HOME | INDUSTRY DIRECTORY | COLUMNS | REVIEWS | NEWS ARCHIVE | GALLERY | REFERENCE | FUN STUFF | SCIENCE FICTION | HORROR

*

Seven Deadly Lies of the Web

Hello. This is a soapbox essay. I was getting tired of seeing sites that said "We're the roleplaying site", "the premiere roleplaying site", "the best site on the web", etc. It's like a bad rap song, mouthing the virtues of the performer while totally lacking in coolness. Good sites, like good songs, balance the hype with actual substance.

That said, below are the top seven lies of hype seen on RPG sites.

• We're the number one site for ...
  
  Yes, you and the other dozen of similar sites. Do you really think you are pleasing all the people, all of the time? The Web is built on diversity, and the law of millions suggests your unique concept might, just might, be shared by others.
• Under construction
  As if any good site is ever totally frozen, perfect, encapsulated. The worst case of these excuses are entirely blank pages that simply say "under construction" or "coming soon". Either make the page, or don't link it yet.
• Recipient of the Best Site Award
  My favorite case of the "award of the week" syndrome was a site that listed itself as the proud recipient of a "Best site" rating... of its own ranking scheme for Best Sites. They even included instructions on how you too could try to achieve their personal "Best site" rating. Guess that #1 slot was permanently taken, though.
• 100,000 visitors!
  Yeah? Name them. For a talk on trying to figure out visitors from hits, look at the checklog talk. It's intrinsic to the web that you can't really count people.
• (akin to that) 250,000 visitors per day!
  I loved the gaming site that put that up. Well, actually, the site was lame, but imagine! That's something like 1 out of every 100 webheads out of there, visiting them each day! Even the best magazine doesn't get that sort of share of the market! Worse, that's probably more people than there are role-players on the web.
• Over 1 million hits!
  Let's see, a page with 5 images actually records 6 hits when accessing, more if you forget to type the "/" at the end of the directory name. Subtract the robots and search engines, plus your own checking of the pages, and that drops by one to two orders of magnitude. And we're back at a few thousand people per month. Undramatic, but true. There are cases of pages more accurately assessing hundreds of thousands of "page accesses", which is a good step towards more accurate reporting. One hopes that the high number is because the visitors are happy (browsing merrily, or using forums or auction sites), and not just due to poor design!
• I'm sorry, but you need a different browser to view this site
  Actually, this just means the site needs a different designer. Imagine, anarchist net people from all over the world get together and manage to agree on a very liberal set of standards (HTML), just so you can ignore that and make your site difficult and prejudiced? Amazing, this technology stuff.