If you are interested in becoming an Editor, please contact either Gnerphk , Whisperer or one of the other Editors. If no response is received within a few days, please contact the Developers by the use of the "Contact" button on the bottom of this page.
What makes a good Editor? Here are a few of the traits that we believe an Editor should have:
- An Editor must be both able and willing to follow the Editing Standards and Guidelines.
- An Editor must be able to work in a team environment with the rest of the Editing team.
- An Editor must be fluent with the language being used. "Fluent" includes, but is not limited to, the use of proper spelling and grammar. At this time, the only language being used in the documentation is English .
- An Editor must be able to clearly and concisely describe objects and processes.
- An Editor should be able to recognize when subtlety or humor is appropriate, and to both use and understand them.
- An Editor should have a basic understanding of HTML, as this is the markup language used in the documentation. There is an HTML Guide for those who haven't learned the more complex portions of the allowed HTML (not all HTML is allowed in the documentation). If this isn't adequate, other Editors are usually willing to assist on complex sections like tables.
The rest of this page is only of significant use to the Planets.nu Documentation Team. Other people will probably find little of interest here, and should probably be looking at the Planets.nu Introduction.
The Planets.nu Documentation Editing Interface is located here. This interface will allow members of the Planets.nu Documentation Team to edit existing documents and create new ones. It should be noted that the names of the pages are case insensitive on the back-end, so no two pages should differ ONLY by the case of the name.
From time to time, a change to the structure of the documentation is required. When this is done, the Table of Contents (currently in the left-hand pane for the "old" client and the right-hand pane for the "new/mobile" client) should be edited to reflect that change. The Table of Contents can be found here. Alternatively, it could be accessed through the Documentation Editing Interface, referenced above, by editing the file called "toc".
In an effort to maintain consistently readable and maintainable documentation, the members of the Planets.nu Documentation Team have established a set of standards for the Planets.nu Documentation. There's also a new page on editorial guidelines which will attempt to address questions of appropriate content and editorial priority.
The document editor works with raw HTML. For those who are either unfamiliar with HTML, or who need a refresher or assistance, there is an HTML guide. This guide also covers the limitations of the tool Planets.nu uses to display documentation. Please remember that the HTML should be as simple as possible, as not all Editors are HTML experts.
One of the tasks that we're doing is removing references to the Host 3.x program, and the myriad of options that it has. In the process, questions will arise as to what a specific setting is. The Default Configuration page should answer most of these.
It is expected that editors will, from time to time, encounter questions that need to be answered by Joshua or one of the other developers. Those questions should be placed into the Questions for Joshua page.
From time to time, it will be found to be necessary to research a subject in the Forum. The search mechanism provided by the Forum is rather useless for that. Instead, it is suggested that an external search engine be used. In both the Bing and Google search engines, the addition of "site:planets.nu" to the end of the search criteria will cause the search engine to restrict the search to this site. This will provide access to all the threads that have been placed into the Forum. This does not work for the Startpage search engine.
It is also possible to page through the historical information by the use of the "Talk" interface, which can be found at http://planets.nu/talk.
The original Planets.nu documentation can be found at http://planets.nu/documentation/intro and http://planets.nu/api-documentation. The VGA Planets documentation for THost version 3.5+ used to be able to be found at "http://www.vgaplanets.com/hostdoc1.htm", but the domain is no longer in use. Finally, the best of the unofficial documentation for THost 3.5+ is the Dreadlord Battle Manual, which can be found at http://www.donovansvgap.com/strategy/dreadlord.htm.
Tim Wisseman was the original creator of VGA Planets. He left us his old bio page from the original documentation.
The original Planets.nu Kickstarter effort can be found at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/172779664/vga-planets-nu-the-official-remake.
Joshua Perina ported VGA Planets to Planets.nu. He can be reached at this link.
There are a number of threads in the Newsfeed that may be useful to the Editors.
A list of Planets.nu Release Announcements can be found here.