Thread: My.LOTRO Blogger Manifesto II: What Bloggers Want from Turbine

Last July, the first time that the bloggers of My.LOTRO met for a Great Blogger Gathering, we came up with a list of suggestions for high priority improvements to My.LOTRO, which Harperella posted here at that time.

At the Blogger Gathering III last night, we were happy to note that of the three requests on our original "manifesto", two have already been resolved! The increase in gallery storage space and the addition of notifications for private messages are much appreciated.

But, as always, there is still room for improvement. As a community of bloggers, we feel that My.LOTRO is an important part of the game experience. Several of us agreed that reading and posting on the My.LOTRO blogs is part of what keeps us playing the game. The community is great; however, the interface can be frustrating. We would like to suggest that making My.LOTRO more accessible to bloggers old and new, and to readers, is an important goal for us and should be for Turbine as well...after all, you want us to visit it regularly; that's what the lotteries are for, right?

So we have come up with a new Blogger Manifesto. This is a shortlist of the suggestions that we think are most important to making LOTRO blogs their best!

The My.LOTRO Blogger Manifesto II:

1. The slow loading issues must be resolved to make the site more accessible to an extended community and to allow it to enhance the in game experience as well.

• We tried loading it from the in-game lorebook and it took over 60 seconds. Who's going to wait around for it? But being able to interact with My.LOTRO from in-game could enhance the use and benefits of blogs so much.
• A mobile version would be very welcome.
• Some of us have started reading our favorite bloggers through their RSS feeds only, because it takes too long to load my.lotro.com.

2. We want to be able to find posts more easily without being limited to the 10 most recent posts. We want search functions that allow us to find posts by topic or content, even those posted some time ago.

• The RSS feed of recent posts is a great step in the right direction! (http://my.lotro.com/_tags/feed, for anyone who didn't already know it was there...)
• Most people don't seem to know about it, though. Only a few at this gathering did, and we're the most active bloggers on My.LOTRO, generally speaking. Could we just have a button or something on the main page of my.lotro.com, directing people to this wonderful feed?
• More importantly, we want to be able to search the archive of blogs. We shouldn't have to go to Google and type something like "music site:my.lotro.com" - such a function should be built in to the site.
• Ways we would like to be able to search: By tags (tag clouds are great). By server (I want a list of all recent posts from Nimrodel bloggers, for example). By keyword, and have results listed by the date a post was made.

3. The community of bloggers is one of My.LOTRO's strengths, and we want social networking features such as GROUPS to allow that community to grow further.

• The GROUPS idea: A blogger could create, or join, a group of like-minded individuals from any server. Kinship pages do not suffice since they are server limited. For example, there could be a group of bloggers interested in roleplay, another of those posting about the music system, one about crafting, etc.
• GROUP FUNCTIONS we would like to see: A NEWSFEED (could be RSS, but it would be better if it could be read directly in My.LOTRO - don't make us leave your site ) of all group members' blogs. The ability to write collaborative blog posts in which all group members could contribute. The ability to make key blog posts sticky within a group's pages. Group mail to all members. Group discussion forums.
• We were thinking along the lines of Ning.com social networking - those sort of features would integrate well with the blogs we have now.
• We'd also like to see more done with the "friends" function. Right now you can friend another blogger but all it does is gives you a link to their blog with their avatar. We'd like notification when people on our list have a new post - could be another part of the recent posts list, or part of the friends box on our home pages.

Well, I think that about covers it! We have some ideas to work on, on our end, as well, such as creating a tutorial in the lorebook for new users of My.LOTRO and perhaps a directory of active bloggers or noteworthy posts. As the blogger community gets to work on these ideas, we hope to see improvements made by Turbine as well! Thanks for providing My.LOTRO; for many of us it is a key factor in our enjoyment of the game, and keeps us coming back to it.

/signed!!!

The only thing I would add (as it is a pet peeve of mine) is concerning the Scribes of the Ages, it bothers me that aside from being nominated on My.LOTRO it really has nothing to do with the site. The new Scribes are not announced on there, there is no place to view all of the Scribes (like a nice, neat scrolling bar along the bottom like the Featured Content at the top or at least a link to see them all.) I've been here since very nearly the launch day of My.LOTRO and I don't even know who all the Scribes are! If there is someone I want to nominate I have to search them on the forums to see if they were already made a Scribe I know in the grand scheme of things it's a small thing (especially compared to a lot on the list) but it is something I'd like to see.

And I would like to second the thanks to Turbine for giving us this great site, it has been a wonderful experience and really the reason I love it so much is why I'm so involved and requesting more done with it

what if we could link it with our non My.lotro blogs that way we don't have to post things multiple times (if it is there already someone could point it out). it just seems a bit bulky I understand that it is relatively new and turbine has to worry about persons of higher and lower skill and knowledge but so do other blog spaces and they seem to be a lot more user friendly. just a thought ~ Bor :{D

That's an interesting thought. You can add the RSS feed from your blog to a widget on your My.LOTRO blog right now. Though I don't know of any way to make it automagically repost your blog's new posts onto your My.LOTRO blog (which what I think you're asking) That would be handy to generate more viewers for those who blog elsewhere.

Nicely put RannaDylin (Linett)!


**signed, notarized and sealed with a kiss!**


Just my two copper:
I realize it's a work in progress and personally I'm very, very happy with even being provided with the MY LOTRO aspect of the community/forums site. As far as I know, most games don't even consider something similar so I hope things continue to improve for the bloggers on my.lotro because it really is an important factor in keeping me (at least) interested in not only playing the game but also staying connected to the community.



I’m looking forward to the next gathering of bloggers and up-and-coming-bloggers (Blogmoot ) on the Brandywine server!

/signed too!

As Kemen said, this is a valuable and fascinating resource that is definitely worthy of attention for players, bloggers and developers. My pet peeve is uploading images onto my.lotro - if you don't use an external photo-hosting website, it's difficult to use and very unintuitive.

A terrific job of articulating Saturday night's discussion and making the key points quite clear. Thank you, Linett! (aka Rannadylin)

~ Pours red wax on the parchment document and affixes her seal of approval~

I would also very much appreciate the graphic upload issue being solved. There is no doubt that adding screen shots and other graphics enhances all our works. Right now, the hoops you have to jump through to add pics are frustrating and time consuming. We may have lost newcomers to my.lotro, interested in pictoral blogging, because of this bug. And that's just a shame.

Being able to "get together" in groups on my.lotro, to discuss particular aspects of blogging would be, as Linett has said, a huge asset to building community. Since the unique player community one of LOTRO's hallmarks, why not keep that energy going by building the mylotro.com community?

Thanks again, Linett, and thanks to all my blogging friends for taking the time to keep building our own unique community.

~ Aerhinn

/signed

I would love to see all of these desires come about, especially the search function. I feel like it is just chance that introduces me to new blogs. I have to be on at just the right time after they post...not a very good way to find out what people are writing.

Also, can we have pictures back, pretty please?

I found out at the blogmoot that I wasn't the only one having trouble uploading pictures to my.lotro...(I figured it was user-error...which is the general cause of all my computer problems.)

All of us who are currently posting pictures are doing so by hosting them on other sites and embedding the code. This must be extremely frustrating to new bloggers and/or those not familiar enough with code in order to add photos.

P.S. Turbine: While I hate seeing that error message whenever I try to load a picture...I do LOVE your verbiage

P.S.S. Doesn't the word verbiage look weird spelled right? I had to look it up in the dictionary when spell-check corrected it...what's that 'i' doing in there. I coulda sworn it was verbage...guess I shouldn't enter any spelling bees.

Originally Posted by Aerhinn

A terrific job of articulating Saturday night's discussion and making the key points quite clear. Thank you, Linett!

I completely agree Aerhinn, Linett turned our crazy conversation into coherent statements!

That truly is an amazing accomplishment!


~Lunna