we'd be able to post anything unique that couldn't be found elsewhere.

There's nothing I can think of to contribute, so really I should just shut up ... :)

pb wrote:
> You could even get us to contribute, I wouldn't mind writing
> articles for an official looking news page.

I wouldn't mind helping out as well. If you are worried about the content, maybe have it checked by a staffie before it gets published. Not wanting to put too much extra work onto your busy workload mind.

I'd gladly help - so long as there's not an expectation for a minimum number of contributions, etc as personal circumstances sometimes prevent me going online for periods of time.

Having a games news section would hopefully give people more to chat about on the forums (especially if linked to them in some way) and may increase regular visitors :)

Cool. I was expecting everyone to shoot down my idea.

I should have more faith! :)

It's a good idea and it would certainly be very helpful if members were to add content, too.

Obviously there are various factors to consider but it looks promising. I or someone else will get back to ya'll on this soon :)