Originally Posted by
Neversoft
I may just find it a little dull now because I am no longer interested in Habbo.
The issue is something we are aware of, and in recent months we've tended to shift away from habbo based articles slightly. The stories, while often incorporating some habbo elements, would sit right at home on a site that posted non-habbo stories.
I guess it entirely depends on what you like. If you're a trader, you're not going to be interested in the Articles section. But if you're the kinda guy that likes to make rooms, then you're going to be interested in Room Reviews and such. When I was into Habbo about 3 years ago I thought the Articles section was the best thing about Habbox. I remember the room reviews and interviews the most. They were very interesting and updated regularly. I don't think there are any interviews anymore are there? Well when I was Articles Manager I was in the process of removing them since it was so hard to find someone interesting and willing to interview.
We do our best to appeal to everyone. Up until Lost-Shark resigned there were regular rares/trading based articles, there are story-type articles, and of course our resident ranter. However, like myself I believe the majority of the team don't play habbo as much any more, which makes it difficult to write about, and with a lack of new recruits it's fairly hard to rectify!
Room Reviews are updated RARELY. There is some 2 month gaps inbetween some.
Thats one of the reasons the Articles section isnt what it used to be. There are no frequent Articles. A Room Review every two months? People who did enjoy the room reviews are going to get board of waiting and eventually stop looking or find different sites with Room Reviews.
Fair point. Our room-review specialists resigned some time ago and the staff that were hired since tend to prefer to specialise in other areas, so the room reviews get ignored somewhat. I shall bring this up :)
If you want the Articles section to be successful, then you've got to update the articles frequently, come up with new ideas often (I still have a few that I never got around to introducing :P), make sure you're staff are happy (they don't want to be doing a boring job, otherwise they'd just leave. When I was articles manager I offered a prize to whoever done the most articles each week) and most importantly you've got to advertise. Without advertising no one is going to know the articles are there.
The point about staff being happy is one I know all too well. When PriceTags was manager and I was staff, we were extremely overworked for voluntary staff with the requirement set at 2 best-standard articles per week, which is simply too much (this is no reflection of PriceTags's management, I believe it was partly the decision of higher management too). With this in mind, the limit is set at 1 per week, which gives the article time to be researched, refined and rewritten as necessary, while also drastically reducing the workload on each writer. Of course, for this to work, we need a larger team, and at the moment we simply don't have the numbers!
However, the tactic appears to be working very well in terms of the happiness of staff. The staff forum is extremely active, with a very relaxed atmosphere. As seen by creature's post, the staff genuinely want to do their job well and the enthusiasm shows in the finished results. The current writers have all been staff for circa 2 months, which is usually the point where people decide they can't be bothered and resign. But the current set of writers have to be commended on their commitment :)
I know how hard it is to get people to work for the Articles department. People have seen the state of it, so they don't bother applying. When I was manager we opened up the applictions on the habbox.com site and allowed normal habbo users who didn't use the forum to apply. That was a big failure. Never do that. :P I don't think the Habbox site skin helps either. The old Habbox skin was jazzy and caught you're attention. The new one... whats so good about white? It's quite a dull colour. However I'm not sure anything can be done about that. Although maybe it's time Habbox had a change again to boost their reputation.
The lack of applications is the main cause of many of the problems you mentioned. If we'd have had them, the team would consist of 8/9 writers now, producing that many articles per week, all of varied topics and styles. As it happens, we have a grand total of 3 and myself, and while the articles are still good quality, there just isn't enough variety in them to keep everyone happy.
Thinking about the skin actually... It doesn't really attract anyone. Rare values is really the only major important section on Habbox now and people only use that because it's what everyone uses. I never knew anyone that didn't go by the Habbox rare values. Maybe I should PM sierk or something... If you get a more colourful and appealing site, more people are going to want to check out the rest.
If I'm correct, a new skin is in the pipeline, so sit tight ;)
The better Habbox looks, the more people are going to want to be part of it.
There was a Habbox directory site that was basically the old Habbox site, but I seem to have forgotten the link. If you know it, I could show you a few things that I as a Habbo user enjoyed back then.
Wow, I rambled on. Sierk should've edited my permissions so I could have still seen the Articles Staff Forum when I left, then I could have a continious input. :D I hope Sierk see's this post actually. :8
Creature, you're not even the Articles manager are you? It's nice to see staff actually taking interest in their job and wanting to help it further. :) I hope I've managed to help you. I hope you can be bothered to read all of this aswell. :P
Each one of the staff have been doing managerial-like things recently, such as providing large amounts of input into possible new initiatives, coming up with brand new ideas, helping each other through constructive criticism and even the small things such as putting an advert for the articles applications in their signitures. Its amazing to think that people put this much effort into what essentially is a voluntary job on a fansite, and each one deserves more than I can give him in terms of praise. There are plans to introduce a "senior writer" position as some sort of reward/promotion, but without new trialists that has been put on hold!
