Why do people come to NA? Currently to talk, primarily (I imagine). That's what's on offer here, by and large. But sometimes people will magically land here from the Googles, after searching for something we've discussed. That's great! Maybe these people will see the fun chat and join us and become productive members of the community.
Currently though the information available here is sparse - scattered about hidden in pages and pages of threads. We have a bunch of smart people here, knowledgeable people, who know things. People figure things out, people share this knowledge, and then... it slides away into adversity.
I propose a new forum category - User-Written Guides (real name TBD?). This COULD have sub-categories as well, organizing guides written into categories such as "Tech", "Gameplay", "Getting High Scores", etc.. I'd say start out with one main category and branch it out depending on the content that users create.
Users would be free to write a guide on any subject related to the hobby. What cord setup is the best for modern TVs with older consoles? How does the Magic Wand in Marble Madness work (Bea_Iank shoutout!)? How come sometimes I get higher score output from certain enemies in Life Force on the NES? These might be guides people could write! Are you passionate about a series of games? Or maybe you have a master list of homebrew games that you want to share with the community? Those could be in the guides section of the forum.
This takes me back to the question - why do people come to NA? One excellent way to gain more SEO traction is to have content that people are searching for; such as guides! To carry on my example above - I currently want to know the best setup for my SNES, which cable should I buy? This might have been a thread here before, hell I'd bet good money it's been asked a few times already. I don't know what to search for specifically to get a good answer, so I resorted to PMing a mod here on NA, because they seemed knowledgeable (they were indeed!).
A guide section would give us:
- More motivation to contextualize and submit well-formatted content for our members
- More incoming search traffic (maybe have ads at the top of guide pages to help with revenue for server upkeep)
- A place to look before asking (maybe someone can even create a "Guides Section Index" thread to keep track of what is available!)
Furthermore if the idea takes off, and if the mod team would be willing to manage the overall QUALITY of the guides (i.e. make sure people don't make a bunch of shit guides just to get credit), we could assign site awards to the creation of such guides. These could go a few ways, such as awards like "Write 5 Guides", or maybe "Write a guide with 10,000 pageviews", among others. This would motivate people to write good content, improving quality as well as quantity. This though is not a requirement of the initial proposal - I see merit to a Guides section for the site with or without an award system backing it.
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