Chaos

I'll allow it, so long as if you note holes you edit them out and let some staff or I know

We have allowed translation efforts before and so I have no problem permitting it here. Go for it! Just make sure it is clear where the original info comes from. Also, good luck, as that's a huge undertaking, especially when there's so much work to be done in English still

Hey ccstat, that's awesome that you are getting published! Awesome. You can absolutely share this in Creator's Corner. The staff had a conversation about self-promotion today, so I appreciate you prompting this. We didn't have this codified in our increasingly out-of-date rules section. We'll try and nail down the exact specifics, but basically: You can promote a product that you are involved in creating is totally fine. Don't ask for donations. For example, if you an aspiring writer, posting a topic asking for donations so you can live is not okay. If you're promoting yourself, you actually need to promote something. Your account cannot be solely used for advertising your stuff. (Contribute to the community.) There's one more caveat: if you are selling a Brandon Sanderson product that is not sanctioned by Dragonsteel, we will remove that. Go through official channels.

What are your concerns? Short version, you can use it, but you can't sell it. Citations are required that it is from the Coppermind. Don't copy+paste to other wikis.

What changed? I did not do anything. Glad to hear it works now, though.

I don't mean to make light of this because I know this is an obvious typo, but I just wanted to joke, maybe it'd be less contentious if there were less spoiler threats (Okay, I'm going to bed now.)

Dreamstorm, thank you for your post. I hope we are on the right track here and if we aren't--at any point in the future--you are more than welcome to write a post in the 17S Discussion board to have open discussion on things. Ideas are coming out of this thread (and from PMs to us) that will lead to active changes, which we hope will improve matters dramatically. Please do!! If it has OB spoilers, still put it in the OB board. I'd also highly recommend you put in the OP @Kogiopsis's suggestions on what exactly the type of thread would be, and I'm glad you find those ideas astute, because I do too. We're considering a character forum but we are very worried about the general feedback we've received from many people interested in character discussion that people might feel that type of discussion "corners" them into a certain area of the site. We want to counteract the idea that character discussion is bad, so we really don't want to exacerbate that with the structure of the forum itself, so we are leaning against no on a new forum, but we are considering it. That's a long winded way of saying, make these topics now! If we make any sort of character forum, it's trivial to move the topics.

We'll get that paraphrased in there as a thing non-Arcanists do. One thing I'd really like you to do, Tesh, is actually post your WoBs in the event thread. I realize this seems silly, but five years later, I'd like there to be a paper trail of where stuff comes from. You have no idea how frustrating it was converting stuff from Theoryland to Arcanum and there was no source listed! We had no idea where it came from. So that was quite difficult at times. Of course, you'd have no way of knowing this as our precise style guide isn't public--yet--so my apologies. I really appreciate you adding it to Arcanum. Add it to the event thread when you get a chance This has another benefit: it lets people discuss said WoBs (whereas Arcanum is not a discussion platform).

This is exactly why we closed ASK, so that doesn't happen. What happened in Oathbringer is that things sort of evolved where this thread was relationship central. I don't think the staff actually directed that to be the case, but it kind of self-selected to be the case. The only thing I can think of is that at Oathbringer's release, we were too aggressive in merging topics. That's because in previous releases, like in the Bands of Mourning release and Secret History release, it was really a fiasco when there were so many topics on the same thing. I don't really think we specifically said "character discussion can only be here" ever, but I do absolutely recognize many members didn't want to discuss that. As I have said before in this thread, I wish to make a topic that's basically enshrining character discussion as being valuable, that people who don't like it can shove it and this kind of passive aggression will not be tolerated. I do want to expand the amount of character discussion and relationship discussing. Having it in one thread was a mistake. There should be many threads. I think having many threads, as you say, will lower the pressure of things a lot. I would like people's feedback on my post regarding a character discussion board. I feel there are some pros and cons and it could end up quite poorly, or it could end up great. But I do want more discussion of this type. Regarding some of other moderators' posts: I don't know. We can only say our perspective. Many of Feather's words, I feel, were twisted in the most negative way possible. We want to have an open dialogue and we're going to be honest with you with how we feel. That's what we're doing.

I am extremely tired today so will likely not be engaging much in this thread. To be honest, I did not get much sleep because I am so bothered by this thread. I know, in my heart of hearts, I do not censor opposing opinions, and neither does the staff. It really hurts to hear that. That doesn't mean that other people aren't hurt either of course, so I guess we have to do better, but at the core, I know we are not censoring dissenting opinion or trying to get people to shut up. It's just false. You know I have opinions too. You know I hate Sixth of Dusk. I hate Zane. If you like those things, cool. This situation is exactly the same. First, writing a post acknowledging that having discussion with staff in a contentious thread can be difficult, and new policy to counteract that (short version: staff don't converse in divisive or heated topics) Another post describing how moderation actually occurs and how it is determined moderation is necessar Short version: we discuss it, get people who aren't involved in the thread to help make a judgment. It actually self corrects for bias really well. Obviously we don't get everything right but the core premise that we are too biased to judge what is respectful vs. disrespectful is not true, and this will explain how things work in practice. ‎A follow up to the ASK closure post describing the plan for character discussion that I talked about earlier, as well as a list of various possible character topics to start with. But please if you want to discuss something, just make a topic now! Make a bunch of topics! ‎Lastly, a post somewhere describing the importance of character discussion, condescension towards a class of threads will not be tolerated, and that we will have people leave specific topics if they are causing things to get heated. We want to try and solve the issues ASK presented and leave members feeling like they can discuss what they want in a relaxed environment That's a lot for me to do and this next week is busy for me, so you might need to wait a bit...If you want to make some character topics, do that right now. The thing in that last bullet point is policy effective immediately. Be specific. I am not ashamed of what has occurred and I am happy to explain the course of action in every circumstance. Serious question, what actually do you want? We're here. We're talking. Tell us what you want and what we can do better. I do agree that there are posters who don't like discussing romantic storylines, and I agree that's a problem, but if you read my posts in this thread (and in the PM reply to you) you can see we are trying to make character discussion and romantic discussion more accessible to a wider variety of people. Just as a note: having contrary opinions are not bad, but there have been times where people were disrespectful and they were dealt with. I fully expect that someone will be upset when--undoubtedly--tensions run high and we will remove people who get heated in those discussions, but there are many, many aggressively levelheaded individuals on the staff. If we think something might be out of line, we discuss it. I'd like you to tell Mestiv, jofwu, Pagerunner, Argent, eerongal, Comatose, KChan, Shivertongue, firstRainbowRose to name a few, and more that they cannot see where the line is between good discourse and someone being way more aggressive than is positive for discussion. The group, collectively, but if a mod has a bias--for example, Feather--she obviously doesn't get the final say at all. Completely false. Plenty have personally said my theories suck, and that's great. And to claim that only staff make theories is ridiculous. That is the extreme minority of theoretical posts, as you can clearly see by looking at the forum indices of anything. There is a difference between respectfully disagreeing and being disrespectful. Shardcast was not to shut people down. I know you have a serious problem with that Shardcast episode, and we will do better in finding opposing viewpoints, but to say that we want to shut down opposing views is objectively false. Shardcast is a group of people just discussing their feelings. It's not to attack. I'm sorry if you felt attacked, but if an episode doesn't connect with you, feel free to not listen. Sorry about that. Shardcast listeners are not sheeple who will just agree with everything we say. In the specific instance of the love triangle, I'm pretty sure everyone who has read Oathbringer has already formed their opinion. On Shardcast, you'll get to know a small cast pretty well over the years and it's totally fine to disagree with them. For the love triangle podcast, we asked for people who cared a lot about character analysis who we could get a time scheduled. Josh, resident Shalladin shipper, doesn't usually come onto podcasts (generally because he knows too much). I'm sorry you felt aggressed by that Shardcast. I know exactly what you are responding to--he's responding to Josh's point in PM that we pick moderators with a certain rapport. Yes. We do select moderators who will have an intense zeal for the site, who are extremely passionate about it for a long time, who, in staff chat, can take heat and also bring new perspectives, too. I'm not sure if you've ran a staff of 20+, but you do need to self-select for insanely passionate people for the organization. That's how it works. If I'm the manager of a grocery store and a customer is upset, I don't just hire that person solely because they have contrary opinions. There are kind of other prerequisites there, right? We also select people who have been long time members. There's a lot in this thread who have very young accounts in the nearly eight year span, and yeah, we wouldn't likely make them into mods. Argent has been around in the fandom for longer than this site's existence, from the Time Waster's Guide era, and we modded him just a bit before Oathbringer. Our timescale is long. Did you know in our staff chat, things get heated and we argue with each other? It's true! We tell staff that what they say is confidential and we will make decisions as a team, and yeah, we get into long, heated arguments. But you won't see us make an official action where another staff member does something else. That's teamwork. You decide on the course of action and then you implement it. Call it a cabal or whatever, but yeah, that's how any management team would work. Would you rather us just not share opinions? If we just hid in holes and you knew nothing about it? We'd still have opinions. If there were posts that some find disrespectful, we'd still evaluate them in the same way. Or, would you rather like to know what some individuals on the staff think? I'm very up front with my own biases with everyone. I don't like Sixth of Dusk. I hate Zane. I like Venli. The word "intent" when referring to a Shard must be lowercase. Sure, you might not care about those things, and some will definitely disagree with me. That's fine. This situation is not different because Feather and Grey feel very strongly on a subject. We have never removed posts for stating a contrary opinion, ever. There is not an example of that being the case. I find the notion that, "because there's no staff member that espouses my opinion, staff can never effectively judge posts," to be a very ineffective argument. Are we supposed to mod people every time there is a controversy or argument purely so members feel the staff is unbiased? I can imagine in forty controversies later, that's not an effective way to run a team. That expectation is wildly unrealistic and impractical. We do realize that the moderator badge carries a lot of weight, and we don't want people to fear moderators. We will be instructing staff to not engage in heated discussions. We will also make it clearer which is Official Moderator Action, probably with boldface, when written in a post. We do wish to improve things and improve moderator communication, and make our disciplinary action more clear. We don't have a handbook and maybe we can codify things. The fact that people feel the staff has been biased in our moderator actions means there is work to do. We can work better. We are trying. Please, anyone, tell us what specifically you want, and we'll talk about it.

Correct, and anyone is welcome to look at my post history to see that when I did join to make a public rebuke, people did need to chill. I am not scared to explain exactly my thought process in an entirely candid manner, and if you disagree, I can probably improve too. We are not a secret cabal. We have nothing to hide. I'm an open book. One more thing about bias from the OP: everyone is biased. Every one of you with your opinions and how you have lived your life. The way to deal with bias is not to hide it but to acknowledge it as being real. The OP seems to suggest that because we biased, we can't moderate anything. That's just not a good argument. Everyone, I don't know if you know this, but we actually hid a lot of posts in ASK, on both sides. Do we need to announce publicly the reason why we do everything? That definitely can have some very serious ramifications if we had, say, a moderator action log for everyone to peruse. That is not a wise course of action. But just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. If we wanted dissenting opinions gone as this seems to suggest, we're extremely bad at it, I guess, because I can think of a lot of methods to make people go away very rapidly. It's almost like we specifically didn't do that because we actually value those people. One last thing. This seemed to spawn from IronBar's topic. I would absolutely tell anyone who accuses someone of being a "fanboy" on this site in a negative manner to cut it out. That is not respectful, sorry. We're a fan site. There are fans here, so yeah, I do tend to find that disrespectful and in extremely poor taste. I don't really see how I am intensely biased against contrary opinions when you can clearly look at my post history where I say it's totally fine for IronBars to have his opinion: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/66361-ob-underwhelming/?do=findComment&comment=676327 To people who seriously are convinced that we are biased against contrary opinions and that we want to silence opinions: If we wanted to do that, wouldn't we just hide this topic/post? Wouldn't we remove various topics like, "Adolin and Shallan will not last," various threads hating Moash and hating on his sections, The Shallan Disgust Thread? Hiding various negative things where people basically are hugely disappointed with Brandon for Adolin's lack of character development in Oathbringer? Has that happened? No. Not in the slightest. This is not a ploy, guys. We don't have a hidden agenda. We are not trying to silence critique. If that was our goal, we are doing an exceptionally poor job of it. We will have more character discussion, and that has not ended. Your feedback is valuable. If you think we are biased against opinions then I guess we need more transparency and more clear ways to record moderator actions, I suppose. We can do that. We are here for you.

I would like to address two general matters at hand. Regarding Moderators Having Opinions I can definitely see how having moderators in discussions is concerning. It would be nice if, like on Reddit, it only showed the moderator badge when it is time to do official moderator business. That's not how this software is structured unfortunately. I could totally remove the "Group" thing that says Admin, Moderators, etc. on posts, but then it wouldn't appear on official business. So, that's a problem. I would like to say that it is totally unrealistic for moderators to never discuss content. That... that is not possible. Are people suggesting we shouldn't say words in Discord, too? I cannot seriously entertain the idea that moderators never engage in content discussion. Wouldn't this be way worse if we were some aloof group who never said anything, who you knew nothing about, and had no relationship with? Wouldn't people on Discord think that if we didn't engage, we didn't care about the community and didn't care about managing it? Let's say, hypothetically, moderators did not engage in discussion. I think you'd see moderators engage in the entire site less. They wouldn't notice problems. They would basically just manage reports. I don't know, that sounds like a good way to lose moderators. (Plus, people would complain "this post that is offensive took a whole HOUR to be removed? Screw this site, I'm leaving." You'd have even more of that. I didn't spike Argent and Pagerunner saying they could never discuss any topics they like (magic, theorizing, that stuff). That's not a realistic expectation, and I would expect many mods to prefer to not be mods if we made that policy. I find it very interesting that historically I've been very involved in cosmere theories, but it never seemed to blow up. People told me I was wrong. I admitted when I was wrong. I wish I had more time to engage with users. That's important. We are not enemies. We are among you. It always seems that people take all character opinions very strongly when we should again, all go grab a cup of tea and chill out. Just to be clear, I'm not saying we can't take our roles seriously, and I tend to think we do. If someone doesn't seem to take that role seriously, they can message me with posts they feel was over that line. Regarding a Character Subforum There was a discussion about this on Discord too a while back. I've thought about forum layout more than really anyone should, so I'd like to talk about this. I do want to promote character discussion, but there are very important factors to consider in making such a board that people are glossing over. (That's fine, it's not their job to think about this minutiae.) I will say: the more forums there are, the more confusion there is about where to place new topics. When a member isn't sure where to put something, there's resistance. That resistance is hard to overcome and thus people will leave the site. It is for this reason you do not see book-by-book forums on 17th Shard. I don't want people to think, "Oh man this talks about Hero of Ages but also a little Alloy, do I put it in the HoA board or Alloy one?" I am inherently resistant to new forums because of this core philosophy. There are pros and cons to making a Character and Relationships forum. I'm going to assume this board is separate thing, kind of like Cosmere Theories, but for deep character analysis. (I am opposed to making a Character forum for each series; that is excessive.) Pros: -Gives a dedicated place where people know what they will get. Cultivates people who want this kind of discussion, of which there is a lot. -People not interested in that forum won't go into it and will leave it off their Activity Streams. This should dramatically lower the annoyance some members find with this class of discussion. Cons: -Segregation. One reason I'm resistant to this idea for a subforum is kind of a reason why ASK became problematic: people would feel that the only place for character discussion is that board. They'd feel secluded from the rest of the site and not part of the community at large. I really wish that we could have these discussions in book discussion boards without people being "ugh more relationship stuff," so all felt welcome, but I suppose I should take seriously the reality that this isn't happening at large, and we should try and foster this type of discussion more explicitly. But I do think segregating this discussion into its own corner would absolutely have consequences five years from now, so it's something to think about. -Confusion for users posting things. Imagine I'm a new user and I'm not tech savvy. I want to talk about a character, and I have thoughts. Do I post it in this Character forum, or do I post in the dedicated book boards? That's a really difficult line. It's hard enough to get the book series / cosmere distinction already, and this line would be way fuzzier. I don't want people to think this is the only place where character discussion should go, like we are hiding them in a box. That's the opposite of what I want. -Spoiler policy. I'd say people having opinions on characters is likely a larger audience than those who care about minutiae about magic. Because of this, much more casual members would likely be interested in such topics. That is a good thing, but that poses difficulty for the Character board. It's more likely for a more casual user to go into that forum and probably get spoiled on a different series they don't care about. Sure we could use topic tags, but again, that makes inertia for newer posters. So, you see, it isn't really a trivial matter. I am curious what everyone thinks about these issues and how we could counteract segregation and animosity from that.

Hello, I don't have unlimited time today, but I'd like to respond to a few matters. First, as Josh said in the ASK closure thread, we are not here to silence opinions. There have been good things in the ASK closure thread. There have been good things in the Underwhelming topic. We did not take closing ASK lightly, because obviously we knew people would feel like we are trying to silence them. We tried to head this off in Josh's post, but we didn't go far enough in reassurances, and for that, I'm sorry. I spent most of yesterday with Josh writing PMs to many people who reached out to him. I'm very grateful for both the positive and negative feedback that we received (some, obviously, quite negative). I'd like to posit to people generally our plan on how we could make character discussion better, leads to less conflict, and hopefully leads to better discourse. You see, we think it's a serious problem that character discussion tended to only be in that thread. That's actually a big part of the problem: ASK felt like the only thread where people could discuss character relationships. This made it so a lot of new members interested in that kind of conversation went there, and people, at times, got very heated in there. That turned out to be a problem. So we feel the core issue is that a megathread with a lot of heated people from all sides is not the most conducive for good discussion. We're thinking the solution to this is that we actually need more character discussion threads. I'm thinking smaller scale, more specific threads like "Disappointed in lack of Shallan and Kaladin development in OB," "Adolin is bad for Shallan's personas," and things like that. What others should be made? I ultimately think that will lead to a lot more variety in character discussion of all types. There are some concerns that people feel like character discussion is intruding on "real" topics. For example, people very passionate about hardcore theorizing disliking shipping discussion. I think we will need to make a topic from the staff that basically says, "Let's talk about character discussion. If you don't like it, go into another topic. You'll be okay. If you find some opinions there bad, we strongly encourage you to not engage and instead get a cup of tea. If people are heated, we'll ask them to leave from those threads." Maybe we need a tag prefix for "characters" for such topics as well so people know what that thread is and can just avoid it. To be honest, I expected there to be ASK related threads after we closed it, but I see that people felt unwelcome by that, thinking we are banning character discussion. That is ridiculous, and definitely not what we want. I am hoping this will help. There's kind of a difficult line, though, as things have developed to be very tribal. I'd really like there to not be two separate threads "Oh there's the Shalladin area" and "Oh here's the Shadolin area." That would be bad. Realize this is the most contentious book the forum has seen, and we can do better as a community to let people who have opinions they don't agree with feel valued. It's a growing process. Next up, let's talk about reputation. Historically reputation has been considered very fun by the community and they like the titles that are there. But I suppose when things get heated and tribal, seeing a number on a post you don't agree with having, say, 10 upvotes might just lead you to say, "wow so many agreed with that? That's sad" and then you just leave. We thought removing downvotes would improve discourse, but maybe we do need to remove the whole system. I will say, I have very limited time this weekend, so I may not get a chance to write a big post, but know your voices are being heard here, all. EDIT: A lot more than you'd expect. Some long time members we've had very extensive, heated disciplinary PMs about.

I replied to his post Anyone can go register an account and make such an edit, and I encouraged him to do so.

I think that's a very compelling astute explanation as to why a lot would dislike the structure of OB. Well put. I do think Amaram's lack of presence in the book made that eventual confrontation much weaker, unlike Sadeas in book one where that relationship was explored a lot.

I know some people think I'm trying to defend Calderis and RShara when I've called them out for them being abrasive multiple times before historically. I simply am annoyed that there appears to be a dramatic double standard when you both are literally doing the same thing, which I'd do for absolutely anyone. I can only surmise that some would leave the thread because they don't wish to create conflict when things are heating up. I don't think that's a bad thing. That's exactly what people should do, because we are all friends here and if anyone gets heated, we can step away, have some tea, and come back later and realize that that argument wasn't very important in the grand scheme of things. I'd encourage you to continue to be here and you are definitely entitled to your opinions. I don't intend to close this topic unless you want it to be. But I'd ask everyone, as I had prior in this thread, to be cognizant of what are opinions and what are facts, not name call, and know that everyone else here is a reasonable human.

Alternatively, I would ask you to look at your original posts and see that you actually just stated opinions, just as Calderis and RShara did. You did kind of say why, but if you really look at your OP, where you say things like "the reason for Dalinar seeing the Nightwatcher was pathetic" is 100% an opinion which you really didn't justify at all. I'm just saying that you claiming to want very justified posts when you are just stating your own thoughts is, quite frankly, an astonishing lack of introspection. In later posts you do justify things, but so do others. Look at the pot before calling the kettle black, thank you very much. If you read many of RShara and Calderis's posts they say similar things, but in other scenarios they even say they think Oathbringer is not perfect, so you claiming--with absolutely no justification--that they think everything Brandon is perfect is false. I think people have been very respectful of your opinion--even if they disagree--and you'll need to actually live with the fact that others don't need to agree with that. The burden of proof isn't suddenly on the opposition because you don't like their opinions. From the other perspective your opinions probably seem equally unjustified. Again, use the report feature and staff will determine whether there is toxic behavior or poor discourse occurring. We have a very active staff chat with many different perspectives and people involved and we make group decisions on matters. Click the Flag on the post.

I mean... If you didn't like Dalinar's arc, does that require justification? No, that's just how you reacted. If you did like Dalinar's arc, then that's your opinion. Informed or not that's the reaction. Them being Arcanists don't make a difference, you're right, in justing which opinion is "right". Please do report posts that you feel undercut an opinion with no justification. Like, I'm sorry, are you suggesting that someone thinking Oathbringer standing on its own and you disagreeing means that they are unjustified in their opinion? It's an opinion. You can explain your opinion but it's an opinion. Please do feel free to share with me specific posts where you think they are out of line and I'll discuss with the staff. It's possible this discussion thread really just isn't productive.

And it's fine if he liked it, and it's fine if you didn't. This thread is not productive if we are going devolve into just calling who's a fanboy or not. (I mean, to be clear, probably a lot of us generally really enjoy Brandon's books here.) It's fine if you didn't like the book but Calderis can also say why he liked it and try to divine why Brandon chose to do what he did. We aren't going to devolve into a thread where people are called fanboys (as if that's bad) or saying that someone who doesn't like the book is bad.

It should be a link in the newsletter.

Regarding Oathbringer activity on the board: it's about on par with Words of Radiance. The month Words of Radiance came out had 1000 more posts, but, Oathbringer came out November 14th, so the fact that with less time in the month they hit that far is a very good sign. More topics overall have been made in the Oathbringer time period as well. This is rather good news, as I was worried that the Discord server would decrease activity a lot. I think Discord did lower the amount of posts, but the Discord was absurdly active around November and December. Constant Oathbringer discussion 24/7. So things have changed a bit. Just wanted to give my two cents on that from an administrator perspective. Last month I had active shooter training and what the police officer said is exactly this. Extensive training helps prevent that lock up, but in situations you don't know how to handle, you can just lock up. Given Kaladin's care for both groups, it really makes sense to me why this happened, though I can see why someone wouldn't like the scene.

This is really interesting to read the disappointment with Oathbringer. I don't know, maybe the book really clicked for me, but for me personally I did find Oathbringer superior to both Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, and in my opinion it isn't close. I stand by everything I said in the 17th Shard review. I tended to find Way of Kings a lot more filler than killer, whereas Oathbringer goes nearly too fast with killer. It's been a few months since I've read Oathbringer. Maybe my thoughts will change in a few more months after I've absorbed the feedback, but I really loved Oathbringer, and it is my favorite book straight up. I never really felt the middle dragged. Every locale we went to was compelling. But I dunno, IronBars, maybe we are just different people with different tastes, because I thought Words of Radiance to be much better than Way of Kings. I remember when that book came out I read a review that said nothing happened in Words of Radiance, which was very confusing to me. IronBars is certainly entitled to his opinion though even though I disagree with most every point he made, but again, different people have different tastes and that's okay! I find it interesting you liked Moash whereas many really hated Moash sections. (I liked them a lot too.)