Thanks!

To ask multiple, tenuously related questions... by Aurora Morningstar on 2019-10-24 11:17:03 UTC Reply

Four things:

First, to begin on a light note, can the Board still generate minis (and NM&NMs, I suppose)? The new editing option allows mistakes to be corrected, but the original post is still there, so you could argue that it still counts.

Second, would it be possible for me to get a text copy of the post metadata for the archives (in order for me to extract detailed statistics about posting patterns, and so on)? What I mean is subject line, author name, timestamp, post id, and id of the post being replied to, in text form, for the entire archives, with or without the contents of the posts. Is this possible?

Third, in the process of digging through the archives, I found an interesting idea which seems to have fizzled out. In this subthread from 2014, Huinesoron proposed an alteration to the Permission system which seems to have been received positively. Would it be possible to implement that? I didn't really see much negative reaction to the idea, and it seems like it would encourage more first-mission writing and betaing.

Fourth, it seems like we're getting a lot of returnbies; as many as four in the last week, depending on definition. There are a lot of contact details for Boarders who have drifted away lying around, and some Boarders surely have more; would it be a good idea to send everyone we can reach one email about the impending closure of the YourWebApps Board, so they can say a few words?

(I was going to put some informative trivia after this, but I decided that would probably be best done separately.)

Some equally tenuous answers. by Huinesoron on 2019-10-24 11:43:23 UTC Edited Serious business Reply

1/ Of course it can! Ye can take our Board, but ye can never take our minis!

2/ Hello! The original Archives are in spreadsheet format, with all that information in easily copyable columns. (There's also archives from before Tomash's archives begin, mostly of subject lines.)

3/ The response was favourable mostly among people who are no longer around, many of whom never sought Permission (I have a spreadsheet for that too!). Neshomeh and PoorCynic, the other two serving PGs in the thread (PC wasn't at the time but became one; Kaitlyn is a PG but has never acted in that capacity) expressed serious reservations.

And... well, if you spent a month writing a mission, brought it to the Board, and then PG!hS said 'this demonstrates that you have no understanding of the PPC, throw it out and start from scratch', would you actually do that?

Also! The reason for the current fairly rigid Permission system is that people kept bouncing in and saying 'my writing sample is a poem!' 'my writing sample is this dark snufffic!' &c &c. We needed to give people some guidance on what to write, so we said 'write something PPC'.

And then every single person wrote My Agent Being Recruited, which was so spectacularly repetitive. So the prompt system was invented to give them some actually interesting ideas.

This probably isn't relevant, but it was very frustrating. :) I think the point I was angling for is that we're not actually super rigid; if someone pops up with a non-prompt example of their writing that encapsulates the PPC perfectly, I suspect it would be accepted.

EDIT: Though all of this relies on people actually requesting permission to write for the PPC... I think the last one we had was in July? It's not exactly a flourishing business.

4/ Unfortunately a lot of people have left for specific reasons, rather than drifting away. Social media posts about it are fine (I've done Facebook and LJ myself), and people telling their friends is fine, but mass emailing is probably a bad idea.

hS

Seeking some less tenuous clarifications... by Aurora Morningstar on 2019-10-24 12:43:27 UTC Reply

Thanks for the prompt and clear response. I think there's nothing more to say about questions 1 and 4, really.

Regarding question 2, is there a list of archive-id to post-id conversions (or old-board-id to either of those, which is helpful for links)? I agree, Excel techno-wizardry would probably suffice for everything else, though. Also, is there a way to get the archives newer than August 2018, or have they not been created?

Regarding question 3, this is less a further question than a comment; good point, no-one's asked in three months, but this is a bit unusual; the average gap seems to have been closer to one month recently.

Tenuously extenuating. (paging Tomash) by Huinesoron on 2019-10-24 13:25:56 UTC Edited Reply

2/ I think the answer to both of these is 'HI, TOMASH! ^_^'. He's offered me an Old Board to New Board translation table, and can presumably do similarly for the archives. He's also the source of the spreadsheets; I haven't yet had the last year's worth, but I would certainly like it! (I haven't had it because I haven't asked, to be fair.)

3/ I feel like it's a lot less common than 1/month. We had less than that in both 2016 and 2017, and we haven't really had an uptick since then. But I may be wrong; I haven't been attending too closely. EDIT: We had five in June and July, and two this year prior to that. Nine across 2018.

(I think I'll go update the spreadsheet, actually... fun stuff.)

hS

HI, HUINESORON! (aka, I've been paged) by Tomash on 2019-10-26 06:24:17 UTC Reply

Here's two CSV files, both compressed with bzip2.

big-link-map.csv.bz2 has the old Board (and old RP Board, and T-Board) translations from mid-2015 on, sorted by post ID.

posts-2019-10-24.csv.bz2 has all the posts (including subject, author, body, timestamp, and ancestry), through a few days ago.

Thanks! by Aurora Morningstar on 2019-10-27 09:20:28 UTC Reply

There are some minor annoying differences between the year-by-year archives (using Google Drive's .csv export) and the combined file, but it only took a couple of hours to work around, and it means I can finally put the last couple of years into my graphs.

I did notice something interesting; Huinesoron's permission spreadsheet contains post ids, and using them I can reconstruct a translation table (approximate, due to errors) back to October 2012, with the exception of periods of spamming or where posts have been otherwise deleted en masse, and possible further extensions depending on the amount of in-post links. Would you like me to send the table to you once I've finished?