So, you want to write a guide? That's great! Guides are a lot of work, but they're also fun to do and can help out a lot of people.
Now here's a short little guide to help
you.
1. Make sure your guide isn't covering the exact same thing that another, stickied guide already is.
If you want to write a guide about something that there's already a stickied guide for, you need to make yours better in some way. If yours is easier to read, prettier to look at, or more up to date it will be stickied to replace the other guide.
2. Choose a title that fits your topic. Try to keep it short, simple, and sweet.
When players are telling each other about your guide they don't want to have to say "take a look at Squeaky's guide
How to Be the Best Heaven Stone Collector Ever and How to Upgrade in the Arena Without Being PWND Naked." They'd probably prefer to say something more like "see Squeaky's guide
Heaven Stones and Upgrading Secrets."
3. Write legibly.
1337 5p34|<, excessive shorthand, bad spelling, and bad grammar make things
illegible. Leave them out.
4. Keep things organized and standardized.
If your guide is really long, you may need to split it up into sections with different headers or titles designating each section. Provide a table of contents or a short "overview of guide contents" at the top of your guide. Also make sure that your sections actually look like sections. If you've got a size 18, bold, underlined title for section 1, and a size 12, red, italicized title for section 2, people may think that section 2 is actually a sub-section of section 1.
5. Check your BBCode tags and formatting.
Don't get too carried away with that font formatting! Too much formatting not only makes things cluttered and hard to read, but it increases the chance that a tag will be left open. Open tags aren't pretty to look at and can really mess up the formatting in the rest of your guide. So check to make sure all your tags get closed at the right places (and that your formatting isn't too over-the-top).
6. Add pictures where necessary.
7. Don't stretch the page.
Everybody loves pictures! Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words. People find it
so much easier to understand you when you've got a picture to show what you're talking about. But do keep an eye on your image file sizes--anything larger than 120kb (current signature file size limit) probably will be removed. Also make sure your pictures are no more than 700 pixels wide. Anything that ends up stretching the page will have its link broken or removed by a Mod.
8. Check your information.
Is everything you posted correct? Are you sure? If not, then you need to check it or have someone else check it for you. Guides are supposed to be sources of
facts, not
I think's or
I heard's. If you want to include something on your guide but aren't sure if it's completely correct, point that out.
9. Cite your sources.
10. Don't steal other people's work.
Always, always,
always always always cite your sources. Tell people where your information is from. That way they can give credit where credit is due, and if something's wrong it's not your fault. It
is alright to post a guide that doesn't have any sources, but if you do it'd better be all your own stuff. If you're going to directly copy someone else's work, add a link referencing it. Don't just take stuff--text or images--and call it your own. Plagiarism is bad.
11. Include a "thanks to" list of some sort.
If others have helped you write your guide, credit them either in the section they helped with or in a note at the bottom of your guide/post. Sure, maybe they only corrected a spelling error or got a picture for you to add, but it was still help. They deserve a little credit too.
That's all I can think of at the moment. If anybody else has another guideline/suggestion for writing a good guide, share it!
