The site now uses a newsing system similar to Cemetech, in the way that instead of fetching news from just 1 single board, you can front page topics from any existing sub-forum. The limitation over Cemetech, though, is that it's impossible to front-page topic replies: Only the first post of a topic can be flagged as news.
First of all, if you are featuring someone's project release or final release, I heavily encourage you to mention his Twitter ID in the topic title (eg @IronMaiden releases new album), so that the author gets notified on Twitter that he got recognition here.
Basically, if you want to post something on the front page, do the following:
1) Go to the topic itself
2) Next to Reply/Add poll/notify/etc, click the ADD AS ARTICLE button.
3) Choose the appropriate category in the drop-down.
It should make newsing MUCH easier as you can keep every topic in their respective category now and in the case an user posts something very important, then you can keep it in its appropriate location while still putting it on the front page! :D Also, make sure that the topic date is newer than the last news, else it won't be first.
Can we still have a news subforum for site news and program compilations? I like the system, but I'd like to have that extra subforum as well.
I think the codewalrus sub-forum will do for now. If it gets too cluttered with site feedback threads then we can eventually change it and add a codewalrus site news and discussion sub-forum.
Okay. That works. It didn't occur to me that we could put site news in the codewalrus sub-forum. *derp*
Yeah now it's pretty much like Cemetech. It's more to make it less cluttered and easier for news editors tho. Under the old system, if you didn't want to have to write news yourselves, you had to do one of the following, which had its flaws:
-Move topic to news, which ended up getting lost and no longer visible at the top of the Ndless sub-forum, for example
-Copy the post verbatim, which was a bit unethical due to claiming the post as our own
-Quote it entirely, which looks ugly
-Rewrite it from scratch, which takes a LONG while.
On the other hand, now we'll have to watch out about obscenely large animated GIFs because younger calc game authors tend to not pay attention to WabbitEmu settings and their grayscale settings. At one point I'll need to write a tutorial or something if that becomes a problem.
Update:
1) I wanted to remind people that only the first post of a topic can be front-paged. If you release a new program and want to be featured, then create a new topic about the release. Perhaps in the future there will be a way to feature any post from a topic, but only time will tell.
2) If you are featuring someone's project release or final release, I heavily encourage you to mention his Twitter ID in the topic title (eg @IronMaiden releases new album), so that the author gets notified on Twitter that his release made the headlines.
3) We do not get notified if someone submit a topic for news consideration. In case we forget to check the news articles section of the admin panel, it's recommended to poke us on IRC or PM if you submit a news.
By the way, to
@Streetwalrus @Ivoah @Cumred_Snektron @Juju , there is a rush of news lately, but we try to keep each news at the top of the page for at least 24 hours whenever possible, or 7 days for important CW news (eg our contest). So this is why, for example, it took a few days before I added the Cemetech contest news to the front page and why I didn't add the HP Prime iOS app yet.
Always make sure to promote stuff in topic start date order (from oldest to newest), because news will appear sorted by most recent topic start date. Otherwise I am just pointing this out in case some staff promotes too many news at a time. We also try to balance news content, so for example, if there are 12 Nspire OS 4.0 news in a few months, then we might skip some or combine them to avoid making the front page look too Nspire-centric.
Yeah, if you're gonna news about several stuff at the same time, better combinig tem all in the same one.
It depends. Some stuff is better left separately. For example, if TI ever opens the Nspire CX to ASM development, don't combine that news with a release of Hong Kong 97 for the HP Prime.