Today has been a rather interesting day. Outside of my usual routine of taking care of my kids and going to the park… I found out a family member of mine whom I am close to may not have long to live. So I apologize ahead of time if I don’t seem like my usual self. Today we launched a new feature, one of which seems to have completely divided our fan base right down the middle. For those unaware it’s our now infamous Zelda Misinformer feature.

Let me explain a little background on the idea. The initial concept came from a commenter who made a satire suggestion with Zelda Misinformer. We had a site meeting last night that dealt with many topics, but one of them was if we should do anything Zelda Misinformer. We decided it might be fun to do a troll post once a week so long as we made it obvious the post was fake – misinformer in the title and a disclaimer at the end would make it clear what the post is, and our regular readers would know they could ignore the post each week if it didn’t suite their fancy. Others who enjoyed it could continue to read and others who fell for the obvious fake post could learn a valuable lesson.

The internet is one of the greatest resources for news and information out there. It is also the worst culprit for spreading lies and mistruths. Some of it is intentional (troll posts) and some of it is just really shoddy journalism. Other times it’s just someone believing a lie – we were a culprit to this back in the Remember Zordiana days almost 4 years ago. It was a harsh lesson for us to learn on how to verify (and not verify) sources properly and we’ve strived every day since to be a reliable source for Zelda information on the internet.

Today’s post felt like a departure from a reputation we strived so hard to build up, but I wanted to sort of use it as an excuse to try and improve our fan base. We get literally hundreds of news submissions a day with most of them being links to false stories. Some simply want us to debunk the story – which is noble and at times we do just that. Others think it is legit news and keep asking how we’re missing it and why we haven’t posted it. Answering these people every single day can get tiring, but I don’t believe in ignoring our fans. It happens at times, but I try to respond to as many of them as I can before I eventually fall asleep at night. I wake up the next day and the cycle repeats itself.

Zelda Misinformer is a bit fun for us staff members (think April fools but randomly throughout the year, or “The Onion” type stories for video games only), but for me the primary function of the posts was to help teach our fanbase to stop believing everything you see and read on the internet. It may be all a futile attempt – surely we can’t help everyone realize that stories can and often are fake, and I know you rely on us to sort that out for you. To do the research so you don’t have to, that way you can trust what we report. We thought putting Misinformer in the title would be a dead giveaway, but for many it wasn’t. They saw Ganondorf and Smash Bros. and simply ignored the rest. What part of our brains make us have that selective reading is beyond me, but I understand now how this may or may not have been the best of ideas.

Stories like this come across our desk everyday and have no sources, true information, and in this case talk about stuff irrelevant to Hyrule Warriors.

I still think we should do something to help educate our fans on what is and what isn’t a fake story, and while maybe the fake stories shouldn’t come from us, it was intended, at least from my standpoint, to be a lesson to make you start looking at what you’re sending us and believing when it isn’t coming from our reporting. We would always make it obvious – if we we’re making up a fake story, it would be properly labeled and easily identifiable. Everything else would then be legit – no confusion necessary. For those who do share stories off headline alone, it would remind them to be more conscious what they are sharing. Even sites far more reputable then us make many mistakes in reporting which is why gaming journalism has a really bad reputation.

Maybe Zelda Misinformer isn’t the best way to tackle this problem. Maybe we’re overstepping our bounds to try and have some fun while attempting to make fans understand that if it doesn’t come from us, please do your research. Maybe we’re misguided.

So today’s debate is about the merits and pitfalls of Zelda Misinformer, how we can or maybe shouldn’t bother trying to educate our fan base on researching reports from other sites, and if we do continue this… how often we should do it. Would once a month get our message across? A few times a year at random intervals? If we continue it, should we focus even more on the fakness? Make it even more obvious in the title, and then make the entire piece satire? I don’t know a solution to any of this, only that I want to be part of the solution – not the problem. I thought in properly labeling it as a fake story it would be obvious what was going on, but it isn’t.

What do you think?

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