I want your opinion

[FM]

I like to write. Lately, if anyone has been following my somewhat slow progress in writing articles, you'll notice I've been trying to adapt to our new community, writing "generic" articles for gameplay rather than focused ones, although the main focus is STILL on MtG, my cardgame of choice for the moment. With this in mind, I'm thinking about writing a Tournament Report, which tends to be a HUGE and rather elaborate article, so I'd like to know how many of you would be interested in reading such a piece, so I'll know if it's worth it to write it in English.
So... yeah, that's about it.

[sickofpalantirs]

the main thing that would convince me to read magic articles is a good auto-linking.  unfortunately, that probably won't happen which leaves manually searching for cards, which is generally a lot more time than I want to devote to it...

[FM]

I can try to autolink them, sure, why not? Don't know how well it'll work, but I'll give it a shot.

[SomeRandomDude]

I would read it.

[Anonymous Prodigy]

As would I.

[macheteman]

i probably wouldn't.

[Centurion]

I might if I had the time at the time of its completion.

[FM]

Ok, let me update this a bit. I wrote about my Regionals experience, but in between describing matches as best as I could remember, telling about choices made prior and during the tournaments and telling about the trips (I attended 3 Regionals), it got HUGE. And frankly, as I was getting more and more out of hand, I tried to shorten it, and it was just not good. So now I'm working on breaking it on a series of 3 articles, mostly to give players an idea on how competitive MtG is (I'm not planning on giving "insight" as M10 will change stuff quite a bit, for instance, expect BGR or BR Rack to become a viable deck...), and will start posting as soon as I finish the first one (which will be AFTER next weekend, since I'm taking the BAR test).

[DáinIronfoot]

Late to the topic, but let me just say that the lack of autolinking is part of what has kept me out of the MtG forums. If the cards were somehow linked inside the topics, I speak for myself and I think several others when I say that I'd be MUCH more likely to poke around and comment and review in MtG topics. I haven't played the game in YEARS, but I think I could follow well enough if I just had the cards in front of me somehow. I just don't have the time anymore to go and seek out the card info based only on the titles.

Maybe we could even go REALLY nuts and, if a good card repository exists, set up some type of autolinker like we have for LOTR TCG. Not sure if Kralik has the time or inclination for that right now, though...or if that would even be feasible if the repository of images wasn't hosted here.

But in the meantime, if you or anyone else links to the cards yourself, FM, I for one will probably take a looksie.

[FM]

There is the one they use at mtgsalvation, I don't know squat about setting something like that up, but if you could take a look you might see if they did something that is possible to be pulled off here as well.

[Kralik]

Maybe we could even go REALLY nuts and, if a good card repository exists, set up some type of autolinker like we have for LOTR TCG. Not sure if Kralik has the time or inclination for that right now, though...or if that would even be feasible if the repository of images wasn't hosted here.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but I highly doubt I would have the a) time, b) resources and c) motivation to do this. Adding the autolink for some 3500 LotR cards was only possible because I had a full database developed and a standardized numbering system. It would be a tremendous amount of effort to do the same for the vast number of MtG cards: labeling card titles, tracking down images, etc. Without them numbered I can't do the inline previews (at least, not without severely bloating the forum autolink code), nor can I host the images at this site.

For reference, here is the external code that does the linking for LotR, and then there is quite a bit of code that I added to SMF (the forums) and the templates to make the inline image previews work. You might notice at the end of each replacement text a label such as {card=00108}$0{/card}. These would be the LotR card numbers (in this case, 0P108). The code I put in the SMF backend translates that markup to certain Javascript calls, and the other code I put in the templates contains the function that pops up the previews. If I had to use the actual URL's instead of the collector's info notation, the size of the code (and the size of each forum page) would increase substantially.

[Gil-Estel]

What...is there something Kralik can't do?

[DáinIronfoot]

That's what I kind of figured.

Sooooo...manual linking, then.

[Gil-Estel]

Can't you pull some strings in NSA dear Dwarf?.....haha

[DáinIronfoot]

Only if you know someone you want...uh...silenced.