Topic: Outdated/Incorrect info on New Pokemons page and Mega Evolutions Page

[Kitt]

I was looking through the main site and saw the New Pokemons Page and noticed a lot of info on the Pokemon were "not released yet" but xy have been out for now a year.

Also, on the megas evolutions page, there is a slight glitch on Lopunny. It lists Lopunny as Psychic/Fighting.

Just thought I'd bring that up for correction.

[Turner]

Yeah some of the pages are frankly way behind, there's just not really enough hands on deck to keep fresh news coming in and the information section of the site maintained.

Anyway, I'm not going to make demands or expectations of the site but instead I will say, I've been a comment moderator of the content pages for almost a year now (I think) and the workload is easy for me. I've checked in daily to moderate the comments queue and it doesn't feel like a chore. If anyone wants to make the case for a more open user submitted news/content system then I'm more than happy to moderate, fact-check and do QC daily for anything that gets submitted. I work full time and I don't believe this would be difficult for me to maintain.

[Joeno]

The people working on content don't anymore and it's not a project I'm going to take on - I've got other things I need to sort first and updating content just isn't high on my list.

We've had several content drives and submission options. The content drives usually lead to maybe one site page on average per time, if that much, and the always available submission form gets a single page submission each year.

Moderation and QC isn't the issue. Spending the time to get content written is, as well as getting it written well, sourced and looking good. People just don't write the content. Even if they say they will, I rarely actually see any results from it. Get that sorted first, then we can look for any QC needed.

[Turner]

Regarding news and content, if we are to separate the two I'd plainly say - Count me out of content. The reason being is that 'content' (If we're defining it as non-news game/franchise information) is just too numerous and tedious for me to put my time into.

Simply put, I think there are numerous sites out there which deliver and arrange content in a layout that I find much more conducive to personal reference than PKMN.NET. I find the lines between plucked content and plagiarised content to be blurred too. I'm not suggesting we should do it this way, but if it was up to me alone I would just lift objective statistical and factual content from an existing site and just change the layout enough to be unique to my own site. The information is practically in the public domain now so I personally would not have any moral hesitations regarding this and my own standards of quality would see to it that I don't appear as just a rip-off of those sites.

News is a different story. I'm not against the idea of submitting news as regularly as I can, but I find the composition options to be sparse. Looking at the Submit News Topics page there doesn't appear to be any form of HTML or markup to make use of and I'm not sure about images either. Honestly looking at the layout of the front of the site, I can't see any reason why people would use the news page as a regular go-to source when the existing alternatives are cleaner and clearer. Generally the other sites have writing styles that are more consistent and there isn't that 'some articles are links, others are bulletins' thing going on (which at first had me thinking that the news page had a load of broken links on it). I'm also unsure of where we stand on unofficial items - leaks and the like. Though that's a minor thing.

Maybe it's a harsh criticism, maybe that's what we need. I wouldn't expect you to update the content Joeno, maybe I'm way off track here but I was under the assumption that you, like many others, didn't spend the same amount of time on Pokemon as you used to and had other projects you'd rather get on with instead, so I never had those expectations.

I am interested however, in how possible it would be to have the main appearance of the site updated and the news submission or even content submission (though I've not looked at the latter) forms to be made more robust. Even just a stripped down WYSIWYG editor like tumblr or wordpress would be fine by most people, I think even what we have here in the forums would be more than enough.

I'm not suggesting you can bash any of these tasks out in an afternoon though, so please don't get that impression. But I also think - you don't want to produce content, which makes sense, but may be more inclined to work on the actual functionality of the site, whereas I think people here would be more inclined to write content if the platform for doing so was more inviting, whether that's the actual submission form itself or just seeing enough of a change in the site that they get the impetus to do something. I think at least there is a middle ground that can be reached.

I understand finding content writers is the first step in that, but in my opinion I'd say the thing that will put most people off doing that in the first place is manually writing content that already exists on at least 3-4 other fansites when it can be transferred in bulk. I mean, I just personally don't see the difference in a reader viewing Hitmontop's egg moves or anime appearances on one site and Hitmontop's egg moves or anime appearances on another, it's exactly the same information so I can see why nobody would want to submit it piece by piece to a site that gets less attention than the bigger names. You even have projects like PokeAPI which are trying to solve this problem for smaller sites, so I think this is probably going to be the biggest hurdle in that first step.

[Joeno]

News requires timeliness. There's no way we're going to achieve the turn around times required for that. The front page of the site is intentionally set up to not focus fully on news, but instead draw attention to other parts of the site as well - when that change was made it had slowed down too much already.

(I never wanted the bulletins and was trying to remove them, but people insisted...)

Content submissions don't require HTML - the submission system is actually set up to do a bunch of those changes automatically. We have a lot of custom stuff as well - a WYSIWYG editor would bypass a bunch of things like automatic links, different image styles etc. Writing that from scratch is not easy - and shouldn't be necessary for submitting content, as that's easily handled when putting the article up.

But as I said, the submissions were non-existent even when the site was more active. Now that it's not, we're not getting enough traffic for it to be worth my time. To make it so, increase the input first.

As for PokeAPI - it's the Pokedex that I'm currently working on updating, and the data-focused/structured information I personally want to get more done on. That's where we can generate a bunch of information more easily and potentially get more done than sites using a more flat structure. It's also a project I've been on for probably nearly two years now, so there's not much to expect there...

[Turner]

The timeliness is something I personally think I can manage. What I'll do first though is throw together a basic Pokemon news blog somewhere else and get used to updating it just to see if I can keep up with the information flow when nothing particularly big is happening in the Pokemon world. I've often seen a lot of news that never or rarely gets covered by English sources that I'd like to throw in too, so it's probably worth me getting to grips with keeping the output quick and informative without spending 30 minutes writing a single piece of news.

As far as the content submission form is concerned, personally I can see how that would scare people off content. HTML and CSS isn't unusual to me but I can imagine that it would intimidate people who are not familiar with either. One thing that strikes me straight away is the lack of the preview button. I'm not sure what exactly lies beyond the 'save' button as I don't want to start submitting test content, but it's something to think about when you look at it from the perspective of someone who's never submitted content before.

Regarding the rest, I think what we're going to have to do at some point when the cogs look a little more in motion is to gather the active community in a new thread and have a diplomatic clear-out discussion of what should stay and what should go. Maybe best done if/when there's a bit more direction and we're looking at what aspects of the site stands in the way of progression.

[Joeno]

My point is that to submit, you don't need to put in HTML. It doesn't say that anywhere. That's the easy part, putting a few HTML tags in. I don't know where you get the idea from that we're asking that.

All submitted content goes into a moderation queue. That queue has been empty for years.

[Turner]

Well if you look at something like this: http://pkmn.net/?action=content&page=submitcontent&id=87 It's kind of right there:

Be sure to follow the HTML Guidelines in all HTML you add!

If I wanted to submit something, how do I bold my text, add an image, use centre align or bulletpoints etc? My only option is to use HTML, which is fine for some but not most. Even the {pkmn} will take people a lot of getting used to and yet there's no preview feature.

[Joeno]

Didn't realise there was the boilerplate there.

Again, nobody submits anything (I just checked, only two submissions have ever been made and previous content drives - ones that don't ask for HTML anywhere - have led to less than a handful of pages being sent) so I don't see the point in putting in the hours. People don't do it.

[Turner]

That's fair enough - it's not that I don't understand, but equally you have a chicken and egg scenario here.

The way I see it, the internet has changed dramatically even in the past 3-4 years or so. Content nowadays is a game of aggregation, the majority of which is user-generated or user-submitted in the first place. If you look at tumblr, 4chan or reddit their respective Pokemon communities are constantly buzzing because there's just new content being thrown onto a pile and consumed in a very quick fashion. I'm not saying we should try and imitate them, because they're very different sites from us, but the fact is that there's no reason to submit news or content to PKMN.NET.

People like their minimal, no-fuss app-like interfaces, where formatting and posting can be done in a flash, not have to go through forms and and menus. If you've written some great content, why would you submit it here and not one of the previously mentioned sites? The only way to keep this website alive and active without having to nominate content creators and hope that they have enough time to commit to write is to make things as easy as possible for absolutely anybody to submit content and gradually decentralize the news/content submission.

I mean, we've never been the most robust site for information nor have we been the fastest at posting news, I don't see that changing anytime soon. The saving grace has always been the community, it just seems logical to me to integrate the community into the site and the site into the community. If contribution was easier, then more people would feel like they're part of the community which would strengthen as a result and the community would get more involved in making content.

Once again, I'm not saying this is going to be easy or that you can just wave a magic wand and have it done, but this is pretty much why the site is stagnant and the community hasn't really revitalized itself the way it normally does. If we don't do anything we're just going to end up waiting indefinitely with bags of spare time who for some reason spends it here contributing good quality content.