User-Submitted News Guidelines

[evandixon]

Guidelines for Posting Your Own News Articles

• Cover Image

Let's face it: walls of text tend to make people think "tl;dr". While it is not strictly required, you are encouraged to provide an image that directly relates to the content of your article. For Pokémon news, this means pictures of revealed content or releases (no spoilers please). For program releases, this means a screenshot of the program. If the article is about a video (like @Kaphotics's data-mining videos), the video serves as the cover image.

For embeded YouTube videos, please consider mobile users.  Large videos do not resize well, so try to keep the width small, about 270 pixels wide.  To test how an article looks on mobile, simply resize your browser window to be about 370 pixels wide.

• Avoid Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a big deal. In academic settings, plagiarizing usually results in failing a class. In professional settings, plagiarizing usually results in losing a job. Depending on the circumstances, plagiarism can even result in the loss of college degrees. While nothing that serious will likely happen here, it's still important to avoid it. When using content from another source, be sure to provide a link to the source. If directly quoting the source, put the quoted text in quotation marks, or if it's longer than a few sentences or lines (called a block quote), put the text in quote tags using the button in the editor.

If you don't cite your sources or put quoted text in quotations, you are implying (intentionally or otherwise) that the content is yours. If the news is about research you've done or a program you've made, this is fine, since it is yours. If it's not, please take care to give credit where credit is due.

 

• Be Original

News often heavily relies on outside sources, but it's important to not just take another source as-is. As Sonicslasher from GBAtemp put it:

Sonicslasher said:

Please write something in your own words which summarise [sic] what the news is about. It is OK to quote something from the source page if it is relevant to the news you are posting. Do not quote an entire article from another site as you are posting news for GBATemp and not simply mirroring news from another site using their words.

The same applies to Project Pokemon. Try discussing the news article and properly introducing quotes, all in your own original words.

Source: http://gbatemp.net/threads/usn-template-user-submitted-news.249271/

• Grammar

Since what's posted in this section has a chance to appear on the front page, try to use proper grammar and spelling. I know that it's easy to make grammar mistakes (mine is especially bad in IRC where there's no edit button), so just give your best effort. Minor mistakes may be corrected by News Staff, although particularly egregious mistakes might not make it to the front page.

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Guidelines for Content

Things that will likely make the front page:

• Research into a Pokémon game that you've done
• Releases or updates to a program you've written, provided it's in some way relevant to Pokémon
• General Pokémon news
• Research into a Pokémon game or releases/updates to a program that is not yours, provided proper credit is given or you've been given permission by the author to post the article

Things that will likely not make the front page:

• Baseless rumors
• General gaming news that's not even tangentially related to Pokémon
• Blatant advertisements (looking at you, spam bots)
• newz articals tht dont' grammer rite (This only includes cases where it's clear the author didn't try.)

The above are just guidelines, however, and it is up to News Staff to decide what makes the front page and what doesn't. If something doesn't, it will remain open for further discussion, as long as it follows general forum rules. Please don't take it as an insult if something you post doesn't make it.