Stop the presses!
We're naturally biased, but we think that QSmack rocks. For the "serious" public Quake server op, the only things more de rigeuer than using QSmack are fixing up your QuakeC (by personal hacks and/or mod packages) and using QHost (if you're on a Win32 platform). We may of course be badly delusional about how useful QSmack is, but all the other server ops who have tried it seem to think it is very very cool. We would assume, therefore, that, given the constant bemoaning about player misbehavior (cheating, profanity, talk-spamming, teammate-shooting, crossdressing, etc., etc.), information about QSmack would be at least as newsworthy as word of some log file parser going from version 1.845 to version 1.846. Or a new third-party map being tested on a server somewhere. Or a .plan file update about what kinds of music an id employee listens to. Insert other trivia here; you know the kind of "news item" I'm talking about. Not to say that these things aren't occasionally useful or interesting, only that they provide a rather low watermark for what is "Quake news".
So, when ahnuld thought that his baby was ready for a public beta test, he put together a little PR-type release and sent it to Planet Quake, Blue's News, The Void, and sCary's Sugar Shack. Some time later, I sent a similar blurb to Redwood and NAWC. The results?
NAWC is basically the only news site that reports everything. If they hear something, their audience will read about it, and very soon. Our blurb popped up on their site with lightning speed... although it was mis-titled; they grabbed the mailer program version from my mail header and used that as the title. :-) Still, with that kind of turnaround I can live with a few mistakes, and NAWC has always passed along stuff from us in the past with the same alacrity. Thumbs up to them. The Void updates less often than NAWC, but more often than almost any other site, and like clockwork. An excerpt from our blurb quickly showed up there, along with a little encouraging comment from the editor. Cool. The announcement was slow to get to Redwood's site, but he did put it up, even though he accompanied it with a disparaging remark about people who still use Quake instead of QuakeWorld. Eh. Fine.
From sCary, Planet Quake, and Blue: total silence. Ahnuld was peeved. I was less worked up, at least for two out of the three. I didn't have many expectations about sCary or PQ, because of the kinds of news bits they run. The absence of reaction from Blue was kind of odd, though, given that he sports the rep of reporting on anything significant, that he clearly lists what types of things he will not report on (QSmack not matching any of those), and that he makes periodic noises about journalistic integrity and giving people equal time on his page. Maybe he didn't get the mail? Although, we knew that "Prophet" had also sent out a mail about QSmack, and he mails his news flashes to Blue among others. Hrm.
All of us were a little put out that the stuff we had been sweating over was deemed not newsworthy by Blue, since Blue probably has the largest audience, but we decided to wait and send out another "update" when QSmack was bug free and out of beta, and when we had more features, a larger user base, and more sets of pre-modified server code available. A couple of weeks passed... and we sent out a new, shorter blurb to Blue, The Void, and NAWC (as I recall). Again, instantly up on NAWC and The Void. Again, nothing from Blue.
Being our resident loose cannon, ahnuld finally sent a third -- and more, umm, aggressive -- mail to Blue. Not that he threatened him, or anything, but ahnuld does a good "barely restrained psychotic" impression; I would hazard that we are Never Being Mentioned On Blue's News Again. :-) However, the mail did result in QSmack info appearing on Blue's page. Of course, it is (rather snarkily) buried in a paragraph about "More Log Parsers". (?) And not by mistake, either, because it is clear from the microblurb Blue gave us that he knows what QSmack is for. (Hint: not log parsing.) Oh well.
Why do we care? Well, a) ahnuld invested a lot of effort in all of this -- including the work involved in gearing QSmack for public release, which is useless if we can't get the word out -- and b) he has fun being indignant. But, also, the whole episode was kind of informative. We have no idea why we are being given the Cold Blue Shoulder, and we probably never will know. (It's especially odd because Blue has posted one very minor news blurb from me in the past, which tends to put the kibosh on any anti-C9 conspiracy theories.) I personally still think that Blue's is one of the best Quake pages out there, but I'll certainly be viewing it from a different perspective now. Wonder what else doesn't make it past the BlueFilter.
A postscript here... something I've thought of but haven't the energy to try to work into the text above. In the past, I've noticed that people daring to criticize Quake celebrities often get the honor of being held up for ridicule on the news pages, inviting thousands of fanboys to send them hate mail. I'm assuming from the evidence that we are beneath Blue's notice, and that even if not, the above is a pretty mild criticism. But I'm certainly not counting on it. (I have a mail filter and I'm not afraid to use it!) For those of you upset that we're only presenting one side of the story, well, ahnuld did ask Blue what was up (if not precisely in those words), and there has been no reply. No, I don't think that we "deserve" a reply in any sense, and in fact I don't expect one, but I can hardly present Blue's side of things without it. If Blue does surprise us with a mail, I'll certainly make any necessary apologies, retractions, corrections, distractions, abstentions, distortions, or obstructions. Scout's honor.
A post-postcript: ahnuld has since also asked PQ (somewhat more moderately than he asked Blue) why they didn't post the QSmack blurb and how they go about deciding what is "news". We didn't really get an answer to that second part, but the guy responding did say that some of their stuff had been on the fritz, and that if ahnuld would send him the QSmack blurb again, he would report it on their news page. Still waiting for that report, of course. :-)
A post-post- ... ah, whatever. More stuff. We sent our release directly to Prophet when QSmack 2.0 and the frontend were released. And ahnuld did a little more personal campaigning. (The details of which...? Well, I'm trying to go by "don't ask, don't tell" so I can have plausible deniability.) News site tally: the QSmack Gospel has spread to everyone's site except Redwood's. Apparently persistence and a little bit of obnoxiousness pays off.