Introducing the official TF2Maps blog
Hello, everyone!
The TF2Maps Blog is a new, slightly experimental project which we would like to use to improve our interaction with the community. We (the TF2M team) want to share more about what is going on, what we are working on, our thoughts on the community as a whole, and whatever else we can think of.
Why A Blog?
For those of you who have not lived through the Forum Age of the internet and are confused what this even is or why we are doing this now: Blogs are long-form semi-regular publications targeted at a specific or general audience.
They have more persistence than a Discord announcement, can be longer and more content-filled than a Twitter post, and are more accessible to non-members than a Forum thread.
This blog is extremely light on resources as it is hosted on Github, making it accessible even when we have hosting issues that make the forums inaccessable. In fact, the (lack of) forum activity TF2Maps gets these days is one motivation for this test run.
If this feature stays, you may expect some of the following types of posts on here:
- Official Announcements: Anything you would currently see as an announcement post on Discord or on the site frontpage will be posted here as well, possibly with additional context.
- Public Service Announcements: Occasionally, something comes up in the team chat that we think everyone might want to know, but it isn’t worth a full announcement, or it might be too complex for a single Discord message. In fact, one of those came up quite recently.
- Behind the scenes: What is Staff doing right now? "Whether it’s showing off Pdan's many discarded contest banners, Nesman’s firefighting heroics, or Zeus’ bedroom decoration ideas, we might share some additional things Staff has discussed that you may not have heard of. This could include both official projects as well as things from our lives, especially if it will affect staff availability.
- Looking forward: Future contests, events, predictions for TF2 Updates or whatever else is coming up will be announced here in advance, as soon as we have an idea ourselves. There’s a lot of people asking when the next Major Contest will be, and even if we don’t have a set date yet, it might make sense to at least announce the vague time frame we have in mind.
- Looking back: TF2Maps is almost as old as TF2 itself. This community has a rich and eventful history. Expect “today, 10 years ago” types of posts in which we remember some of the more interesting changes, contests, and perhaps sources of drama that happened here. Some of us have been around for a long time, so why not gather around the campfire and share some tales?
Your Turn!
Finally, there is one more type of post we would very much like to encourage: Yours!
If there is anything interesting and vaguely TF2Maps-related happening to you, or if there are any projects you would like to talk about in detail, we want to offer you, esteemed TF2Maps.net community member, a platform. We have not fully finalized rules for which posts we are definitely going to allow or disallow, so expect more developments on this as we figure it out ourselves. We might also approach certain community members if we think they have published something we think more people should see.
You can subscribe to this Blog via RSS here or if you need it in xml format: here
That's All Folks
All this said, talk to us! If you have a post idea, or criticism about the whole blog post thing, reach out via @ModMail or discuss this article on the forums!!
Now, back to Hammer. This layout won’t fix itself.
