Chaos

Congrats on engagement! That's a super adorable engagement story; painfully so Once you have a date set, email Brandon, or we can have Josh mention it to him. If wedding is after Oathbringer I can explicitly mention this to Brandon there at the release. Doesn't mean he will go as he is very busy, but I'll make sure he knows of his invitation

The Torturer of Heralds and the 1337 ranks are some of my favorites, but I'm still really pleased I have super weird ones like Enefel and Tarachin Superstar in there.

You know what that means? Time to make new topics at those times! In seriousness I feel that too, especially being in Japan and being off-sync from America.

I'm sure the news there would be no Oathbringer Splintercast is disappointing. But I would just like to say that Alyx was a boss on the Oathbringer beta and noticed some things no one else did. Oathbringer would be a worse book if Alyx was not involved. So I mean, if the Oathbringer Splintercast had to go to do that, I think that's a fair trade. (That said, hearing her reactions would have been SPECTACULAR.) Sorry again, though

I'm not saying I would remove the Popular Contributors/Leaderboard, but it was an idea.

Click the "choose files" on the bottom of the text editor and choose the file to upload, then click the attachment to insert it into the PM. It's the same for regular posts.

I could remove it?

Yeah I don't know, it's super weird. (Also, since I freak out about weird 17S errors, it's nice that I can say that it was not at all my fault here.)

I've heard that people in certain countries get that error; apparently it's been very longstanding. We certainly won't have that issue in the new one (and is another reason to run things in house, so we can fix stuff like that). Amusingly enough, in the one specific hotel I am at in Japan right now, the hotel WiFi gives that error but mobile data accesses it just fine. I couldn't fathom a guess as to how they set up Theoryland wrong.

I'm still quite proud of my work on those ranks.

Guys, you don't know it yet because we haven't showed you the archive yet, but it's really cool. Also Mestiv is a god.

@Mestiv for sure He's a rock star in my book for his work on the new WoB archive.

I would take one point out of ten for that Also remember your differentials!! Don't make me cry.

At first this had me turn my head, but the answer to your question is simple: |x-1| and |1-x| are the same function. You see, when you integrate 1/x, the antiderivative is not ln(x), but actually ln|x|. That absolute value is important because now those two functions have the same domains. That is essential here because when you integrate 1/(x-1) you get ln|x-1|. But really, by looking ln(x-1) vs. ln(1-x) they are the same function except for some domain issues. The absolute values fix that. ln|x-1| contains those smaller domained functions. Basically those two functions are the two halves of ln|x-1|. Of course, if you use Wolfram Alpha plotting you'll see that their graph of their real part (if you allow complex solutions) are exactly the same: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=y+%3D+ln(x-1) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=y+%3D+ln(1-x)

Okay okay okay I'll make the forum! Sorry for the delay. I probably should have done that before heading to Japan... It's done now. If there are Oathbringer related topics floating around, can you link them here so we can get them moved there? Thanks!

I've edited this topic title; the previous one "Why does everyone like Mistborn" was clickbaity and deceptive. That's not useful for anyone.

That sounds pretty applied. I dunno, my E&M is really poor and I don't know anything about EE, sorry.

Updating wiki citations will indeed be a big project and is on the agenda. For the past few years (since 2014 or so) when things weren't all getting into Theoryland, it was faster to cite on the wiki the direct source. So direct sources are fine, but I imagine eventually most everything should get converted to the new citations. At the very least, depreciating Theoryland for those citations. (Pagerunner is correct that Theoryland may be relevant to cite in some very specific circumstances, but I imagine that will be very particular.) That conversion will be a big project and will take a while to do, and I couldn't tell you when that would be done.

Well if you ever need help with math, you know who to contact

We will not be including any Wheel of Time related quotes. So yup

We have a pretty good name that we came up a day or so ago but Weiry was not ready to confirm it quite yet. I'm really liking the name we have planned though; I'm liking it more and more the more people I run it past. Nothing to announce yet though! Thank you for the suggestions, however, but I think we are set

For a general user, they can submit things and suggest edits, but they won't go live until their stuff is approved. Anyone could do that, though. We expect there will be a core group of pro community members who contribute a lot and they will get a special rank, and be able to avoid the approval queue because they know the conventions and stuff. These to start out with will likely be our beta users.

Unfortunately, Palanaeum doesn't work for a few reasons, though it is cool. Honestly a big reason is that I think no one will be able to spell it properly, so that kind of kills it. So we decided Palanaeum is the software name, and our implementation of the software will be different. We're finalizing our branding of it, so worry not, and it is also cool. But this module will not be called Palanaeum.

Considering the quality of some old Theoryland stuff, I don't disagree, but we will definitely need a lot of help to comb through it As you'll see, we do things slightly differently than Theoryland in how we label certain events and stuff, so it's possible an automated thing is just impossible.

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.