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ganon578
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Review Posts

Post by ganon578 »

Question, do we have anyone uploading reviews anymore? I know people are probably super busy, but I don't think anything has been put into the reviews section for over a year. Is this something the site is still doing, or do they just now reside in this thread? Just curious.
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Warcry
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Post by Warcry »

They're supposed to be getting uploaded, but none of the people who work on that (including me) have had any time in ages. :(

But if any of our prolific reviewers are interested in pitching in on that front, I can see about getting you set up to do the uploads.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

I'd be up for having a go at that. I will need some clear instructions and a roadmap, because I'm from 1794 and technology confuses me.
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Post by ganon578 »

I can't say I'll have too much time either, but I could also try to take a stab, just like Skyquake mentioned. I suppose the more hands on deck, the lighter the load of work!
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Post by Warcry »

Consider yourselves hired!

After Christmas I'll put together a how-to for you on how it all goes. But for now, a brief rundown. There's basically three steps:

1) Proofing. This is the most time-consuming part IMO. You've got to read through the review, correcting any obvious spelling or grammar errors. They don't need to be perfect but we don't want to post anything that looks like dalek wrote it, either. :)

2) Formatting. Basically, you copy-and-paste the post into a PHP file (something you can open with Notepad), then do a couple find-and-replaces. Then save the review and the images using the name format that the site uses. This is about as complex as writing/editing a post here, nothing fancy.

3) Uploading. This is the only part that's actually technical: you need to FTP the files to our server, then go in and manually add them to the site database. It's quick and easy for me, but I went to school for this stuff. Other people find it a bit more intimidating and that's totally understandable.

If you're not comfortable with (3), I could probably do that part if you guys take care of (1) and (2).
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

I'm up for that. I'd like to learn 3 - I haven't done anything techie with computers since our old Commodore Vic 20 where you had to program it to do EVERYTHING. So learning some new stuffs would be cool :)
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Post by ganon578 »

I'm up for any of it.

I've done a lot of proofing in my time (wrote and re-wrote my dissertation several times over, and I still write technical documents on a weekly/monthly basis), so it shouldn't be too terrible.
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HotShot81
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Post by HotShot81 »

I did want to bring this up for a while, but old Canadian manners and work.

Work is down (boo), and someone already brought it up.

I am willing to help out in whatever capacity I can, AFTER the CPU is replaced in my rig. Since 2 of the 8 hamsters have died. (Looking at 2-3 weeks)

From a learning standpoint, I am up for 2 & 3.

I also want to bring up someone needs to create some new fields, since there is no Combiner Wars, or Titan's Return field for bots.
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Don't they fall under the Generations umbrella?
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Post by HotShot81 »

Skyquake87 wrote:Don't they fall under the Generations umbrella?
It's debatable I feel.

I mean look at the Unicron trilogy, they were treated as three separate toy lines. Despite being part of the same story arc.

I admit I don't have a clue of how many hits TFarchive's gets per month, but if you are someone who prefers a written review over a video one, it's not too much work (I assume) to break them into the toy lines they relate to for ease of navigation.
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Heh. Semantics, I suppose. Armada/ Energon/ Cybertron weren't sold as 'The Unicron Trilogy' though. That's a retroactive fan term (like the ghastly 'G1') that's gotten traction.

Combiner Wars and Titans Return do have their own prominent branding, with the 'Generations' tag relegated to a sidebar, so probably worth their own categories (unlike 'Thrilling 30'). Although I note the videogame (FoC and whatnot) stuff got lumped in with Generations - does that need separating out too, do you think?
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Post by HotShot81 »

If we are serious about helping our fellow fans then a little retroactive reorganizing of reviews might be in order.

I think the best method might be to go to the box shot. If a box says it's part of line X, then line X is where the review goes. We can always leave a note in the review of the toy indicating if it's connected to a game. I'm going to use an example here to hopefully make myself clear.

Blaster (Box says Generations, so he'd go under the Generations title)
Blaster (Box says Generations, but it's how he appeared in FOC, so we'd put Blaster (FOC) as it currently is)
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Post by Warcry »

Proofing is the most urgent need -- we can't prep or post anything until that's been done. So I'll up Ganon and Skyquake to do that when I've got a free second (after New Year's, probably, since I've been dealing with a sick toddler over the holidays). Hopefully, by that time that's been done I'll have had a chance to put together a guide to how the other steps work (or I'll make Blackjack do it!)
HotShot81 wrote:I also want to bring up someone needs to create some new fields, since there is no Combiner Wars, or Titan's Return field for bots.
I completely agree with you, but they are still technically Generations toys, so it's right to have them in that category as well. Ideally we'd list them under both but our site isn't set up to do that. :(

Honestly, the problem isn't with the presence or absence of any particular set of indexes. The problem is that the front page of our toy section is a decade and a half old. It was designed for a time when there were like ten different TF lines with no crossover between them. It really needs to be overhauled to be more user-friendly, and we've known that for a while, but we've never been able to figure out a way to do that without having to rebuild everything from the ground up. One day, though!

For now, I think getting the reviews up onto the site is the most important thing and we can figure out the indexes later.
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