How to help people get online
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I’ve been looking at the wiki trying to figure out how to improve our instructions for helping people get online. Before I dive in and make changes, I wanted to ask people about the best way to do this.
I’d prefer the instructions were somewhat similar to these - without the discovery specific stuff. http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=44642
These instructions work for Vista/Win7 (and 2000/XP) and they avoid problems with UAC because FLMM and Freelancer are not installed in Program Files but on the user’s desktop.
Proposed wiki changes are:
- Move Technical > Getting Started to the top of the main wiki page. Maybe renaming this to “How to play” or something.
- Replace “Installation and Recommended Applications, Installing and Managing Mods, Getting online in Windows XP, Getting online in Windows Vista/7” with a single article similar to the link from the discovery forums above.
- Move the server operator information into a new article about how to setup a server and include FLHook setup information in this too.
- Retain the existing Vista/7 and XP fault finding articles and link them into the new installation article.
- Add a subsection that has links to mods?
Thoughts/improvements/random ranting?
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some people meets online are so lazy they are not specify their problems properly
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Just some random thoughts:
A lot of search engine traffic we get is for the search “freelancer windows 7” which directs to the article of how to get online in Windows 7.
Im not really sure what would be the best way to do what you’re suggesting. Maybe re-design our wiki-structure alltogether?All in all, I think our existing beginner guide is pretty cool, with the quick links at the top.
I like the idea to put technical on the top of the main wiki page.
Regarding a subsection for mod links:
I’ve already created a mod-database and server-database page and want to refine their standard style, in order to build our own giant mod/server database. I think its saying we are an FL modding site but refer to ModDB in the beginner guide to let people find actual mods. This needs to change and Im on it (seeing we already get a lot of search engine traffic from “freelancer mods”, but we are not the top#1 search result).
I’ll do a news post about this in the near future, after Im done designing how mod database entries should look like. -
If you change the structure of particularly popular entries (like the one w0d pointed to), it might be a good idea to leave redirection pages so as not to lose ranking on search engines.
Otherwise, just go for it. The wiki was built so the community could make it as good as it can be
