[Argent Archives] The Missing Manual by Barloy
Intro
The Argent Archives is an online portal to Argent Dawn’s roleplaying scene. You can use it to upload your character’s profile, post adventures as or about your character, create events for all other AA users to read, upload images about your character, or well, just to see other people do the same!
These limited features can be used in many ways, however. Using them the right way could offer certain benefits. For example, if you add enough banners and images to an event, we might publish it to the front page, which will result in a lot more view counts, which is good publicity for your event!
“I doubt anyone really reads those event nodes, or my profile page! I’m not putting effort into the AA!”
Well it’s your choice, but here are some numbers:
The Fablewind Faire has an event page which they re-use almost every week. It has over 26.000 views, merely by being on the small event section on the right side of your screen. (It’s 3K views less than Amarae’s character profile has, though!)Did you go to see the Fakelwind Farce, hosted by the East Bank Scoundrels? Their one time event received just about 1000 views, which is about the same as a recently uploaded front-page news article gets.
In the long run, it pays off to use the Argent Archives. Much of your roleplay will be secluded, for a limited audience to witness. Perhaps you like it that way, but perhaps you’d rather broadcast your achievements, so that likeminded roleplayers can read about it and find you. That’s what the Argent Archives is, a medium through which likeminded roleplayers can find eachother.
This guide will explain how to best use the Argent Archives. It’s going to be a long guide, so I’ll include an index!Index:
Section one: general tips
- Registering a new character
- Profiles
- Brackets
- Adventures
- Noticeboard items
- Images
- !! Events !!
Section two: optimizing your AA use
- Advanced search
- Articles
- Events to the front page
- Advertising
- Friendlist
Too long, didn’t read
Frequently asked questions
Recurring problems
Useful links
SECTION ONE: General tips
1. Registering a new character
We suggest using the same e-mail address for all your characters. It’s far easier to keep track, and if you ever encounter a problem, the admins will have an easier time helping you out. You can register an endless amount of characters.
IMPORTANT: Always use your ingame name! If your name is already taken, use the contact button to tell the admins about it, and we’ll see if we can free it up for you.
It can take a while for the admins to activate your account, but if it hasn’t been activated after 3 days, send us an e-mail!2. Profiles
Your profile is like the centerpiece of the party. You’d be surprised how many people check out your profile after you published some content on the AA. Many people love to use images on their profile, and we can only encourage that, but keep the following in mind: Like any SEO expert will tell you, pictures containing text can normally not be found by a search engine! If your entire profile / guild node / event is one big picture with text on it, the search tool will be less eager to post your node in its results.
Instead, use brackets!Good use of pictures:
- http://www.argentarchives.org/node/127199 - Itsy Lockpop
- http://www.argentarchives.org/node/94649 - Razkul Wolfbane
- http://www.argentarchives.org/node/129467 - Paithien Dawnstalker
Not-so-optimal use of pictures:
- http://www.argentarchives.org/node/137921 - It’s appealing to use images with text on, as it’s easier for the layout, but it’s not easy to edit, slows the AA down and SEO unfriendly!
3. Brackets
Read all about them! No, seriously, you have no idea (perhaps you do) how good it is to link to others. A quality link to a quality profile might reward you with links to your own profile.
I could write essays about the proper use of brackets, but Alabast beat me to it!
IMPORTANT: http://www.argentarchives.org/brackets
4. Adventures
I’ll include a few tips for making adventures more pleasent to read, as well as proper use of the different kinds of adventure.
NOTE: Recently, people have been uploading adventure-like nodes on the noticeboards. That’s not good, and not nice, cheating for higher viewcounts.
Most of the adventure types explain themselves: Diaries, poetry … Okay, perhaps only two of them explain themselves. However, each time you make a new adventure, the green text underneath the “what kind of adventure is this” question explains exactly what each kind is for. It’s important to only use published works if you want other roleplayers to actually find the text in-game, AND if it is a work of considerable size, like a book, or an important scroll.
Everything else fits in the stories and notes section.IMPORTANT: Never dedicate an adventure to an OOC message. We’ll look the other way if there’s a small OOC note somewhere in the adventure, but if the adventure is all OOC, we’ll likely take it down.
What makes a good adventure?
It all depends on who you want to be reading your adventure. People who’ve met your character and roleplay with it will automatically check the adventure. But if you want to reach more people, continued excellence is a must!
- Include pictures. People generally don’t read long texts (you’re allowed to quote me if you reached this point, even!), and pictures really help to make things more interesting.
- Whitespace: ADD IT! It won’t slow your adventure down! Use paragraphs and whitespace until you’re sure your adventure is more pleasent to read.
- Spelling and stuff: Check it, or let a friend proofread for you. It’s not a must, ofcourse, but it helps!
5. Noticeboard nodes
The noticeboards are located in 3 different cities: Stormwind, Thunderbluff and Booty Bay.
They’re meant for people to post small notices on, like “Looking for mercenaries” or “Have you seen this mechanical squirrel?”.
I have noticed that people have been starting to use the noticeboards as a way to bypass the quick rate at which adventures disappear, or that they post them in both Stormwind and Booty Bay in the hopes of reaching more counts.
IMPORTANT: Do not post posters of considerable length on the noticeboards, or start back-and-forth messaging. Instead, make an adventure to post your large poster in.
The rule of thumb is: If it’s not a short notice, it belongs in the adventures section.
Quite good:
http://www.argentarchives.org/node/139833 - Alright, might have been better if it were written, with images added to it, but then notices are often one-time things that do not need to be found again later.http://www.argentarchives.org/node/139540 - Still a bit long, but not too long! This is a pleasent notice to read.
Not-so-good:
http://www.argentarchives.org/node/139848 - Sorry to be picking on nodes by the same guild, but they’re the best examples of how it should not be done. This notice might be for public eyes, but it’s far too long for our noticeboards! They’d have made a perfect adventure, however (a banner, whitespace, … excellent!)
6. Images
I love the images section. It allows me to go back in time for like 7 years and see events I totally forgot about. An image of the past is a wonderful thing! But I can only find these pictures if they were uploaded correctly back in the days! So here’s a few tips:
- Unless you’ll use the images in an adventure, include TEXT, CONTENT TAGS and LINK TO GUILD/ NEWS-EVENT LINK. I can not stress this enough! I know it can be irritating to have to update that part if you need to upload a lot of images, but not only will your content have more views if it’s linked to an event/guild, you’ll find it a lot easier to retrieve in the future. Content tags especially should be considered, so that images may show up if you do a search for a guild or profile node.
- Don’t steal artwork! We’ll take it down, no matter what.
- Keep it stylish!
7. Events
Everyone can upload an event. It’s in the same tab as images / adventures / … “Create Content”. Events are amongst the nodes that are most read, often ranging in the thousands, but they’re also the nodes that are least well constructed. I’ll dedicate more to events on the next section regarding “optimizing” your AA use. Here’s a few general tips:
- An event doesn’t have to be long. Very often, a simple message like “We’ll be going there, at that hour with those intentions” is better than four long pages of text explaining every detail of the event. Always consider that most people do not want to read the entire text.
- Images instantly upgrade your event to a higher level. It shows that you’ve put thought and effort into making the event, and promises some quality. Not only that, but with enough images, your event might end up on the front page for extra publicity! More on that in the next section.
IMPORTANT: Upload even your small events, or recruitment drives, or just a guild event. Let people know your guild is doing something, even if it’s just a guild event that isn’t accessible for outsiders! When the AA came out of beta-mode, guilds often used the event section to catalogue their guild events, which attracted lots of people!
Ofcourse, if you have a dozen events a week, don’t start uploading them all, causing other people’s events to disappear until the day they take place. We’ll keep track of that as admins.
Let people know what you’re doing so that they can judge if your guild is for them or not.SECTION TWO: Optimizing your AA use
If you’ve mastered the first section, you might want to read on about optimizing your AA use! There’s a lot you can do to make the AA a far more pleasent place to browse through.
1. Advanced search
The search tool isn’t perfect, and it can be slow in updating new content. It could take a week or longer for your profile to finally show up! But there’s more to the search function than just that small textbox in the upper left corner!
When you’re in the search tab, you’ll find the “advanced search” option right underneath the textbox with “enter your keywords”. Here, you can select what types of content you’d like to see, or give in a specific phrase that should be searched for.
I just searched for an old character of mine, and only wanted to see images, and it allowed me to find this old picture by Colaina of the meeting during the WotLK introduction event:
http://www.argentarchives.org/node/167612. Articles
You must have had an event sometime where you thought: “wow, this is awesome!”. Well, the article section is all about that. We want to show people the cool roleplay going on on Argent Dawn. Used to be we were able to visit most events as reporters, but the realm is so big now, and our time so limited, we can barely cover 0.1% of the roleplay ongoing.
You can make an article about your event, even about your guild!
How? Create an adventure > PM the link to an AA admin (not via contact!) > Done!
Just like that? Well, there are a few rules! You can find all of them at >>http://www.argentarchives.org/articles
- Images. The more, the better! Add a main banner of 590 x 150 px, and if you want to be perfect and well loved by the entire AA staff, add a small banner of 275 x 100 px for when your article moves down.
- Make it interesting enough. It’s impossible to please everyone, and some articles will mean nothing to certain people and quite a lot to others. Write about a guild event, but in such a way that it’s not all about your guild, but more about the roleplay others could take part in.
- Less text, more message! Endlessly long articles will only be published if they have an absurd amount of images too. So make it a short but informative article.
- Spelling: You can’t be perfect, but try to be. Have a friend read it over!
- Different subjects. If you love to make articles, you might upload two or three in a row. Don’t upload two or three in a row about the same subject! If your articles are all about what one guild did in a timespan of 3 days, it gets boring to read. Find different things to write about. And it’s excellent if you can find a subject that isn’t all over the AA already, or all over the forums!
- Include people’s opinions. You’ll often find articles with quotes from people who witnessed an event. This is good! It’s expertly good if these are people who are not in the spotlight all the time!
Here’s an example of a terrible article:
http://www.argentarchives.org/node/139708 - Barloy generally sucks at making articles, but this was really bad!! No, but really, while the article is short, and the story could be quite interesting to a few people, it’s not something that should be on the front page. There obviously was a lot of potential for quotes from bystanders, but I included no other names than those who duelled. And those are two people who are already quite known within the Alliance community!
There’s plenty of pictures, but then those pictures say little about the event itself, it’s just more of the same.
It was good roleplay, and it deserved some attention, just not on the front page!Here’s an example of a good article:
http://www.argentarchives.org/node/137899 - It’s a bit long, but the pictures are excellent! There’s plenty of quotes, which makes up (and more) for the long text. It’s informative, and those people who weren’t there will know what it is about, allowing them to partake in the roleplay.
3. Events to the front page
If you have constructed an event according to how we suggest you do it in section one, there’s a big chance your event is fit to be a front page article! This means:
- It has plenty of images.
- It’s got a reasonable amount of IC text, but not too much!
- It’s an event you want people to see and go to.
If that’s the case, don’t hesitate and PM the link to an AA admin and ask if it can be put on the front page. We’d rather have a dozen small front page articles about events than one giant article about an event that is already over!
Here’s an event I’d like to post on the front page when it draws near:
http://www.argentarchives.org/node/137276 - It needs a few more images, but it’s one of those big public events that can’t get enough attention!4. Advertising
“Gaaah, I put so much time in this guildnode, but I don’t think people are seeing it!”
There are a lot of guilds and people on the AA, and many of them upload stuff daily, or get links to them. It’s not hard for your guild to be skipped over.
Luckily advertising on the AA can help you get the attention you think you deserve!
You can read all about it here http://www.argentarchives.org/advertising
NOTE: You’ll notice there’s a price to advertising. But that’s not always the case. We often give strong discounts, or allow people to advertise for free, depending on how many people wish to advertise.
It’s easy to upload an ad, but you need to pay attention:
- Go to “create content” > “Advertisement”
2. Fill in the form: “Title” is important, it allows the admins to find your ad quickly. “Ad groups” is also very important, it’s where you want the ad to be displayed. It all depends on the dimensions you chose for your ad!
“Description” isn’t that important and can be skipped. The “destination url” is the most important part, it’s where you want your ad to link to when someone clicks on it. This could be anywhere, even your guild website! Mouseover is optional.
3. File attachment: You’ll find this at the bottom of the form. This is where you put in the actual banner. Once you’ve uploaded the picture, you’ll see two checkboxes: “Delete” and “list”. Check “list”, or it won’t work!
4. Submit and PM an admin! This is important, since we do not check the advertisement section all that often!IMPORTANT: Your ad has to be in-character. This is easier for law-abiding guilds, but criminals might have to get creative!
5. Friendslist
This feature is often overlooked, likely because it is somewhat hidden away and hardly advertised.
The friendslist allows you to invite people to become your friend on the AA, which in turn allows you to see the content they recently uploaded.
This is quite handy, because the AA grows so rapidly it’s easy to miss content your friends uploaded.To add a friend, all you have to do is visit their profile, go to the bottom of the page and click “add Barloy to friends”.
A request will be sent, pending approval from that friend.You can then see your friends’ activity underneath your friendslist on the left side of the screen.
TL;DR!!
Here’s a few important things you might not know:
If you have constructed an event according to how we suggest you do it in section one, there’s a big chance your event is fit to be a front page article!
Upload even your small events, or recruitment drives, or just a guild event. Let people know your guild is doing something, even if it’s just a guild event that isn’t accessible for outsiders! When the AA came out of beta-mode, guilds often used the event section to catalogue their guild events, which attracted lots of people!
Ofcourse, if you have a dozen events a week, don’t start uploading them all, causing other people’s events to disappear until the day they take place. We’ll keep track of that as admins.
Let people know what you’re doing so that they can judge if your guild is for them or not.Do not post posters of considerable length on the noticeboards, or start back-and-forth messaging. Instead, make an adventure to post your large poster in.
The rule of thumb is: If it’s not a short notice, it belongs in the adventures section.
Read all about them brackets! No, seriously, you have no idea (perhaps you do) how good it is to link to others. A quality link to a quality profile might reward you with links to your own profile.
I could write essays about the proper use of brackets, but Alabast beat me to it!
F.A.Q.
1. The AA is so slow!?
True, apologies! We’re not taking donations for a better server simply because when those donations stop, the AA might entirely disappear (moving it isn’t so easy anymore).2. The AA is so buggy!
True, there are a few things that do not work like they should. -Most- problems can be solved by using google chrome or mozilla firefox (the former is prefered). If that doesn’t help, contact the admins!3. Can I be an AA admin?
The path towards an AA admin position is long and full of perils. The best way to start is making quality articles, which’ll bring you a reporter status, allowing you to publish articles without AA admin editing. If you’re known for good behaviour in the community, your chances dramatically increase.4. I want this feature added to the AA, I have a good idea, implement it!
The tech admins are occupied, too occupied! We’d love to implement new features, but at this point it’s likely the entire website should be remade before that happens.5. Why do you allow all this questionable quality roleplay to be posted it angers me so!!??
The AA allows you to find the roleplayers you want to roleplay with, and those you’d rather stay away from. Everyone has his or her preferences, and we’re not here to judge!Recurring problems
1. My character’s name is already taken - upon registration
Cause:
- The AA does not make a difference between “e” and “é” or “a” and “à ”. It doesn’t understand accents!
This means that Barloy is the same name as Bà rlöy. Ofcourse, this causes for registrations to collide.
- The name is actually taken as it is, but someone already had a character named like that in the past, deleted that character since then, but did not ask for his character to be deleted from the AA.
Solution:
All you can do is Contact the AA admins via the contact button in the upper right corner.Include in your mail:
- A link to the profile that currently has your name (if you can find it).
- The name you’re trying to register.
And we’ll take care of it for you! Most of the time, we can give you the name, as the other user’s profile is either inactive or empty. If not, we’ll handcraft a profile for you!
2. The background of my profile doesn’t save when I submit! - When editting a profile
Cause:
You’re likely using internet explorer as a web browser.Solution:
We hate to force you to change web browsers, but currently there is no other solution. Google Chrome is best, then mozilla firefox.3. I can’t edit my profile at all, it just shows a blank page without the edit button! - Right after registration
Cause:
This generally happens on user registration, we’re yet to figure out what causes it!Solution:
http://www.argentarchives.org/node/135812
Saerynn is personally taking care of this! However, if you do not have an AA account to PM with, use the contact button in the upper right corner of the page. We’ll remake your profile for you, which will solve the problem.
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