A bit more on submissions..

By now, most of you have seen what I posted under the News section on the 12th of January. If not, here it is, in all its glory(?):

12/01/98
There is a line in the contribution guidelines section that reads “Please only place one link to your page, not a link to each HTML file on your page.” I would seriously appreciate it if people took notice of this. If you add a link once in awhile to a new section of your page, fine with us. If you add 7 links to 7 different files within 3 minutes, you aren’t doing anyone a favour but yourself. You push other new entries out of the Latest Submission section, and generally clutter up the Archive.
Don’t get me wrong. I love seeing the submissions and new entries everytime I load the page. However, there are more effective ways to get exposure than spamming our index. Yes, this will lead to a full Jury’s Bench article later this week.. Until then, Thank You.
Adam Jury

This is that Jury’s Bench article : )

First of all – the post I made on the 12th was not prompted by any particular person or incident. As several people brought up, it sounded accusing, although it wasn’t meant to be that way. It was meant as more of gentle reminder. If you feel that I was poking a finger at you with that news item, please accept my apologies.

Secondly, I do not wish to discourage anyones participation in The Shadowrun Archive. This site was made great by having a large number of people contributing to it. The thing I would like to avoid is 1 person contributing a link to each seperate file on their web site in rapid succession.

There are a few reasons I would like to avoid this, some selfish and personal, some for the good of my sanity and Paolo’s as Archive Maintainers, and some for the good of all you users.

The first is the simplest: Submitting several items in rapid sucession pushes other entries out of the Recent Submissions area, which lowers the number of people they are exposed to. This may seem trivial, but isn’t the entire point of the Archive to expose new and innovative ideas to a wide group of people?

Secondly: If you decide to rename a file that you’ve submitted, or move it to another directory on your site, remove it completely, etc, the link from the Archive will no longer work. This means either a) Paolo or I have to notice it and change it, or b) You or someone else has to tell us and we have to change it.

Thirdly, if you move your entire site, or it dies for some reason (You lose your account, change providers, or something like that.) ALL the links to your site die. This once again means that Paolo or I have to notice and delete these links, or wait for a user to report them as dead.

So what’s the solution? Pretty simple, really. Take a quick peek at one of these, pages, it doesn’t really matter which.

Yes, one of these is my page, the other two are pages of friends. They’re all good examples. What do they all have in common? A main index page which includes relevant links to all the parts of the page! What else? There’s only one link from The Shadowrun Archive to each of them.

A few simple steps to get your page linked with The Shadowrun Archive and not only getting 1 hit from a person, but getting them to come back:

Using the Add Link feature, add your link with a description of your site, including What it contains and how often it is updated. “My web page contains my house rules, custom character sheets, and my rants on lousy players! Updated twice a month”
When you update your site, add a note on your main index with a link and the date. January 15th: Added 6 new spells and a new physad character sheet.
Keep your main index clean and uncluttered! You want users to be able to see what’s new and how to get everywhere easily, or else they’ll just click away.
And finally, if you add something big to your page, add a new link to the Archive. An example of this would be the Australian SR Netbook, which is part of Lady Jestyr’s page, but certainly deserves it’s own spot on the Archive..

In short – Keep the killer Shadowrun material coming, but do so in a way that respects the work of others, and doesn’t create extra work for those that help bring it to you.

Thank you.

Adam Jury
Wednesday January 14th, 1998