Jace Hall's Feed
Jace HallDear Community,
Hope you are all safe and healthy during these challenging times! For those that celebrate Easter, please have a happy one.
Make sure you keep your social distancing when talking with the Easter Bunny, as insurance companies wont cover rabbits that lay chocolate cream filled eggs. Hospital bills can be quite a burden for a bunny that only works one day a year...
Now, on to TG business -
We have continued to focus on bug fixing and have made a lot of progress. The fixes are too many to list, both on the front-end as well as back-end of the site, but the cumulative effect is that the site continues to improve step by step.
Certainly we are not done with the bug fixing and it will continue as the primary resource expenditure until we have addressed them. Aside from our own list, @admin staff is aware of this list on the wiki as well and will be working through it.
TGSAP STUFF:
You may have noticed that TGSAP adjudications are finally moving through and you can expect a slightly quicker process there on a forward-going basis. This is related to the now present and proven success of the dispute system as a retroactive error-correction function. With that system in place, certain time based restrictive components of the front-end of TGSAP were able to be slightly adjusted for the positive benefit of the community, without having to sacrifice final accuracy.
WALL FEED:
We have modified the Wall Feed to automatically include News articles in the feed. This required the engineering team to do a lot of database work since previously news articles were stored in an entirely different database than user wall posts. The total net effect is a faster wall feed overall.
NEWS CONTRIBUTORS:
Now that we are providing the newsfeed both outside and inside TG, we would like to offer the opportunity to approved members of the community who may be interested in receiving news editorial privileges so that they can place editorial content into our news system.
This would allow an approved contributor to post community related news articles directly into the main site's newsfeed and they would get pushed into the mainstream news via google and etc.
Any contributions would need to be on a voluntary basis, with no financial compensation but an approved contributor could write appropriate articles they deem fit and the world will see them since search engines like google specifically scrape TG for news (as long as it is specifically in the editorial feed.) It would be up to the contributor when they would want to post an article. There would be no expectations or demands on that front (other than the posted content being appropriate), and of course people will receive a proper credit listing for the articles they post as a news contributor.
Many members here do good research and share a lot of great information, so this might be a way for those interested members to get a wider voice than just the wall feed with their articles.
A couple of members have already been approved and given editorial access. You can see one of their articles here:
**If you are interested you can PM me here at Twin Galaxies and we can determine if it can make sense at this time for you to be granted news editorial privilege and access.
PROFILES:
The effort to upgrade the profile system is still underway. The goal is to simplify it and allow the profile to list all your Twin Galaxies achievements as well as other achievements on other platforms, such as XBL, PSN, Steam, etc. There will also be an improved social media / channel listing section which will allow you to list all your content locations in one spot so that anyone viewing your profile can quickly find them. Once this is implemented, you will be able to add your twitch channel, which will then be read by our system and display your channel in the active streamers section of the site whenever you are live.
NEXT STEPS:
When all of the bugs are fixed and the new profile system is complete, we will finally take our next step and ADD a new feature/function to the site which will be the ability to quickly and easily set up BOUNTIES. We will set up a very simple and straightforward system, which will then slowly expand its feature set on the basis of user input / request.
A FINAL WORD:
At various times I will read some community commentary suggesting that I perhaps personally take a more "present" and "front facing" role in Twin Galaxies leadership, which may help foster and create a greater sense of community.
I understand this suggestion, but the reason that I have historically resisted this idea is because I have tried very hard to make TG not be about "me."
In my opinion, most of the previous owners of TG operated in this manner and essentially drove TG toward a cult-of-personality type of existence - that seemed to come at a bit of a cost to those that may not have fit well into that kind of atmosphere.
While as TG owner, it is almost impossible to not have some kind of connective tissue to the public perception of the "vibe" of TG, but please understand that I've been quite conscious of TG's past leadership and have been trying to avoid some of those pitfalls.
It has become clear to me that perhaps my approach may have been too distant in that respect because I have seen that there are those who translate this distance into an incorrect assumption of perhaps me not caring about TG.
While we know that TG still has a ways to go, it has certainly come a long way from where it was in early 2014:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140317231944/https://newsle.com/article/0/131068738
When looking at the above article, I think that we have all collectively saved TG, and even have made it more successful as an authentication platform than at any other time in TG history. More scores per year are being adjudicated than in the past - and adjudicated more accurately. Invalid data is being removed, through documented processes - and negative drama has been reduced considerably.
It is my opinion that this was all achieved because we ALL care.
In any case, for Twin Galaxies to continue to grow and succeed, we must all continue to contribute and participate as best we can. Step-by-step things are improving, and I have been personally working on some big things behind the scenes, that if successful, will secure the economic future of TG and allow us to finally put that kind of resources behind classic / retro gaming that I've always envisioned. We shall see.
In the meanwhile, I want to thank the community for its patience, understanding, contributions, and passion. Yes there is more to do, but look how far we all have come!
lexmark
Snowflake
datagod
Daniel Ocampo
Michael Sroka
Jace Hall
Doron
Snowflake
Daniel Ocampo
Snowflake
jesperoland
jesperoland
JJT_Defender
JJT_Defender
Andrew Peter Mee