The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

In which the search for antidote ingredients begins, and strange vocabulary choices lead to a race track appearing out of nowhere.

Thanks again, Neshomeh, happy to help condense down some of what we've discussed elsewhere.

While it's true that WikiTide as a service is a relatively new entry compared to the other players, we are by no means new to the wiki space. Our volunteer team and board of directors has had presence on and volunteered for several farms beyond just Fandom and Miraheze, including pre-acqusition Gamepedia, the Miraheze predecessor Orain, and its predecessor TropicalWikis. We've seen farms grow and fall for several reasons - disinterest, lack of resources, technical issues, interpersonal conflict or worse: morph into hyper-capitalist entities we had no interest in continuing to associate with.

Given that wealth of prior lived experience, we took a long look at where things went wrong with each and decided that rather than reacting to a sudden downfall, we had an opportunity to build something with a solid foundation from the start. Our key learnings:

• 100% reliance on goodwill donations and accepting every single wiki request is a surefire way to overshoot our resources in terms of both people and funds
• We are uninterested and unwilling to sacrifice user privacy through ad sales or other forms of user data exploitation, but running donation drives every half-year/quarter/month is demoralizing to volunteers and damages user confidence
• There is an underserved market for paid wiki hosting that exists somewhere between the free and professional/enterprise space, and we have the right mix of technical and professional experience to serve it sustainably without compromising our personal ethics

It's from there that we developed the working model we've implemented today, with great success. Instead of the perpetual fundraisers of past platforms, we have in WikiTide an advertisement-free, free-to-use hosting service that grows in a deliberate and manageable way that keeps pace with our budget. Between community contributions, donations of excess profits from our companion paid service (WikiForge) should it become necessary, and our pursuit of not-for-profit status for WikiTide, we are fully confident (and have been proved correct thus far) that our approach to financing WikiTide will allow a resilience to grow with our community and keep any tendrils of capitalist overreach far, far away from our core service.

We are smaller, by design. By being more selective with the scale and scope of hosted wikis, we can ensure that we devote our time, funds and attention more equitably and provide a higher level of experience to those who choose to host with WikiTide. No member of the WikiTide volunteer team is paid to be there (even members of the board of directors), we're simply folks that believe quality wiki-hosting is a public good and should be maintained as such. It's our intent to be transparent as possible, so please feel free to ask any additional questions you may have.

--NotAracham

And I'm sorry to hear about the content losses incurred due to Fandom's continual purges in pursuit of perfect SEO. At this time we haven't fully removed our topic-ban on fandom/fanfiction content, but have given opportunity for existing communities and creators to pursue an exception review. Based on the substantial existing set of content you mention, I think you may have a reasonable case to be made for an exception -- more details about the exception process can be found here

To expand a little on why a topic ban even exists at WikiTide:

• At launch of service we were trying to preserve resources as much as possible, fanon/fanfic wikis can be potentially very resource-intensive esp when there's lots of fan art involved
• fanon/fanfic wikis can also be a frequent source of copyright/licensing complaints, which requires us to act as arbiters for resolution
• fanon/fanfic wikis can be high targets for vandalism, which a strong moderation team can help mitigate but abandoned/unmoderated wikis become a huge time-sink for our volunteers
• fanon/fanfic wikis can be a wellspring of toxic community behavior, but setting and enforcing strong community standards can mitigate this too

Given that we're a volunteer-run organization without the resources (in terms of both people and money) that a Fandom might have, it was decided that we'd need to be more restrictive on certain types of communities that could cause excessive volunteer workload or costs for us based on prior experience, hence the exception review process on those we identified in the first round.

Thanks again for your consideration. Part of our intention with being a smaller wiki farm with more intentional growth vs 'growth at all costs' was to afford us the opportunity to have a more direct and personal approach w/ the onboarding of new communities, as opposed to just letting folks thrive or fail on their own. We feel it's a better approach for building an engaged global community on our platform in the long-term and hope to continue it going forward. :)

Will try to consolidate what we discussed above, thanks for creating a new post towards the top for it.

Hello! Here's your Discord invite link, available for about six hours as of posting this: https://discord.gg/hA7qncv

welcome to the PPC!

as a welcome gift, have a rubber duck that changes to whatever your fit you want it to on a whim!!

(also i’m in high school too!!)

Thank you for the coin! I'll be careful with it. To answer your question, no I don't think my friend was a PPCer, they were just a fan. I'd really appreciate if you could get me a link to the discord! Thanks again :D

Nice to meet, you, I'm Linstar! I don't know if you know, but we have an invitation-only Discord chat. I can ask the mods to give you a link. (I'm linstarguy on such.)

I've only played DnD a few times, but I definitely think that's cool! As a present, I hereby bestow upon you a coin that is unaffected by gravity. Make sre not to let it go!

If you're looking for recommendations, I'd suggest reading Iximaz's missions--and there are plenty to choose from. By the by, was said friend a PPCer?

-Ls

Hello,

I'm Twist and I found the PPC through a friend who recommended the Original Series. I really enjoyed it and went looking for more works like it which led to me finding the PPC wiki. I'm in high school and I'm a guy who uses he/they pronouns. I'm still getting used to everything and I'm trying to make sure I read everything I'm supposed to and what will help me. I generally enjoy reading and I am looking for something new to read. I also really like knitting and playing Dungeons and Dragons. I know Spanish and English is my second language. I'm excited to read some more works people make and if anyone needs a beta reader, I'm willing to do that almost anytime. You can reach me as twostedmarshmallow on Discord.

NotAracham is a representative of WikiTide who has graciously offered to answer any questions we have about the wiki farm here on the Board. Their intro post is here, but I wanted to start a new branch of this thread for them where it's more visible.

First, I've asked them to share some of the same information that's already been explained to me and Linstar via Discord. I found it most encouraging!

~Neshomeh

I must admit it feels strange to have someone from a Board of Directors take such an interest in little old us, haha. It's very kind of you to give us your time!

I think it would be great if you shared what you and Agent (a name which has amused me from the first, by the way!) explained to us in the Discord about WikiTide's founding ethos and financial strategy. Since this branch of the thread is getting a bit leggy, though, I'll make a new reply to the original post where it and your response will be more visible, and invite others to ask their own questions there, too.

By the way, in PPC Posting Board tradition, please accept this virtual bumper sticker as a welcome present. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Okay. Okay. I felt so very slapped in the face for a moment there, because when “Jacques” first pulled his wand on Harry, I thought Crouch Jr. had been Jacques for the entire year, and I really and truly couldn’t force my brain to accept that. It felt so wrong, not only because I was so sure Junior had been in Senior nope that phrasing is no longer okay impersonating Senior, but also because Jacques has just been so much fun all year, and also I hated the idea of one of our PPC boys being locked in a trunk all year . . . but now I just feel so dumb! Because of course Junior switched identities throughout the year. That’s actually easier than the original Junior remaining Moody all year! But yeah, thanks for that early morning crash into my senses, there!

I love Harry’s observation that the Knights view Gaunt as “some sort of Chosen One,” since it’s a turnabout from canon, where Harry is “chosen” rather literally as the “solution” to Trelawny’s prophecy. (Which I rather forgot about; did that prophecy just not occur in this timeline?) And it’s a lovely demonstration of why Chosen One plots can get kind of toxic, and assigning people a status of “most special child” can lead them to stop questioning their actions and goals in a healthy way, to say nothing of the possibility of collecting worshipful followers . . . oh, hello, parallels between Gaunt and Trump. it’s been a while!

For being such a dark chapter, I was filled with wonderful feelings when Dumbledore stood up to Fudge and put him in his place. What an absolute and fully justified power move! Fudge having the audacity to think of himself as “the very last defence you’ve got against tyranny” is so pathetic and cringey, I can’t imagine having that level of self-confidence. “Everyone in this community got a magic wand, but it’s me, the Wizarding World equivalent of a one-term U.S. president, the walking embodiment of middle management getting promoted beyond their competence level, the very goodest of boys with a title in front of my name, I’m the only hope this country has!” CRINGE. Still, going to be a hellish election next year, with potentially disastrous results. And the one in Heirs of Avalon could be bad, too! (Oh, hello, parallels!)

—doctorlit is even more concerned about Neville’s continued absence, considering Junior clearly had the Longbottoms on his mind before kidnapping Harry

I don't have any particular question right now (I'm one of those already sold on the moving), but there is a sort-of-related question I'd like to make, if you don't mind.

Basically, one of the reasons I am so adamant on moving the PPC Wiki to a different space is because I had a fairly bad experience with Fandom some time ago. I have written quite a bit of things over the years, with my PPC works being only a fraction of it, so I had at one point attempted to make a wiki to better organize the "lore" as I realized it was difficult for people to "get in" in my works - to the point even my current collaborators are struggling.

Fandom erased said wiki when it was still early in the making, without warning and without notice, so I'd like to know if a wiki about my works in particular (currently clocking 500k+ words, and the closest cathegrization it can have is "massive multiverse crossover fanfiction"... I mean, some of it is a PPC spinoff) is allowed on WikiTide? While it is unlikely to see much traffic from readers, it would surely be a big help for my current cowriters.

You can scrap this idea if it seems like too much work 😅

...it seems to go into some detail on other wikis.

Hi all, this is NotAracham, member of the joint WikiForge/WikiTide board of directors. Thank you to Neshomeh and Linstar to reaching out to us regarding a potential move, It's been very cool to learn more about the PPC + its history and operation over the past few days.

Changing hosts is a big decision, we're glad for the consideration but don't want to start things off w/ folks feeling like they were forced into a choice with incomplete information.

As such, I wanted to make myself available for any questions y'all might have about the WikiTide service to aid in reaching a decision in either direction. Feel free to ask away, I'll be happy to answer what I can.

If that would help with the discussion.

-Ls

You never know how many people might be unwilling to say something because they haven't seen anyone else say it yet.

~Neshomeh

His is probably more comprehensive than the one I got from FANDOM, but mine at least includes all text-based pages (which I believe includes namespaces like User, Talk, and Template) and their edit histories. If the whole thing got nuked today, we could recreate the majority of the content as it was as of the most recent backup.

I can certainly commit to updating my backup once a month, at least; I don't reckon there's usually enough major activity to warrant more frequently than that, but correct me if I'm wrong!

~Neshomeh