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Chaos

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Hi all,

We are codifying a rule regarding posting information from signings and events. We would like information from a particular signing or event into the relevant event topic. The reason for this is simple: it can be difficult for people researching sources and putting things into the interview database to find quotes if we distribute these across many topics. So if you are interested in posting info, please post it in the event topic.

I know I personally have been guilty in the past of posting a cool quote I got in Cosmere Theories or something and not in the relevant event topic, so I understand that this has happened. But from now on let's post all info and all WoBs in the event topic corresponding to the event you got this info from.

Should you want to make a post discussing a cool factoid in the main book discussion boards, feel free to post them there after you post the info in the event topic.

If you see anyone posting facts in separate topics and not in the event topic, please press the Report button so we can move some stuff around! 

For each book tour we'll have a pinned topic pointing to each signing topic. Hopefully that helps.

Let me know if you have questions or concerns.

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  • Chaos pinned this topic

I think you need to be careful with how you enforce something like this. Information is very valuable to many people on this forum, but forcefully asking people to share their findings in what is kind of arbitrarily chosen place leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I personally would love if new information was organized as you suggest. But I also don't necessarily agree that enforcing this is healthy for the... less zealous members of the community (who, coincidentally, are less likely to respond to this thread because they are more prone to lurking).

So, in summary, I myself like the idea, but I also think you need to be careful about how you handle violations.

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I agree with Argent.  When I get a new fact from Brandon at a signing, I feel it is my personal special connection gift thing (hard to explain but you know what I mean).  Now I always want to share these, but not always right away or in a certain way, and it really feels like trying to control how those are shared infringes on what's a very personal author/reader connection.  (I could see some people simply not sharing at all under these conditions).

(I also agree with Argent in that I would love it if everyone DID share everything, because that's the main reason I check the threads for events that have happened.) But I think we have to respect their choice to release it another way if desired.

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I'm all on board with the proposed enforcing of this. Long time coming. In my head, the first reporting of WOBs should be in the Events thread. Obviously then people can quote them anywhere they want, but as a semi-lurker, it's very frustrating to know that there are WOBs dropped into separate forums that I don't check every day. I'd almost suggest just going ahead and setting up posts for every Brandon date and then letting posters add their reports to those pre-setup threads.

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2 hours ago, Argent said:

...forcefully asking people to share their findings in what is kind of arbitrarily chosen place...

 

1 hour ago, CosmereQuestioner said:

Now I always want to share these, but not always right away or in a certain way, and it really feels like trying to control how those are shared infringes on what's a very personal author/reader connection.  (I could see some people simply not sharing at all under these conditions).

Maybe I'm missing something, but the policy isn't telling people what they can't do, (individual topics on WoBs are still allowed, and there's nothing enforcing that you have to immediately share anything you get during signings), only that if you're going to share it, make sure it makes it into the signing thread as well so it gets documented. There is a ton of tribal knowledge on this board when it comes to WoB's (and incorrect tribal knowledge, too, which is even more dangerous), so taking a simple step to catalogue direct information like this is a big step to ensuring accurate information is readily available. I can't envision a situation where someone would want to publicize a WoB or a book signing they received, but not want it available in Theoryland, which is the end goal of the policy. (Side question, is the plan to use Theoryland as a repository indefinitely? Or is this a first step towards a WoB database of our own?)

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11 minutes ago, Pagerunner said:

 

Maybe I'm missing something, but the policy isn't telling people what they can't do

Isn't that exactly what it said?  That we CAN'T post new WoB in other topics unless we post it in the event first?

 

13 hours ago, Chaos said:

I know I personally have been guilty in the past of posting a cool quote I got in Cosmere Theories or something and not in the relevant event topic...

Now again, I LIKE it to be in the event column, but telling people they HAVE to put it there first, and this will be "strictly enforced" really rubs me the wrong way.  Just my feeling.

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15 minutes ago, CosmereQuestioner said:

Isn't that exactly what it said?  That we CAN'T post new WoB in other topics unless we post it in the event first?

 

Now again, I LIKE it to be in the event column, but telling people they HAVE to put it there first, and this will be "strictly enforced" really rubs me the wrong way.  Just my feeling.

That's semantics; they can't not post in the event signing. The rule isn't prohibiting an activity, it's proscribing an action. If you're going to post a [WoB] topic based on something you got at a signing (example), you need to mention it in the signing thread as well (same example).

I agree, though, that a clarification on 'strictly enforced' would be useful. The only method of punishment available on the forum is banning, correct? And I can't imagine anyone would get banned for posting too many WoBs in the wrong places. (First world WoBlems!) Would the enforcement be, if you don't put it in the thread in a day, Chaos is going to do it for you and take all the sweet, sweet upvotes from the signing thread?

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Maybe I need to edit this, because I didn't exactly intend this to be a "YOU MUST POST INFORMATION." I was more going for, "If you are sharing information, share here in the event topic first." I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. I should probably edit to try and remove that connotation. 

Obviously this is just here to help organize the chaos of lots of information rolling around. That's all.

This isn't going to be a bannable offense, I'll just be slightly annoyed and PM them asking them to follow the rules. Not really a big deal! :) 

I really don't imagine anyone will deliberately flaunt the rules after such a PM. I suppose if someone like does it a ton of times, maybe I'd actually do some restrictions, but it's like the don't double post rule: you shouldn't do it, but we'll gently prod you about it rather than anything serious if it's an occasional thing. 

Though me taking the upvotes is a good idea, so I'll do that ;) 

EDIT: I've edited some wording on the main post. Is this more acceptable? If not let me know, I'd like to get it right. 

Edited by Chaos
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I like the idea, to be honest I thought it was already a rule of the forum. it would really made the "find a Wob" simplier.

Example: There is a doubt, who periodically arise in the topics, we have a WoB who resolve the doubt (and we have it from an year at least) but it's not on theoryland. Therefore everytime I have to check on Reddit (or quote my past self) to find it.

Anyway I have a doubt, in the case of WoB not from events (book's personalization, Reddit post, Twitter's reply, ecc.....), where is the "rightful first place to post it" ?

Edited by Yata
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5 hours ago, Chaos said:

Maybe I need to edit this, because I didn't exactly intend this to be a "YOU MUST POST INFORMATION." I was more going for, "If you are sharing information, share here in the event topic first." I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. I should probably edit to try and remove that connotation. 

I know, and it's still what I was targeting. I guess it was the part about enforcing this that sounded off to me. The edited version looks better.

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5 hours ago, Yata said:

I like the idea, to be honest I thought it was already a rule of the forum. it would really made the "find a Wob" simplier.

Example: There is a doubt, who periodically arise in the topics, we have a WoB who resolve the doubt (and we have it from an year at least) but it's not on theoryland. Therefore everytime I have to check on Reddit (or quote my past self) to find it.

Anyway I have a doubt, in the case of WoB not from events (book's personalization, Reddit post, Twitter's reply, ecc.....), where is the "rightful first place to post it" ?

Good question. That does seem to be the cases of non event stuff. Ideas? I'm not sure how we should handle those.

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4 minutes ago, Chaos said:

Good question. That does seem to be the cases of non event stuff. Ideas? I'm not sure how we should handle those.

I don't see a good enough reason to standardize individual WoBs. Not unless you - or someone else - can come up with a way for people to submit WoBs in a universal way, independent of the forum structure itself (e.g. a webapp or a tool of some sort).

I think this way of getting information out of Brandon - the asking of questions either in person, online, or in books - will remain dominant in the future, so the earlier somebody comes up with a good system to organize (or at least store) this, the better. Theoryland is great, but it's always been a bit of a hack.

My reply is starting to encroach on a different topic altogether though, so maybe that's something we can discuss another time.

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@Chaos at the moment the only easy answer is to create a topic (I think a subsection is too much) where everyone with a WoB may post it there and maybe suggest the relevant Tags.

It would be good also as a method to recover old WoB (as the one I talked in the previous post) that for some strange reasons never reached Theoryland.

Maybe when a member of the Staff place those WoB on Theoryland, he/she may edit the post with the right link to theoryland and some sentence (like "Edit: Wob added to theoryland at link:-------")

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5 minutes ago, Chaos said:

Good question. That does seem to be the cases of non event stuff. Ideas? I'm not sure how we should handle those.

A pinned Book Personalization thread would make sense. I'm not sure we need to aggregate info from Reddit or Twitter, since those platforms already have the means to do so.

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1 hour ago, Pagerunner said:

A pinned Book Personalization thread would make sense. I'm not sure we need to aggregate info from Reddit or Twitter, since those platforms already have the means to do so.

Well for example, there are WoB from the AMA of the last year on Reddit that escaped the catalogation on Theoryland.

The problem is actually to skip the passage where the Staff have to manually search the WoB among many topics or platforms

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27 minutes ago, Yata said:

Well for example, there are WoB from the AMA of the last year on Reddit that escaped the catalogation on Theoryland.

The problem is actually to skip the passage where the Staff have to manually search the WoB among many topics or platforms

Many topics on the board, sure, I'll give you that. But if Reddit quotes don't make it into Theoryland in a timely manner, I doubt it's because they're hard to find using Reddit; I don't have an account on there, and have only been on there to follow Brandon, and I have no problem keeping up-to-date on his replies to his update posts and such. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I check Brandon's Reddit and Twitter accounts on a daily basis (they're in my routine with news sites and webcomics). To get that information into the Signings forum in a manner useable for searches (i.e. full text copied over, not just links to the post) so that it can get put into Theoryland by only referencing the Signings forum... it would be a work-intensive system, with a lot of potential for gaps. Better to ensure that those who are updating Theoryland are able to use the existing platforms, and simply aggregate directly to Theoryland.

That's predicated, however, on us continuing to use Theoryland as our main WoB database. I agree with I think Argent is saying, that there's the potential for a new system that could better suit our needs. I don't have any problem pulling information from Theoryland, but since it's on another website there are extra steps to populating it in the first place, and I think having something in-house could give us something more up-to-date. Even the current Events and Signings subforum has some areas of improvement; I'll search for a term, and have to wade through several pages of suggested signing questions and follow-up discussion before I find the actual quote.

Is there potential to use the Coppermind?  (It would certainly be thematically appropriate.) Wiki software accommodates sources and direct-linking to subheaders, which are two things that Theoryland currently does well. As long as there's sufficient oversight, opening it up to users would allow for anyone to submit new quotes. Searching would be a little trickier, but I've seen some other wikis create additional spaces (like a Help space or even a Forum space) that can be limited in the Advanced Search options, so there are definitely some potentials.

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I'm not sure what we want to do with the signed books. I think we can manage to figure out where they are, moreso than the random WoBs of the "so at this signing he said this" type thing, so they are not as significant of an issue. 

I want to comment on the database though. We are only having this policy here with the idea that this will be a useful structure to input things into a database easily. We are not intending to use the Events forum as a Theoryland replacement.

I will say that we are sorry for not having Theoryland's database up to date. It has been difficult to stay on top of the many things that occur. Additionally, though we don't have anything to announce at the current time, much effort has been expended (with Weiry and Joe and others doing a lot of things) in exploring avenues for replacements of this database. We've done a lot of trial and error. One implementation is looking very promising. Someday we will likely have something to announce, and we hope you'll be thrilled about it, but for now there just isn’t anything to say.

In the meantime this does make looking for quotes pretty bad during this interim period. For that, we are really sorry. Hopefully with having quotes from signings being relatively in the same spot this will be somewhat better. But the situation for doing considerable cosmere research and quote finding is quite dire, and we're sorry about that.

So we're working on a permanent solution for collecting quotes, we promise. It is very much on our minds.

The idea of having stuff from a given event in its respective event topic is to make sure people don’t have to look in multiple places to find everything, which should make cataloguing and research far simpler.

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Hey everyone, I do want to chime in on this as I did work with Chaos on formulating this policy. In my mind this really wasn’t changing anything, it was just a formalization of what I have already been doing. The only difference is encouraging people to report it when this sort of thing happens. And even then it’s not like people are actually going to be getting in trouble per se. The reporting is mostly so we know who to nag about posting their stuff in the event threads. (Though I guess that could be considered a punishment by some, I am a younger brother so I’ve perfected the art of being incessantly annoying. :D )

 

I do understand what you are saying about the it being up to the individual to decide to share information from what was a personal interaction. I get that. But at the same time my priorities are ease of use and ease of access to that information. If it’s not where people go to find that information then there is a chance it will be missed. Both in the circumstances of the average user trying to keep abreast of new WoBs and the indexer trying to catalogue everything. I’ve tried to be good about keeping track of random event reports, and I do always post encouraging them to post it in the event thread, but I’m sure there are things I’ve missed because I can’t read everything. And now those reports might be lost precisely because we don’t know they exist.

 

On the topic of non-event WoBs like reddit and twitter, I don’t think we need to worry too much about keeping track of for now. Those sites do keep track of his posts/tweets and it would really just be a matter of time to go through and find the ones we want to add to any database. Book personalizations are a bit trickier, right now having a stickied thread to post them in seems like the best option but I’m open to other ideas.

 

I do want to say that I have nothing against people starting new threads to share/talk about a new WoB and I probably won’t complain if it isn’t posted in the event thread first, as long as that information is posted in said thread in a timely manner. Even if that post is just a short “Hey I asked abc and Brandon answered with xyz, here is a link to a thread where I talk more about it.”

On the matter of a new database, as Chaos says, we are exploring options. I have no idea how long that process will take, so please don’t expect to have this resolved any time soon. This is part of the reason why I’m so insistent on this policy. Until we have a better system in place to keep track of WoBs, we need a way to make sure this stuff is easily findable, both for the interim and for eventual indexing.

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