Changing the Guide System on Giant Bomb

So we're nearing the launch of the Giant Bomb beta and I figured it'd be a good time to talk about one of the more major changes we're making to the site. Specifically, I'm planning to simplify the guide system to the following features.

1. Every game will have a Guide. This will live on it's own distinct URL under that game's page.
2. There will only be one guide per game and everyone can edit it.
3. Submissions to that guide will follow the same ruleset and use the same tools of the wiki system. Meaning that you'll gain wiki points for editing guides, and new users won't be able to just run in and damage shit. Also, our new wiki history system will allow the mods to rollback edits if something bad does happen.

Before I get into the reasons why I want to do this, let's just get the ugly part that no one will like out of the way. This will mean that existing guides on the site will either need to convert into the new system or disappear. Currently there are near 2500 guides (most of them unpublished) on the site. Of those, I'd say realistically 50 or so of them are of a quality that makes them worth keeping. The obvious bad part is that I know those 50 guides are amazing, and took hours and hours and hours to create. I'm talking about guides like this, this, and this. Fucking those authors over and destroying that hard work is obviously not something I'll just whistle my way through.

Now the confession. I failed with guides. This is entirely my fault. In trying to compete with gamefaqs, I tried to think up an advanced system that bettered guide creation. Instead I ended up creating something that was clunky and most people didn't need. Draft systems? Multiple author permissions? Drag and drop Table of contents? Hit counters? Comments per section? All great ideas and there's some stuff to salvage there, but we executed it really poorly and it made our guides simply too hard to edit. What I should have done is make guides a big ass WYSIWYG editor field and auto-built the TOC off of them. It would have made them extremely simple to use and understand.

Some authors got passed my poor design and realized the potential, but most guides ended up unpublished, broken or worthless. Outside of the failure of the featureset, with mostly poor guides being made they ended up being a teeny bit of our traffic and the reality is that I just can't afford to spend large resources rebuilding a similar guide system when I've got a whole site to rebuild in a short time. I hope those fantastic authors forgive me and understand that day to day, the people here really do care about our userbase, but we also have very popular wiki, api, forum, blog, profile, image and review system that had to take priority. Most sites idea of community is a comment system with PHP BB slapped on top.

So with this new site (that remember, we've had to 100% rebuild it from scratch) I'm going to try and start fresh, keep it simple and give guides a real chance to do well on Giant Bomb. I say that knowing that the answer may be that guides simply don't need to be on Giant Bomb, but I still believe it can work and think that our editing tools allow for very rich guides to be made. Some might say, well, why not just allow text files uploads or something easy like that. I'd respond and say... well, it's not that simple. 20% of development of community websites is fighting spam. All these amazing tools that are unique to our site also make it really easy to pollute the web on high SEO ranking pages. Just ask the mods. Having a single guide that goes through the wiki system allows me to fight the same battle in one place and hopefully gives more visibility to the guides in general (I can now link to them directly only game pages). I think it's a better way to do things and in the long run (meaning the next time I have to go through a major rebuild) they'll be very easy to port over.

So if you're a guide author looking to keep your guide on Giant Bomb past the relaunch follow these simple steps.

1. Copy your guide and paste it into a forum post attached to that game's forum.
2. Tell a mod, and have them lock and pin it for you.
3. When the new site rolls around, that forum post will come over. Simply copy the guide from the post and add it to that game's guide (which will be blank).
4. Earn a bunch of points, have my thanks, and know that there's now a public record of the edits made to your guide that can be rolled back at anytime.

You will have ample time to do this and play with the tools during the week long beta, being able to jump between the live site and the beta site to copy from one and paste into the other.

To quote a conversation with our moderator sweep earlier this week "Websites are never finished, only abandoned...". Fear not that changes to the site are happening, look more out for the day when updates to the site cease to happen! I'm really excited about the new site and this is one of the few ugly parts we've got to live with so we can keep moving forward. It's why I'm bringing it up now, rather than in a couple weeks.

This sucks for guide makers. :( I wish there was a better way to do this transition. :/ Thanks for giving us the heads up though, Dave.

I trust you to do what's right, Dave. Sounds like a rocky transition into a better overall system.

@snide said:

I'm talking about guides like this, this, and this.

One of my greatest works.

It was meant to be a link to Sweep's hamburger rollup. But of course I couldn't find the god damned thing because the guide system is a complete wreck so much that sweep uses it to put thousands of images into a single text field. :)

Thanks for the heads up, Dave. I don't have any guides of my own, but I'm guessing whatever pain is involved with republishing all that work will be worth it in the long run if it means more visibility and an improved editing system.

I was wondering about the fate of "miscellaneous" guides like Jeff's Wiki Style Guide, X19's "Can't Remember the Name of This Game" wall and StarFoxA's SNES Wiki Completion guide? The last can be connected to the SNES platform page, I'm guessing, but I hope you guys can find a place for the rest. There's probably even more guides that can't easily be attached to a single wiki page that are still useful in some capacity.

@Mento said:

There's probably even more guides that can't easily be attached to a single wiki page that are still useful in some capacity.

I'm thinking Pepsiman's guide to imports. That's gotta be in one of the 50 good guides, but it's hard to think of any one page it could go on (especially if we're limited to games and not just wiki pages).

Thank you for the warning, Dave. I've been putting off certain Wiki edits and potential guides that I want to write knowing the site is going to change next year.

@Mento said:

Thanks for the heads up, Dave. I don't have any guides of my own, but I'm guessing whatever pain is involved with republishing all that work will be worth it in the long run if it means more visibility and an improved editing system.

I was wondering about the fate of "miscellaneous" guides like Jeff's Wiki Style Guide, X19's "Can't Remember the Name of This Game" wall and StarFoxA's SNES Wiki Completion guide? The last can be connected to the SNES platform page, I'm guessing, but I hope you guys can find a place for the rest. There's probably even more guides that can't easily be attached to a single wiki page that are still useful in some capacity.

Honestly. The forums are prolly the best place for these.

If the author of one of those great guides were to not perform this transfer process, the staff or the mods can still do that, right? 
I'm just thinking as a last resort, so that the actual authors still have the chance to get their points, but it would be a shame to lose a great guide just because the original author wasn't there to transfer it.

@MaFoLu said:

If the author of one of those great guides were to not perform this transfer process, the staff or the mods can still do that, right? I'm just thinking as a last resort, so that the actual authors still have the chance to get their points, but it would be a shame to lose a great guide just because the original author wasn't there to transfer it.

I'll have a copy of the old DB around for last resorts.

I think that's actually a good idea.

@snide: Yeah this is probably for the best in the long run.

The unfortunate truth is that all of the examples of good guides on the site are from users that don't really post on Giant Bomb anymore and it's questionable if they'll be reporting their guides to us.

@snide: You're probably right. It'd be cool if they continued to exist as stickied threads somewhere prominent, at the very least. I'm just not sure where. Editing & Tools? I guess I ought to let the authors themselves figure it out.

The beta will answer a lot of questions about how the guides will work on the new site, I'd imagine. It'll also answer the question of just how destructive this community can become. Can't wait.

@ZombiePie: I'll spend some time to bring over a couple myself and try and contact those guys.

Thanks for the heads up Dave. I'm all for this idea, hopefully it'll serve as another level on which to bring the community together by making it easier to collaborate on guides in the future.

@Mento said:

I was wondering about the fate of "miscellaneous" guides like Jeff's Wiki Style Guide, X19's "Can't Remember the Name of This Game" wall and StarFoxA's SNES Wiki Completion guide? The last can be connected to the SNES platform page, I'm guessing, but I hope you guys can find a place for the rest. There's probably even more guides that can't easily be attached to a single wiki page that are still useful in some capacity.

There's also the (now defunct) community run TNT Archive that @X19, @Devildoll, @ZeekDaGeek, and myself worked on for the majority of 2011, which is highly reliant on guides. Would be a shame to see all that work disappear.

@B0nd07 said:

@Mento said:

I was wondering about the fate of "miscellaneous" guides like Jeff's Wiki Style Guide, X19's "Can't Remember the Name of This Game" wall and StarFoxA's SNES Wiki Completion guide? The last can be connected to the SNES platform page, I'm guessing, but I hope you guys can find a place for the rest. There's probably even more guides that can't easily be attached to a single wiki page that are still useful in some capacity.

There's also the (now defunct) community run TNT Archive that @X19, @Devildoll, @ZeekDaGeek, and myself worked on for the majority of 2011, which is highly reliant on guides. Would be a shame to see all that work disappear.

I'm willing to archive it just in case, and wait to see the full details of the new Guide System when it launches.

As much as its a bummer, this idea makes much more sense to me and makes me excited to actually contribute toward a guide. However that is where my question comes in. If they operate under the same WYSIWYG editor system, how do you suppose we handle page content redundancy? For example a lot of pages, like Fallout 3, have long tables that list content which take up a lot of space on the page. With the new site, the table of contents at the top will make navigating a page like that easier as it is but I have to ask whether tables like the one that lists all the perks only belong in a guide anyway. Is that something enforceable, encouraged? Or will that content be in both places? Say I want to migrate that list of perks over to the guild because I feel that belongs there instead, what would be the reaction from the mods?

Personally when I think of a guide, and want to use one, it walks me through things, lists every single thing out. When a page on the site provides a table listing every single monster or weapon or car, I appreciate that someone put that information there but I always felt that stuck out or was overly cumbersome on the page and wish it was somewhere else. I think it could be possible to link to the guide within the wiki if someone reading it wants to know what all the perks are, not just what the perk system is and some examples.

I don't care much about guides on GB, because other sites already have those locked down. However, as always, i appreciate your honesty and openness, Dave.

@BaconGames said:

As much as its a bummer, this idea makes much more sense to me and makes me excited to actually contribute toward a guide. However that is where my question comes in. If they operate under the same WYSIWYG editor system, how do you suppose we handle page content redundancy? For example a lot of pages, like Fallout 3, have long tables that list content which take up a lot of space on the page. With the new site, the table of contents at the top will make navigating a page like that easier as it is but I have to ask whether tables like the one that lists all the perks only belong in a guide anyway. Is that something enforceable, encouraged? Or will that content be in both places? Say I want to migrate that list of perks over to the guild because I feel that belongs there instead, what would be the reaction from the mods?

Personally when I think of a guide, and want to use one, it walks me through things, lists every single thing out. When a page on the site provides a table listing every single monster or weapon or car, I appreciate that someone put that information there but I always felt that stuck out or was overly cumbersome on the page and wish it was somewhere else. I think it could be possible to link to the guide within the wiki if someone reading it wants to know what all the perks are, not just what the perk system is and some examples.

Great question. I think this is up to the community to decide, but my opinion would be that the wiki serves as the information base around the development, release, reception and impact of the game to the gaming industry at large and the guide is a better place to cover the here are the things I need to know when playing the game. In that case, items, achievements and the like probably belong in the guide.

This is why Jeff and I plan to hire a full time staff position to really manage the wiki and set some style guides eventually. It's a budget thing at the moment unfortunately.

@snide said:

I say that knowing that the answer may be that guides simply don't need to be on Giant Bomb

Unfortunately, I feel that this is probably where things will land. While user input is certainly a part of the success of the site, there are so many other places offering walk-throughs, guides and videos that it seems unnecessary and probably plays against the sites strengths. Obviously I can only speak through personal experience, but if I'm ever in need of help, I google it and go with whatever results come back. There is no go-to place for me to find stuff. If being a valid alternative to gamefaqs is what you're after, it seems like such an uphill battle that you would need to hire people specifically for this task of expanding the guides section of GB, and with so many alternatives, I don't know that its worth the time.

That isn't to say that these aren't valuble, as guides have proven very useful and I'm always amazed at the effort people are willing to put into them, its just not an essential part of this site

I love the fact there are guides here, but they really aren't promoted or shown that there is an actual guide here. You know? So after a while, I stopped bothering even going to look and went somewhere else. Having these promoted would make a massive difference.

This sounds like it'll be a positive transition. Looking forward to it!

Might just as well start doing guides now :-)

I love the fact there are guides here, but they really aren't promoted or shown that there is an actual guide here. You know? So after a while, I stopped bothering even going to look and went somewhere else. Having these promoted would make a massive difference.

@Hailinel: I don't quite understand the busted part, though. So maybe that's where I'm going wrong? They seem fine to me.

I like the idea of having one super guide per game to amass the information.

About how long do we have to copy our guides before this new system goes into place?

@snide said:

So we're nearing the launch of the Giant Bomb beta and I figured it'd be a good time to talk about one of the more major changes we're making to the site. Specifically, I'm planning to simplify the guide system to the following features.

1. Every game will have a Guide. This will live on it's own distinct URL under that game's page.
2. There will only be one guide per game and everyone can edit it.
3. Submissions to that guide will follow the same ruleset and use the same tools of the wiki system. Meaning that you'll gain wiki points for editing guides, and new users won't be able to just run in and damage shit. Also, our new wiki history system will allow the mods to rollback edits if something bad does happen.

Before I get into the reasons why I want to do this, let's just get the ugly part that no one will like out of the way. This will mean that existing guides on the site will either need to convert into the new system or disappear. Currently there are near 2500 guides (most of them unpublished) on the site. Of those, I'd say realistically 50 or so of them are of a quality that makes them worth keeping. The obvious bad part is that I know those 50 guides are amazing, and took hours and hours and hours to create. I'm talking about guides like this, this, and this. Fucking those authors over and destroying that hard work is obviously not something I'll just whistle my way through.

Now the confession. I failed with guides. This is entirely my fault. In trying to compete with gamefaqs, I tried to think up an advanced system that bettered guide creation. Instead I ended up creating something that was clunky and most people didn't need. Draft systems? Multiple author permissions? Drag and drop Table of contents? Hit counters? Comments per section? All great ideas and there's some stuff to salvage there, but we executed it really poorly and it made our guides simply too hard to edit. What I should have done is make guides a big ass WYSIWYG editor field and auto-built the TOC off of them. It would have made them extremely simple to use and understand.

Some authors got passed my poor design and realized the potential, but most guides ended up unpublished, broken or worthless. Outside of the failure of the featureset, with mostly poor guides being made they ended up being a teeny bit of our traffic and the reality is that I just can't afford to spend large resources rebuilding a similar guide system when I've got a whole site to rebuild in a short time. I hope those fantastic authors forgive me and understand that day to day, the people here really do care about our userbase, but we also have very popular wiki, api, forum, blog, profile, image and review system that had to take priority. Most sites idea of community is a comment system with PHP BB slapped on top.

So with this new site (that remember, we've had to 100% rebuild it from scratch) I'm going to try and start fresh, keep it simple and give guides a real chance to do well on Giant Bomb. I say that knowing that the answer may be that guides simply don't need to be on Giant Bomb, but I still believe it can work and think that our editing tools allow for very rich guides to be made. Some might say, well, why not just allow text files uploads or something easy like that. I'd respond and say... well, it's not that simple. 20% of development of community websites is fighting spam. All these amazing tools that are unique to our site also make it really easy to pollute the web on high SEO ranking pages. Just ask the mods. Having a single guide that goes through the wiki system allows me to fight the same battle in one place and hopefully gives more visibility to the guides in general (I can now link to them directly only game pages). I think it's a better way to do things and in the long run (meaning the next time I have to go through a major rebuild) they'll be very easy to port over.

So if you're a guide author looking to keep your guide on Giant Bomb past the relaunch follow these simple steps.

1. Copy your guide and paste it into a forum post attached to that game's forum.
2. Tell a mod, and have them lock and pin it for you.
3. When the new site rolls around, that forum post will come over. Simply copy the guide from the post and add it to that game's guide (which will be blank).
4. Earn a bunch of points, have my thanks, and know that there's now a public record of the edits made to your guide that can be rolled back at anytime.

You will have ample time to do this and play with the tools during the week long beta, being able to jump between the live site and the beta site to copy from one and paste into the other.

To quote a conversation with our moderator sweep earlier this week "Websites are never finished, only abandoned...". Fear not that changes to the site are happening, look more out for the day when updates to the site cease to happen! I'm really excited about the new site and this is one of the few ugly parts we've got to live with so we can keep moving forward. It's why I'm bringing it up now, rather than in a couple weeks.

I didn't even know this site had guides.....

Also, video guides?

I kind of embarrassed to say it, but I didn't even know there were guides here.

I think this change makes a lot of sense though. Each game will have its respective wiki page, and guide page. Makes it really simple for people trying to find information on the game because everything is sort of in one place. General details about the game in the wiki, and actual game information and walkthrough in the guide.

Change is good, this sounds good.

Honestly, I would be very interested in working on contributing to the guides once there is a better interface for them. I always wanted to write one, but I just could never justify the insane amount of hours needed.

Contributing here and there while playing the game anyway, especially with more obscure games, sounds like a good idea to me.

Single guide sounds like a great system. They have barely had any visibility on the site up till now, as you can see many people didn't even know we had them. So I hope the feature sticks out more in the redesign.

David, about half of my Metal Gear guide is missing—maybe it happened when the last re-design hit, but I haven't looked at the guide in ages, so I don't know. I guess the missing half has been lost to the wind? I'll try and find a backup (at the very least I'll pull it from the Kindle version, plug) and maybe post it when the new site hits. In any case, thank you for the heads-up.

Yeah, I have to say that you're right Dave, guides were kind of a total failure. I mean, I never once thought about going to Giant Bomb before GameFAQs, and I think on the various times I've seen you guys look up a faq on a live stream, I very much doubt you checked Giant Bomb before going to GameFAQs either.
 
Though, I have to say that the idea of one guide per game being automatically made is such a better way of doing it; knowing that the page is already there but empty seems like a small thing, but it actually makes me so much more willing to, I dunno, go through Wario Land 2 again and list out where all the treasure rooms are or something. Plus, I think a bunch of stuff in the wiki is already a lot more suited to guides, and splitting the two into separate pages is probably beneficial to them both. And having one guide per game that everyone can edit, combining a whole bunch of people's knowledge in one place, is actually something that makes me want to use Giant Bomb instead of GameFAQs, which was almost certainly the main reason they failed in the first place.
 
Honestly, I'm glad to see that you haven't given up on guides completely; they're such a small part of the site that I would have totally understood if you'd just scrapped them completely like you're doing with quests. It's really heartwarming to see you want to give them another go and do them better.

When they are integrated and implemented into the slick new shit that you're dropping soon, they'll become much more sexy.

A few, top-notch guides that are more visible and easier to work on sounds okay to me.

Not sure how I feel about one giant guide per game. Will have to wait to see how it's implemented.

According to my guide stats the Fez Game Guide I made is still getting traffic from Google up to this day, which is pretty cool to see. I really should finish it sometime so maybe the redesign will be the push I need.

I'll put the Fallout 3 megaguide in the forums tonight. I would be crushed if that was deleted!

I never made guides though I always thought about it. Maybe this new update would help me do that. Though I could not create megaguides like that. :0

Fallout 3 Megaguide has been posted to the forums

Posted the "Golden Guide" (remember when there were enough guides being made to justify that being a thing in the community post?) I worked on for Shadow Complex long ago. Can I get a lock and pin? Here it is.

Fallout 3 Megaguide has been posted to the forums 

Posted the "Golden Guide" (remember when there were enough guides being made to justify that being a thing in the community post?) I worked on for Shadow Complex long ago. Can I get a lock and pin? Here it is.

Most guides are published under one of the Creative Commons licenses, no? We've already been granted permission to copy the guides as long as the the terms of the license are complied with.

Someone should do that. Set up a mirror containing all the published CC-licensed guides, including author attribution as required by the license. We would lose the guides with custom licenses, but it's a lot less than we'd lose otherwise.

Please note that this is a suggestion and I do not currently have plans to do this. Don't assume that I'm already in the process of preserving your guides. I'd like to, but I'm currently busy with assorted other things.

@snide said:

I say that knowing that the answer may be that guides simply don't need to be on Giant Bomb,

Gotta tell ya Dave, and I hate to say this given the time people have poured into some of the guides here, but I think this has never been more true now that you guys are part of the same family as Gamefaqs.

Having a link on each gamepage to the related gamefaqs game page (or somehow using their data) might save you a bunch of time and would probably be honestly more useful to the reader given that gamefaqs has such a critical mass of guides Giantbomb would really struggle to ever replicate. You guys have so much else to do with the relaunch, I'm not sure guides are worth diverting your time and resources to.

Sometimes less is more. And since you are part of CBSi now you might as well use it your advantage.

@snide: Here ya' go.

Soooooo you are basically saying that there will be one big guide for Cannibalism?

FINALLY!

I'm really glad this is happening. I tried my hand at making a multiplayer guide for Assassin's Creed Brotherhood when that was fresh, but I got really discouraged with how hard it was to use the mostly broken tools.

@snide: I may not post much any more but I still visit Giant Bomb.

Everything I've done on Giant Bomb has been in relation to guides. Snide may think he failed but after the update Andy made to them last year, they became a lot more functional. The editing tools have allowed me to have a lot of fun coming up with interesting ways to use them. It's the reason Giant Bomb has the edge over other sites as far as ways I can contribute to it. If it was just the forums and the wiki then I would of never put the work in. You can see for yourself that the ability to have multiple users working on the same idea, using those guide tools, has the potential to be amazing. It's the tools that are important, there's a lot more potential in them than just being related to "guide for one game"

If I have understood this correctly Snide, you're only doing one guide per game? There seems only two options for those who want to use the guides for anything outside the box. Hijack a game no one gives a shit about and build a guide there or get special permission from the mods to make up a game and build it in there.

http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/x19/tnt-archive/30-72532/

As far as the TNT Archive, I would like to know what can be done honestly. It's still the easiest way to view those TNTs (videos still work) that came out before Giant Bomb put them on the site, under the subscription service. There's three complications as well.

1) A single guide page can only hold five to seven videos before the page starts to slow down and takes forever to load anything.

2) Because the code is from before the redesign, if I go back in and publish it, I lose all the links that are joined to the main thread on the forums. Any change to those guides will result in those links being lost. Also I think the videos will stop working.

3) I can only make two forum threads up because of the flood filter. There's 15 TNT guides to transfer.

http://www.giantbomb.com/guides/the-cant-remember-the-name-of-this-game-wall/2317/

The guide which keeps me coming back to Giant Bomb is this one ^^^^. I don't come on Giant Bomb enough to know when this switch over will come so I'm worried I will lose questions. I can back it up as it is now but that guide is constantly changing, I still get new questions every week and am waiting on answers to be verified by users. This whole idea will not work as a forum thread. The guide tools allow users to add questions themselves and are then easily viewed on one page. The traditional method means questions get lost in massive forum threads which can only hold so many comments per page.

This is the one I will be the most gutted to lose. With what you're planning, it will be impossible for this to carry on functioning.

Submissions to that guide will follow the same ruleset and use the same tools of the wiki system. Meaning that you'll gain wiki points for editing guides, and new users won't be able to just run in and damage shit. Also, our new wiki history system will allow the mods to rollback edits if something bad does happen.

What worries me the most is this. Losing author control over the guides and having to wait for mods to check it. I honestly don't care about wiki points, which means I have very few, which means I will be treated like a new user. I have guides which are open to everyone and are self governed. The reason there's never an issue is because of the "history" guide function. If someone deletes everything, I can just go back and revert to a previous state.

The tools are fantastic for experimenting with ideas and having a simple platform for users to collaborate together. Having the same ruleset that the wiki has will reduce creativity and make guides the same as every other site. It's always been about the tools and after the update, it seems even harder to get at them.

http://www.giantbomb.com/guides/the-giant-bomb-uncharted-clan-gbc/2175/

You see a new multiplayer game come out and one user makes a forum post which has to be constantly updated with player ID's etc. I made a guide for Uncharted 3 that could be edited by everyone so there would be no need for such threads. You could have a player list guide for each game which everyone could just add to.

I just wish you would see the potential of the guide tools. The reason most guides have failed is because they have been hidden away, deep within the site. The only reason the best ones have survived is because they have been lucky to be in the tiny most popular guide list (http://www.giantbomb.com/guides/) or they have been promoted by ZombiePie or linked to a forum thread. What's the most amusing thing is that people find my guides through google because it's the easiest way to find them.

In the grand scheme of things I'm sure guides don't bring in a lot of traffic. I know I'm in the minority that put the time to get the most out of the guide tools. For the majority it will make them more willing to contribute to guides. It's just a shame those tools are only available to be used for the purpose of a singular game and will be governed by the mods, with a ruleset which doesn't include anyone who wants to be more creative than doing a straight guide.