Shacknews
Type of site | Gaming |
|---|---|
| Owner | Shacknews |
| Created by | A couple of homos |
| URL | http://www.shacknews.com/ |
| Commercial | Yes (but you couldn't tell) |
Shacknews, commonly referred to as "The Fag Shack", is a website offering news, features, editorial content, and forums relating to computer games and console games. The Shack and its sister site, FileShack, are owned by Steve Gibson (not to be confused with computer journalist Steve Gibson) and Maarten Goldstein. The site's editorial staff includes Nick Breckon and Chris Faylor.
Site history
Shacknews was founded in 1996 by Steve "sCary" Gibson, 20 years old at the time, as a website dedicated to following news about the then-upcoming Quake 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. "Shugashack" was chosen after a discussion with friends about the general direction of the page and content. After a few years of frequent spelling confusion and interpreting the name as that of a pornographic website, the site was renamed "Shacknews."
FileShack.com, a site dedicated to providing game demos, patches, videos, and miscellaneous game-related files for Shacknews users and others, was launched in August 2002.
Shacknews and FileShack currently reach millions of gamers each month with the daily work of five full time employees. Shacknews, Ltd. is privately owned by Steve Gibson and Maarten Goldstein.
The news on the front page of the site is normally separated into several categories for organizational purposes. While for much of the site's history, little original research was involved in Shacknews content, in recent years main news items have steered away from the "link-and-quote" news method. Currently, Shacknews relies heavily on internally researched news, in-house feature content, and industry event coverage.
In addition to normal news posts, which allow focused discussion pertaining to that topic, there twice-daily community posts. These posts have had the following titles: Evening Reading, First Post, werd, Morning Discussion, as well as various other one-off titles. Typically these posts will feature some noteworthy or interesting news-links; however, the major function of these posts is to allow for a "free-for-all" discussion in the posts comment section. These posts are where the majority of the Shacknews community congregate to converse with one-another, as well as the site staff.
Staff
Ownership
- Steve Gibson - Shacknews founder and majority owner Steve Gibson has somehow managed to keep this whole thing operational and independent for over a decade. Originally the sole voice of the Shack, Steve now sits at the top of the vast Shack empire, managing its business affairs and thumbing through large rolls of bills while stopping in on the front page on a daily basis.
- Maarten Goldstein - Maarten joined the Shack as its second full time employee and first resident Dutchman in 1999, becoming a part owner in 2002. He is responsible for maintaining FileShack as well as keeping Shacknews updated with bulletins from around the web and contributing programming when needed.
Editorial Staff
- Chris Faylor - Chris brings with him a well-rounded body of industry experience from such online publications as GameDaily and Gaming Age. He focuses on news, previews, and event coverage, as well as rendering complex and robust electronic devices useless with his mere touch.
- Nick Breckon - Plucked green and eager from the thriving, fertile masses of the Shack community, Nick Breckon has quickly acclimated himself to the rough-and-tumble world of video game journalism. He regularly handles news and interviews as well as feature content.
Community Manager
- Jeff Gondek - Better known to Shackers as long-time chatty poster and moderator geedeck, Jeff Gondek coordinates the Shack's community efforts, runs contests, generates topical discussion, and fosters our lovable readership!
Comment System History
The Shacknews comment system lies at the heart of the Shacknews user community. There have been three major versions of the comment system. Each comment system has allowed the Shacknews users to add comments to each news article, screenshots gallery, or chatty post. The comment system is maintained by a group of volunteers, known as "Shackmods", under the direction of head-moderator and Community Director Jeff "Geedeck" Gondek.
On November 16, 2006, a copy of the moderator-only message board was posted anonymously on an external website. The site contained almost all of the private moderation discussion posted between June 18th, 2002 and October 26th, 2006. The modboard contained personal opinions of the moderators about Shackers, particularly those who had violated Shacknews rules and guidelines.
funk.y
funk.y was a comments system built by Andy Hanson that was used on the Shack. Comments could be viewed in flat mode or threaded mode depending on user options. The comments could also be tagged by moderators and "nuked" if they went against the guidelines. A nuked comment would be replaced by the words "* N U K E D *" and the original poster's name would be replaced by an admin account called Duke Nuked.
ja.zz
Until June 2007, the comments on the Shack were powered by ja.zz, a unique message board written by Sander Pilon for the Shack. ja.zz was essentially a threadded message board, with posts moderated into categories. These categories could be filtered by the user to remove unwanted post types from the comment view. Comments could be viewed in several ways, flat, threaded, or dthread (Dynamic thread) mode which was the most advanced and quickly became the most popular view for the users.
laryn.x
The latest version of Shacknews was released on June 18th, 2007, and had previously been previewed to users of the shack during the preceding week. The system is said to be a mix of PHP & MySQL running on the popular Apache webserver. The new system goes by the name "Laryn.x," clearly a play on larynx, commonly known as the human voicebox. The design team was Mike "haiku" Kane on design, John "pup" Brooks on HTML and CSS, Jack Matthews and Shane "wtf242" Sherman programming, and Steve Gibson leading the team.
References
External links
Community Created links
The Shacknews community is full of vibrant and talented individuals, many of whom have created related websites and Greasemonkey scripts to modify the Shacknews comment system.