Collaboration is one request we get frequently, and today we’re announcing a first step towards getting the PlayHaven community to collaborate on guides:  peer reviews.

This new feature will help reinforce our mission to host high quality user-written guides on the Web. Peer reviews will also give readers a chance to contribute in finding factual corrections, spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, etc.  The process is very simple and will be extremely valuable for guide writers.

Upon publishing a guide, you will be presented the three options to invite your friends for peer review:  Facebook, Twitter, or Email.   When two or more people have peer reviewed your guide, a special recognition icon will appear next to let readers know your guide has earned the seal of approval among the community.  For those of you who are friendless – don’t fret!  Any member of PlayHaven community can also peer review your guides as well – just ask around and I’m sure someone will help you out

A special icon for peer reviewed guides!

I’d like to take some time to take an in-depth look into one of the more popular features of PlayHaven’s guide editor – the ability to export your guides to text. Here’s a simple case study on how it can be used to maximize your guide’s viewership and exposure across both PlayHaven AND all the text-based gaming sites while at the same time minimizing the amount of time it takes you, the guide writer, to create the actual guide and distribute it.

Since PlayHaven takes care of all the structuring and all the technical bells and whistles that many people find time consuming in creating a guide in notepad, most guides and walkthroughs can be written in a much shorter amount of time. There’s no need for creating elaborate ASCII tables, art, or a CTRL-F style table of contents. One favorite game of mine when I was a kid was just recently re-released in a special edition – The Secret of Monkey Island, on the PC, 360, and the iPhone. I’m a big Tim Schafer fan and I knew right there I had to do a full walkthrough for the game. It was also a chance to see how much faster it would take me to do a walkthrough on the PlayHaven editor vs. a notepad one (I have done some in the past). It ended up taking me only one weekend (and not all devoted to it!) to complete most of it, even having to run through the entire game to get screenshots!

So now what? I have a pretty guide that I had created, but only available to visitors of PlayHaven. With the new text exporting feature, I just click one button, and it gets all formatted to 79 characters per line, and ASCII. But, the big question probably looming over your head is, will GameFAQs accept it? I decided to see if this text based version of my guide would pass the submission process over at GameFAQs – I submitted an unedited text file straight from PlayHaven and soon found out that it had been accepted!

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We have just deployed our latest build of PlayHaven complete with a brand new feature that both guide writers and readers will find very useful – the bounty system. Members of PlayHaven will now have the option to request guides to be written and vote them up to let guide writers know what topics are the most important to readers, and what most people would like to see created. Once a bounty is created, guide writers can submit their guides to the bounty. If multiple submissions are present, the bounty creator can choose which best answers his bounty. I encourage all of you to try out this new system and give us your feedback so we can perfect it.

That’s not the only change you’ll find – we have many other new enhancements and features included as well – implemented based on your feedback that you sent us!  One important one is the ability to know view your guides as text only.

Many of you are GameFAQs writers and some have expressed concern over having to write two completely different versions of a guide to gain maximum exposure. We completely understand the concern, and to alleviate this, have created an exporting tool to have a text-based version of your guide automatically created for you once you create it on PlayHaven. This text version completely adheres to GameFAQs standards on submitted FAQs including the 79 character limit and also converts your tables! You can access these text versions by just going to the guide themselves while logged in and clicking on “Export as GameFAQs text”. We would love feedback on how to further make your guide as accessible as possible to everyone.

We know our guide editor is quite a bit different from how you would normally write a guide / FAQ, and sometimes it could be a bit daunting if you are not familiar with web-based writing tools.  In this short video tutorial below, I want to demonstrate how easy it is to write a guide with our tool, and how much time it will save you!

PlayHaven Guide Editor Tutorial

A few highlights of the tutorial:

• How auto formatting and structuring works, and never worry about the 79 character line limit ever again!
• How to easily embed screenshots, images, and videos directly into your guide
• How to save and publish your guide at any time

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!

Hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July weekend!  If you don’t live in the U.S., I hope you had a great… um… weekend  I want to give you guys a quick update on the new feature we are pushing out, as well as various bug fixes.

New feature – Guide Categorization:
Many early beta testers often ask us:  Could I write a full walkthrough?  Could I just share a simple tip & trick?  Could I combine multiple micro-guides into one?  The answers are yes, yes, and yes.  We want to give you the full freedom to share whatever gaming knowledge you would like.  So, you may now categorize your guides into one of the three categories:

• Full Walkthrough:  guides which describe how to beat or finish a game in its entirety in one document
• Micro-Guide:  short guides / FAQs that help players accomplish specific goals or achievements within games, or learn specific strategies
• Tip, Trick, or Cheat:  very small guides that contain cheats, tips, hints, tricks, or glitches to games

Regardless of the category you choose, you will still have access to all the tools from the guide editor.  If you have already published your guide, you may go to the guide you have written and edit the category to the appropriate section.

Bug fixes and Enhancements:

• We have improved the “Text Block” with various bug fixes and enhancements.  We know it’s still not perfect yet — so if you still encounter a bug or an issue, please don’t hesitate to shoot us an Email!
• Keyboard shortcuts now work in the guide editor  (e.g. CTRL+S to save, CTRL+B to bold, etc.)
• Search will now return much more relevant results

Thank you again for helping us beta testing PlayHaven!  Your feedback has been invaluable to our product development.  If you have any additional suggestions, please let us know!