<>@7 °ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø *4@2 THE PROBLEMS WITH BEYOND THE FRONTIER *3]5@5 by Slade / A51 *1]1@7 ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø° @1 Okay, I have to admit that there are a few small little problems that I have to get off my chest. I think there are many that will be thinking, what sort of problems can a diskmag have. Well, here we go: *3@3 1. A recent contact said to me about the length of time between issues. This is currently standing at three months as of 5/8/96. Although, you will not be reading this article until you have in your dirty mits a copy of BTF5. 2. The more wise people will have noticed that, if we are writing articles three or four months before the actual issue is released, this doesn't give much scope for a news section as all news will be old hat. This is one of the areas which Amiga Frontier excelled in. Although the quality of the magazine was not up to the standard of BSE, the news section was the best section of the mag. That is not to say that Amiga Frontier would not be as good or even better than BSE if three months were spent between issues. 3. As the magazine is put together by one, and only one, person, and to which we owe a very big debt of gratitude. If you didn't know that person is zYLAX. This leaves other *3@3people out so we can't offer any help in compiling issues. Although all the Plymouth articles are collected and formatted by myself, this is only part of a massive job. 4. The last problem is the popularity of BTF, although this is improving with every issue. What we need is more readers, and from these more readers will hopefully come more contributors. I can safely say that if we had more contributors and hence more articles, then we would be able to issue the magazine quicker, say every two months, or every month. This would also solve the above problems. *1@1 So the moral is to copy the magazine for all of your contacts, and then ]5SEND]1 us your views on BTF. @5 [Well, I thought I'd better offer my opinion on the points raised in this article. Concerning Slade's initial view on the amount of time that passes between issues, I can only say that although we attempted to begin releasing the mag on a bi-monthly basis, it doesn't seem to be working. As the mag grows in size, so does the workload that goes into creating it. The second view was that of news articles. I realise that it can be tricky producing news articles (which can have a very short life span) when the release date of the magazine is not determined until late in it's development. But, I suppose, that any events that occured after the previous issue of BTF was released could be reported as news. Of course, this solution is far from ideal in some situations. For example, in BSE4 there was a news article describing the proposed specification of the Amiga "Walker" by ESCOM. But, further down the news page there was a more recent article reporting on how VIScorp had acquired the rights to the Amiga, which kinda made the "Walker" stuff look a bit dodgy. I think the best way of handling this situation at the moment is to write the articles for the news page towards the date when BTF is roughly due to be released. Therefore it should be up-to-date news on the condition that the mag doesn't get delayed for any great length of time. Although I don't think that the magazine should concentrate mostly on news articles (or other material that has a short life span) as this reduces the life span of the magazine itself. For example, if BTF was virtually full with news articles, once the news was old there would be no reason to look back at the magazine. I want BTF to be the sort of mag that anyone can get hold of at anytime and find something interesting in. Slade's third point was that the magazine was put together completely by myself, which explains why it often gets delayed. The reason for this at the moment is in the way that articles are formatted and justified. As you may of noticed in BSE/BTF, I have attempted to format all the textfiles in a similar way (i.e. article name followed by author's name in appropriate fonts and styles). This, in my opinion, does a lot for the magazine's presentation and puts us a little bit nearer to the quality of the commercial, paper mags. But, why can't anybody else format the articles in this way, I hear you ask. Well, the problem here is that I often don't know which magazine engine I'm gonna @5be using or even which version! And, because the type of articles that can be displayed and the text effects that are available vary with each engine, I have to adapt my article layouts for each issue. But, hopefully, if we manage to settle on a particular mag engine we should be able to form a system in which everybody in the group can type their own articles as they will appear in the mag. This will greatly speed up the production time and the mag will be released on time or possibly early. Well, that's the plan anyway! On the subject of popularity and reader interaction. Well, this is out of my hands and only YOU can solve this one. The only way we know WHO is reading the mag is when they actually TELL us. So what I'm asking everyone out there to do is simply to send us either a letter or a postcard letting us know that you read either AF/BSE/BTF. That's not really too much to ask is it? This will allow us to see who is out there and what we're doing is worthwhile. In return you'll also get a greeting in the mag. Of course, feel free to tell us what you like and what you don't like about BTF as well as any ideas you may have, as to grow we need as much feedback as possible. If you think you can stretch to contibuting an article or two as well then they would be grateful accepted. But this is in no way obligatory, all we want to know is that you're out there. Okay, next question please.... zYLAX!]