general strategy guides

There used to be many good guides in the general strategy section, especially for beginners. What happened to all of them? Why does the number of guides there keep decreasing?

Well...they are getting old, out of date and some people just delete them.
THe problem I see is that there aren't a lot of new guides for general strategy because dotafire doesn't really promote them (for example the tab for guides says "Hero Guides" so when creating a guide you naturally create a hero guide.

Try changing the "Freshness" to "Expired". As michi says, some of them are extremely old (and probably outdated). A lot of people who made those guides are inactive now. 8{(

Indeed, guides which are outdated tend to lose popularity.

Also, if you ever put a lot of effort and time into a guide, feel free to PM me and I'll look over it, if it's good I can share it on our official Facebook or maybe even front page it on DOTAfire.

Uh, gonna be a lot of effort to do a quick update on my better old guides to get them back in the list :(

*Puts in 6.86 in tha headline *
*presses update*

This "expired" system on general strategy guides seems pretty contestable.

Just because a guide hasn't been updated in the last 48 weeks doesn't mean it's outdated. Outdated means "no longer relevant", not old. The whole point of general strategy guides is that they're, well, general. In other words, they stay relevant regardless of the different patch changes, they're guides on the game itself and not on a specific hero. The game has existed for more than 10 years and personally I still find myself reading old dota 1 guides on general strategy from other sites.

Removing the guides from the standard list because they haven't been updated recently honestly sounds like a terrible feature. I'd really suggest reworking it. It's fine putting the "hasn't been updated recently" symbol on them, but right now they're simply removed from the list. I think they should at least be included in the list without having to click a specific button.

Right now there is a "freshness" filter on dotafire and it removes by default all strategy guides that haven't been updated recently from the list. That's why you don't see many of them. This feature makes no sense because the guides are still relevant (just look at Sando's guides for example), so it needs to be reworked in some way.

It's especially striking to see this freshness filter on *general strategy* guides when there is no freshness filter on hero guides when you click on a hero. Hero guides do become outdated, there are actually quite a bit of 3 year old outdated hero guides on dotafire. While if you ask me, general strategy guides *never* become outdated, and they're the ones getting completely filtered out whenever they are 1 year old.

Seriously this makes no sense...fix pls.

A beginners guide to Dota2:
Learn the positions / farm priorities.
Learn last hitting if core position.
Learn pulling, warding and zoning if sapport.
Watch the minimap a lot.
???
Congratulations in 3 years you won't suck *** at Dota2

It depends on what the guides cover, anything with a mini-map needs updating regularly since the map does actually change now, so Warding Guides can now be easily outdated.

Just because some things have stayed the same since the start of the game doesn't mean they won't get changed in 6.87, so nowadays, general strategy guides are becoming increasingly vulnerable to becoming outdated.

As an example, Sando's "Choosing the right support" guide might only need a few Heroes adding to it, but his "Full Support Guide" needs many things rewriting, e.g. Pulling has 2 different timings now. Just look at Atlas's beginner's guide, that was made a few years ago and a lot of the content is outdated now.

Even assuming that some guides are still relevant after several years, how do you decide that a guide that's been left alone for a long period of time is still relevant? The only way is to go through each guide and manually change it's status, but this is subject to opinion.

It would be much better to leave old guides to go stale and just have the author add a new image or rephrase a section to be clearer, etc. than to mess with the freshness system. Not to mention, having them update the guide with little tidbits every so often would generate new interest from new members. It's not ideal to have authors making minimal updats to their guides, but in the case of general strategy guides that don't necessarily change much between patches, I see no harm in it.

This is pretty much all some strategy guides need tbh. Just let the author go through the guide, check nothing has changed, then update.

Well, argue what you want, the fact is that right now we have 8 general strategy guides on dotafire. 8. While in fact we actually have 30+ of them and quite a bit of them are actually pretty good, but they're just not visible.

Also, it says "guides that haven't been updated in the last 48 weeks" are marked as outdated, but that's not even true. Guides that were last updated in last July are marked as outdated. 48 weeks is almost a year, last July is just a bit more than 6 months.

The fact is, clearly right now nobody wants to write strategy guides. If you impose restrictions that make no sense like having to regularily update your guide every 6 months otherwise they get permanently removed from the list, people will want to write strategy guides even less. Again, hero guides don't have this ridiculous restriction, so why are strategy guides restricted like this?

Besides, don't we have a rating system to judge the quality of a guide? If you think a guide is outdated, you can just downvote it. And then a newcomer can sort guides by rating (if it's already not done by default). The site should judge guides based on their quality not their date. Let the viewers decide whether a guide is good or not, not some arbitrary freshness system.