Well, Well, Well

It has been many moons since the last edition of From the Jury’s Bench has been published; many people, including myself, considered it dead. In truth, I haven’t done much of any work on the Archive for nearly as long - since the move to shadowrun.html.com and then to Dumpshock, the Archive has been 99% Paolo and 1% Adam, and that’s being generous to myself.

However, I’m back now. Why? Not to talk about running Shadowrun, not to review online stuff (I might get back to those two ideas in the future…), but because something important needs to be done. The dust must be wiped off and the lustre must be restored to The Shadowrun Archive - once the most important Shadowrun resource on the internet, now slowly sinking in usefulness. It has failed to grow with the times - the last major update was nothing more than a facelift, and did little to add to the features of the Archive, although it did look really nice…

It’s always nice getting to talk to people in real life about what we’re doing online - no matter how cool I think AIM is, how amusing a quick phone call can be, or how much information can be jammed into one email message, sitting down next to someone and hammering out ideas can be extremely productive. And that’s just what Paolo and I did, the day before last months wedding. The discussion was no longer than 10 minutes in between a million other things that we talked about, but those ten minutes served to summarize and expand on the feelings that we’ve both been having for months now.

The problems basically boiled down to these:

Categories being overly broad and therefore having too many entries, making them slow and hard to navigate.
Lack of regularly updated local content (Columns and other files that are actually part of the Archive and not just a link elsewhere).
Lack of searchability/filters - no way to filter based on Language, for example.
Dead links.

In order to fix these problems, a complete redesign of the Archive is needed. The old Categories simply do not work well enough with the number of entries we have, searching is limited, and besides brief user-submitted descriptions there is nothing for a prospective user to guage each submission by. User interaction is nonexistant - it’s like the Archive exists in a vaccum - Authors Submit Stuff, the Archive Links stuff, Other Users read stuff, but nobody talks about it. Authors have no idea how many people have read their material and what they thought of it, the Archive maintainers don’t know what’s popular, and end users have limited means of getting feedback to the authors.

While Paolo and I have had much discussion and have already laid down some plans for improving The Shadowrun Archive, we’re also inviting you - the Archive users - to take part in the planning and offer ideas and suggestions. You can do so by emailing me or by dropping by the Shadowrun Archive Forum at Dumpshock.com and reading the messages there and leaving your own ideas.

I’ll be back - hopefully sooner than later - to outline some of my ideas for revising the Archive. Some of them have already been talked about in the Forums, but I’ll discuss them in more detail in The Jury’s Bench very soon.