<metaname="description"content="RuneScape Developers' Blogs - RuneScape Editor Mod Osborne talks a bit about the Postbag from the Hedge and Players<72> Gallery.">
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<divclass="content"><p>It<EFBFBD>s a strange thing to say about your job, but a RuneScape editor wants their work to be invisible and unnoticed. You don<6F>t want typos to be found in game, and you certainly don<6F>t want Knowledge Base errors to be highlighted on the forums. In fact, by just mentioning the editor role, you are probably scouring my text for grammatical inconsistencies (I<>d do the same, by the way).</p><p>That<EFBFBD>s not to say that we<77>re the shadowy word-ninjas that the introduction implies, no matter how much we want to be. We get involved with some enjoyable projects that are visible, and these can be appreciated by a large number of people. For this dev blog, I<>ll reveal our work in a couple of them: the Postbag from the Hedge and the Players<72> Gallery.</p><p></p></div><divclass="hr"></div><h3>Postbag from the Hedge</h3><divclass="content"><p>Every month or so, we comb the Postbag inbox for your letters. There are oodles to read - we have 618 waiting right now - and it can take many hours to pick the best. </p><p>If you<6F>ve ever sent a letter into the Postbag, you<6F>ll want to know why some are picked and others are unused. Personally, I prefer succinct letters to interesting NPCs, or letters to NPCs we haven<65>t heard from in some time. We also like a varied tone in the Postbag, so we pick a mixture of humorous letters, letters that explore RuneScape<70>s history, and those that allow us to reveal a little about future content. We<57>re suckers for Evil Dave, Party Pete and the penguins, but don<6F>t all send your letters to them; they<65>re lovely to visit occasionally, but can you imagine living with them?</p><p>I hope we<77>re not shattering illusions by revealing that we, the editors, write the replies, and not the characters themselves. We do, however, submit all letters to the character<65>s parents (i.e. the developer who created them or, if that developer has left, the one who <20>curates<65> that content) to guarantee that all text is in the character<65>s voice and suitable. We<57>ll also pass the Postbag under the nose of <spanclass="strong">Mod Mark</span>, who makes sure that the quality is strong and the spoilers aren<65>t too spoilerific. He has a definite plan for RuneScape over the coming years, and we have to adhere to it in the same way that game content does.</p><p>We couldn<64>t talk about the Postbag without mentioning the Chaos Elemental. For any fan of the Future Updates forum, the Chaos Elemental <spanclass="em">is</span> the Postbag, and on a personal note, it is the best part of my job. We see the Chaos Elemental<61>s letters as a battle of wits with you, the readers. Each and every time, we will try to use new methods of confounding you - the periodic table and Teeline Shorthand was used this time round - but we get beaten repeatedly. Sometimes it can take a couple of days for all the hints to be found, but the Chaos Elemental is generally decoded on the Future Updates forum within hours. Next time, Future Updates, next time.</p><p></p></div><divclass="hr"></div><h3>Players<EFBFBD> Gallery</h3><divclass="content"><p>Like the Postbag from the Hedge, the Players<72> Gallery is collated once a month from its individual email alias. There are fewer submissions for this feature, but that is understandable when you see the quality of what we receive; often we receive artwork that must have taken hours, days even, to create.</p><p>Unlike the Postbag, however, the Players<72> Gallery is nearly all your work: we just get the enviable job of picking our favourites. The Gallery also causes more arguments than the Postbag, as the definition of a good gallery image is different for each editor. I will lean towards unusual images, a variety of media and more colourful depictions; previous curators have leaned towards cuter artwork or dark and epic images. Still, a stunning image will knock any Gallery curator<6F>s socks off: just look at this month<74>s Bandos Armour image.</p><p>Once chosen, the images are input into HTML, tested and translated. We<57>ll then do a plagiarism check, where every employee
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