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[Sekoia]

Historically, most of the space on the wiki's Main Page was taken up by News. During the Sunset, our rate of news slowed to a halt.

Arguably, there isn't going to be any more news to put on Paragon City until the game is brought back to life. But even if someone wants to argue that there is news (relating to "Save City" efforts, perhaps), the fact is that nobody has been writing such news. Our last news article is from late September. That's nearly three months ago.

I'd like to propose we remove the news and redesign the front page to be more of a portal than a news source. Let's use it to highlight our content. We can keep the Twitter feed, which will at least keep something news-ish on the site.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

[Blondeshell]

I agree that any more official news is likely going to be a long time in coming. Bringing back and/or massively expanding the Quick Reference bar would do a lot toward revamping the main page as a portal.

[eabrace]

Sounds like a reasonable suggestion to me.

[Hotaru]

I think a "Featured Article" would be great. Maybe have a subforum to discuss them, with each day getting its own thread where people could walk down memory lane. Kind of a way to stay positive and keep our eyes on the prize till we're in Paragon City again.

If a good library of demos or a channel of YouTube videos gets built, you could also add a "Featured Video" link.

[Blondeshell]

I took some time tonight to implement this suggestion, with pretty satisfactory results, I think. The "Calls to Action" section could stand to be updated/simplified to reflect the current state of our SaveCOH projects, but I'll leave that to the folks who have been following those details more than I.

Would there be any way to implement Hotaru's idea about a "Featured Article" section using an automated method to randomly select a different article each day? It could go between the "Welcome" and "Portal" sections, and ideally might show just a little snippet of the article with a "More..." link. I have no idea what MediaWiki is capable of, though, to know if this is feasible.

[Sekoia]

I think your revisions look great, Blondeshell! Thanks for taking care of that.

I'm pretty sure I could come up with a way to randomly select a different article on every page view, but that sounds like a bad idea. I'm not sure I could make it do the selection daily instead of per page view, but I can investigate it at some point if we decide to we really want it. However, I don't think we should have it pick randomly. Random means you have a good chance that some articles will get repeat displays while others never get displayed. Worse, we wouldn't have a log of what articles were shown on what days.

Instead, I think we should plan it out. (Even if we're randomly selecting from the articles that haven't been featured yet, that random selection should be done ahead of time and planned out.) I'd have to do some testing to figure out a way to do it, but I'm sure I can some up with some way to let it automatically update what's displayed for a given day once we have it planned out.

However, there's a lot to be done before we get to that point. We'd need to determine which articles are of sufficient quality to be featured. And for that, we'd need to determine a process by which articles can be approved for featured status. And for that we may need a set of criteria to determine whether an article is of sufficient quality and scope for featured status. I say "may" for these things because we may also not. Depends on how we choose to approach it. But we do need to decide how we're doing to make it happen before we need to start thinking about how they'll get integrated in the Main Page.

[Blondeshell]

Those thoughts make sense to me, though I don't think I'll have time to focus on that kind of in-depth comparison yet. I mainly was just curious about the technical side of it for now, so as to address his suggestion. There should be plenty of time to visit this again later.