Consuetudo Missionaria

From The Nethernet Wiki

You’re trying to think of a mission? Good for you!

So-called “Missions” are at the creative heart of PMOG. Missions are the only way besides web browsing to generate datapoints. But for a mission to generate points, people have to want to take it. Nothing irks a veteran pmogger more than an annoying mission. This page offers some suggestions. Missions themselves are not hard to make. Simply go to the pmog.com/missions page and click on “Generate your own mission”. A mission is simply a linked series of web pages. But what is on those pages makes all the difference. Missions tend to fall into the following categories:

a.“I like these web sites.” These missions just take someone through a series of web pages that are meaningful to you personally in some way. When they work well they can introduce someone to whole new concepts, people, or sources of information. They can also be just awful—rehashed jumbles of webcomics, youtube videos, and self-referential tech news sites. Think carefully before you ask others to see what they may already hate.

b.Puzzles or treasure hunts – These missions may introduce someone to new ideas, but their primary feature is a series of puzzles or riddles (or a single complex puzzle) that a user must solve in order to find some kind of treasure, often a crate of goodies hidden somewhere on the Web. If you make one of these, you will probably be committing yourself to rewarding others with datapoints for solving your puzzle. So don’t make it too easy.

c.Instructional missions – Pretty self explanatory. The missions made by the PMOG staff are all instructional.

d.Metamissions – These are missions about missions. For example, if you want to know more about what to avoid in mission making, you should take this now famous metamission by zous (http://pmog.com/missions/worst_mission_ever) and enjoy its blistering prose.

Here are some rules of thumb for mission making.

• Don’t place the first lightpost of a mission on any of the main pmog.com pages unless it’s a bonafide instructional mission relevant to the page you’re putting it on. Simply putting a mission on pmog.com site to attract attention is gauche.

• PDF files in your mission will cause some browsers to eat the lightposts. Players must allow their browser to display pdfs. Here's how: Tools -> Options -> Applications -> Adobe Acrobat Document -> Use Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox). It might be a good idea to include these directions in your mission description and first lightpost of the mission.

• If you can, try to spread your lightposts out across several websites. People like to earn datapoints for browsing while they’re taking missions.

• Don’t link to a Wikipedia entry unless you think you have found an entry that others wouldn’t think to search for on their own.