LATEST CHATTY HEADER
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
New to Shacknews? Signup for a Free Account
Already have an account? Login Now
Subscribe to Shacknews Mercury starting at $1/month!
Chrome Shack Community Guidelines Chatty Search
Scroll down to join the conversation.
Rumor of the Shackpocalypse has reached ECO’s ears. Well, actually, somebody left the barn door open and a few cows wandered out. These things happen. So here is the news.
Sometime next week, we will re-launch Shacknews with a complete redesign, a new backend code framework, and new hosting. In terms of our beloved Shack, it’s a massive overhaul.
In the new version of Shacknews, Latest Chatty stays pretty much as it is. We’ve cleaned up the db structure; rewrote some janky code, and did a minimal amount of styling. Haiku has grabbed the reins; solicited input from the Shack (apparently some folks don't like blue); and is providing some styling changes that we hope to implement by launch. These changes should make for a ‘new and improved’ Chatty with plans of more to come. The rules of conduct, though, remain the same. The Mods still prevail. We even built them a new mod tool to which they have had advance access, and they are providing additional input. Dognose will remain master of his domain.
There are some changes to Chatty. First, Chatty no longer will be tied to a specific MD or ER ‘story’, but will live on a 24-hour cycle. We will still post Morning Briefing and Evening Reading, but they are independent of the chat threads. The benefit is that posts under Morning Discussion won’t disappear when Evening Reading is published. Instead, threads will live for 24 hours after the post date of the root comment, and then will be available via comment search.
Second, news headlines and story comments will integrate into Chatty with the headline and link as the root post and comments as the thread. Now you can stay on Chatty and see news headlines, but our primary purpose was to aggregate all discussion on Shack within the Chatty application.
As for community-developed apps, we have worked with SqueegyTBS, stonedonkey, and electroly to write an API on which the community can develop and revise Shack applications. This will provide a stable and enhanced platform for community-developed apps like Latest Chatty on iOS and ShackDroid.
As for Shacknews, those of you who actually use the rest of the site will see something much different. We are moving away from the traditional blog model with its long river of posts to a format that is more visual and surfaces a wider variety of content. The home page look and feel will be vastly different. We still have a news hub, and we will continue to cover news as we have in the past.
The new Shack gives much greater prominence to the games themselves. The game pages are highly visual spaces for aggregating content from game-specific news to media to files to comments. Video and screenshots get much better treatment.
Fileshack and Shackvideo will no longer live as separate sites. Video rolls up closer to the associated game, but still has a hub page to aggregate featured and recent video.
Mercury will live on and evolve in the coming months. Storage, free email and “high speed downloads†don’t hold the same value as they once did, so Mercury will focus on services, products and discounts to provide value for Shackers. That means we are going to shut down Shackspace and Shackmail (believe me, no one uses it), and instead will provide access to another free storage service with a larger limit. We will continue to support Shackspace in the near term to allow folks to move files stored there. Mercury members can still turn off ads.
The new site will launch without the Shackmeet scheduler, but we are working on an improved Shack scheduling tool to be added after relaunch. If anything, we want to provide more support for Shackmeets and Shackbattles. Also there will be no user profile pages at launch. The existing user pages get little use, and we had to make some calls on what to include in the initial release. However, if there is sufficient community demand, we certainly will reconsider rebuilding them.
One casualty that will sadden some of you is Shackpics. With the plethora of photo-sharing sites out there, I’m sure you will find places to put those NWS pics. Life won’t be quite the same for the mods. We’ll give people some time to grab any pics they want to keep.
I know that change brings uncertainty, but I hope our track record over the last couple years speaks for itself. Steve, Maarten, and Faylor have moved on to new adventures. (Well, really, they’ve all moved to Gearbox.), but the Shack stands. We’ve invested a lot in rebuilding. Some of you will like the changes; some of you won’t. And some of you – as Garth says - “fear changeâ€, so it won’t matter what we do. Our hope is that you like the renovation, but more importantly we hope you understand that our goal is to make the Shack better – both as a site and for the community of Shackers that continues to make it thrive.
Last, I want to thank all Shackers who have provided feedback, suggestions, and help in the rebuilding process. I specifically want to thank themelon; squeegyTBS, Stondedonkey, ThomW, Haiku, and all the mods. Any bugs will be ours alone.
And now for a taste. A game page - http://www.shackpics.com/files/gamepage_kz7uoimpyull52wpgiig.jpg
and the screenshot viewer - http://www.shackpics.com/files/screenshotviewer_kdvlhym5y721om0h0fx4.jpg
Fire away.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 741 replies.
I don't think we could have had any better company take over that what you have done.
You have listened to the users of this site, basically left the site the way it was when you took over and actually have made good improvements (Friday contests, a bit more focus on news, etc.)
While to many users of Shacknews, the current design still seems new (I remember this site when it was the Quakeholio, the ShugaShack and the Teal and Black Shacknews days), it has been this way for quite some time, and so I understand why you would want to update the design.
I have seen some of the previews that have been linked / leaked, and while there are some things that will take getting used to (the new front page), the fact that you are working with Haiku and some of the other developers of the Shack phone apps and other programs and browser plugin scripts is very encouraging! If Gawker had done that, they might not be in the position that they are in now.
As I'm sure you noted by now, basic profiles for posters are used by many people for check out how credible the other posters are, or for finding out gamer tag / steam info for meeting up in games. If the free-form text/html area of the profile must be lost, or reduced in side to only a few lines of text, I can accept that, and long as the basic info (registration date, age, location, gamer tags, IM info, etc). Their loss would be the biggest regression of the new design (I don't post to shackpics myself, but I do view picures posted there often, but you are correct in that an alternative could be found).
I'm assuming that the Game Library stuff will be lost with the conversion, or will that be coming back eventually? Not that anyone really uses it, but converting / incorporating it into some GameFly profile of games played could more strongly link this site to your Brand.
I've written a few greasemonkey scripts for this site myself. I'm assuming that the URL for the chatty posts will be different (no more laryn.x), but from the preview I saw it looked like the html structure itself won't be too different, and so few changes will be needed for scripts that modify the look/feel of the posts. The other pages on the site (front page, article pages) however, seem to have more changes. It's a little early to tell if the new site will have a better flow, or if it will be easier to fine information on a particular game, but it will at least give me something to do adapting my scripts to the new site. :)
Again, I'd like to thank you for your support of this site and community, and for you inclusion of the community in this upcoming change. It really shows that you are concerned about the community and shows that you really do want to do what is best for this site, and you aren't just trying to made this site over to better fit in with the GameFly brand.
The post has been reported. Thank you!
You must be logged in to post.
You must be logged in to post.