Overview
If you were a member of our predecessor site, The Shadow Sun, we're glad to see you back! Papertank offers many very new, exciting features, and this is a guide to get former The Shadow Sun members back on their feet.

Papertank was created over a period of one year, and started out as a simple update for The Shadow Sun, commonly known as v2. After about three months into developement, the team found that the new addition was far too large to be considered a mere 'update', and made the paramount decision to start a new site, Papertank.com. Overall, looking back The Shadow Sun is considered to have been an experiment by the team, as it allowed us to make proper adjustments to the system to more benefit the user. Papertank still uses the principals and ideas of the structure of The Shadow Sun, however, it is more focused both on providing feedback and constructive criticism to writers, as well as providing visitors with enjoyable content at the same time, which is why a different voting system was put in place. With that being said, Papertank is focused far more on the most important element, you.

Changed Features
In order to provide better control for users, there have been a multitude of changes from The Shadow Sun. In addition to many small changes made in previously existing systems, here is a list of large changes to features The Shadow Sun users were familiar with.

Voting
Voting has changed from being a one to five scale, into being a thumbs up, thumbs down scale. These two options not only make voting easier, but also gives readers a greater discrepency between the average, good, and great articles. In addition, if an article isn't good at all, or has some major revisions to be made, readers can vote the article down enough to where it is removed from the main area of the site.

Featured Articles
On The Shadow Sun, users were familiar with the fact that featured articles were added to the front page by Site Staff Members who enjoyed the article. We realized that this wasn't fair at all to users, as the Staff couldn't possibly read all of the articles that were submitted on a daily basis, and the decision was very opinionated based on the Staff Member. So, we decided to give full power of this to site users on Papertank. Now an articles is featured based on an algorithm of the voting patterns of users, so users collectively have complete control over adding articles to the front page.

Reviews
When we added the ability for users to review articles on The Shadow Sun we hoped that it would give writers more feedback and constructive criticism to their articles. It worked, to a certain extent, however, there really was not much of an incentive to submit a review. When we created the new voting system for Papertank, we decided that we needed to add more to article reviews to increase both the benifit for writers as well as voters. So, in Papertank reviews now double the weight of a users vote on that article. In addition to this, the review structure is now organized into three different categories: Pros, Cons, and Final Thoughts. This makes it much more easier for the reviewer to summarize their thoughts, as well as the author to view the reviewers thoughts. Reviews are also now accompanied by Meta Votes, which allow users to rate the review on helpfulness. If the review gets a large amount of negative votes, the review is labeled as 'not helpful' and does not count towards vote weight.

XP, Gold, and Artifacts
We decided that the entire role playing system was unnecessary and required far too much maintainace, so we completely removed it. Most features that were available by purchasing artifacts are/will be available for free.

Levels
Levels are now known as ranks, and are achieved by submitting certain number of reviews (currently 5 per rank). As you achieve ranks, your vote weight goes up by 1 point.

User Avatars
With the removal of the artifact system, you are now able to upload a user avatar whenever you want.

Layout
We realize the most surprising thing you'll notice when you first come to Papertank is the dramatic change in terms of style and layout. At the core, everything is set up just about the same, with minor alterations to labels and organization. A couple more important things that have been altered are modules, which are movable and removable to better suit users liking. The other big change is how articles are organized now. They still fall into sections such as 'Up and Coming', but they now also get organized into a broad range of categories that article gets sorted into when being submitted. This will make finding articles that fit user's taste much easier and hopefully help articles get more exposure to their targeted demographic.

Article Submission
The article submission process is now extended to fit the new features of the site. The submission process is now on a single page, so there is no reloading to get to the next step.

Categories
Previously, there were five different categories that you could submit an article into. Though this provided a bit more organization, we decided that we could broaden the organization. Now in Papartank, there are three different kinds of categories that an article can be labeled with (type, writing style, and topic). This allows for readers to find content with ease.

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