Subject: :(
Author:
Posted on: 2014-01-28 09:59:00 UTC
The last time Oddlots was updated seems to have been 2004. The Wayback Machine holds scans dated up to July 2009 (the last one being How to write Middle-earth Romance), so I guess it disappeared around then. Perhaps not coincidentally, that coincides with a six-month-or-so downswing in the number of active Boarders, and the number of posts made.
hS
Due to today's influx of new threads, the Continuity Council thread has been pushed off of the Board main page. In most cases, this wouldn't be a problem, but the script-story that several Boarders had been working on went away with it, and at least one person who had plans for adding to it never got to. So, I'm duplicating the script parts of the thread and moving it to a thread on the Other Board, in case people want to continue contributing to the story but might take a while to do so or don't want to have to go to the next page to check on it.
I copied the posts containing scripts(and the two immediately-preceding posts that led to the scripts) in their entirety, with the original subjects, author names, and text. The only one that was modified in any way was the last one, the new Fearn-related section that I'd intended to post two days ago but actually only got around to doing earlier today, and I still left its script text unchanged.
Have fun, everyone!
Oh, and while we're on the subject of the Other Board, on its main page, the links to the PPC Constitution and the "main PPC content page"(I'm not sure what that means, but it may have been another Board or an early version of the wiki) are currently both dead. They appear to have both linked to a site called Oddlots originally, but now only redirect to one of those "this site was not found, so maybe you mean one of these" browser web searches.
Could someone with sufficient knowledge change where those links go? I know that there's at least one person active who can change the Other Board, because there's a reminder to read the Constitution at the top of every page that wasn't there a few months ago, but I'm not sure who it is, so I can't ask them directly. It might have been Huinesoron, since he was the one who changed the main Board's header a while back, but again, I'm not sure.
And since the story wasn't finished, I wanted people to be able to contribute to it in its original format regardless, as several distinct script sections each followed up on by different people. The GDoc is very good for looking at it as a whole, though, since a reader can just scroll down all the way through the script without needing to click on several different posts. I just don't think it would be the best format to work in while people are still creating the story.
It's a public, published GDoc. I'm probably going to split the script out - it was only one or two sections long when I put it in there - but everyone can read the doc.
Nevertheless, having the pieces all up there while it's still being written is a good idea - and certainly can't hurt!
hS
I could read it, and I'm guessing most other people could as well, but I couldn't change anything on it, which would be required for adding new scripts. Should I be able to?
It makes me sad that people don't know what Oddlots is - was - any more. For years, it was the public face of the PPC (inasmuch as we had one), as well as one of the best LotR-movie-commentary websites around.
Unfortunately, Philosopher at Large apparently no longer wanted it, so she let it slide into obscurity. This is the resurrected version of the 'main PPC content page', with, sadly, a whole bunch of dead and missing links. I think I'll go and fix those now, in memory of what once was. And I'll update the header on the Other Board, too.
hS
Er, assuming I'm correct in, well, assuming, that you're capable of changing the headers and footers and so on of the Board.
We've got a typo at the very bottom, in the quote about Assassins; it should be 'noticeably', rather than 'noticably'.
~DF
... you're the first person to notice or comment on that in twelve years? I'll change it now.
hS
Wow.
I shall hold that as a mark of honor, then.
~DF
That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak
That age had sapped and cankered at the root
Resisting from her topmost bough there broke
The miracle of one unwithering shoot.
Extending the random quoting into a metaphor, yes: since the greatest cataclysm to ever overcome this community, the departure of both our founders, no-one has noted or commented on the error. Before that, I wasn't here, so can't say for sure - but I suspect it's gone unnoticed since Gaius Julius crossed the Rubicon.
hS
Really though, it was just a crack about just how ancient stuff from ten years ago is by internet standards. I wonder how everyone missed it for so long, maybe their brains subconsciously filled in the correct spelling for a decade?
...Anyone else suddenly feel old? :(
Being an eleven-year-old.
Now all y'all can feel old. =oD
I wonder if I saw it however many years ago...when did it stop being the public face of the PPC, as you put it?
~DF
The last time Oddlots was updated seems to have been 2004. The Wayback Machine holds scans dated up to July 2009 (the last one being How to write Middle-earth Romance), so I guess it disappeared around then. Perhaps not coincidentally, that coincides with a six-month-or-so downswing in the number of active Boarders, and the number of posts made.
hS
...as I'm fairly sure I hadn't even heard of the PPC yet. Actually, I don't think I even knew what fanfiction was yet, so...basically, it definitely wasn't in 2004. Odds are I caught it closer to 2006 (anywhere between there and 2009, really)...oddly enough, it may have contributed to my assumption that the PPC was no longer very active? I mean, up until last January, I had no idea there were more than a handful of active PPCers left. So...you never know.
A six-month downswing? Wow. Any theories on what caused that? (Or is it normal, somehow...?)
~DF
This is a plot of every single post still available in PPC Board history (I know, I know), up to December. The white line is monthly counts; the mysteriously straight rows of black points are where I've had to use averages to fill in the gaps.
You can see that we do get periodic 'slumps' - the winters of '09, '10, and '11 all show a dropoff in posts, as in fact does '13. I'm guessing that's mostly 'summer holiday/back to school/Christmas', or simply people not having much free time.
This graph is rather more fun: I looked at when a person's name first and last appears on the Board, and used that to plot the number of Boarders at any one time. Obviously it falls down when someone like Saphie comes back for one post, or when we get a second user named Artemis, but in general, it works.
The blue line is the raw data; the red is tweaked to remove users who post only in one month. A lot of those are typos, but it does eliminate the massive one-point spikes in '08 and '11 - I'm pretty sure those are the Badfic Games.
You can ignore the massive dropoff in the last four points - that's bias from people who posted, say, through to November, then just didn't say anything in December. The sloping down prior to it, since mid-'11, is real, though.
And you can see the downswing I'm talking about. In late '09, around 20 people simply... left. And I think that may well have been due to the front page vanishing. Those are the people who had the FP bookmarked, and never made the transition to the direct link. The pickup at the end, I suspect, is from us appearing on TVTropes.
You can see a similar fall in early '08, but I think that's a data artefact - due to the low number of surviving posts from that time, the data doesn't show the new people until later, and shows people leaving earlier than they actually did.
So yeah... far and away the most active time for the PPC was back in '04-'05. Since then, we've mostly been staying level. And now? Ehm... not sure. The second graph says we've got decreasing numbers of posters; the first says we have an increasing post count. And if you look at the right hand side, the grey scribble at the bottom is the number of IP addresses looking at the Board each day: that's on the increase, too (and has virtually doubled since March '13).
So there we go. Data, data, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.
hS