 Hey everyone and welcome to the first ever episode of Zi Update or Zelda Informer Update. This is a brand new bi-weekly show that is all about informing you guys, our fans, about future ongoings at the site, current projects going on, as well as answering any questions or concerns you have in regards to anything we are doing at our site on our social media channels or really just in general, anything that has to do with us. And for this first episode I already have one question or concern to address, but I also want to give you guys some teases about some upcoming things, maybe let you know a little bit about our E3 plans and what you can look forward to from Zelda Informer over the coming weeks. So for starters I want to address the big cat in the bag, the big concern that some of our fans have had and that is the comment system and just really the comment system in general. So about a month or maybe it's almost two months ago now, we experimented with a program called Spot.i.m. to be our new commenting system at the site and the reason we were moving off a discus is a long-winded and I'm not going to get into it now but needless to say the Spot.i.m. went a lot better in testing than it did in final implementation. So in other words, it worked really well when we were just running the test run of it and then when we fully implemented a whole bunch of issues cropped up that did not exist before. Basically I do not think that Spot.i.m. can handle the load that we give them from our user base, which is good you guys are really active. It also showed that discus itself is actually holding back our activity a little bit and that's a little sad but because of a lot of the various issues including a massive security bug, we switched back to using discus and we switched back without making an announcement. We did announce Spot.i.m. we did not announce the return to discus. This is kind of our uber late announcement that yes we are back using discus again and that's just because it works. It doesn't have the issues. We don't have to worry about security right now. Maybe someday we'll go back to Spot.i.m. but they really need to clean up their platform. They have a huge list of bugs for me to sort out and they have not sorted them all out yet. Kudos to them for listening and working on it but they have not finished sorting that whole mess out. We use discus again and when we return to discus I turned on discus's default filters, word filters that is and I know that upsets a lot of people. Why are you censoring us? We used to always be able to swear. We used to always be able to say but or ass or bullshit and now I can say it right here in this video but you can't say it below in our comments. I hear you. So first let me explain why the filters are in place. One big rule we have at Zelda Informer for our discussion is to not attack people and I know that seems extremely PC and I'm not really trying to be PC. I'm trying to create a friendlier place for people to converse but fans don't need to be afraid to come and talk about things and have opinions that others will not agree with whether it would be about you know the controversial topic of gender in Zelda games or whether it is just about why Zelda game is the best game out there or whether Nintendo is making a mistake with their E3 stuff. It shouldn't matter which side of the fence you're on. Everyone should be able to have a respectable conversation about that. It doesn't mean they need to respect everyone's opinions. Respect has to be earned as they say but we don't need to be attacking people just because they disagree with us and there's a lot of forms of attacking and you could still end up attacking people without using foul language. However, foul language was often found to be commonly associated with people that were not being so nice to others. So, the filters allow us to not have to worry about moderating our community as much as we used to have to and it gets really tricky when we're deleting and we're trying to contact users and it's a big mess. So, this just made it a lot easier just to censor that stuff out. Now keep in mind we're not censoring your ideas, your thought process. Just censoring maybe the approach to how you present that thought process. Like if really you just want to be like F off Nintendo, instead you can be like I'm done with Nintendo or whatever. Some other phrasing that means what you're trying to say without having to use a foul word. Now, I have heard your complaints that it's a little too strict. So, before this episode goes live, in fact, right as you're watching this, I will be making changes to the filtering system to allow a bit. Some of the words that I feel might be a little bit extreme. Discus is default list, which I have not gone through entirely. I did notice when I first put it up that there was, it was a little bit more limiting than I wanted. I can't tell you exactly what words have been lifted yet, because at the time of this recording, I have not actually lifted the words. But I can tell you that I am listening and we're going to keep the filters in place, but I will pull back some of the restrictions and allow some words that I would say I would allow our authors to use, or the kind of words that I would say I'd allow our commenters to use. I think it's only fair that if we could say it, you should be able to say it too. There might always be special cases where it doesn't happen. Say the F word slips in somewhere. That's not something we really want to use ourselves, let alone let our community use. But we're not necessarily going to censor, say a guest. If we have a guest on our podcast and they say something that has the F word in it, I don't want to be rude to them as they are a guest taking time out of their day to help us do something for the site, for you guys. So that's what's going on with the comment system. Thank you for all your feedback on that. If you have more feedback on it, let us know. Again, if you have any questions at all about anything we're doing at the site, anything we've done in the past, anything we're doing in the future, any features you'd like to see return, features you'd like to see next, let us know in the comments below. Like, this is all about informing you guys and getting my face to face with you and letting you know what's going on at the site. So what else is going on at our site today? Well, we brought back daily debates. We did this yesterday. We're going to keep doing it every day, moving forward for as long as we can realistically keep it going. We will be taking most of the week of E3 off from daily debates. So I'm letting you know ahead of time that while they are back now, that week for E3 from the Monday through at least the Friday, we probably will not have any daily debates because we'll be focused squarely on coverage. There's a lot of stuff going on for us at E3. So we really want to make sure we nail our coverage and then we'll come back to the daily debates once things calm down a little bit. We feel that daily debates are something our fans really enjoy because they get you interactive. There are always some of our most commented on pieces that we post at the site every day. So we hope that you look forward to seeing them return. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed yesterday's Daily Debate and the whichever one we posted today will try to keep this train going. So what happened with daily debates before? If you remember, I did a site update around the time that ownership switched over to Massies from Zelda Dungeon owning Zelda Informer. And I said we'd be doing daily debates and it didn't. Life happened as you might not be aware, we have two paid staff in Zelda Informer that actually do things. There's, well, there's three all the others. Massies the owner and then there's me. I'm the editor-in-chief. Darren is our managing editor, which primarily means he manages the news team. And yeah, that's it. So if Darren and I don't necessarily have time, chances are that features end up getting cut from the site. And I hate saying that features. We don't want to cut features. But daily debates were kind of the first thing to get nixed for a little while because we were really short on newswriters. We are extremely short on copy editors right now. And it's put so much on our plate that we haven't been able to keep it in going consistently. If you notice our podcast has even been coming later and that's not even rammed by me or Darren right now. And then there is our The Boss Man series and Zelda Increase. It's all been kind of inconsistent. I don't like that inconsistency. We want to be consistent for you. So yeah, that's the plan moving forward. Speaking of plans, because this is a bi-weekly show and it's happening on Wednesdays, if you recall, the Boss Man series also happened on Wednesdays. To make things a little easier for me, the Boss Man series is going to be bi-weekly as well on this same day. So this week you have gotten a ZI update and next week you're going to get a Boss Man opinion piece. And then the following week another ZI update, then a Boss Man opinion piece the week after that. That way it gives me more time to spend on editing the Boss Man pieces, which are a lot more editing intensive than say this, which is just me in my office. But yeah, so yeah, that's kind of my goal with that and make sure we produce good episodes of our shows moving forward. Now I did mention briefly the podcast. I am sad to say that our current podcast host and editor, Adam Cohen, will be stepping down by the end of this month. He's been running the podcast. I don't want to get it wrong. I think he'll be at 87 or 88 episodes when he's done. And that means for 87 to 88 straight weeks, he's been releasing a podcast every single week. I think he's missed one week I can even think of in that span. And if you think about that, that's a year and a half, a year and three quarters, that he has consistently ran our podcast. And it's reached over 600,000 views and tons of people. It's been wonderful. It has lost a little bit of momentum lately, but that's okay. Adam expressed to me that he is ready to move on in life and do some other endeavors. And the podcast is an extremely time-consuming event. So I want to thank Adam, Colin, Chris, and everyone else that he's had on as a guest, even some of the regulars, like our former staff member, former copy editor, Jeff Edelstein, who no longer works as a former as well, who's a friend of Adam's. I want to thank all of them for the hard work they have put into the podcast, but especially Adam, because without Adam, we would not have a podcast today. Now, that being said, the podcast is going to continue. We're still going to have a podcast. The day of the podcast is going to change. Instead of it releasing on Saturdays, we're going to release it on Wednesdays. And I'm going to release more information on this in the future, but here's what I can tell you. It will be hosted by me. I will have a co-host. We will have at least three people on every single episode, hopefully three people from Zelda Informer, so we keep it really inclusive. And then if we have a fourth person, that'll be a guest. Someone else we bring on as a special guest. And it will be different than what you've gotten with the Zelda Informer podcast in the past. I know that a lot of you really love what the Zelda Informer podcast has been and has become, but I don't feel I can do as good a job at that format as Adam did. Essentially, I don't want to try to beat Adam because Adam is amazing and I don't think anybody can beat Adam. The kind of show he ran is a very unique style that I can't do, or can't do well enough. So it's going to be a different sort of podcast. It's going to be an hour long period. And we're still working on some finer details on maybe sectioning some stuff and keeping things really condensed. We will see. I can tell you we won't be talking about news. We will be talking about a lot of things, really, some fan topics, some zany stuff. There might be a theme to each episode every week. I'm not exactly sure. We're still working out the fine-tuning details that I just found out recently that Adam is stepping down. So that's what's happening with the podcast in the future. Now, obviously, we have a big event coming up with E3 and we know that no matter what you think about Nintendo and how they're handling E3, we're going to get a ton of Zelda at E3. So here's kind of the gist of what's happening there. Myself, my best friend, who's going to be doing some camera work, Zion Grasso, a former Zelda and former staff member, and right now Rod, one of our writers, news writer at the site, I believe he's still planning to. We are all going to be attending E3 as a team. Our goal in attending E3 is obviously to play as much of that Zelda demo as we can, as many times as we can, to get all the fine details we can, all the best footage we can, et cetera. I have requested of Nintendo an interview with A.J. Anumu. I didn't know if we're going to get it. I also said, you know, I'd be willing to take interview with Shigeru Miyamoto if he's available, or Reggie Fizeme. Really, anyone that we can get an interview with about that game, we really want to interview. And then, you know, to get a private show floor showing so we can get some good footage, trying to bring you guys inside the experience of what their booth is going to be like on the show floor. Unfortunately, we're not doing a 360 camera thing, like some other places might, but we're going to try to give you the best experience we can. And then, we're kind of thinking of a bunch of different compilations and working with various YouTubers, and other people we might meet at the floor to come up with even more show ideas and even more opinions and reactions and all that great stuff. We will have a preview of the demo, we will release that to let you know what we thought. So yeah, we have a lot of stuff planned for our on-show coverage. Meanwhile, at the home base, Darren's going to be running the entire news team on his own, making sure that you guys get all the latest news out to your feeds, out to your Facebook, out to your RSS feeds, your Twitters, your Google Plus, your Tumblers, et cetera. We're going to be trying to get all the news out to you as fast as we can, as fast as humanly possible. And that's what you can expect from our side of things for E3, to do what we've always done and provide better coverage. And I just totally shook that camera side. I'm sorry about that. Again, first episode, there's going to be some issues. All right. And beyond that, our comic series is coming back to me in a weekly. I know some people have had some criticism of our comic series in the past. And while we do have some comics banked up that we're going to get through, there's about five to eight comics that are banked up. Once we get past our banked up comics, I can tell you that myself and Darren have been taking a more hands-on approach with our comic artist and trying to make sure that the jokes land a bit better than they have in the past if there is a joke at all. Some of you might have even noticed our last comic that we released before this episode was Captain America one with Link and Samus or whatever. Anyways, it was really clever and simple. And that's what we liked about it. It made sense. There wasn't a lot of thinking that had to go into the user or the reader experiencing it. And people seem to enjoy it. It is our most liked comic to date. So just so you know, we're going to keep on our artist and we believe in Trey. He's an amazing guy. He is the person who does our comics. We're going to keep pushing all those comics because we believe we can do better and create something that you guys really want to look forward to every single week. We've also been producing some more editorial content. I'm not going to leak anything that's going on right now, but yeah, that's coming. And we have the big Zelda dungeon informer or the ZDI marathon coming up this summer. I don't know the details on the top of my head because I won't be going to the marathon, but it is this summer. I'll put some details in the description or down in the post on the site. One of our very own is going to be in it. That's why it is the Zelda dungeon informer stream because we're going to have one of our staff members, Kristen. He's going to be there and playing at least four Zelda games. I believe it was Ocarina of Time 3D, which he's going to be doing a group speed run. You know, who can get through the game the fastest all at the same time. And then there will be, I believe it was the Minish Cap, Juan of Gamalani's playing. And I forget what the fourth game was, but yeah, he'll be playing at least four games at the event, which was pretty exciting. And he's representing all of Zelda informer in front of a bunch of guys from Zelda Dungeons. So it should be fun. We'll let you know more details on that stream as it gets closer and closer and closer and if there's going to be a charity fundraising for it, et cetera. So look forward to that. That's the first of ever marathon that Zelda informers ever really participated in. So that's exciting. That's really all I have for you this week. You can follow us on Twitter at Zelda Informer. You can follow us on Facebook, Zelda Informer on Facebook. I can't tell it's a theme. The only place where it's different is on Tumblr. Believe it, Zelda Dash Informer or Zelda Underscore Informer. I don't remember off the top of my head. Shows how much I know as the editor-in-chief at Zelda Informer. All right, so if you have any questions and any concerns, anything you want to know about our sightable things we do at the site, let us know down in the comments below. And before I forget, because I do not want to forget about this, our Zelda Versus Dungeon Tournament Best Dungeon, Best Zelda Dungeon Zelda Versus Tournament has been ongoing now for the last week or so. And I really want to put a shout out to a lovely person who prefers to remain anonymous, who emailed us, who did all the image work for it. And I really want to thank all of you guys for your patience. I know we were supposed to be done with Zelda Versus by the end of February or the end of April. I'm sorry, the end of February and or the end of March at the earliest or latest. And unfortunately, things got delayed because of communication errors. But it is moving forward now and we are ready for I think our fourth matchup today of all days in round one. So I'm really excited about that. It's the largest Zelda Versus tournament we've ever conducted. So yeah, I'm excited. I hope you're excited. Let us know if you have any other Zelda Versus ideas you'd like to see. Yeah, thanks for watching. This is episode one of ZI Update.