how to Some Guide Guidance

[GM Fiddleback]

Some Guide Guidance
by GM Fiddleback
(Being a mere suggestion for those in need of it on the usage of formatting and tags in the new forum system.)

Hello and welcome to this guidance on guides. This is intended for those who have never written a guide before and want some general guidelines by which to do so, those who have written guides before but want to update them to look reasonably nice on the new forums, and those who like to spectate and kibitz without actually having to make a guide at all.

I will cover two things very briefly without going into too much detail.

First, we will discuss tags and their usage.

Second, we will discuss a few simple formatting choices and the reasons behind them.

Tags
You now find yourself using a system that allows you to apply tags to the content you create. These tags are intended to make it easy to find your content and to find content that is related to it.

When you begin the process of creating your guide or other content, you will be offered the opportunity to select tags related to it. General advice for selecting these tags is as follows:

Limit yourself to no more than three tags.
This prevents an explosion of needless tags and helps coordinate different pieces of content together so they can be more easily found. If someone creates the very popular guide Joe's Guide to Running Into Walls for Fun and Profit and tags it 'economy', 'inf', and 'advice', your new guide, Susan's Guide For Which Walls Make The Most Profit should be tagged with at least one of,  if not all three of, those tags  in order to have it come up as related, and presumably useful, similar content.

Make sure those three tags reflect the most important topics within your guide.

It's no good writing the world's best guide to the tall buildings of Paragon City if no one can actually find it. Sure, it'll be at the top of the forum list for a few days, but that is short-lived glory. With tags you can make your content easy to find, but only if you properly tag it to reflect the information inside. Make your three tags very relevant to the guide you are writing. Don't elect to use tags such as 'cute', 'green', or 'amphibian' when your guide to tall buildings doesn't even mention Kermit at all.

 

Pick one tag as an Item Prefix.
Usually you'll want the one that is most relevant to your overall guide content. Think of it as the biggest category your guide would fit in.

 

Formatting
In general, you are free to use whatever formatting strikes your fancy and is most appropriate to your guide. We (the moderators and devs) thought it might be nice, however, if the guides could have a sort of similar look and feel. It's by no means mandatory, but if you'd like to work towards that goal or just need some general guidance, try the following.

 

Font
The default font choice and size in the editor is preferred. It's the generally best typeface for readability on the forums.

Title
Go ahead and repeat the title in the body of your guide. Right at the top. Set it to size 20, bold. Color it the default Yellow from the color picker. This ensures that it is big enough to stand out and visible enough on a quick look to verify the correct article is being read.

 

Heading 1 (Main Headings)
Headings make useful divisions in guides and other printed matter that help guide the reader through the content and find sections they are most interested in reading. Your main headers, generally the biggest sections and divisions within your document, should also be size 20, non-bold, and that same yellow.  It really jumps out as you scroll through a document looking for something.

Subheadings (Heading 2 and 3)
Within and between main headings, you can further break your content down by subheading to emphasize certain elements of your main heading that are important. Here we take two steps down in size for a Heading 2 (size 18), and two more down for a Heading 3 (Size 16).

The color for both, because color as well as size helps us navigate a document, is #00ccff which you will have to manually enter by selecting the paintbrush in the editor and then clicking More Colors and entering that code in the place indicated.

 

Generally speaking, it is usually unnecessary to go much further down the heading chain than a Heading 3. That's a little too much sectioning in most cases. If your guide and content warrant it though, just keep stepping down by two for each subsequent heading level until your text is too too small to be seen.

Graphics
If your guide includes graphics, try to take the original picture at it's 'best', most readable size. Center it up in the frame so that things don't look 'left heavy'. By Ctrl+Right Clicking you can get a menu that allows you to adjust the size of the graphic as it appears in the post. Make that adjustment look properly balanced size-wise for the body of your text (somewhere around 400 vertical or horizontal pixels seems to be best). In other words, not so big that it overwhelms everything and not so small that a casual reader of the article can't tell what is going on. Keep in mind that by clicking on the graphic in the body of your text, the reader will get a pop up of the graphic at the original size you uploaded it. So readability isn't the prime concern, but should certainly be kept in mind.

Other Niceties
I find there is usually a preamble on most guides explaining their purpose and reason for existence. These I like to leave in the default text, but increase the size to 16. It makes it easy and quick to read and, if you've written it right, saves the reader time trying to decide if a guide covers what they want or not. After the preamble, which shouldn't be more than the first paragraph under the title, the main text can return to normal size.

Indents, bullet and numerical lists, and URLs are on a case by case basis. What you do with them is up to you, but they should be consistent throughout a given document. You'll know if something doesn't look right in the document you are creating based on how the whole document looks overall. From there, just use your best judgement.

And That's It...
Please remember these are just suggestions and helpful tips for creating your guide. You are free to ignore any and all suggestions if you choose. We aren't going to beat you up over it. This is just intended to help folks get off on the right foot when it comes to creating, or cleaning up, their guides.

Have a good game!
 

[Zolgar]

*looks for a 'pin' button* *realizes he doesn't have such permissions*

[GM Fiddleback]

I never like to presume. 🙂

[Oubliette_Red]

I think there are a few more nice thing that can be included in Guide posts, especially if your guide is long, is to break it up.

-Try not to put it all in one ginormous post. If it can be broken down into sub-posts I think it's better to do so. Create replies to yourself as place-holders.

-When creating multi-post guides, you can link to said posts easily by creating a Table of Contents at the beginning of your first post and then hyperlink the table to the specific post.

-For example:

• GM Fiddleback's 'Some Guide Guidance'. (Which send you back to the first post.)

To do this:

1. Rt-click on the 'time of post' at the top of any post and select 'Copy Link Location'
2. While in edit post mode, highlight the selected text in your table, then click the 🔗 tool and paste the copied link and save.
3. Repeat for other sub-posts as needed.

This has the benefit of allowing returning readers to jump to the desired section without the tediousness of scrolling.

 

[GM Fiddleback]

Yup. Good stuff.

 

Mostly, I just wanted to give folks a place to start. Advanced steps are always good to work towards.

 

In fact, an interested party probably ought to write the 'next level' guide, which this one could link to.

[Shenanigunner]

That's really excellent material on how to write a useful guide post. May it be heeded and used.

 

But... but but... as someone who's written everything from quickref cards to full-length software and product manuals for, well, way too long, I have to say the forum/FB/Reddit-based system of posting what's meant to be permanent reference material drives me crazy. When someone has to say, "Oh, there's a great guide to that on Reddit post 'How to give your female alt great hooters' - skip down to posts 238 and 245" - it's a clumsy-ass system.

 

The wiki is better, but AFAICT no one is updating it these days, and there's lots and lot of outdated entries, as well as many critical ones that remain stubs or simply repeat the same useless paragraph found everywhere else.

 

I do get pushback for the Guide being (1) too big and (2) standalone, not wiki/forum/live, but honest, I don't know how else to present so much info in a coherent manner without writing/rewriting about fifty wiki pages. Which is just too time-consuming; I give what time I have to the community, but it's not unlimited. But my widdle old site is on the obscure side, so it's not as helpful as it should be, either.

 

Not sure what the answer is. It would be nice if efforts were concentrated on Paragon Wiki, maybe, and guides posted there in their cleanest, most polished form after trial runs and comment here. Maybe that's too much work for most player/helpers. I dunno. I do know I find it exasperating to have to page through miles of old posts to find a list of something - over and over, as the standard way of sharing info.

Edited July 26, 2019 by Shenanigunner

[GM Capocollo]

IPB is pretty good about providing permanent links to content that don't decay or break.  There's a "Pages" feature that we don't currently use that'd be good for publishing fixed reference material at a specific, easy URL, so maybe we could eventually push specific guide material to there.

 

For better or worse, the PW people have decided that ParagonWiki is going to remain crystallized as it was on the date of the live shutdown, and not allow any edits about the content updates on any of the private servers.  We've been kicking around a project to either fork PW and edit it, or make a Homecoming-specific wiki that only contains new information and links to PW for things that haven't changed, but that's a big project and finding time and resources to do it ourselves in a non-half-assed way has been difficult.

Edited July 26, 2019 by GM Capocollo

[Oubliette_Red]

I am constantly visiting Paragon Wiki because it's a one-stop-shop for most everything I am looking for. My own personal preference for game info/details such as contacts, missions, zones, powersets, etc. is to be able to go to one place to find it. I'd rather the CoH:H wiki had it all, rather than just the Homecoming exclusives.

 

One-stop-shopping.

 

For things like build specific guides or binds or whatnot, then I'll be looking here on the forums.

[_NOPE_]

3 minutes ago, Oubliette_Red said:

I am constantly visiting Paragon Wiki because it's a one-stop-shop for most everything I am looking for. My own personal preference for game info/details such as contacts, missions, zones, powersets, etc. is to be able to go to one place to find it. I'd rather the CoH:H wiki had it all, rather than just the Homecoming exclusives.

 

One-stop-shopping.

 

For things like build specific guides or binds or whatnot, then I'll be looking here on the forums.

That's why if they do it, they should clone ParagonWiki as a base and modify from there. I believe that there's tools out there that provide that functionality. And the Titan Network has already stated that the contents are essentially open source, so they can do it. 

[WanderingAries]

Standardization of helpful things is helpful! ^.^

[KnightSoul]

Shilling the Guide Index.

 

Is there a list of tags anywhere?  The scan by alphabet/auto-fill really only works if you know what your looking for, so it helps to have a full reference.

[GM Fiddleback]

15 hours ago, KnightSoul said:

 

 

Is there a list of tags anywhere?  The scan by alphabet/auto-fill really only works if you know what your looking for, so it helps to have a full reference.

None that I know about yet. And, as far as I know, the list would only be populated with tags people have created already; which is to say that it might not be as organized and helpful as one would like. There's no way to moderate the list. but it is at least an attempt to help organize things.

[Oubliette_Red]

I have to say that seeing tags in the Subject lines makes for difficult reading. Just looking at the Guides section.... it does not look orderly.