medium Investigate help documents and look into possible better ways of organising help

[Chewett]

We currently have some help documents under Live help button -> help topics.

We also have documents under the top links -> restrictions

We also have various documents under "More Info" links which are pretty scattered about how they are displayed.

Also below the avatar we have some how to play links.

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All in all its pretty disjointed. We need someone to talk to others and the newbies currently in gateway (I can give you a way to travel and talk to them)  and see what they think, see if they have found anything that does it well so we can do something similar.

Payment 2 Gold

[Fang Archbane]

Ill handle placing all this information in one good place under our Discord chat, ill make a new "frequently-asked-q" tab in there and make sure its all neat and organized. Ill ask the Young Blood what they think  works best for them as well, and the item to travel to GateWay and back although not required by me Chewy, would be nice to visit my adepts in person on the Island to help face to face when they need it, instead of just over Discord.

Edited December 14, 2017 by Fang Archbane

[Chewett]

>Ill handle placing all this information in one good place under our Discord chat, ill make a new "frequently-asked-q"

Fang this isnt what this job is about. We need to work out the best way for storing a variety of tutorial style documents and Im pretty sure there isnt a way to embed 10000 words of documentation and pictures about MD in discord.

Since it appears you may have misunderstood this its still open for anyone to work on.

[Fang Archbane]

I am actively taking screenshots of all said scattered info, labeling it properly, and making a comprehensive alphebetized segemented Whole Guide out of all of it, if you do not like it when i am done then that is one thing my friend, but please allow me to finish before you say such

As things stand i would be done by now, but my net died late last night so ill finish it immediatly

[Chewett]

How do you propose we then modify the data? Considering that Im planning on getting a lot more data.

Fang I am telling you outright you are wasting your time if you are screenshotting things.

[Miq]

as my two cents then skip the democracy for now and just take the data into one place properly labeled, categorized.

From that you can work on what of the data should or is wanted to be displayed where.

[Chewett]

>just take the data into one place properly labeled, categorized. 

You think just make a set of HTML pages or so in MD so we can easily reference them, etc?

[Chewett]

For anyone thinking about this the main thing is that we have many many differnt forms of docs and they are a nightmare to find information about. Ideally we need a better way although this might just be a set of easily searchable docs.

Once we have a set of docs we then want to work on improving them, adding more content, and having them cross link each other.

But the key thing here is for people to see if we can find at least a good starting point. Once we have that we can start the longer process of moving all the docs to the new system, whatever it is.

[Miq]

What i meant was first collect and organize (maybe even fix some) the data and then find a place for it. Creating a nice linking html and replacing all the current random data with direct links to that would be a solid option.

So meaning you don't have to start with finding a system that never gets agreed on. Just replace the current pages with a singular source backend. Changing and adding fronts would be long term tweaking.

[Chewett]

I think thats a very good idea to start, Which is why I shall create a new job open.  

 

Many thanks Miq

[Ivorak]

Having help documents in one place sounds like a great idea. As you mentioned before, it's important that they are searchable and cross-referenced. Each individual help document should have its own URL for easy sharing. It would also be helpful if documents could be tagged by category.

It would be nice if each document had a feedback section. Basically, "Is this page helpful?" and a comment box. I wouldn't display comments on the page though, just store them somewhere that could be referenced when routinely updating help documents.

Not sure about this part, but maybe the documents could be a directory of Markdown files stored on GitHub? That would be an easy way to compare, discuss, and approve changes, without spending time building a custom editing interface. You'd just need a way to fetch the latest version on a regular basis and render as HTML.

[Chewett]

17 hours ago, Ivorak said:

Not sure about this part, but maybe the documents could be a directory of Markdown files stored on GitHub? That would be an easy way to compare, discuss, and approve changes, without spending time building a custom editing interface. You'd just need a way to fetch the latest version on a regular basis and render as HTML.

That was actually an initial idea I had. There is no real reason why we couldnt do this IMO.

[Fang Archbane]

After some thought and mild questioning, i have formulated a thought here id like the communities and chewys viewpoint on. Here goes everything.

In WoB, they have an update system that follows both a written version in the page at login (Our equivalent => https://magicduel.com/authentication.php) and a video version to compliment the written update (On Youtube) for those who would rather view a video than read a text. 

If we were to follow this same law by placing all Updates (Our equivalent => Announcements) on the bottom of the Login page and pushing what our current announcements are with the links to the youtube versions of the updates etc, whether the update is just one sentence long or an hour of explaining why the Molima no longer messes with your own ritual a level before max, then regardless of anything youd keep player retention. 

The strength in this method lays in giving the option to either read through blocks of text if thats your thing (which for people like me, it is) or if you prefer the visual equivalent of a "TL;DR" description, then the video format is for you. If this is all in agreement Chewy, then all id need is for you to make an Official Youtube Channel and give me access etc so i could help make these videos, as id be more than happy to do so, and i could do so in our main language of English flawlessly. Thank you for taking the time to read this to the community as whole and to Chewett, please do leave your thoughts as to why or why not below, im sure itll only help us Unify.

[Chewett]

The combined text + video bit is helpful, but we still need to come up with some way to hold the textual information and make it easy to search/find/implement into MD.

That was the main aim of this. Not to mention the announcements are something we are planning to keep in that format, (but we could change where they are shown, etc)

[Kaya]

Wouldn't the Wikia be ideal for this? There already is a great deal of information on there, and while it's slightly out of date (everything regarding the new start is missing for example) that's nothing a little community effort can't fix. It's searchable and relatively easy to keep up to date. Just add a "How to get started" page and update the FAQ, and link it from MD.

[Chewett]

So it is public:

Fang has asked for payment for this so I will publicly state that since the main objective of this has not been finished by any player this will not be "paid out"