Weekly roundups
- Thread starter Flintlock
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The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
So, FFIV: The After Years is not only getting another release, but it's a 3D remake at that? What is Square's obsession with IV? It's fucking annoying. I know VII and XIII get a lot of attention (well, VII used to), but I swear they put out a new release of IV (or related) on a yearly basis.
Dark and Divine
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- D&D
Hi guys!
It was a busy Friday and I hadn't the chance to do this week's roundup yet. But I'll do it during this Saturday, so no worries.
It was a busy Friday and I hadn't the chance to do this week's roundup yet. But I'll do it during this Saturday, so no worries.
Dark and Divine
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- D&D
The Weekly Roundup is made, so go ahead, Shademp!
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
Good job. I have a correction, however: "Live a Live" is about 20 years old.
Dark and Divine
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- D&D
Ooopsie!
Will correct it now!
Will correct it now!
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
That is fucking beautiful.
Dark and Divine
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- D&D
Good thing i wasn't able to do the weekly roundup last night!
Will do it tonight.
Will do it tonight.
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
Good thing i wasn't able to do the weekly roundup last night!
Will do it tonight.
Good job.
And thanks for the shout-out.By the way, I centered the YouTube vid for you.
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
I've decided to do the next Weekly Roundup. Flint (or whoever), can I get the template thingy for that?
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
Thank you, my good man. Looks like DandD beat me to the punch this week and used most of what I was planning to. XD I did go ahead and extend one line to include something I wanted to mention, though (new portion in bold):
That's alright, though. I need to make a front page announcement for when we begin the FFVIII Community Playthrough anyway. I'm sure there will be more material by Saturday. I'll just have to find it.
By the way, a round of applause to Dark and Divine for shouldering several Roundups in a row.
That's alright, though. I need to make a front page announcement for when we begin the FFVIII Community Playthrough anyway. I'm sure there will be more material by Saturday. I'll just have to find it.
By the way, a round of applause to Dark and Divine for shouldering several Roundups in a row.
Last edited:
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
I'll be posting the roundup tomorrow. Got my material together.
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
Dark and Divine
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- D&D
Hi guys! Sorry, but got caught in some irl shit and i haven't got time to do the weekly roundup.
Can anyone else do it?
If not, I'll see if I can make it tomorrow.
Thanks in advance.
Can anyone else do it?
If not, I'll see if I can make it tomorrow.
Thanks in advance.
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
I'll go ahead and edit that.
Flintlock
Pro Adventurer
Long post incoming, but before I start, I want to thank Dark and Divine for picking up the Weekly Roundups baton and running with it for a long time. I'm sorry I could only vote once in the Best Site Contributor award, because you deserved more recognition than you ended up getting.
Now, onto the actual topic: what shall we do with the roundups in 2014?
I'd like to start working on them again, but I think we ought to look at how they could be made more interesting and engaging. I don't have that much enthusiasm for the current format any more, to be honest.
The roundups make up most of our front page activity at the moment, which probably reflects the relative ease of putting them together compared to writing an original article. That's not to suggest that doing the roundups is a straightforward task - I've often spent a couple of hours finding stories, copying and pasting, formatting, editing and uploading images, linking to the relevant discussions - but actually writing an article usually takes even more time and effort. With that in mind, I'm hesitant to suggest any change that makes the roundups any more work than they currently are, because if they stopped appearing as well, our front page would be very bare indeed.
The challenge, then, is to find a way of making them better without making them require much more work. I think it's worth having a conversation about that.
My first thought is that we should give Final Fantasy VII news more prominence. When writing the roundups before, I usually gave higher priority to significant non-VII stories than to trivial VII stories. For example, if one of the older games had received a new Android/iOS port, I would consider that to be more interesting than some fan-made VII figurines. That may have been a mistake, considering our audience surely visits us primarily for VII news and information. Perhaps the top story should always be about VII where possible. If there is some really significant non-VII news, like the announcement of XV, then it could still get a post of its own, but those occasions would be very infrequent.
Next, considering there is usually a maximum of one piece of VII-related news each week, we could actually re-write the story in our own words, instead of just copying and pasting. It only needs to be two or three paragraphs long, so it should only take a few extra minutes, and I'll off-set that time later on.
I got a bit fed up of working with the article images in the past. The Wordpress image editor is fiddly (and doesn't function at all on my work computer), and I ended up spending more time editing the images than actually putting the roundup together. I'm not sure if Lex and D&D had the same experience; maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist But either way, we could make life easier for ourselves by switching from three small images on the right of our top stories to just one large image that appears at the top of the article. It's probably more eye-catching. That would mean that the second and third stories don't get images, but as they're probably not about VII anyway, I think that's fine. Making that change would also make it easier to be flexible about how many stories we include: adding a fourth or fifth story would be very straightforward.
For the bottom half our roundup, I'd like to keep the "more from the forum" section, and maybe introduce a new community feature. Comment (forum post) of the week, perhaps. It would have to be something Final Fantasy related, but it would be a good way of getting an extra link to our forum from the front page, and might make our forum members a bit more interested in reading the roundups
If all that is difficult to visualise, don't worry. If nobody objects to me writing the next roundup, I'll put it together with my suggested changes and say we're trialling the format. Then I'd like to hear comments and criticism, of course. And if you have any suggestions of your own, let's have them!
Now, onto the actual topic: what shall we do with the roundups in 2014?
I'd like to start working on them again, but I think we ought to look at how they could be made more interesting and engaging. I don't have that much enthusiasm for the current format any more, to be honest.
The roundups make up most of our front page activity at the moment, which probably reflects the relative ease of putting them together compared to writing an original article. That's not to suggest that doing the roundups is a straightforward task - I've often spent a couple of hours finding stories, copying and pasting, formatting, editing and uploading images, linking to the relevant discussions - but actually writing an article usually takes even more time and effort. With that in mind, I'm hesitant to suggest any change that makes the roundups any more work than they currently are, because if they stopped appearing as well, our front page would be very bare indeed.
The challenge, then, is to find a way of making them better without making them require much more work. I think it's worth having a conversation about that.
My first thought is that we should give Final Fantasy VII news more prominence. When writing the roundups before, I usually gave higher priority to significant non-VII stories than to trivial VII stories. For example, if one of the older games had received a new Android/iOS port, I would consider that to be more interesting than some fan-made VII figurines. That may have been a mistake, considering our audience surely visits us primarily for VII news and information. Perhaps the top story should always be about VII where possible. If there is some really significant non-VII news, like the announcement of XV, then it could still get a post of its own, but those occasions would be very infrequent.
Next, considering there is usually a maximum of one piece of VII-related news each week, we could actually re-write the story in our own words, instead of just copying and pasting. It only needs to be two or three paragraphs long, so it should only take a few extra minutes, and I'll off-set that time later on.
I got a bit fed up of working with the article images in the past. The Wordpress image editor is fiddly (and doesn't function at all on my work computer), and I ended up spending more time editing the images than actually putting the roundup together. I'm not sure if Lex and D&D had the same experience; maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist
But either way, we could make life easier for ourselves by switching from three small images on the right of our top stories to just one large image that appears at the top of the article. It's probably more eye-catching. That would mean that the second and third stories don't get images, but as they're probably not about VII anyway, I think that's fine. Making that change would also make it easier to be flexible about how many stories we include: adding a fourth or fifth story would be very straightforward.For the bottom half our roundup, I'd like to keep the "more from the forum" section, and maybe introduce a new community feature. Comment (forum post) of the week, perhaps. It would have to be something Final Fantasy related, but it would be a good way of getting an extra link to our forum from the front page, and might make our forum members a bit more interested in reading the roundups
If all that is difficult to visualise, don't worry. If nobody objects to me writing the next roundup, I'll put it together with my suggested changes and say we're trialling the format. Then I'd like to hear comments and criticism, of course. And if you have any suggestions of your own, let's have them!
The Twilight Mexican
Ex-SeeD-ingly good
- AKA
- TresDias
I say go ahead and give the new format a shot, but I don't think it sounds too good. Seeing as I've only put one roundup together, I don't want to sound like a dick by saying not to implement a change that would make things easier, but cutting down to a single image just sounds boring.
As for the notion of rewording things, that, to me, sounds like the unnecessary bit of extra work. We typically paraphrase/summarize whatever source we're quoting in the headers anyway. I feel like most of the time going into the roundups would then become time unnecessarily spent rewording information/agonizing over turns of phrase that make it "our own" when what's relevant to begin with is putting the information forward. It already comes to us in a ready-to-digest format anyway.
I can guarantee that would be the thing that leads to procrastinating and ultimately leads to roundup fatigue.
One other issue is making whatever VII-related bit of news is in for that week the main story. I disagree that most people are coming for VII-related news. Most VII fans are Final Fantasy fans, not just FFVII fans. Most fans who are paying attention also know there isn't a lot of relevant VII news these days anyway.
Also, it would really make for some ridiculous-looking prioritization. To give you an example with the roundup I wrote, that means my story on a guy with a Cloud-like haircut walking out of "Cid's Barber Shop" in the PS4 launch advertisement would take priority over Lightning appearing in FFXIV and the X|X-2 HD Remaster being confirmed to include all of the International+Last Mission content that never saw a release outside Japan before now. That would be hilarious, but in a bad way.
That story ran last in my roundup because it was least relevant. Even the biggest FFVII fan would see that and think "Out of touch a little bit here, guys?"
Because I feel haven't been very supportive up to now in this post, I want to end on a positive note and say I like the idea of a new community feature at the roundup's end, such as a "Post of the Week." That sounds like a great idea.
So, anyway, go ahead and give it a shot. You had the vision to conceive the Weekly Roundup in the first place, so I'm willing to indulge you experimenting with an open mind even if I have my doubts.
As for the notion of rewording things, that, to me, sounds like the unnecessary bit of extra work. We typically paraphrase/summarize whatever source we're quoting in the headers anyway. I feel like most of the time going into the roundups would then become time unnecessarily spent rewording information/agonizing over turns of phrase that make it "our own" when what's relevant to begin with is putting the information forward. It already comes to us in a ready-to-digest format anyway.
I can guarantee that would be the thing that leads to procrastinating and ultimately leads to roundup fatigue.
One other issue is making whatever VII-related bit of news is in for that week the main story. I disagree that most people are coming for VII-related news. Most VII fans are Final Fantasy fans, not just FFVII fans. Most fans who are paying attention also know there isn't a lot of relevant VII news these days anyway.
Also, it would really make for some ridiculous-looking prioritization. To give you an example with the roundup I wrote, that means my story on a guy with a Cloud-like haircut walking out of "Cid's Barber Shop" in the PS4 launch advertisement would take priority over Lightning appearing in FFXIV and the X|X-2 HD Remaster being confirmed to include all of the International+Last Mission content that never saw a release outside Japan before now. That would be hilarious, but in a bad way.
That story ran last in my roundup because it was least relevant. Even the biggest FFVII fan would see that and think "Out of touch a little bit here, guys?"
Because I feel haven't been very supportive up to now in this post, I want to end on a positive note and say I like the idea of a new community feature at the roundup's end, such as a "Post of the Week." That sounds like a great idea.
So, anyway, go ahead and give it a shot. You had the vision to conceive the Weekly Roundup in the first place, so I'm willing to indulge you experimenting with an open mind even if I have my doubts.