Stage 1: COMPLETED
As we all know
@McMonkey essentially retired from his SL work a number of years ago when his hard drive bit the bullet and he lost all his Civ2 projects, and unfortunately he was the main man for posting news on the SL front page here:
https://sleague.civfanatics.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
These news items usually pointed to forums threads here at CFC and allowed people to visit the authors threads and comment on their projects without having to search the forums for them. Since McMonkey went quiet there's been no news and I was thinking it would be great to get it going again and get it all up to date again as it only stopped not all that long ago. However I don't seem to be able to edit the news page so presumably it's SL wiki admin only.
@Prof. Garfield is the last active wiki admin and so assuming Curt & Tech have no objections I think we need you to grant admin access to myself and/or
@JPetroski so we can update the news page and get things all caught up again (maybe even add a few new scenario tribute pages there eventually too as while anyone can create a scenario page the main scenario A-Z list editing appears top be admin only too I think). Also not sure where all the news icons he used are stored on the wiki. Obviously I can view them separately via the news page, but I'm guessing there's some nice list page that McMonkey would browse to find the appropriate icon for whatever news item he was posting, not to mention adding news ones to the list too. Any ideas how I can find his resource Prof Garfield? I can ask McMonkey but his visits are 6-12mthly these days so it might be a while lol!
Stage 2:
Once we've got access the next thing is for me to work out just how much has been released over the last few years and build a submission list to put on the news page, this is where community help is needed. Things were pretty quiet on the SL news page even before McMonkey's final 2020 news posts too with no 2019 posts so maybe we should look at any releases not already listed from 2018 to now? Off the top of my head I don't see
@Knighttime 's brilliant Medieval scenario there,
@Dadais released his Elder Scrolls scenario v1 in feb 2022, then the bigger v2 in nov 2022,
@gapetit has done the mother load of enhanced ToT overhauls of great old scenarios over the last few years before retiring, Nichael has done a few new ToTPP scenarios too, and while all my big projects are still yet to come out (but finally will in 2023 lol) I've also done a number of mini overhaul releases of other peoples classic scenarios over the last few years eg Civ1 mod, Warcraft, Starcraft, Terminator, & Martian Dawn, which may not be news worthy due to their small size but most are popular 'clickbaity' franchises that are probably good for luring people to the forums. I just remembered that cool Civ4 ToT mod, and the Game of Thrones MGE total conversion mod that quietly came out over the last few years too. We've obviously got a number of other up and coming projects from Patine, Curt & others that will make good future news items too.
Stage 3:
So then once we've worked out the news items list and updated the news page this list can also serve as a good source for something
@JPetroski and I recently discussed which was him bringing back his old Civ2 news sharing duties on the big main CivFanatics home page news area. eg here's all the old examples of his that I could find (btw can see a few more projects here not on the SL news page):
https://www.civfanatics.com/2020/11...odpack-for-civ2-totpp-by-knighttime-released/
https://www.civfanatics.com/2020/02/11/napoleon-i-released-for-civ2-totpp/
https://www.civfanatics.com/2020/02/10/over-the-reich-released-for-civ2-totpp/
https://www.civfanatics.com/2020/01/19/burma-campaign-1942-1945-released-for-civ2-totpp/
Our completed SL news submission list would serve as a great source to make his job easier for create some new news posts. If the source list is too big then maybe a few combo/summary news posts spaced out over a few months about the goings on in the Civ2 community & SL listing the completed projects would surface. If circumstances don't work out and you don't think you'll have time to do it JP I can look at doing something in the future instead I guess, although I don't have access and usually pester
@The_J about my news items lol!
Step 4:
The final stage is a job for me again in that these days I'm one of the CFC social media sharing guys, so it's my job to share Civ related news posts by The_J & others on the CFC main page out to the CFC FB & Reddit groups, so I could naturally do that with JP's newly created news posts too (also whenever The_J is busy gallivanting around Europe haha and it's a slow news week I usually pluck out an old news posts to share so I plan to share some of JP's old ones too btw). As part of my work I keep a big list of all the Civ social media groups out there across FB/Reddit/Discord which I often share our CFC social media posts out to putting a lot of extra eyeballs on them as some of these Civ groups contain
tens of thousands of members. Obviously these days most will go "Civ2? pfft" and move along but there's probably 1 in every 100 who has fond nostalgic memories of Civ2 and mighrt wanna check some of the cool advanced level scenario & LUA work some of guys here are doing! I've already got this whole sharing system down pat as I've been
creating ModDB dev diaries about my Civ2 projects and sharing them around social media for years now and getting really great interaction so the interest is out there, many just don't know about this community.
Summary:
So in summary we need access to the SL news page, I need to build a list (with help) of recent completed scenarios and mods that we can put on the news page, JP can then also use the list to do some nice main CFC news posts putting more eyes on our Civ2 forum, then finally I can share them to all the big super Civ communities out there getting even more eyes on them.
Oh and lastly I just noticed the SL link at the top of the SL forum is not working and is out of date, I don't seem to be able to fix it so I'll get the admins to fix that asap. Most people probably don't even notice that little link up there though so no biggy.
