Letter from Shacknews

Welcome to the brand new Shacknews!  Read more about what we have planned in the near future...

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Hello readers, viewers, and Chatty members,

We have spent the past 7 months working on a strategy to revitalize Shacknews, and we officially open a new chapter in our site’s history with tonight’s relaunch!

Over the past several months, we’ve tried a bunch of different things — we have daily video news with our Shack Snacks, fun programming like 8-Bit Cuisine and Shack Reels, and great written editorial led by Steven Wong, Steve Watts, and Ozzie Mejia. We are constantly engaging the Chatty community to find out what they want to read, hear and see, including at the recent Shackcon (pictured here). We’re even on our second official episode of the Shacknews' Chattycast podcast and we have plans to introduce new shows in the near future.

Shackcon 2014

It’s been a very busy year so far, but we have assembled a great team touching on everything from editorial to video production to management. Still, it is clear that we have a lot more to do. I look forward to working with our team and the community to bring the Shack back to its rightful place in the vast realm of video game journalism.

We want to thank all of our partners for supporting us during the transition, and I personally want to thank the team at Shacknews for working harder than most people realize to get us to this point today.

Lastly, we want to thank our Shacknews community. I am very happy that we won't have to live in a world without the Chatty. I will do everything in my power to give the team at Shack the resources required to maintain its rightful place as a premier video game news site, but we all want to hear your thoughts on what we could do better. We can’t do this without you.

As I said before, we have much more to do. This is merely the beginning.

Thanks for sticking with us,

Asif A. Khan (the man with the briefcase)

CEO/EIC/EIEIO

Asif Khan is the CEO, EIC, and majority shareholder of Shacknews. He began his career in video game journalism as a freelancer in 2001 for Tendobox.com. Asif is a CPA and was formerly an investment adviser representative. After much success in his own personal investments, he retired from his day job in financial services and is currently focused on new private investments. His favorite PC game of all time is Duke Nukem 3D, and he is an unapologetic fan of most things Nintendo. Asif first frequented the Shack when it was sCary's Shugashack to find all things Quake. When he is not immersed in investments or gaming he is a purveyor of fine electronic music. Asif also has an irrational love of Cleveland sports.

Filed Under
From The Chatty
  • reply
    July 9, 2014 2:46 PM

    Asif Khan posted a new article, Letter from Shacknews.

    Welcome to the brand new Shacknews!  Read more about what we have planned in the near future...

    • reply
      July 9, 2014 10:34 PM

      Testing testing

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      July 9, 2014 10:43 PM

      Hooray for good shack overlords.

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      July 9, 2014 10:50 PM

      I posted an article?

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      July 9, 2014 11:04 PM

      thanks!!!

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      July 9, 2014 11:06 PM

      Well, I think you're doing a bang-up job so far. I've been loving the new articles and editorials.

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      July 9, 2014 11:08 PM

      I definitely love what you'll have been doing so far.

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      July 9, 2014 11:09 PM

      [deleted]

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      July 9, 2014 11:10 PM

      [deleted]

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      July 9, 2014 11:11 PM

      Woohoo! Party in this chatty!

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      July 9, 2014 11:49 PM

      Link to letter isn't working?

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      July 10, 2014 12:16 AM

      Ugh, the new webpage design is awful.
      Reminds me a lot to the webpages that were made long time ago, a few years after the begining of the internet.

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        July 10, 2014 12:18 AM

        I knew we should have just brought back Quakeholio's format...

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        July 10, 2014 12:49 AM

        Isn't that the point?

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        July 10, 2014 6:44 AM

        It's a bit of a mixed bag for me. I appreciate the simplicity of the design, but the elements don't mesh well. I almost missed the 8-bit graphic reference for feeling like things were sloppy. Took the mix between bit graphics and smooth web text isn't quite their yet. Needs to be a bit more pixelated and boarders defined a little more between sections. Might be as simple as that.

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        July 10, 2014 1:04 PM

        Hate to diss peoples hard work, but I really REALLY don't like it.

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      July 10, 2014 12:36 AM

      Sweet

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      July 10, 2014 12:42 AM

      i welcome my new leaders

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      July 10, 2014 3:21 AM

      Ooooo looks nice!

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      July 10, 2014 4:34 AM

      Damn, no more links to next and previous news article at the end of the page.

      I really don't like losing that with the new design...

      Seems Rock Paper Shotgun is the last of the pages I visit that still have that great linking style to next and previous article...

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        July 10, 2014 5:52 AM

        this is actually something we had mocked up and intend to keep in this iteration. Adding this to the list of things to take care of today. Not sure why it isn't showing up!

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          July 10, 2014 8:46 PM

          Thanks, good to hear it's coming back. Still not there now that I checked the latest articles, but thanks for replying that you fine folks are working on it. :-)

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      July 10, 2014 4:59 AM

      thanks for making the investment and interacting with us

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      July 10, 2014 5:13 AM

      Great start, congrats!

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      July 10, 2014 5:17 AM

      <3

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      July 10, 2014 5:18 AM

      <3

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      July 10, 2014 5:19 AM

      pop pop popsickle, part part particle, test test 1 2 3.

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      July 10, 2014 5:51 AM

      [deleted]

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      July 10, 2014 5:52 AM

      [deleted]

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      July 10, 2014 5:52 AM

      It's different! I don't like different! Make with the same, different scares me D:


      Liking the new change so far.

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      July 10, 2014 5:53 AM

      Nice!! I like the new design...and there's now actually content and news on this site horray!

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      July 10, 2014 6:01 AM

      Love that redesign! Thanks for the kind words.

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      July 10, 2014 6:06 AM

      Looking great!

      FYI the responsive design is pretty messed up on Chrome on my Nexus 4 - huge margins mean you get a couple words per line in news stories

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      July 10, 2014 6:26 AM

      I am really excited for all the work and content you guys are putting into the site.

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      July 10, 2014 6:28 AM

      Sailor of Fortune is one evil dude.

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      July 10, 2014 6:46 AM

      looking great !

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      July 10, 2014 7:12 AM

      Omnova is super tall!

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      July 10, 2014 7:14 AM

      hooray :D

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      July 10, 2014 7:38 AM

      Site looks really good!

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      July 10, 2014 7:49 AM

      Wish you guys luck with the relaunch. Not a fan of the new design but hope it will grow on me as Shacknews is where I come for gaming.

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        July 10, 2014 7:54 AM

        It's a bit of a mess fortunately the new crew is pretty good at taking criticism. The shack snack videos have changed a ton since the first one in terms of look due in part to feedback.

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          July 10, 2014 10:06 AM

          Yerp I am looking at all the feedback now to make some tweaks. Trying to focus on anything that is broken first, but then taking a long hard look at some readability and color issues.

          My first order of biz though is fixing the responsiveness for the site so our smaller screened friends are good

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      July 10, 2014 8:59 AM

      Looking good!

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      July 10, 2014 9:11 AM

      noo :( it's completely broken/unusable on my iphone, and I really only shack from the toilet, help!

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        July 10, 2014 9:22 AM

        iPad looks ok but those borders on side really kill things. Especially in portrait mode on iPad you get no content. Landscape mode is a bit better but feels like what you are able to see is greatly limited. I understand for advertising wraps and the likes (and I believe the old Shack had sidebars as well). All I know is especially when I look on an iPad, I feel like I am looking at one of those 'first time I made a webpage sites' or a quick $10 template purchased from some template site, not something professional.

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      July 10, 2014 9:28 AM

      Looking not bad. Definitely better than the all tile design of few years back.

      Couple criticisms.

      First and foremost the color scheme. While the colors themselves aren't a bad choice, they are laid out a bit off. I would definitely try to eventually toss out all of the black. The black really does detract the visual impact. This is especially true with your navigation bar.

      This leads me to the second. Your navigation is an important element that seems to fail to grab enough attention to itself. It doesn't have to stand out like a sore thumb but it definitely needs more visual language signifying that it exists. It is really obscured by the choice of color and size. Play around with some different colors first. The small sub nav white box is also really weak.

      Third. The "zoom in " transition effect you have going on the top stories is too slow. It sort of detracts from the desired effect.

      FInally, speaking of top stories, the story that is literally on the top of the page is a complete waste of valuable layout space and even makes the page look worse. Serves no purpose, hard to read, and is ugly. This can be used for something far more valuable like your header or top story section. You already have enough story alerts around the page as it is. You don't need one that doesn't even do a good job drawing attention to itself.

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      July 10, 2014 10:23 AM

      You guys look great in the pic. Thank you for all the years of great news. You are still, and always, my first read in the morning when I get to work. I like the redesign so far. Well done and congrats!

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      July 10, 2014 3:17 PM

      Reading this on a WP7 Mobile I can see that the picture didn't reformat for mobile and you have forgotten to add the links to other articles about the same subject which always resides at the bottom of the page.

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        July 10, 2014 3:21 PM

        You might also want to avoid using the same colour on the side bar as the background.

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      July 10, 2014 6:24 PM

      I posted this in another thread by accident.

      I've been posting here since 1999. I haven't posted since 2002 on this account though I just realized.

      The font size is just a TINY bit too large for the article headers. It distracts from a lot of the page since my eyes just jump to the massive font and I feel like I'm looking at an iphone and not a desktop. Was the site designed for mobile? If so lower the font for the full site for us desktop users :)

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        July 10, 2014 7:36 PM

        Really I don't mind the font size so much as I mind the highest width media query. Surely you can make one level more for people with 1080+ monitor resolutions

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      July 10, 2014 9:28 PM

      new layout looks good. For me the video and podcasts etc dont do anything for me, as I tend to look at shacknews when at work, and just scroll down the articles and read those that interest me. I like that the articles are short and can easily be consumed in minutes. Keep up the great work guys/gals

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      July 11, 2014 9:18 AM

      Maybe it's just my PC, but I use firefox with NoScript, and even if I allow everything it still looks broken. And the color scheme? I don't get why you "fixed" what wasn't broken. Oh well, I will get my gaming news elsewhere I guess. Sorry about that.

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      July 11, 2014 9:07 PM

      doesnt look too good, sorry.

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      July 12, 2014 9:28 AM

      [deleted]

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      July 14, 2014 2:10 PM

      Please bring back the sub tags. Seeing as I dont have any consoles or portable devices anymore (other than my phone), I used to be able to simply look for the articles with PC in the tags. I cant do this anymore.

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