N4G is a social game news site that covers the game industry 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our large community of gamers, journalists and industry professionals have made N4G one of the most up-to-date and visited game news sites on the web.

As a member of N4G you can participate in discussions as well as contribute news stories to the site. You will also get access to the pending news area and news tips section which lets you read the news before it goes live on the main site.

N4G is a community driven website, which means all news stories are posted by our members. Instead of just having a handful of staff members N4G has thousands. This way N4G is able to cover many more news stories each day than your average game site or news blog.

All members can submit news tips to the site but only N4G Contributors are allowed to submit news posts. To become a N4G contributor you must first take a short test to make sure you understand the basics behind news posting. If you pass the test you can start to submit news stories to the pending news area. However you will not become an official N4G contributor until 5 of your news stories have been approved.

Most of the news posted on N4G is linking to other websites and millions of hits are sent out each month. This makes N4G a great place for webmasters to get free traffic and pick up new readers. The easiest way is to use some of the N4G webmasters tools. This way your readers can vote for your stories to be posted on the site. You can also join N4G and become a contributor, but remember that you will have to follow the same rules as other N4G members. This means that administrators reserve the right to edit both the url and the text of your articles if necessary.

Before a news story can go live on the site it must first be reviewed and approved by the community. Only N4G contributors and administrators are allowed to approve news stories.

The news featured on the N4G homepage is approved by the community. However our administrators monitors the site on a daily basis and will sometimes remove approved stories from the homepage if necessary.

Level 1 News posts is the easiest way to post news. A Level 1 news post is often just a quote from a news story hosted on another website, with a link to the full story.

Level 2 news posts is a full summary of a news story. So you will not have to visit another site to get the full story but a source link will be available. This option is only used by site administrators and N4G partners.

Level 3 news story is a N4G exclusive. This means that this story can only be found on N4G.com. This option is only used by site administrators and N4G partners.

Gamer:
This is the role you start with when you first sign up. As a Gamer you can post comments, submit news tips, and participate in other site activities.

N4G Contributor:
Contributors can post Level 1 news stories. Contributors can also review and approve news in the pending news area. Become a N4G Contributor

N4G Super Contributor:
Super Contributors can also edit other members' news posts if needed. To become a Super Contributor you must first be a Contributor for some time and deliver content of high quality.

With hundreds of news stories being posted on N4G each day the more important stories can easily get buried by the less important stories. To solve this problem N4G has invented a temperature system which shows how hot a news story is. When a news story reaches 100° (degree Celsius) its temperature sign will turn red to make it more visible. The temperature of an article does not directly reflect the number hits it gets. The temperature is decided by an algorithm which looks at the combined attention a story gets and the nature of this attention over different time periods. This way the system can predict if a story is hot or not just a few minutes after it has been posted on the site. A system that only relies on how many hits a story gets which is used by most news sites is not as effective as it can go many hours before a story show up as hot. But the reality is that it was “hot” from the minute it was published.

10°	0-69° Your average news article.
70°	When a story reaches 70° it turns light red indicating that it is most likely of above average interest or importance.
100°	When a story reaches 100° it expands and turn red to show that it is of above average interest or importance.
250°	When a story reaches 250° it is definitely of above average interest and importance. It is also likely to have generated a lot of user comments.
500°	A story that reaches this temperature is either extremely interesting or very controversial.
1000°	Sony announces PS4

All new members are given 5 speech bubble containers that will be visible on all posts. A member with 5 speech bubble containers is allowed to post a maximum of 5 comments per news article. As comments are made the speech bubbles will turn yellow, representing how many comments a member has made per news post. Members who post comments of low quality or ignore the forum rules will risk having their comment limit reduced, while members who receive positive feedback from other members and makes useful and interesting comments will be granted more speech bubble containers. The amount of speech bubbles you get is decided by the number of positive and negative votes you get from other members.

More and more people are starting to express themselves on the internet through video. N4G now allows users to post comments to news stories in the form of video. To post a video comment you must first set up an account with YouTube or any other video hosting service that allows you to embed the videos on external sites.

The CRank or Contributor Rank determines how many news post you can make each day. With a CRank 5 you can post a maximum of 5 stories within a 24 hour time frame. The more news you posts the higher your CRank will get. If you edit your news post according to the N4G Guidelines your Crank will increase faster. On the other hand members who keep ignoring the N4G posting guidelines and just copy and paste text from other websites without doing the proper editing will get their CRank lowered. See the N4G Guidelines and News Posting Tips for more info about proper editing of news posts.

All your actions on N4G will give you Member Points. Here is a list of how many points each action is worth.