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Hey everyone! For the past few years there has been a lot of discussion on the Words of Brandon situation. The Theoryland Interview Database served our fandom well but it has always been more a part of the Wheel of Time fandom and has grown harder to keep up-to-date as our fandom has grown and aged. The subject of a new database has been brought up a number of times but myself and the other admins have either remained quiet in those discussions or been unhelpfully vague. And there is a reason for that. We have been working on something. In fact, we've been working on a replacement for a long time, and we've iterated our implementation for a while. We've scrapped a few bad implementations, so we did not want to prematurely announce something that wasn't good. But, we have a system now. It's real, and it's pretty cool, so it's time to start talking about this with you all. The software is codenamed Palanaeum (though that won't be the name of this database; it's the software's name), and it's been made by coder extraordinaire Mestiv, who you may have noticed has a new rank on the site due to his tireless work on it. Our goals with a new WoB Archive have been to not just replicate the Theoryland Interview Database, but add new features and improve upon Theoryland. Let's talk about what Palanaeum does. Submitting interviews open to everyone A core problem with the Theoryland DB is that only a select few input things, which means it is almost always outdated. (Turns out, Brandon talks a lot.) The solution is obvious: we need a system that allows the many awesome and enterprising members of the community to contribute. Palanaeum does this. Anyone can contribute, input new events and entries, and suggest changes to old things. Transcribing audio The workflow for transcribing audio has been clunky. The audio has to be uploaded and then there's a Google doc where transcribers work at it, with the link to the Google doc being buried in an Event topic somewhere. We can imagine that in a year or two it can be very hard to find the original audios and the transcription Google doc. This is not sustainable. Palanaeum puts that entire process in-house. You can upload audio and transcribe it within the system. You can create "snippets" of audio that links the timestamp of the audio to the question/answer you are writing. Since the audio and transcription are connected in the system, this means for new interviews inputted this way, you'll have a Play button next to an entry which will just play the audio source of that exact question. We intend to host all this audio forever, so it won't be lost to the aether. It will be in our system and you'll always be able to find it. We also intend to allow people to do similar things with video sources, but video is significantly more costly to host, so you'll have to upload videos--or link to videos--on YouTube, then transcribe them similarly. Huge props to Mestiv for creating this crazy feature. I wasn't sure this would be possible, but it absolutely works. It's hard for me to describe to you how awesome this actually is. Search that doesn't suck Lastly, there's another problem with Theoryland: it's really hard to actually find the thing you want, so obviously we want to have a search feature that works well. (This is one of the core reasons we wanted to build a new system in the first place.) Search is complicated but we have an implementation we like. It will have a lot of search filters as well to narrow down your search, too. A big benefit to us doing this in-house is that the search algorithm can be iterated on. If we launch and you think it's being weird and not giving you reasonable results, we will work on it. We don't have to say, "well, that's how it works. Sorry about that." Since there's an account system on Palanaeum, we want you to be able to favorite particular quotes for later. We think that will really help research for theories or writing wiki articles. That's an area we intend to work on. Oh, and one more thing: this software will have a responsive design, which means you can find all the quotes you want on your phone. The software will be open source, too. If you're an enterprising coder, you can contribute to the project. If you're a different fandom, you can install it for your use, too! The software probably won't be open source immediately, as Mestiv wants to clean up his code a bit before opening it up. But soon after launch, it will be open source. Where we go from here We plan to show the WoB Archive to many awesome individuals in the community who already transcribe stuff so they can test and give feedback on things. This will be our beta period. We're just about there, so very soon this will be out there in June. We have a list of people we are inviting, so hang tight! We want to show you this ASAP. We're starting small for now (especially compared to the fandom at large), but you'll all see this soon! Overall, our goal is to have the software done--with the core functionality listed above, at least, completed and well-tested--by the Oathbringer release. Obviously, that's where there will be a massive spike in new interviews, so all our transcribing stuff needs to be very good there. So, Oathbringer is our deadline. But our progress is going very well, so we may end the beta period early and have our official launch earlier. We'll see. Lots can happen in software development. You'll notice that we didn't include any screenshots of the system for now. That's not to conceal anything--it does work, and it's pretty cool--but right now our design team hasn't begun work on making it pretty. Function comes first. The usual 17S design team will work on making it look and feel good this summer, and then we can show more off We intend to import all Brandon-related interviews from Theoryland to this new system. We're hoping we don't need to manually input things and we can do a software-based conversion of the data, but we are committed to a system that is complete and will be up-to-date. We hope you will join us on this quest to archive everything Brandon has said in this difficult time of transition from Theoryland to this system. But, I think this system will finally be the interview archive we all need. With your help, we will be able to keep things up-to-date for years to come. The era of long lag on things being inputted into the database will be over. (Of course, we will be working hard too.) We're sorry it's taken so long. Big thanks to Weiry, who tirelessly works to make sure everything is perfect. Even bigger thanks to Mestiv who is finally making this a reality. Also major thanks to Joe who coded an implementation of a database as well and is always awesome. He helped us move towards a custom coded solution, which I always worried would be too difficult. But it's real now, and I'm insanely excited to show you all this.