Broken Articles Got You Down...

Day 913, 17:00 • Published in USA USA • by Chocolate McSkittles

This guide is gunna pick you back up!

You see, I love the eRepublik media module and want to see it thrive....but the eRepublik media module isn't the easiest aspect of the game. First of all, you have to think of a topic. Then you have to write. Then people have to read.

Actually, hold on. Any media mogul will tell you that sometimes...even the very act of getting an article to display on the screen can often be as aggravating or exhilarating as managing to lead armies into battle or getting in a fist fight with an elephant.

This is not an exaggeration. Code in this module is whacky at times. I'm going to give you an example of one quirky rule I learned in my last article that can destroy articles...using parenthesis instead of brackets so you can see the coding as I will throughout the article

(u)(b)(size=16)Over Hiring(/size)(/b](/u)
(u)(b)(size=16)Over-Hiring(/size)(/b)(/u )

Using the first title as a header leads to you getting a bolded and underlined section header.

Using the second coding gets you something like this:


I'm putting a caption out of habit, but there's really not a lot to say about blank space

Ohgod the white space!

Emerick, a champion of the media, later explained to me why this is the case:

"It's because eRep automatically puts a space in any string of characters over 40 characters to prevent users from stretching the page because the admins do not understand the concept of wordwrap"

That said, there's a lot of weird aspects of article coding, so Im going to help you figure out how to survive the minefield that is the eRepublik media module!

Check Your Links!

Broken links break articles. Before posting your article make sure all of the sites you are linking to work. Also be downright anal about ensuring that you have the entire link. That letter "h" might not seem important until he decides to not hang out with his homies "ttp://" at the start of your link, so the whole article falls apart.

Check Your Webbing!

Basically, any tags that you open need to be closed (obviously)...but more importantly they must be closed in the same order you open them.

Lets go back to our previous example:

This works: (u)(b)(size=16)Over Hiring(/size)(/b](/u)

This doesn't: (u)(b)(size=16)Over-Hiring(/size)(/u)(/b )

So check all tags to make sure they end in the correct order, or...end at all.

Use the buttons!

If youre an amateur, trust the coding buttons on the top of the article. Generally you can trust that these will be done correctly. Even doing something small wrong like using (😎 to start a bold instead of (b) WILL lead to a broken article.

Use a test article!

While eRepublik for some reason refuses to allow a "Preview Article" feature, there is a solution. Use a test article...preferably, an old article noone would ever see. For example, I wrote this article here.

This is a nice idea because it prevents you from the embarrassing situation of having an article posted with you working on fixing it. Many subscribers wont check twice to see if your article works, so you're missing out on readers for every second your article is posted but not showing.

It also allows you to visualize the article as will appear and allows you to have friends edit/provide opinions before posting.


Yet another content reader thanks to you following this advice


Take it one step at a time!

If an article is broken, post it chunk by chunk and narrow down on the problem. Once the article breaks, you know exactly which paragraph contains coding that results in the error. Begin to play around with this section to get it working...or if all else fails, post it without any fancy additions 🙂

I really have nothing more to say about this suggestion, except that I would REALLY emphasize using this strategy. You cannot fix something until you know what is wrong.

Ask a friend!

This goes back into something I mentioned in the "test article" subsection. Having a friend look over the entire article provides a fresh set of eyes and a different person with different experiences to find code errors.

For example, I mentioned that capitalizing code will break an article. I learned this by posting my article code as a google doc and having a friend look it over. This friend has a lot more media experience and found the error fairly quickly.

The benefit of having a friend provide grammatical and substantive opinions is also great \o/

Shrink those links!

For some reason, the (url)(/url) hotlinks feature sucks. If your link has a question mark the hotlink simply wont work. To solve this, I suggest using a website such as tinyurl to shrink the URL.

For example:

This may be the best song ever

but...

Until I shrunk the URL the hotlink didn't work

This is especially important when linking to youtube videos and google docs.

Copy THEN Publish!

ALWAYS COPY YOUR ARTICLE BEFORE PUBLISHING!!!

If your eRepublik session ends before you press the "submit" button on a new article...you just wasted a lot of time unfortunately. This is part of the reason having a test article is cool (You have a backup). It is also the reason I suggest you get in the habit of copying before submitting articles. The second time you write an article is never as good and nearly always feels rushed/incomplete.

Also, don't forget to copy before you submit when you edit.

Conclusion:

An active media is one of the key aspects of the game that really makes it worthwhile. In this piece, I hope to have helped you in participating in the media and saved you from the countless hours of frustration I have encountered.

If anyone has any suggestions or questions, feel free to ask!

-Choc