Shacknews

Shacknews, commonly referred to as "The Shack", is a website offering news, reviews, articles, and forums for computer games and console games. The Shack and its sister-site, Fileshack, are run by Steve Gibson (not to be confused with Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation), along with several contributors such as Maarten Goldstein and Chris Remo. Sander Pilon did much of the programming for the Shack, including the ja.zz comments system.

Site history

Shacknews was started in 1996 by Steve Gibson who was 20 years old at the time, as a website dedicated to following news about the upcoming Quake game from id Software. The original name of the website was "Quakeholio". Through the years the website evolved to cover more than just Quake, and the name was changed to reflect that. The name "Shugashack" was chosen after a discussion with friends about the general direction of the page and content. After dealing with a couple of years of people constantly spelling the name wrong and thinking it was a pornographic website, Shacknews.com was decided upon.

FileShack.com, a site dedicated to providing game demos, updates and miscellaneous files for Shacknews users and others, was launched in August of 2002.

Shacknews and FileShack now reaches literally millions of gamers each month with the daily work of just three full time guys.

The news

The news on the front page of the site is normally separated into several categories for easier access. These include:

• Category specific news, such as RPG or FPS specific news items.
• Hardware and software reviews, which contain a linked list of items related to products that have been reviewed around the web.
• Editorials including previews and opinion pieces.
• Gaming news that covers the gaming community as a whole as well as rumors and news items that don't belong in a certain category.
• Late Night Consoling, a large news item posted around 10 CST each evening that covers console news and rumors. This was initially the responsibility of Jason "loonyboi" Bergman who moved from Blues News where he updated a similar section but is now maintained by one Chris Remo of idlethumbs.com fame.
• Sunday Afternoon ShackReviews highlight the new games that have been added to the ShackReview Database.
• Evening Reading is a "Chatty Post" that contains various technological and humorous news items from the day, as well as a small sounding board for Steve Gibson.
• First Post is a "Chatty Post" that contains all the files that have been added to FileShack that did not warrant their own news post the previous day. This includes videos, maps, small utilities, and more. It also serves as a sounding board of Maarten Goldstein and may include a movie quote at the end, to be identified by Shackers in a spirit of friendly competition.

The comments

The gaming news on the front page is what draws most hits to the Shack, but the comments system comprises a large part of the Shacknews community. In summary:

• Every news post has the ability for readers to reply and add comments. For instance, a story about a game demo will usually have comments summing up readers' impressions of the demo. A story with screenshots will usually prompt discussion over the screenshots.
• Twice a day a non-gaming story is posted. In the mornings this story is given the title werd or First Post!. The nightly story falls under the title Evening Reading and is usually accompanied by several links to interesting or humorous news events and information. Every once in a while posts from other Shacknews associates will be put in place of the normal Chatty threads; these are sometimes called Nighthawking or Sup!. The user comments in reply to that story are generally accepted as being off-topic. These comment sections are what Shackers use as a message board.
• The comments are moderated by a dedicated group of mods. As the Shack is an open community with open registrations, the moderation is (often) basically to prevent any one user from doing anything that would discourage other users from participating.

ja.zz

The comments on the Shack are powered by ja.zz, a unique message board written by Sander Pilon for the Shack. Some facts about ja.zz:

• ja.zz is essentially a threaded message board. As such, the comments on the Shack go remarkably quickly compared to UBB style posting. Given the twice-a-day nature of the chatty news posts, there is a fresh start every 12 hours or so.
• Posts are moderated into categories. The default options are for all posts marked with a category to be filtered out.
  • Interesting or Informative are for posts than generally the entire reader base will find informative, like important gaming news or tips on improving computer performance.
  • NWS stands for Not Work Safe, and as such these posts usually contain links to pictures that are unsafe for viewing at work.
  • Posts may also be marked random (formerly called stupid).
  • Political or Religion based posts are marked Political / Religious
  • Anything not relating to games or any of the above topics are marked as tangent.
• There are several ways to view the comments:
  • Flat mode shows all comments in the order they were posted.
  • Threaded mode order comments as root posts and replies to that post showing only previews. There are two types of threaded mode:
    • Thread mode opens each comment you click on by itself in the browser window.
    • DThread is more advanced; the main page stays open but the reply you click on replaces the root post.

Lingo

• Shacker - One who posts to the Shacknews forums.
• Shackbattle - A gaming event sponsored by the Shack, most often run on servers ran by Shackers, namely Ashkie, rydogg1, haiku, themelon and mojoALD. As of late many Shackbattles have also occurred via Xbox Live. Games often played in Shackbattles are Battlefield 2 (PC), Counter-Strike: Source (PC) and various titles on Xbox Live.
• Shackmeet - Refers to Shackers who know each other through the forums meeting in person.
• Shackmessage - Refers to the E-mail-like messaging system used on the forums of the Shack.
• Shacktagged - The Shack's forums have special formatting tags which users periodically fail to close correctly. The result is brackets or curly-braces in the text instead of the intending formatting, showing the error. This is called being shacktagged.
• Chatty Post - A post to the front page of the Shack to which Shackers can respond with on-topic or off-topic posts in a chatty fashion.
• Comedy Gold - This phrase may have originated on Something Awful, but became a mini-fad on the Shack, especially with parodies (ex. "Comedy Platinum").
• Duke Nuked - The fictional character who sends a shackmessage to a user when a post has been nuked (that is, deleted) for a violation of the rules. This is a play on Duke Nukem, a fictional gaming character.
• Genjuro Sized - Comically minuscule in size, but not in girth.
• Phil Sized - Very large :)

External links

Official pages

• Shacknews site
• Fileshack
• Latest chatty thread
• Forum Posting Guidelines
• Who's online at the Shack
• Where did they come from?

Community-based pages

• ShackFAQ A frequently asked questions site about the shacknews comments community created and maintained by Portax.
• ShackStuff links
• Giant Censored Robots, the unofficial Shacknews World of WarCraft clan. Formerly known as 'Giant Communist Robots' until the World of Warcraft admins deemed the term Communist inappropriate for a guild name. There is also a smaller branch, titled Giant Capitalist Robots, that is composed of Alliance Characters.

Spawned Sites

A couple of sites have come into existence related to Shacknews, often used as a refuge for banned shackers.

• Squabble. Created by Clay, it was place of anarchy and spite, for a long time home of klerck, perhaps shacknews most famous banned shacker. Clay shut it down and a lot of squabblers shifted to Stoofoo.
• Stoofoo Created by skold. It is similar to Squabble as a place for people who want something similar to shacknews, but has more relaxed moderation and more comment features.
• Shackifieds An online marketplace for members of both the Shacknews and Stoofoo communities.
• ShackBattles A website created by the Shackers boolean, Ashkie, Haiku and verbatim, which allows you to enlist in ShackBattles so that you can play online with other Shackers, create ShackBattles and create reminders so you will be sent a Shackmessage when a ShackBattle is created. ashkie shut down the site on May 4th, 2005.
• Xbox Live Gamertag List An Xbox Live gamertag list for Shackers to keep track of each other.