The Plagueburst Crawler and Hobby Reporting

This popped up on Faeit212, one of my more trusted sources for Games Workshop news.

Death Guard Griffon

You can tell it's Chaos because of the spiky bits

Faeit 212 then released this image of a better look at the new tank coming our way:

Suspiciously similar to my Nurgle's Gardeners colour scheme

You may be forgiven from looking at my latest posts from thinking I'm a news site. Well not really. I get excited by new information and the little bump in views I get from my BREAKING NEWS posts, but I rarely if ever post a picture without comment.

For what I do here (analysis, reviews, guides and ego stroking usually), I have to put in a little more research and hunting around. It's the value I add with this blog, as I really don't have the time to spare to trawl the net for fresh news.

But I thought I'd share some of the research I did on the above tank. And maybe you can see the frustration I have with some "hobby blogs" out there.

Here's a quote on the above picture from Faiet 212. Note I always link back to my sources:

This was sent into me, a better look at the new upcoming Plagueburst Crawler for Death Guard.
Thank you for sending this in.

Fair enough, nothing more to add, and the blogger thanked his source. And here's a quote from a similar article from Inmaterium.com:

This was sent into me, a better look at the new upcoming Plagueburst Crawler for Death Guard.
Thank you for sending this in.

Ok, maybe the same source sent it to a different site. And from Blood of Kittens:

This was sent into me, a better look at the new upcoming Plagueburst Crawler for Death Guard.
Thank you for sending this in.

Sounds familiar right? And from the absolute worst, games-workshop.eu:

This was sent into me, a better look at the new upcoming Plagueburst Crawler for Death Guard.
Thank you for sending this in.

Abadon's black bones, you'd think the "european website for Games Workshop" would have something better than a camera shot of pre-release copy of whatever book this was in in their art resources.

You can see why I get frustrated.

There's far more websites out there like this, and I'd be grateful if you didn't follow the links back to give them a page view. They're there, with ads running and affiliate programs up to make money with minimal effort, and don't really care about giving you any value for your time.

I know I've talked about this before, and probably will do so again in the future. With such a glut of terrible blogs out there, which ironically have better search engine optimisation than legitimate hobby blogs, it's hard for newbies to find information on the web.

Warhammer Community has gone a long way to fixing that, but it's not really much of a community building site. It is a very good news outlet for official news, but there's no reaching out to players or other online hobbyists. For that, we need to play our part in getting blogs and news sites to link together.

I used to write an Eve Online blog, and the sphere of writers there was well linked, easy to break into, and even well supported by the game developers at CCP. There was a page you could go to to find endorsed blog sites, which gave writers a free account if there content was posted on that page. This is something we're missing for Warhammer 40K.

Instead what we have are ad-ridden websites, with information buried under potentially malicious scripts. How many of you have gone to your favourite hobby news site, only to have the page try to sneak some malware under our firewall? There are some sites out there which barely even boot up under the weight of their advertising. Whilst these sites have a "list of affiliate blogs" or something similar, these are hidden to ensure they don't get your clicks.

I think I need to clean up my own Blog Roll really, but that's at the end of a long list of things I need to do for the blog.

Ah well, rant over. If you find someone looking for good Warhammer blogs, point them to the good ones. Warhammer Community should be the first obvious one, and Faeit212 is the most ethical and professional of the news sites that I know.

Of course, you could always point them towards the blog of a certain hard-working and desperate teacher, trying to scrape together pennies for his school club to have more PVA glue and sand for textured bases. Maybe encourage them to drop some change into the PayPal jar? Or use his affiliate links to get cheap miniatures?

I'm talking about me. Send them to me.

Please?

Until next time!


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