It's been exactly three months since our article, TibiaNews: The Revival. With many hopes of new sections, reviving old sections, here we are - three months later, still standing. In this article, we'll touch base on our plans ahead, what we've accomplished already, and what is still to come.
Simply touching base on the sections of TibiaNews, we have continued to publish Council of Wisdom, Horoscopes, and Shorts! on a constant (and almost weekly) basis. The CoW has not been so popular, and we have had minimal requests on actually giving advice to players with "real" problems. The horoscope section is still rising up, and with that, we will still release it monthly. Blamina, a TibiaNews staff member, is now in sole control of the horoscopes. We have revamped the horoscope section since its release, and brought back the horoscope pictures and the style from the old TibiaNews site, such as when Avianna was fronting the horoscope section. Our horoscope section is updated every month on the first of the month. So, be sure to check out the side menu of ours to see what your horoscope will be for that month!
Speaking of side menus, the side menu of TibiaNews has undergone several changes throughout the past couple of months. Now, with a color-coded system that's easy to understand, we have finally come to an understanding on the side menu. What was once messy and not appealing to the eye, is now understandable and neat. In case you have not looked at our side menu and just navigate the front page for our articles or shortnews, we definitely encourage players to look at it. We have revamped our "forum" icon to fit more with the TibiaNews theme. Under it, we have added a "news ticker," showing the 25 recently posted content; articles, games, anything. Our map icon, which is disabled for TibiaNews maps, links to promoted fansite Tibia ML. We have added a "Breaking News" section which is the top "hottest" news which has recently been posted on TibiaNews. If you submit your own news, your news could even be there for the whole Tibian world to see! In the General section, you will find a brand new link which has just been released quite recently - Staff Portfolios.
In order to keep track of your favorite TibiaNews authors, we have begun developing a staff portfolios page in order to allow the viewers to track down their favorite writing styles.
For now the staff portfolios are up for Elu Longin, Krin, and Thuddy. More will come with time, but we are still in a "testing" phase more or less with the portfolios. In content, we have added another new feature, the "Featured Video of the Week." What is more is that we have actually lived up to what we wanted to do, and that was to release a section called "TibiaScoop." Updated weekly, TibiaScoop gives players a sarcastic and satirical way to look at things, from the simplest of things to teh more complex arguments. Started n February 20th, TibiaScoop already has thirteen editions from countless of topics, including TCC To Fine Tibians Who Don't Keep Up With The TibiaNews Newspaper, or even to the newest edition Guido Makes It Through Another Day Of Resisting Urge To Launch All Ruthless Seven Members At Once. TibiaScoop is definitely something worth a read on Sunday mornings while drinking your morning tea or coffee, or yes - even espresso.
Moving forward, we have released the Everybody Has A Story article again a few weeks ago, updating with questions from former gamemaster and TibiaNews staff member, Erig. In this time, we have also released an interview with our former editor, Excessus. In case you have missed it, you can read it here.
In our last article, we promised more events and more contests. We are happy to say that since that article's publishing, we have had three contests. We had the TibiaNews Caption Contest, the TibiaNews Birthday Spectacular, and more recently, the Tibian Royal Wedding contest. We have also given away our TibiaNews Golden Newspaper for the milestone Tibia forums reaching 30,000,000 posts! We have many more contests and events still planned out for this year to come, so stay tuned.
Moving back to the side menu, we have released a new fashion section, Tibian Vogue - everything fashion, everything Tibia. We have also republished old articles and sections such as GM Bannalot and GM Banmore. Moving forward, we have added another section to our site, a big hit during the weekend, "Spot the Difference," which staff member Mari Aloran has been kind enough to take care of for the past couple of months. With all of that said, we have heard your voices in the poll(s) we have done in the past. In our revival article in February, we stated we had changed "Picture of the Day" to "Picture This!" We are happy to announce that it was changed within almost a week of our article being published, due to the community's outrage of it. We will always have our PoTD now, and that will never change. To show that we understand, we are always open for suggestions and proposals for either the site itself, or our forums. Just recently, forum member Khwaj suggested a Contest Archive section. Less than a week later, the section was implemented within our forums, allowing players to access contests as far back as 2006. To show we stay in touch with the community, we have also released a new section, Letter From the Editor, which is updated monthly with reports about TibiaNews and its community. In one of those letters, we stated we are giving over 1000%, just for you!
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Dear TibiaNews readers,
Last but not least, I cannot wait for our seventh birthday celebration with all of you. Here's to you, our readers, for making us where we are today, and for helping us rebuild a community back to its roots.
"Let's go! Everybody! |
With that letter comes sadness, as we have done away with our translation section. We are happy to announce, however, that we are still updating shortnews and PoTD daily, as well as our other sections weekly. We still encourage players to join our team of journalists to gain knowledge and experience of a great working team. Applications are still open!
Another new section (small section) we have added to the site is "King For A Day," simply asking players what they would do if they were King for a day in Tibia. Updated frequently, you can submit your own answer in our thread on the event board to be featured on the TibiaNews front page! That of course means bragging rights to your friends.
Moving forward, TibiaNews is happy to announce that its ranking (with all 28 supported/promoted fansites) has gone up from each month. From Februrary starting at 17, to March going to 16, to April being 14 - we are slowly (but surely) gaining the trust of our Tibian community back. We are so happy that this has happened, and do still encourage our readers to let others know that TibiaNews has its footing again and is here to stay. Each month we have a positive percentage of visitors changed from the previous month. We will feed off this energy and keep going if you are with us. We have gained a bunch of new followers on our twitter account, and love that everyone is following us there. We try to respond to any fans that tweet us and comment us, and will continue to do so in the future. We have noticed a trend with our visitors as well. When the Tibia site goes down - players come to TibiaNews to see what's going on. When the patch for spring was released, and when the site was down several hours a few days later, our visiting rate sky-rocketed, ensuring us that players like coming to TibiaNews for fresh content.
In case some players may be curious of what was popular from the week before, we have also decided to release weekly shortnews about "What was popular on TN last week?" showing the top articles and content of what was most viewed on our site. This does not include our forum or threads in our forum.
If you are interested in submitting your own news, our daily updates of news across all the servers, your news will be bound to be found by players throughout the world from many servers. Our news is not only posted on our site, but also tweeted automatically through a feed as well as retweeted by many more fans and players alike! We encourage all players to submit their own shortnews to us! Don't worry if you're not the greatest writer - the editors are here to help you make sure you news gets posted within a timely manner.
We really do appreciate the feedback we have been getting from the community, and thank each and everyone one of you who has been with us thus far on our new journey. We are still with you - our community - and intend to be with you for quite some time. Let's celebrate this time together and hope for more great things to come for TibiaNews this year. And as they do, we can surely say that we did this together. You have shown us already that we can prosper, so let's continue this trend of TibiaNews, and together, let's prosper even more.
Posted Featured Articles Since Our Tibianews: The Revival Article:
History of Darama
Grrrl Power Diaries
The Pitiful Seven
Tibian Mysteries
Senators: The Wise and the Elder
A Guide to Roleplaying in Tibia
Tibia Fansites
Farewell Interview with Ogrey!
Community Trends: The PvP Disconnect
The Triangle Of Terror: Cultists
Interview with Armored Patrol (1NpcKiller)
Excessus, Interviewed!
Interview with Romano the Knight (aka Imrageth)
These articles average about one article per week.
Posted Sections
