Pink Poogle Toy Forum

Hey guys. I've thought long and hard about this but can't come up with a solution. You guys are all varied in terms of experience, ideas and talents so I thought I'd throw this out there to you guys to see what you can come up with.

Basically, it's regarding the running of PPT main. I'm having trouble maintaining it because basically, I'm being swamped. There's simply too much to do. The influx of emails with articles and guides is too much for me to handle and I find myself getting more and more backlogged each day. Currently, I add articles manually. I code the HTML pages offline then upload and link all the relevant pages. Is there a better way to do this? How would you solve this?

Then there's the issue of the Avatar Catalog and the NeoPool and the Trophy Catalog. I could maintain it all myself previously but as I'm now doing a lot of things for my university, my time is limited to just PPT main... how would you guys solve this?

Then there's the news and faerie crossword answers... I've run a couple of recruitment and people have been pretty good, but they usually post real good for the first 1-2 months then taper off. What would you do to rectify this?

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I wish I could help you, but I dont know how you do things...

But for the articles, perhaps you could ask if they be pre-coded before you get them?
Or have someone else code them for you?
See if there's an easier way to code them?
Maybe have a template for a guide that others fill in?
Maybe have some read through your emails/guides for you and see which ones you need/don't need?
Assign someone else to be in charge of the Avatar Catalog, Trophy Catalog, and Neopool?
As for the news I guess you would just need to continue recruiting until you find someone who'll keep it up. I hate to say these words, but perhaps fire those that slack the most? =/

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You could threaten peole who taper with knives/bazookas/BFGs/very large encyclopedias/etc.

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Any chance you could recruit someone or team up with people from another site? I know the logistics could be horrendous. Just a thought though. Avatarlog seems to have the avatar's nailed down. I know some people might get upset if the avatar catalog shut down. I used to get faerie crossword answers from here but since it's been sparse I go http://www.faeriecrosswordhelp.blogspot.com/ now. Honestly I think the faerie crossword answers are what first attracted me to the site.

Personally for me I enjoy the forums the most here and tend to skip over PPT Main. Since everything that's on main is in the forums more or less.

Maybe you could have people volunteer for simple things like the Faerie Crossword for a month or two at a time. People's lives change and committing for a month or two would be feasible and they wouldn't have to volunteer again. Whether you recruit people from the forums or some of the other lesser known sites is up to you.

Assemble a team of people to read the daily emails and either answer them or forward them on to the appropriate person's email?

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in terms of making the articles, you could consider restructuring the site to be more of a wiki so people could add things without you having to do anything... you'd just have to get some peopel to volunteer to check the changes peopl have made...

Yeah, the trouble would be the morans who think PPT is evil since OMG, THEY USE SPYWAR AND POPUPS LOLOLOL, I mean, the people who make up junk. And junk-makers and Wikis don't mix well.

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I think it would be a great idea to put together a one-time committee to go through the articles that are backlogged in your email, pick the ones that are good and still relevant, and get rid of the ones that aren't. I remember I sent in an article back in June '05 that was never posted or even answered, so I'm sure they're pretty backlogged.

Also, at some point you might want to do a similar thing with the articles already here. Many of the game guides are outdated TO THE MAX, and there are like 10,000 get-rich-quick guides that all say the exact same thing. Of course, you would want to keep articles on Neopets history like ChromeFox's Mari_Jhane articles and stuff.

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IDB Rater, Pink Inker

I've just realised that my suggestion completely forgets the neodex - why not try and combine the two? you have to be registered to add stuff to the neodex right? why not add the ppt content to the neodex and then scrap the main ppt site as it is in favour of the neodex, which seems great so far, so can only get better!

Hmm that NeoDex idea thing is an interesting one.

Jacob can we get your input on this? How could they be incorporated considering the NeoDex has neopets information and the articles on PPT Main is all about guides and articles and solutions etc.

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Humm, coming from a very geeky perspective, I'd be tempted to make up a news/article posting system in PHP and give a couple of people accounts to it. Though... they'd kinda need to know HTML, so ideally you'd need to plug in an HTML-generating text editor... *rambles*

*5 minutes later*

There must be quite a few people who HTML here. I'm sorry I haven't thought to volunteer earlier... I'm a webpage geek, I'd be happy to help Not sure about a PHP system, might take a bit too long. It'd be useful though.

As theonlysaneone said, maybe a one-time committee might be good - you can forward 10-20 articles to each person and they can go through and send the HTML pages back to you, perraps? (if you give us a template first)

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I think the NeoDex and main site should remain separate. The NeoDex is a place for unbiased, factual information, much like Wikipedia. Game guides don't belong there because they aren't factual: they're strategies and ideas that are different for every player. It would DEFINITELY be a good idea for there to be a NeoDex article for every game, with links to the guides on PPT, but they still need to be somewhat separate.

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IDB Rater, Pink Inker

I meant to say this earlier, but Mazil's comment reminded me.

As of right now, TOSO's idea of a temporary committee sounds the best and most logical to help out at least in the short and medium term until everything gets sorted out. The only problem with the idea is making sure each member delivers their assignment or whatever on time, but that isn't really too much of a speed bump since the members would be chosen well enough so they are known to be reliable.

Go with his idea. It is easily the sanest (no pun) so far.

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Perhaps, for the Faerie Crossword--and I know nothing about websites so this may be completely impossible--we could have a system where the crossword answer can be submitted by anyone, but has to be verified by, say, three or four different people/one staff member.
Like I said, I don't know if that's feasible, but it seems like it'd help.

And for newsposters(though I don't really know much about how they work now), it might help if we had them specialize. They pick one or two topics--pet colors/makeovers, or items, or Neopets site events, or changes to the PPT site, or miscellaneous/general--you get the idea. That way, they'd only be posting about stuff they're interested in. I'd feel like posting stuff if it interested me, you know? Instead of having to post about everything that goes on within the site, which would get me thinking, "Ah, let someone else do it."
You could do the same thing with the games section(and other parts of the site). Split people up into different categories of games, and you'd have one group for the first five games, another for the next five, and so on. They could screen submissions for each game, then send the acceptable submissions on to be put up on the site.

Like I said, I know virtually nothing about running a website, so these ideas may not actually work...but that's my two cents, for what they're worth.

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