New articles feature; feedback requested

[Dark0ne]

I am looking to code an "Articles" section for TESNexus over the coming days/weeks and would like feedback on the idea.

 

Essentially the section will be a bridge between the site and the forums. There are many users of the site that have no clue about the forums, or how to use them, or any wish to use them. These users know how to use the site however; they're used to the site, they know the interface, they understand how to make comments, add files, etc.. What the Image Share section did for images, I want the Articles section to do for written content. The idea is to promote discussion and articles on any subject via the site; be it Oblivion, Morrowind, gaming, the website, the internet, the latest fashion trends, etc.. Basically like the Off-Topic forum meets the General Oblivion forum meets the PC Gaming forum meets the Tutorials forum. Just like file and image comments these articles will make direct use of the forums so us forum users can use the forum interface to interact with articles as per usual.

 

Obviously this presents an organisational stumbling block. How can articles be organised so that people can find content they're interested in as quickly as possible in as few clicks as possible?

 

There's the standard hierarchical structure of categories; broad categories each containing smaller categories much like forums and sub-forums. This has a tendenacy of decending into stupidity, however. You either have categories with only 1 or 2 articles or you have broad categories with too many articles.

 

Next is the tagging structure of doing things; have a set of broad categories (i.e. Oblivion, Morrowind, Tutorials, Gaming, Funny, Interesting, etc.) and then allow authors to tag their articles with more descriptive keywords (i.e. Construction Set, Quests, NPCs, Dialogue, Video, News, Fallout 3, Border Lands, etc.) that users can search for, search the latest tags, etc.. This system would be slightly different to the file tagging system in that it would be author only, and there will not be set tags so the author can tag their articles with whatever descriptive words they deem relevant.

 

There's also a more anarchical structure of having the articles listed linearly, much like the image share section, and with each article coming with an indicator of the type of article (i.e. tutorial, funny, debate, general, etc.) listed in a tabular format. The data could then be sorted via drop-down or selection boxes for specific content (filter out funny content and/or tutorials, etc.). It's more messy, but sometimes messy proves activity and promotes people to interact with the system.

 

This system will replace the tutorial system from TESSource.

 

What are your thoughts on such a system? What would you want? What features would you have? How would you organise the articles?

[Abramul]

Were you thinking of having this as new topics created for the articles page, or topics that have gotten off the ground being featured on the acticles page?

 

I'm inclined to favour an option to allow anyone, or maybe established forumers only, to nominate a thread for Article status. Nominations could then be confirmed, denied, or 'wait-and-see'd by a moderator, or perhaps by a member of a somewhat broader group.

[Dark0ne]

Articles would be new topics started by anyone. A front-end of the forums that is organised in a different manner so that is more appealing and accessible to browsers of TESNexus.