Please Use Guildwiki Before Posting Here

Nearly 90% of the questions I see asked here can easily be found on Guildwiki:

http://www.gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Main_Page

And nearly 85% of the answers are simply people posting the appropriate link to it.

Please use this first. It is maintained by many of the people that are involved in this message board. The only other thing you need to know about it is that it doesn't have a spell guesser so you have to know the exact spelling of any searches you make, which is easy to find on google.

Could an admin please make this a sticky.

Thank you,
Livingston

How about you leave the "announcements" to the mods and perhaps...admins??

Or do you really think that in all this time since the board went live, no one thought "Hmmm, maybe we should tell people to stop posting and go directly to Guildwiki instead of our own forum. "

what caleb said, and besides, not everyone knows wiki has a gw part, this is the q&a sub forum, questions are ment to be here

and almost 140 posts in about 16 days? what are you posting in?<.<

and for manic, I wouldn't be surprized on the posting idea

wiki can be changed by anyone with a account thing on there, meaning some things can be off[though not likely, nothing perfect]
and here you can get multiple responses on one thing, having more input, as well as a personal contact[aka pming]

as for his response, then use the edit feature

^random spam forum aka Sell/Buy forum

as for GW anouncment, yes it is a good idea

why waste the time and space with questions allready answered when the answer will most likly be a link to GWiki anyway. Nonone likes repeating themselves to every unwilling reader. I mean come on...GOOGLE people, use it...and it links to GWiki. And GWG is not in competition with GWiki...if fools want to leave over that they are welcome to it. GWG kinda serves a different niche.

Wiki doesn't have a guild wars part in it, it is a seperate wiki for guild wars. And the part about people not knowing about it is the point of the post, so people will know about it. And though anyone can edit it, it also has many people watching each page in order to prevent people from posting inaccurate info.

To Caleb: Sorry. Yes I think announcments should be left to the Admins, but I was hoping that one would make this a sticky and thus officialize it. I figure if they don't they'll just tell me to shut up and close it anyway. And yes I am sure it has been thought of before, but seeing as how there is so many people here flaming new posters to use the search option, which atm isn't working too well. I thought this would be a better idea and wanted to make a new appeal for it.

I know the admins support Guildwiki as they have an entire section devoted to it at the bottom of the forum. The only problem is there is nothing to point new players to it as many people don't even know what a wiki is, and this would be the best place to do so.

As for this being the Q&A section and thus the place for this type of thing. I agree. However, it is also clear that with the heavy pressure on using the search feature that the admins don't like to see new threads opened for every question that has been answered 100 times over. If this was a sticky and new players saw how easy it was to find the simple questions on it, then the questions that were made on here would be questions that really need to be asked. This would cause less grief from board vets not having to post the same answers over and over again. It would cause "good" questions to get more exposure and thus better answers as there wouldn't be a sea of other questions that no one wants to answer for the 100th time. It would also provide better material for readers as questions that don't have obvious common knowledge answers would be more visible, and thus you could come here and learn a lot about the game.

As to my post count, 2% you will find in the warriors forum. 1% you will find in the community projects forum. 1% you will find in Sardelac Sanitarium, and 1% you will find in Druid's Overlook and Ventari's Sell. 95% of them have been in this very forum answering questions that could have been found in Guildwiki. Hence the reason for this thread.

I have never posted in any off-topic sections or spam forum, nor will I ever.

I really like to help new players. In a previous game I created a guild (clan) based entirely on helping new players to the game, it's just what I do, as I believe helping new players is the best way to create a firm player base of people that are enjoyable to play with, rather then having tons of people that have no idea how to play the game and even more leaving because they can't find help. The game should be fun, and it's not fun to wander around not knowing what you are doing, or getting grief from other players who don't want "noobs" on their team.

So personally I feel that pointing new players to Guildwiki is the best way I can think of to really help them out. They find definate answers without having to wade through posts that have nothing to do with the question, or through answers that are out dated or simply wrong. A lot of the stickys in these threads for new users point to places that are no longer accurate unless you wade through 24 pages, and then you start to wonder if that's out of date as well. This is through no fault of the admins as you would have to go through and update every sticky or its OP every time there was an update, just to make sure you covered everything. It's simply not efficient for the simple questions. And on Guildwiki no one has to worry about having too many questions or getting flamed for asking a common question. You just enter the search, read the one page, and move to your next question.

Livingston

So any hope of getting a sticky for this thread or someone else making a link to Guildwiki where new players can find it easily?

Mods? Admins?

>_>

<_<

*Looks around*

Livingston

since you are obviously trying to be helpful the mods/admins have not closed this or swatted you down so far.

the very fact that this has not been stickied is your answer.

this is a forum to answer peoples questions even if you have answered it 100 times before (AND I HAVE DONE JUST THAT) because the question is new to the person asking for help/information

lets have a main forum page that is nothing more than a wiki redirect and a message saying if you cant find it here come back and bother us.

if repeating an answer bothers you skip it and let someone willing to help do it but dont just shove people off to another site

The more time you spend on the forums, the more repeated questions you see, the more sensitive you become to them. I get pretty pissy sometimes too, but I try to remember that it's a new person just about every time and not the same person over and over again.

Making this a sticky won't help. Because if people read stickies, then they'd have seen the FAQ's and other topics already in place to help them and wouldn't be repeating common questions, which this thread is trying to prevent. Lovely logic, eh? =)

quoted for truth.
This sums up what the poster is feeling (including some of us) while at the same time taking consideration that we were once new to the game and asked the same questions.
And yes, 90% of the people do not read the stickies or even the forum guidline.

If stickies work do you think there will be less than 24 hour bumps at the sell forum. I check the forum everyday and keep seeing these less than 24 hour bumps everday.

Well actually, I just didn't see this thread We have thousands of posts a day and I'm bound to miss a few. Livingston, we adore GuildWiki. It's a valuable resource and I've spoken with Gravewit a handful of times about both of our sites. We do indeed serve a different aspect for the community but we need our viewers and our viewers support just as GuildWiki does. It streches beyond just what site can offer the better or quicker answer.

Anyone who has been on GWG for a bit knows that we encourage the sharing of information. We do not prohibit links to other Guild Wars Sites so please, if the answer can be found on GuildWiki post a link to it! But reaching further then that, I have a website to run and grow just as the admins at GuildWiki want to see their own website continue to grow. The Q&A forum is more for just answering a question though, it's for open discussion as well.

We have an ongoing partnership with GuildWiki and we continue to discuss ways that we can better serve the community together while growing our individual sites. I have spoken with several of the admins on the site and they know that they can always message me with any requests.

Thank you very much Inde. *bows humbly*

I was more or less hoping to get a reason (from an admin or mod) why there wasn't a link here (when Guildwiki seems to otherwise be promoted by this site) and that is a very valid argument of why one shouldn't be here.

It may not be nearly as efficient as going to Guildwiki, but it does encourage new users to stick around and read this board rather than being swept off to Gwiki and never coming back.

My only problem is that the stickys that are provided in this section are near worthless as most of them are outdated or you have to wade through 20 pages and hope you can find the updated answer somewhere within. I think a lot of people will look at the answers to the very first post and believe that is the correct answer to the question subject or they will actually know that its wrong, so they simply create a new thread about it instead of reading all the way through the original thread that is linked.

I was an admin of the last board that I was a regular on and a mod on the one previous to that, so when I see things like that I have a huge urge to fix it. Since I'm not a mod I figured promoting Guildwiki would be the best way to fix it.

In any case if you have need of a mod with the specific purpose of going through and updating sticky threads, just let me know.

Livingston

You know, all this can be easily avoided...

Change the text on the 'Submit Post' button to 'Did you check the wiki first?'.

this is turning into quite a discussion. moved.

guru is more reliable imo so i will always look here first

Because it has me to answer your questions?

*smile*

And me! . I can actually smile .

Sounds like you really want to get your post rank up and get some stickies.

Without those questions these forums would be next to dead. To some people this is a better resource than guildwiki. After all, this was here before the wiki...

glad to see this is in a better place now, and the admins have spoken!<.<
camp the q&a most of the time don't you livingston, kind, but you'll drive yourself mad.... too late for me

If I wanted to get my post count up I would go to the off topic forums and make fun of Rurik and Sister Tai. Also why would I want to implement something that would make me have to post less if I just wanted stickies and post counts. The logic meter hits a big 0 on that conclusion.

I disagree. The only thing that would happen is there would be less questions in the Q&A that could be answered with a one link post. The rest of the board would still be heavily used as it goes into things that Guildwiki doesn't handle. Things that require discussion and debate. Anyway the admin has spoken his will be done.

To Plushie Penguin: It's too late for me as well. @_@

Basically what I do is when I am playing faction battles I come here to answer questions while I'm waiting for the next battle to commence. Considering I sometimes have to wait 10 mins at a time, it's quite easy to answer 6-7 questions that have very simple answers.

If a mod/admin wants to close this thread, please feel free to, as the OP has been dealt with. Everything else is simply opinions and conjecture.

Livingston