User blog:LostInRiverview/Weekly Update Blog - Starting out

 The Sims Wiki - Weekly Community Blog  Week of November 17, 2012 

Okay, here goes nothing!

We're trying out a new community news feature - weekly news blogs. The Newsletter isn't going away, but we want to be able to provide more regular updates on the goings-on here on TSW. In addition to current events, we'll try to provide some useful information or, failing that, at least try to be interesting. This is an experimental idea so any feedback on it is more than welcome - leave us a comment or drop a message on this forum thread. Another thing to note - we're shooting for a weekly release, but the day of the week that it releases on isn't set in stone, so it may change.

What's happening?
The biggest news of the week is definitely The Sims 3: Seasons release! We weren't able to design a cool theme re-design like we did with Supernatural this time, but he hope you're all still excited for the expansion pack. As usual with new expansion packs, there's a lot of information we need to add to the wiki. If you have a copy of TS3: Seasons, be sure to head over to the page and its related pages and help us get our articles updated.
 * TS3 Seasons release

Related to Seasons, there's currently some talk on this talk page over how our seasons/weather pages are to be organized. Be sure to head over to that talk page and weigh in on what you think the best approach is.

We're continuing to shift into full use of our Forums feature, and there are a couple active discussions on the Community Discussions board you should all be aware of.
 * Community Discussions


 * The aforementioned discussion about establishing a weekly news system can be seen here.
 * A discussion of when discussion threads should be considered archived can be accessed here.

Additionally, the remaining discussions on the old Community Portal Talk Page have been archived. If there was something being discussed that you want to continue talking about, feel free to start a thread about it in the Community Discussions forum.

Where to find Community News
Along the lines of trying to "provide some useful information," I'd like to briefly go over all the places you can find community information and discussions.

We try very hard to make sure our big items make it to the Main Page. Be sure to scroll down the page past the slider images at the top, and you'll find a lot of templates and links that lead all over the wiki. Generally speaking, Featured items are near the top, followed by game links and game news, then community news and links nearest the bottom.
 * Main Page

Important updates are announced through Community Corner, which is visible on Wiki Activity. These updates may include announcements of important discussions or their outcomes, promotions of users to admin or bureaucrat status, and other current events.
 * Community corner

Our main forum of presenting news is through blogs, like this. For quick access to all TSW community news blogs, look at Category:Wiki news blogs and Category:Community blogs. Our most-recent news blogs also appear on the main page, so keep an eye open for those as well
 * News blogs

Our Community Discussions forum is the most direct way to observe much of what's going on with wiki discussions. I'd highly recommend checking out that forum regularly to see the latest threads.
 * The Community Discussions forum

While we don't necessarily update Facebook and Twitter with a lot of detailed information on wiki happenings, we will from time to time send out a message about particularly major events on-wiki. If you don't check the wiki often, keep an eye on our Facebook or Twitter feeds to see the most recent "major" news, as well as some Sims-related content.
 * Facebook and Twitter

Well, Weekly News Post #1 is now in the books - comment below and tell me how I did, or give some advice on future news blogs.

Thanks for reading!

--  LiR speak ~ read 01:56, November 17, 2012 (UTC)