Editorial

DSOGaming Is Celebrating its First Anniversary – Announcing User’s Articles

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Normally this Editorial piece would be posted back in July, but we decided to delay it in order to provide you with more information about our first year. Yes, DSOGaming is celebrating its first anniversary, as it’s been on-air for a year (and a month). In this Editorial, we’ll be sharing information about the team, what has happened this whole year, and what’s our plans for you, our readers in the coming months.
Firs of all, let’s kick off with the team. We’ve covered this in the past, but this is a good time to share more information about it. DSOGaming’s team is consisted of four people. One of them is the programmer, while the other three are the editors. Yes, although you only see me posting, there are two other people searching and writing news. These two guys prefer to remain anonymous because they are already working in other publications – and there might be some complications if they reveal their names. In my opinion, there shouldn’t be any problem, but I respect their decision.
It’s been a really hard year and, honestly, a lot of things happened. Back in August 2011, we had some server issues and we are pretty sure that some of you still remember DSOG’s downtime. Due to high traffic – and awful optimization from our part – we were forced to change hosting services. Thankfully, everything worked out in a matter of days and we have not encountered any issues since then.
DSOG’s advertising services have also been tweaked to be more friendly to our regular readers. A couple of months ago, we were using a pop-up ads system. That system provided pop-up ads every 15 minutes. As we said back then, we wanted a more ‘friendly’ system for our readers and we delivered. The annoying pop-up has been replaced with an Interstitial Ad. This ad is being shown once every 24 hours (provided you do not change browsers or IPs). This basically means that you get this ad – that can be immediately skipped – once a day, and won’t be bothered with it for the rest of the day. You can view pictures without pop-ups and you can visit as many times as you want the website without getting pop-ups or other Interstitial Ads. Naturally, some people complained about this Interstitial Ad, however those were not regulars readers. In other words, this Ad system ‘punishes’ the leechers and the one-time visitors and rewards our regular readers. Naturally, we also want to get rid of this Interstitial Ad but that will not happen at this point. We are not greedy and when DSOGaming has grown enough, we’ll remove it.
This brings us to you, our readers. During our first days, we were using a simple Comment system that had a recPATCHA. The recPATCHA was shown only to those who had not registered to our site and was added in an attempt to get rid of all the bots that were lurking DSOG. We admit that this recPATCHA system was a pain in the ass. Therefore, we decided to move our comments to DISQUS. Thankfully, the transition to this new Comment system was as good as we’d hoped to, and everything is working great now.
DSOGaming is also launching a new section that is dedicated to its readers. This section, called ‘User’s Articles,’ will be filled with your articles. It’s a way to get our community involved into more than commenting on articles. Each and every week, we’ll be publishing a story of yours. You can find a guideline below to get you started. This section will kick off as soon as we get the first noteworthy stories.
We are looking forward to our second anniversary and we hope you’re enjoying your stay here. Enjoy everyone and happy gaming!
User’s Articles Guideline:
1) DSOGaming is a PC gaming site, therefore your stories should be focused on the PC. Yes, you can write Reviews so feel free to do so if you want to. Articles should be around 1000 words (more or less, it doesn’t matter if they are 900 words or 1200 words).
2) There are some grey zones though. For example, you can’t write about “Why I’m excited about PS4 or Halo4” but you can write about “Masterchief’s origins” or “Halo’s history.”
3) This is a volunteer job, there are no obligations to DSOG. This means that if you don’t feel like writing, you can definitely skip a week or even a month. Feel free to write whenever you want to about PC topics. There is no reason to feel like you’re forced to.
4) Originally, we didn’t want to get on with this volunteer thing. We strongly believe that writers should be paid. However, we can also acknowledge that some want to make their first steps into this industry. That’s why we’re creating this section and we are not hiring for ‘News stories.’ We don’t want to force you working on daily basis without a compensation.
5) You should expect to see each and every story of yours get published (even if your debut story gets published). Similarly, you should not get disappointed if your first story does not get published. Truth be told, that was how John started and got involved into this industry. And let us tell you that he jumped around like a kid when his first article went live, back in 1999. So who knows, you might get something out of it in the long run.
6) Articles will be sent via mails in this Email Address. We will check them and will publish them if they fit with DSOG’s content.
7) Always include the author of the article. This is crucial.
8) Would be great to include screenshots or images. That’s not necessary, but we feel that it would be best for the author of the article to decide the images he/she wants to be included in his/her article.