negative news.

[Martin]

This, otherwise what would be the point in writing Habbo articles when we could all just read them ourselves on the Habbo website?

Yup, originality and uniqueness is the key and reporters need to display their investigation skills, find out things for themselves and report on stuff that isn't always reported by Habbo. Things that are done by Habbo but not always picked up on and things which occur on the hotel etc. They are reporters after all and should report on what they witness and give opinions and stuff. As Mike said a bit more of a balance needs to be achieved but I'm pleased that we're not just reporting on the 'safe' news that Habbo themselves would post and are offering something a bit different that could spark discussion.

[HotelUser]

I've read over the thread and I'm not going to quote anyone directly but I am going to make a reply which has to do with one of Sulake's fansite rules. If you're not familiar with this particular fansite rule it's the one which states that we as a fansite are not allowed to post about unreleased Habbo content. I'm not entirely sure how to best phrase this so I'll just say it and then justify what I am saying. Sulake has directly crippled our News team by imposing what are quite arguably very unfair limitations upon Habbox.

So first off I'll give some background. In April we came to the conclusion that the reason News wasn't experiencing more attention from viewers was because what we were doing was essentially taking whatever Sulake posted in the official Habbo.com news feed and rephrasing it. Now as you will probably already know Sulake doesn't frequently just post news on Habbo.com/community and outright mention, "we're adding these new rares to the client, here's detailed photos". No no, they wait until the furniture is already added into the client and then they make up a ridiculously childish scenario like "entering the dreaded Hell Hound Labyrinth" (no joke, I just found that in an article here http://www.habbo.com/community). So there we are in April or so, and for the most part we were only really posting the exact same news Sulake was themselves so we only ever seemed to promote Habbo, and never really reported on more interesting news like upcoming furniture and features to Habbo.

During this time we made sure to create extra emphasis on the importance of news reporters investigating situations and using their own incentive to find interesting articles to report on. This started working and there was a clear increase in the interest of news at this time, which was satisfactory to us especially when we allowed news reporters to report on upcoming furniture additions to the game itself.

You might also be aware that posting unreleased information about Habbo violates the fansite way. However, HabboTimes and Puhekupla have been doing this for years, and we were especially convinced that it was fine for us to do this when Puhekupla was featured on the Sulake website in early May (http://www.sulake.com/blog/entries/2...09_Volter.html). So with Danube's guidance on how Sulake add Rares to the client I created a script for Habbox which automatically detected new rare additions, displayed them on the Habbox.com website and notified our news reporters as so they could do a news article on it. This worked beautifully for several months and even upto recently this continued to progress well because we could finally compete with HabboTimes and Puhekupla (because we had insights on rare release information, which is really part of the magic formula if you want to run a successful Habbo news firm these days). So to summarize the above all was well for Habbox News at this point because A) We had reporters starting to investigate things for themselves, after having banned reporters from using the RSS feed for their news source which they were more or less all dependent on and B) We could finally compete with HabboTimes and Puhekupla because we too had the ability to report on unreleased Habbo information.

It was after all this that Sulake did something so stupid (possibly even more stupid than banning fansites from selling VIP, and even more stupid than banning users for saying "Habbox" ingame). To make this as crystal clear as I can I have never seen the company treat us as a fansite more unfairly since we opened than I have here, because they prohibited Habbox from posting about unreleased rares and features, and as hard to believe as it is (and to tell you the truth if I was someone else reading these words I wouldn't believe them), but they also told us that they weren't going to stop HabboTimes and Puhekupla from posting unreleased rares.

Their reason? According to Sulake HabboTimes and Puhekupla aren't English fansites. If this was true I probably would still think their decision was unfair, but not as unfair as it actually is because unless I can't tell the difference between English and other languages, this http://puhekupla.com/en/home and puhekupla itself, is an English fansite. HabboTimes as well up until (I think) Augustish, as that's when I first noticed they removed their English section of the website (unless I just can't locate it).

Where does that leave us now with News? Well, to put it in the best way I can, there's a lot of links in our own news forum (http://www.habboxforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40) that go to Puhekupla instead of Habbox because we're not allowed to report on the biggest segment of Habbo news, and Puhekupla for reasons beyond me, is. Sulake has not done us any favours here and as you can see I'm very annoyed at their decision, because it's quite clearly hurt our News team to an extent. However, Habbox is still lucky to have a team of really good writers, who are still encouraged to not use the RSS feed, and to do their own research to find Habbo News. I can see what you mean about how we have an abundance of "negative news" lately over positive news, but one of the reasons this is more visible at the moment is because we're not allowed to post the sort of news we were posting in the past due to this clause brought up by Sulake. I think we're in a situation right now that's similar to any other news site for real world news, more often than not it's negative news they're reporting.

I was honestly thinking of creating another petition of sorts for users to sign to allow us to post about unreleased rares, but again I'm not even sure we're allowed to do that because the last time we did for the Volter font, it was demanded by Sulake that we take the petition down. I can say though that recently the initiative for reporters to go out and investigate to find things to report on has been good. You might think a few topics on Habbox.com are negative but a lot of them are very good reads. Habbox News isn't going anywhere, we may have hit a road block in recent times, however we are doing everything we can do to make sure we post news about anything we're allowed to post news on, and in the future I suppose we can always hope that Sulake makes an effort to restore a fairness to their fansite rule which imposes this limitation upon us.

[Grig]

Cheers for the reply Dave, +rep. I can't believe Habbo disallowed Habbox from posting furniture releases. They make the job impossible now, I remember they used to send exclusive information to fansites in news pack e-mails years ago. Now it's close to impossible without connections or what not.

As for the rss feed, I fully agree it was useless- made the job too easy and simply allowed reporters to re-phrase. Re-phrasing articles never did us any justice, after Habbo posted news on their site. That's why real life news rarely did justice, unless it was tech or something where a specialist reporter who was into the tech stuff did a report on the latest gadgets from his own knowledge etc. That is not to say I still 100% agree on how those articles of late were phrased.