temptation

I hadn't logged into GameFAQs in forever until a few minutes ago.  I was just randomly curious as to how many hits my Rumble Racing FAQ had gotten lately.  But on the contribution page I noticed that they had a help item I hadn't seen before: Formatted FAQs.

After reading it, it looks really simple.  It's just slightly adapted MediaWiki markup.  You put a special first line of your file that their server will see and go "oh hey this is a formatted FAQ" and then shit works.

Having read this I'm very tempted to actually release version 1.7 of my Rumble Racing FAQ as a formatted FAQ.  I've had it sitting here for quite some time, because any time I update my FAQ my inbox gets spammed from other FAQ sites saying "omg can we host ur faq".  I think they scrape for changes in update date on all the game pages or something because Rumble Racing isn't exactly the most popular game in the world.

Anyway, so tempting to redo my FAQ with real formatting instead of bullshit 80 character/line limits and whatnot.  Nobody has a screen that small anymore, and nobody fucking prints out FAQs.

I mean, shit.  I can even use images in their formatted FAQ format.  Not that I have any (and they do restrict the images to things that actually pertain to the FAQ, so people can't abuse it to have fancy title graphics or section headers or whatever), but I do have an ASCII art diagram of one part of one track that could stand to be redone in MSPaint or something, and I could make shitty track maps showing where all the shortcuts are, which would greatly help since I currently just have textual descriptions.

And fuck, if you use the section header markup it makes your table of contents for you.  No more having to build it yourself, no more tedious section name copy/pasting so that they're the same in both places, and no more shitty search keys for use with Ctrl+F.  Just put the section headers where you need them in the FAQ and the table of contents/navigation to specific sections just happens.  There's even markup for linking inside your FAQ for all those "and for a reference on $item, see $section" crossreferences.

I've been putting off making a website version of the FAQ for a while.  I had one constructed from FAQ version 1.4, but never actually released it anywhere (and it was a pile of shit).  The main trouble was navigation.  Unless you want to use frames (which are balls), every section of the site needs to be linked from every page, which results in an exponentially increasing amount of work as you realize "oh shit this content needs its own section" and you have to edit the link into all the rest of your pages.  Server-side scripting languages like PHP come to the rescue here, I can just set shit up with the navigation in its own file that gets included in when the page gets generated, so the navigation only exists in one place on the server.