Subject: PSA: Please publish your Gdocs and put your penname on them!
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Posted on: 2021-08-04 03:37:05 UTC

Hello! So, the post about Google Drive making some security changes that could affect some links is still on the front page, and I'm also linking it here for convenience. Per the recent emails from Google about this, it doesn't look like it's going to be as bad as we feared, and that's great!

However, I still implore you to publish your docs. Three reasons:

  1. Published docs are so much faster to load than ones that are shared. It's a much smoother user experience. It would make a world of difference to me, personally, when I engage in the occasional stupidly large wiki project that involves opening many, many docs.
  2. Privacy. You can see what username a shared doc belongs to by looking in Shared With Me in Drive. As far as I can tell, it is absolutely impossible to tell who owns a published doc unless you attribute yourself within the doc. (More on this later.)
  3. Turns out shared Gdocs are not archiving well lately. Anytime I try to load something saved in Wayback Machine in the last couple years, I get a pop-up saying "Unable to load file" and asking me to try reloading or sending an error report, which I can't actually do. I wonder if that's because it's trying to load the navigation sidebar, as sometimes shows up on docs I've tried to save via Archive.today even when there's nothing IN said sidebar. For example, compare "Queen of the Mobs" on Wayback Machine and on Archive.today. You can at least read the latter version, but neither of these is a nice, clean save.

Therefore, if you haven't already, please please please publish your docs. Pleeeeease. Please.

You can use Ypsifang's helpful spreadsheet as a guide to exactly which docs are published and which ones aren't. With Thoth's help, I fully populated it with every Google Docs and Google Sheets link from the wiki. Published docs are marked "Okay"; unpublished ones that aren't broken are marked "At risk". (They may not actually be at risk, but I can't be bothered to change it now. >.> )

Please note some stories appear multiple times. This is deliberate, because they have two or more versions of the link in use. I will eventually fix this. I would like to do so by changing all shared links to published ones. {= ) If you could please supply the link to your published doc in one of the Archive link columns on the line of the first iteration, that would be awesome.

Later is now! Whether you're publishing your docs for the first time or whether you've been doing this all along, please name yourself as the author in your docs! As noted above, if you do not do this, there is no other way to determine who a published doc belongs to without referring to some external source, and sometimes even the wiki doesn't help. Plus, I can't tell you how many times I've opened a doc and seen disclaimers that credit everything under the sun only to wrap up with "and Agents X and Y belong to me." Who is "me"? For posterity, please credit yourself by your Board name.

Of course, there's nothing we can do about docs whose owners aren't around anymore, but if you know someone who doesn't regularly visit the Board or Discord but would still be amenable to improving the readability of their docs, please share this thread with them.

Thank you!

~Neshomeh, wearing her Archivist hat.

P.S. A great big thank you to whoever went on a Wayback Machine archiving spree in 2016. You're a hero!

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