The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

I found my copy of the video, and was actually able to upload the full-size version now - 48 MB rather than the 8 MB version that was all Youtube could take back in the day. (Theoretically we could go up to 300 MB if I used the original .AVI files, but that's going a bit too far, don't you think?)

hS

Acacia, AW, bjam, Evil Bob, Jay, Nenya, Rosie, Thalia, and Twiggy all exist in the PPCverse under something very close to their own names. Artemis, Gundamkiwi, and P@L are the only ones who don't, though Agent Gunny possibly counts enough for a "Namesake" section.

P@L could probably be addressed by a reference/footnote on her eight or so references, just linking to the Oddlots archive. Artemis I admit I don't know what to do with, but she actually has no unique info on her page - just back-references to BRD and Flaming Denethor.

So yes, we'll be okay.

hS

We're not allowed to have pages about "non-notable living people," i.e. anyone who isn't a public figure. Sadly, that includes Jay, Acacia, Miss Cam, Meir Brin, and several other good and worthy folks who currently have wiki pages celebrating their contributions to our community.

This one makes me angry. Last night, I went through and marked all such pages, and I was near crying at having to lose some of them. Bjam! Leto Haven! NenyaQuende! {= (

There is good news:

• Due to our tendency to have characters named after ourselves, some of these pages can be rewritten to focus on the fictional version of the person. Per hS's suggestion, it might even be acceptable to retain a short section about the character's namesake, so long as the page isn't "about" a real person.
• Others actually have User pages, too, which are allowed and are freely editable, so we can relocate biographical content to existing User pages when possible.
• We always have the option to make new pages about a person's works or events they were involved in.

So here's the plan:

In the categories for Candidates for Deletion and Articles That Need Work, you'll find Boarder pages I've labeled with one template or the other. (You'll also find some other stuff, like a bunch of unused images I haven't gotten around to deleting because I don't like doing it, but let's focus on the task at hand. ^_^; ) The template will include a brief on which of the above actions to take with that page.

If people will kindly volunteer to take one or two, and let me know when you've done what's in the brief, then I can take the final step of deleting anything that needs deleting.

Let me know if you have questions.

We might also consider creating an off-site Who's Who, but it's heckin' dicey to do that sort of thing in a non-freely-editable OR non-protectable space. FANDOM was nice because it allowed both equity for good-faith additions and recourse for bad-faith additions. I don't know how I feel about attempting a new PPC Directory-type thing on, e.g., Gdocs, which is less good at both of those things. Still less an individually operated site like mine or hS's.

Fanlore allows pages about fans, though. That's another option. I dislike it only because it's not "PPC space," and it feels skeevier to me to write about our people outside our own community-centric space. IDK.

~Neshomeh

I am something of a hoarder when it comes to digital stuff, so the only question is whether the video was too large in 2008 to keep on the hard drive. I'll have a look tonight.

I see Fanlore believes you to be Miss Cam. Now that would be a fun conspiracy theory - maybe the earliest PPCers still walk among us under different names! But they chose those names in, like, 2003, and spent a year or so setting up their new identities while keeping their original names in use. And it was all so much effort that they've just kept using those new names for 20 years. :D

hS

Hope you don't mind if I slump with you. Slumping is better with a friend. {= )

I'm sad if the York reading is gone. Did you know it's linked from Fanlore's "legolas by laura" page? o.o (There's actually a bit of PPC-related content on there. Much of which is horribly out of date or plain incorrect, like this page. I don't even. What. But that is a matter for another day.)

The other reading I know about off the top of my head is the "Blood Raining Night" one. I think there were just the two?

Good on Neocities for being reasonable about non-illegal explicit content—and yes, that's the kind of policy I was talking about.

Community Members are indeed the subject of my next post. I like your Namesake suggestion!

~Neshomeh

[Dramatically slams the double doors of the Board back; runs out of energy and just sort of slumps against them]

I'm happy to throw up a hub page for dramatic readings on the Multiverse Monitor Archives - I think it's in scope, and certainly fits better there than on the Lost Tales. I quite like that our two archives have such different focusses; there's a bit of overlap (Suedom could logically be on either), but largely they stand apart. Um... do we have a lot of dramatic readings? Sadly I think the York Gathering "legolas" may have died with my Google account.

The good news is that Neocities' T&Cs specifically do not ban explicit material - instead, they state "You understand that information available to you through Neocities may include materials that are unedited, sexually explicit or offensive to you and that your access to such materials is at your own risk. Neocities and its affiliates hereby disclaim any responsibility for or control over such materials." Which I think is what you wanted Fandom to be doing, tbh. (Obviously illegal, threatening, and harassing material are still banned.)

I see you've also sneakily saddled me with the "legolas" and "C_l_br__n" pages; thanks for that. ^_~ The good news is that the mission to Teh Bad Fic is pretty prudish - possibly too much so, it skips over vast swathes of what makes the fic so legendarily bad, but that's Historical Me for you. And I should have a link to the badfic at the foot of the mission, so it will be findable if anyone is feeling masochistic. I'll try and take a look tomorrow and see what I can do.

hS

PS: I know you're going to get around to Community Members, but just throwing this in there: a lot of our founders have a namesake agent or other character. Jay, Acacia, Miss Cam, the Great Goddess GreyLadyBast, Thalia Weaver (DCPS), etc etc. The Fandom T&Cs talk about full pages on real people; a section titled "Namesake" on self-named inserts might be acceptable? Link to a userpage if they have one, or give a one-paragraph summary of who they were otherwise. "Miss Cam was the creator of [[OFUM]], and one of the three [[Permission Giver]]s designated by [[Jay#Namesake|Jay]] to carry on the PPC."

Here's the problem: FANDOM's Terms of Use state that a user may not:

Post, link or transmit any written, visual, or symbolic content that is obscene, pornographic, abusive, offensive, profane

Emphasis added. Strictly speaking, we're not even allowed to have links to anything of an NC-17 nature. {= /

This is obviously bullshit, but it's bullshit that could get pages deleted by staff if anyone really gets in a snit about it, like they have with "Celebrian" and "Rose Potter." Especially if it involves a character who is technically underage or, gasp, a scary, scary sex act like anal penetration. (One could make the case that objecting to the mention of anal and kinks in general is discriminatory as hell, but I don't think that's a fight we can win with a US-based company.) Since that describes most if not all the Legendaries, we had better take matters into our own hands before FANDOM get the chance.

I propose:

1. For Legendaries that have missions, revise the page to be about the mission. (We were already taking steps to replace Sue pages with mission pages; this is an extension of the same idea.)
2. For Legendaries that don't have missions, delete the page.
3. For the Legendary Badfic page, revise to include BRIEF descriptions of the fics, being as coy as if you were speaking with a particularly delicate six-year-old in the room.
4. Where there are links that shouldn't link to a mission page, link to another, non-FANDOM resource, ideally Fanlore. If content is missing from Fanlore, consider adding it if it's important to you.
5. For dramatic readings by PPC members, maybe hS has a place to link them from his site, if he's willing?

I hope that any authors of missions to Legendaries who are still around will step up to rewrite the pages they're connected to. For instance, I'll handle "Blood Raining Night" and "Subjugation."

For the rest, I hope other community members will volunteer to take a page or two. (For Sue pages, too, while we're at it!)

While it sucks to lose content and be restricted from discussing a traditional aspect of our community culture on FANDOM, and we're within our rights to be angry about it on principle, we should bear in mind that Legendary Badfic is far from the most important part of the wiki or of our community. Our own and each other's characters and stories should always be our main focus.

~Neshomeh

The Trio get a major break in the case.

we should still create a mirror/backup wiki anyway, just in case.

It's because each chapter of the fic is ludicrously short, and there's no point in waiting until the next chapter. They haven't done much because they aren't given any time to do much. The next chapter is also set in the DC Comics fandom, which I'm not in. The actual genleman training would begin next episode, when they find a "proper" badfic.

That includes revisions, but does not include images. Images will need to be backed up separately. Joy.

~Neshomeh

That is, the staff probably need to come up with some kind of policy to shut down potential People We Don't Like Wikis ("you definitely shouldn't harass them *wink*"). It's reasonable to try to have a policy against that sort of thing given the state of the internet.

And then, due to a combination of limited staff resources (meaning not wanting to get drawn into arguments about how our page about $random_person is fine, really) and concern about scandal/advertisers/..., they probably went and tossed down a broad policy that stuff like the Jay and Acacia pages clipped the edges of.

Like, as seen in this here thread, it's obviously not quite a good solution to the problem they might've been trying to address, but I can at least understand it.

• Tomash

Heh! I love Urato's plan, and especially the ominous looming scene that initiates it! I can't wait to see Inasuke's attempts at training him. Kind of thought we would see some training during this mission, but the charging scene came so abruptly. I know the grammar was poor, but Alice and her sister really hadn't done much of anything yet; I feel like there should have been a bit more this time. Well, I'm still looking forward to Urato's new hobby in the stories to come!

—doctorlit puts no value on private clubs, himself

Nice to see you've decided to drop by the Board!

Feel free to introduce yourself in a new thread so you can get the traditional PPC welcome wagon free from distractions. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Traditionally, we hand out newbie gifts, so here--have a purple duckling. It is very adorable.

-Ls

Yep, I was fighting that troll, found this place, and here I am.

I mean, the difference is that a User page is created by the user (and impersonation is not allowed, so no to dummy pages). A person can't dox themself, so FANDOM can't be held accountable. At least, I suspect the threat of legal liability for user content/behavior is what has them scared.

Which is unfortunate, because web hosts have been legally (in the US) off the hook for most content and activity by users for ages, but since the open Internet is currently under threat in the US... here I stop myself from digressing into a political rant. >.>

It could also be about not wanting to offend the delicate sensibilities of advertisers; I hear that's the excuse on YouTube. In which case [further political/economic opinions withheld].

AHEM.

I actually wanted to say: I invite editors to be as sarcastically twee as they can stand while editing pages that mention sex. I'm fantasizing about an entire cypher with code phrases like, idk, "sharing a vase," "petting the rooster," "drinking a milkshake," any other silly thing. {= P

Or, of course, we can always say "things we can't talk about on FANDOM." But that's less fun.

~Neshomeh

everyone and their grandma supports Net Neutrality why is this even still a debate aaaaaarrghhh

Because trolls can't possibly find and edit a user page, but will inevitably hack any actual pages.

If they're so concerned about this, why allow publicly editable user pages?

sigh

Anyway, I'd be happy to help with said sensible edits. I suspect some of the other Legendary pages might be in violation.

-Ls

But the "Rose Potter" complaint gets me really hacked off. When it gets to the point of not being allowed to state that a thing was written about in a fictional story, that's pure crap.

And seriously, being prevented from documenting our own historical figures? Because they're afraid it will be "tempting" for trolls on the Internet? I see where they're coming from, I do, but considering we credit our creators for their creations on many pages anyway, and it would be wrong not to, I don't quite see the use. Any troll with a grudge knows how to use a Search bar.

SIGH.

Anyway. I'm gonna come up with a plan for what we need to do next. Create backups, plan rewrites, consider where to potentially rehome some content, etc. In the meantime, if anyone else wants to jump in and start making sensible edits to existing pages that might give FANDOM the vapors, please do.

~Neshomeh

Miraheze Content Policy

With them, NSFW warnings actually count for something! Nice.

For the record, I'm not necessarily proposing we actually jump ship from FANDOM right stat now, since there ARE ways to work around their policies while keeping most of our existing content there, but I AM going to find out if I can create a backup that might be ported elsewhere, just in case they become unbearably draconian.

~Neshomeh

Like wikidot, etc... there are many different wiki providers. Miraheze looks the most promising because it's free, noncommercial, and runs MediaWiki, just like fandom, to minimize transition pain.

Of course we can also self-host but I don't think that's practically viable right now for cost and especially time reasons.

Sites like Miraheze or BookStack.

I have to say, the "No-non-notable-individuals" is stupid. So, so, stupid. We can't even have pages on Jay, Acacia, Thalia Weaver or Miss Cam?!?!? That's... beyond stupid. I guess we could get around this by making dummy userpages.. but seriously. Not only that, but "No YouTubers"? Well, there goes half of Wikitubia! And might there be some pages on the My Immortal Wiki that could be deleted under this (lack of) thinking?

Actually, who determines notability here? FANDOM?

I don't know what to say about the Celebrian and Rose Potter pages. Just... aaagh!

I guess that's good about the Spidey3000 and Paolini pages.

-Ls, positively enraged