Chaos

Ya'll need to chill. EDIT: That is certainly odd, so I understand the reaction.

I don't know what to tell you. I have no idea when you changed it. If it happened to be very close to when you changed it, that is certainly strange. It is a coincidence. Indeed, I absolutely don't come on every day. Spooky? Sure, I can see that, but I would appreciate if you believe the words I say? I have literally no reason to lie... there was no report or anything... That would be completely insufferable if I got pinged for every name change.

Is that common? Maybe this is why we get so many people who literally never read the forum descriptions. But yeah, I loaded the forums and saw it pretty much first thing. This is not a mystery

...I saw it on the forum home, just like any most recent poster would appear?

Hi

Yes: That's five lines. You have space for that first paragraph, everything after is too long. I'd leave it for your About Me page or compactify.

Hi, the 17S Discussion board is for site related discussion, not book discussion. You're looking for the Cosmere Discussion board, which I've moved this to.

Hi and welcome. AI generated content is not permitted in the site, including profile pics: Apologies and thank you.

This does vary depending on viewport, but feel free to report people and I'll investigate. I would say this is too long; choose between image or the text. Both makes it too long.

You want Entertainment Discussion for non-Brandon books, and says books in its description: https://www.17thshard.com/forums/forum/29-entertainment-discussion/ Lots of people had issues with Wind and Truth and so that wouldn't be unusual. Our Code of Conduct discusses the conduct we expect from people, and yeah, people are allowed to like or dislike what they wish. Of course, you can imagine discussion on Brandon books to involve lots of fans here, which can bias who is talking. I guess what I'd say is you're absolutely allowed and encouraged to post unpopular opinions, and everyone does need to be respectful. But, others are also allowed to not agree with your opinion either. That doesn't mean anyone is talking in bad faith for disagreeing. For example if someone came onto the forums and said Way of Kings (a book very well received in general) sucked, that person should expect people to not necessarily agree, and that's okay. I have seen this where people with the unpopular opinion feel they are being dogpiled, when in reality it's just... Yeah, sometimes a lot of people like a thing that you don't.

No worries. In general I do recommend thinking, as a general policy.

This is not a joke. Do NOT ping me for stupid BS. If you are not pinging me for urgent matters then don't. (Though realistically you should just use the Report feature.) Yes, har har, you're very funny. Cool, let us not do it again. If people insist on not following my very reasonable instructions, then I will ensure you not be able to be a problem in this regard, and you will not be laughing. This is incredibly immature.

Don't ping me for dumb forum games. Thanks.

It's not that the AI content is "trolling", it's that it's trivial to generate. Yes, this is a niche community, but as you can see from some forums, some people can make a lot of posts. Imagine how much can be generated with basically no effort. Sure, I feel like a post like the one you suggest, it's kind of whatever. Maybe a worth a laugh. If even 2-3 people are doing stuff like that often, will people to care to read? I'm not sure. That's the spamminess I'm talking about. The easier it is to do, the more it's like, "Do I want to read or watch something AI generated among all of this AI stuff when I could do something else?" It's a forum that if it exists I think quickly devolves into something not useful. But, of course, I'm sure there's different opinions on that, and fair enough. I think we as staff are more concerned with the fact that these LLMs are effectively stealing copyrighted information to generate this stuff, which feels... less great. Among other reasons. So, that is a motivation of the AI policy. We don't feel the benefit outweighs that. Again, I think we might have different definitions of "spam". I think there's a pretty colossal difference between someone creating hundreds of images in moments and posting them all vs. an artist who is creating things themselves. There's a pretty important bottleneck there, in that creating art takes time, that inherently makes it far less spammy. I can't comment on the video you're talking about, as I do not know the video or the specific art piece therein. We do feel it is very important that 17th Shard is a place that is a pleasant and positive place to be for artists. This is why we have a No Unsolicited Critique policy. We want to be encouraging to artists. Some are doing things for funsies. Some want to improve, some aspire to be professionals. Canonicity is not required nor would be a thing we wish to judge or adjudicate. Not all are looking for feedback like, "Cover the safehand." That might not be the focus of the art piece or the artistic intent. That's not our domain to judge, and if people are not requesting critique, then that is not permitted to judge here, either. I think your concern is quite overblown. There's, what, 2000 images under Stormlight Archive Art across nearly ten years? I'm... not really concerned with that pace, I have to be honest. I am also not concerned with some... nefarious artist who is drawing noncanonical Stormlight art in an effort to get their name out, and is using this site to do that. Let's be perfectly real: there is vastly more cosmere art on Instagram. They'd use that. If it wasn't reasonably good, then it wouldn't get traction anyway. And, is there some more nefarious intent? I feel like that's literally never happened on this site. Again, I can't speak to the video you saw, but I would need more information to make such judgments. Lastly, artists posting their art here without discussing much here is fine. I like seeing cool art here. We are also fine with cosmere content creators posting their videos here. This doesn't happen too often--again, the time required to create such content is an important limiter--and certainly that could be spammy, if a creator was posting their video in a ton of forums. But one topic every once and a while? Sure. If we disallowed that and required all posters of such content to be active on the forums, we would be even less of a Brandon Sanderson hub than we already are. The difference with AI is, again, the scale that this can be done compared to the effort. That's my spam concern. It is not my personal main reason the AI policy exists, but it is a reason why I think an AI-only forum would quickly become a ghost town with lots of stuff that probably no one looks at. Your mileage will vary, of course, and that is fine, but I just don't think it's an extremely compelling use case to warrant an exception to the broad policy. This is already highly restricted and moderated here. It sometimes comes up, but has not been a major issue.

For what purpose or goal? Seems like that would just lead to a ton of spam, which also undesirable.