Character histories & episode summaries...

[The Amstor Computer]

A quick suggestion - and one I wanted to check whether Wake & everyone here was interested in.

Would it be possible for fans to contribute written character histories to the site, and possibly even episode summaries for series? I know that a lot of people who've just gotten into Tooth want to find out more about characters like Dredd & Dante, but aren't particularly interested in tracking down back progs.
What better place to find a detailed history than on the official site, and what better place to find out what happened in a particular story 10 years ago?

Most of us have favourite characters, and most of us are competent enough to write a clear, intelligible piece that anybody could grok - and enough of us have a complete or near-complete run of 2000AD to fill in episode summaries for even the most bizarre minor characters.

The big problem I can see is the pressure on Wake. Forgive me if I'm assuming too much, but Wake seems to have enough on his plate with regular updates & tweaking the site to be able to make time to convert our scribblings to usable HTML.
I'm sure there's a way around this, if Wake's interested - perhaps asking for submissions in plain text format, with suitable HTML code plugged in by the writer? It would involve a little work for the writer - learning a couple of HTML tags for line-breaks etc... - but it should mean that Wake could simply plug the text into a template page & upload.

No doubt, there'll be plenty of other problems likely to crop up, but this kind of system has worked before, and it would make for a bloody good addition to the site if it could be pulled off.

Any thoughts?

[Wake]

The code is already in place for this, in three ways:

Character Profiles
The following headings are available:
Creator1, Creator2, Characters, Status, Dateline, Location, Weaponry, SpecialAbilities, Partners, Motivation, Soundbite, Trademark, Notes, Backstory

You don't have to use every heading. Several of the existing characters already have profiles. In addition character pages should have 2 jpg images: one 230x350 pixels and a second 90x90.

Story details
There is a single notes field. Details should be kept to a minimum, since they will be displayed every time someone asks for the credit details for that story.

Timeline Data
This gives space for a longer report for a given story. There should be 2 versions...a brief summary which will appear on the timeline page, and the full report which can be selected following a link from either that page or the story credit details. PVS has already done a few in Dredd's timeline. A year is also required so it can be fitted to the timeline.

The best format to use is plain text. I can add paragraph breaks myself easily enough before uploading.

The advantage of going for the timeline option is that you get credited (and earn a profile page of your own, if you don't already have one)

Cheers,

Wake

Link: Judge Dredd's Timeline