Smogon's Flying Press: Behind the Scenes Exclusive
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Introduction
Toast++ sent me a message a little over two years ago. I don't really remember the contents exactly, but I do remember that it was basically asking if I'd be willing to give up multiple hours of my life for the good of an e-zine. I accepted for some crazy reason. 14 issues and over 20 individual releases later, I'm still here.
Sure, a few months ago during an interview, Toast++, princessofmusic, and Bummer alluded to the fact that being staff was stressful as hell. But the truth is it's almost impossible to explain how much stress is involved in this role. Compare it to something like being a sim mod, where you only need to keep an eye on it while you're online, and as soon as you leave the server it's somebody else's business. With this, it's always your business. You go offline, but as soon as you come back online, the pressure of an upcoming release is still there, and so is the constant need for more writers, more artists, more GPers, more HTMLers... you get the picture.
This article is going to look into what being staff of this section is really like. I'm going to, with the help of the community, be asking my fellow staff about what being staff is like. Let's give a warm welcome to antemortem, Albacore, anto, Quarkz, Toast++, Jumpluff, Tangerine, Jimbo, and myself (skylight).
Article Workshop / Smogon's Flying Press
What do you look for when approving an article?
antemortem
I'm not super strict when it comes to article approvals overall. If I see that someone has both a) a pretty decent foundation for their article and b) a clear focus and starting point -> process -> end point, then they're good to go. Not everything has to be clear from the get-go. A lot of ideas are formed during the writing process and the Quality Control stage. Media HQ is full of creative minds that bounce concepts off one another and generate new ways to tackle them. Therefore, even if it seems like a submission isn't very strong, I'd like for it to have time to walk and build some support before saying "this probably won't work", because who knows? I certainly can't tell the future, not ever since one really long after prom party a couple years back.
Albacore
We're not picky when it comes to approving articles. Most the articles people suggest are spotlights and general metagame guides, which usually get approved easily, as long as we have a basic skeleton of the article, the writer can guarantee the timeliness of the article, and the same article hasn't already been written recently (if it's been over approximately a year and the old article is outdated, it's fine to write a new one). From then on, most errors can be patched by QC, so we aren't too concerned about the way competitive articles are written as long as they are well structured and present accurate information. Entertainment articles are a bit less likely to be approved, since they're less formulaic and trickier to write, and they require a lot more creativity, since you can't just write what you know about something; you have to make sure people would actually want to read the article. We usually want a sample of the writer's general style, and we want to make sure they also have enough material to write a full article. Other writers are also encouraged to contribute to entertainment articles as well.
How do you organize releases?
Quarkz
As a more technical staff member, I didn't really worry about much that wasn't related to the HTML of the article or the actual uploading of it. I'd argue though that uploading the article is actually pretty easy. We have a thread inside the staff forum (mirrored in Media HQ as well) that we keep up to date with all the upcoming releases. If I'm uploading and there's something scheduled for that day, I'll look in the thread to see what article I need to grab the HTML from the thread for. Then it's as simple as uploading the article and its image(s) to the SCMS, doing a few small tweaks here and there, and merging my fork. Obviously then we have to see to actually announcing the release, so we'll wait until the optimum release time before putting the thread up in the Article Workshop forum and then go get the social media guys to preach about the release on Smogon's social media base.
The only thing I've ever found annoying with releasing an article is when the HTML is done incorrectly. This is probably because that was my particular area that I was responsible for, so I was looking for errors there more than anywhere else. HTML is pretty objective, so when something goes wrong it's all too simple to think that the HTMLer messed up. It's easy to forget sometimes that everyone in AW is human and we all make mistakes, even silly ones, sometimes. We as a staff team therefore need to make sure that we are looking out for these mistakes (not just in HTML but in the article as well) and ensuring not only that these errors are fixed but also that the person who made them is made aware of it as well. Especially for HTML, this advice is invaluable to progressing as a coder, and you can learn to not make that mistake again.
antemortem
Publishing articles for Smogon's Flying Press is much easier than it ever was for The Smog, that's for sure. It only takes the reapplication of pre-completed HTML to the SCMS and some messing around to assure that it's touched up and ready to present. Then, a thread is posted and a social media announcement (or two, normally) is sent out and voila! Your article's prime and ready for you to read. Of course, if we had an article scheduled that's not quite done, or the art is being finished around that time, then the situation becomes a mess incredibly fast. If one component is incomplete, something else is bound to be out of place. On a typical day, though, releases are pretty easy, and I appreciate our hard-working contributors for that.
Albacore
We try to have a regular release schedule of three articles a week, and we plan ahead a couple of weeks to make sure we can actually release articles on time. Obviously, we prioritize articles that are close to completion, and we try not to release articles that are too similar consecutively in order to have some variety (for example, we'll refrain from releasing three OU articles in a row unless we have to, and if we haven't released an NU article in a while, we'll prioritize that). It's important to always have a backup in case of last-minute delays so that we can still release stuff on time. But because the workshop is completely dependent on how many people just happen to be writing articles at any given moment, it's impossible to guarantee that we'll always have enough articles ready to go, especially since the removal of explicit deadlines due to the transition from the Smog to the workshop. We do try to warn people in advance that they need to finish their articles soon, but that often doesn't happen in time, and we have to go a few days without releasing anything as a result. Workshop staff will try to write additional articles if we ever run out of things to release, but we need to anticipate those situations in advance, since even the most dedicated writer won't be able to create a full article in less than two weeks, considering that you also need to go through the QC, GP, HTML, and Images stages, which can take a while.
What's it like leading HTML for Smogon's Flying Press?
anto
Leading HTML is huge responsibility. Approving others' HTML evals, checking over others' HTMLs to see if they're ready for upload, updating the page design. As I'm a web designer, this is something I don't do for free irl, but teaching others and doing what I love on a site that I find fun is something I enjoy.
Besides, I ended up learning a lot from correcting other people's mistakes and learning from what others taught me too. Helped me with practice and with quickly spotting errors on my codes without validating them first.
Wanted to use this tiny space to let people know that although I'm no longer willing to teach HTML and CSS to beginners due to lack of time, you can always pm me in case you have any questions or want to learn something specific, and if you ever want to apply to be an HTMLer, you're always welcome to and I'll do my best to guide you in case you need it!
Quarkz
Before I left the team, I often found myself questioning why I was still a staff member, and it wasn't because I was really enjoying it at that stage. To be honest, it was starting to become quite the opposite (hence part of the reason that I quit), but I still found myself hanging around, at least for a bit. The truth was, I was learning a lot, and this is what really drew me to AW / The Smog in the first place. In the beginning, it was me getting advice from people like Toast, but once I started leading HTML myself, it was my turn to help others out. I learnt a lot from looking at other people's code, searching for errors, fixing them, optimizing the styling, that sort of thing. For me, this was my favorite part as HTML lead. I've definitely progressed as a HTMLer and, nearer the end of my time with AW, a programmer as well, as I looked to implement some scripts.
I've already talked about my worst experience with uploading articles, but I also handled HTML approvals, and this also proved stressful at one point. There was a point where we had a surplus of HTMLers, so we really wanted to raise the bar with a new evaluation task. Spy and I ended putting a lot of work into this, and with Toast's help we had two tasks that we thought would work fine. As it turned out, the second task proved impossible to mark easily. We ended up falling back onto having just one task again. In hindsight, we probably should've kept things simpler, but I think the eval that we are left with now is more than sufficient for ensuring the quality of HTMLers. I'm going to go ahead and remind people that if they want to apply to the HTML team, they can do so by just making a thread in this subforum. Equally, if you want to learn about HTML and CSS, I've linked a couple of beginner's resources.
What challenges have you face in regards to organizing Art Assignments?
skylight
The biggest challenge I face is getting brand new art for articles. We decided a while back that all articles should have art (which was mainly when we started promoting Article Workshop articles on Facebook and Twitter more). It was fine when we first switched to Article Workshop—lots of people had free time and it took only a few hours for people to respond to highlights. As the months have passed the volunteers have dwindled, and even articles that need new art have to rely on Bummer's skills. We recently decided to allow art that has been previously released through The Smog, and that has helped immensely. So you might see art reused here and there... but with an active artist shortage, it's definitely worth it. As for personal challenges, it's hard not being able to contribute art to articles, as I'm a photographer primarily and not that great at drawing, so it makes it difficult at times.
The Smog
How did you decide on deadlines for each issue?
Toast++
When I started, this was very much one of those processes that started with one of us asking, "Hey, shouldn't we release soon?" A thread would be created in which we tried to balance our own availability with a fair deadline. This usually ended up with us choosing a date two or three weeks out. As is human nature, many people would only start to work on their articles when the deadline was announced. When the deadline finally came, we would have 2+ months' worth of articles (upwards of 40), and the crunch to get them ready in the two days we gave ourselves to release was insane. The GP and HTML teams would be overloaded. I converted 20+ articles to HTML in a day on multiple occasions. I believe jumpluff had many similarly ridiculous workloads. I think this method was actually really hard on all of us.
When I took over, this was one of those things that I wanted desperately to fix, and I think we were mostly successful. We started communicating deadlines far in advance and setting a constant five weeks between them (unless it fell too close to something like Christmas). The last week of that was entirely reserved for the process of getting articles ready to be put onsite. If you failed to meet the deadline, you just didn't get published this month. It took so much of the weight off the staff and the GP / HTML teams. With a larger staff and a smaller number of articles to release, personal schedules barely mattered anymore. The process of selecting deadlines just became a matter of looking at a calendar.
jumpluff
Usually this was done by group consensus, with somebody taking the initiative to propose an ideal date and it then being refined. Not only did this date have to suit the working schedules of several staff, but it also needed to fit around what appeared to be a perpetual global calendar of holidays and exam periods! The final polish process was very team oriented and could take days alone, so finding one that worked for enough of us was imperative. We also had to take into consideration potential extensions; while we never picked a date with the intention to extend it, we occasionally had problems with writer or GP shortage, so we needed to pick a date that was close enough to the general release schedule to give us breathing room without being too short and potentially discouraging authors from committing. Having dedicated naggers helped us get an earlier picture of what an ideal deadline looked like. In the end I don't think there was any other method that could've reduced the madness. We just played the hand we were dealt and made the most of the suspense! I think one of my biggest regrets is that sometimes we did not communicate a hard-and-fast deadline immediately enough, which led to confusion and stress for our contributors, but we always learned from those types of internal failings.
What was the most difficult part of putting together each issue of The Smog?
Quarkz
The days of The Smog seem so long ago now... Other than the obvious thing of uploading 20 or so different articles, from a technical perspective, I never struggled. Obviously the other guys had their own jobs and their own issues and many of them would have been much greater than mine (skylight for example would consistently work to ensure that all the articles were actually written and ready for release). Uploading all the articles was never really hard though; it was just time consuming and tedious. There's a lot of repetition involved and it can take a while, but if everyone chipped in, it was usually quite a painless process.
This is going off on a bit of a tangent, as it's not related to putting issues together, but the most stressful event was when we were dealing with the Smog / Player / Competitor merger, which was shortly followed by the moving of The Smog to Article Workshop. We spent quite a while debating these topics, and the staff was definitely split in two. The discussion got quite heated at certain points, and I think it's fair to say that there were a number of staff members uncomfortable with this, but we eventually reached some kind of compromise both times. A lot of staff left in this period, some due to the fact that they didn't feel like they could be motivated to work with the changes, others due to the conflict between The Smog staff and even with senior staff (who at the time a fair few members of The Smog staff had strong negative feelings towards), and others for much more personal reasons. This was definitely a low point for me, as it was quite demoralizing to see everyone go and the discussions didn't exactly put me in the best of moods either. Still, I think that it is fair to say that the Article Workshop is back on track and we seem to be moving in the right direction. The current staff team is more than capable at keeping these articles going, and looking at the release schedule, there's plenty of articles to look forward to.
jumpluff
I guess it would depend on what you would call difficult! A natural product of the deadline, like any deadline, was that everyone finished at the very last minute possible, which meant the editing and collating work all had to be done in huge bursts at the end. Sometimes this burden fell disproportionately on one or two members from the respective teams. I think I stayed up 27 hours once to finish getting things ready for release and swore to myself to never do that for anything in crunch time ever again, even a job. Ensuring content variety and consistency on an entirely volunteer effort was also a bit difficult and meant a lot of reaching out to people, but it was always heartening to see how eager people were to write.
We had some pretty severe backend technical issues, like having to have our image uploads to the server approved in our smaller, earlier days; this would often cause huge release bottlenecks where everything was ready to go but we were waiting on one of the rare people with authorisation to let us go live. That was really frustrating, especially when everyone was anticipating reactions to their work, and in retrospect I can't believe we had to function like that for so long, but I guess we loved everything else about it so much that it was worth it in some way.
While it wasn't difficult per se except emotionally, a thing I really hated was seeing works that an artist had poured their heart into go to waste due to a shelved article. I think the art leaders did a good job of ensuring the art still got out there, though.
What was The Smog like in the early days?
Tangerine
The Pokémon community has always been one of the more imaginative ones, so even if people came to Smogon for competitive Pokémon, it always led to quite a bit of community projects on various things. There was quite a backlash towards some of these projects at the time (for example, there was quite a bit of really condescending attitudes towards CAP), and I think some of the cooler projects needed more attention (Jumpman16's battle tower runs, RNG research). The idea was to bring them all in a format that gives them coverage, because I thought they were really cool and I wanted to bring them together in some sort of official capacity.
The early days were interesting, since most of the contributors that I was close with tended to be more competitive people, so we got a lot of really in depth competitive analysis. I think a few of the editor's notes are just me just appealing to people to contribute more. I was also extremely relaxed about it—generally, I just let people comment that they're going to write something, and if they didn't make the deadline, then oh well. It's why the content distribution is quite uneven. It was at a point in time where I lost real interest in Smogon, so I didn't particularly look out for content.
I'm glad that it eventually took off due to the efforts of Jimbo and jumpluff, who kept it running, and eventually it caught on. Consistency and passion is key and I'm glad that they really made this an actual passion project of theirs to help turn it into what it is today just from a vision I had. Awesome people.
Jimbo
I felt passionate about The Smog because it would provide people some light reading and let the members of Smogon showcase their passion and skills for writing at the same time. The Smog was a new venue for people who weren't necessarily skilled at writing competitive analyses. It was great coming up with new ideas with my fellow writers / editors, and conducting interviews was always enlightening.
In the beginning, The Smog was disorganized and needed leadership. Thanks to Tangerine, the first issue got underway and we all kind of found our niches. I was drawn to doing the interviews and working on HTML, while other people found their places as writers or grammar editors. Leading such a large publication gave me an avenue for developing leadership skills. I found that each person needed prodding in slightly different ways to get their work done. Honestly, I think it's helped me a lot in the "real world," as my management skills have flourished since then. I'm thrilled that The Smog is still around and has really evolved over the years since I've taken a step back. I still read many of the articles when I can, and people are still doing a fantastic job.
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